Lukács rationalized a lover’s suicide as necessary for his great work.

Evidence

It was his belief that he had to renounce the woman who seemed to embody life for him, the painter Irma Seidler, because of his own incapacity for life and his duty to his great work. … After her suicide, he put the following words into the mouth of a character in his dialogue On Poverty in the Spirit': She had to die, so that my work could be completed, so that nothing should remain for me in the world but my work.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Pathological devotion to the work at the expense of life echoes the ascetic sacrificial figure that recurs in later theory (and connects to the reader’s earlier material on sacrifice as a theme).