Herbert Marcuse identified a revolutionary position in marginalized groups. His conception of the marginal is, however, not without ambiguities. This essay aims to explore the potentialities and ambivalences of Marcuse's theory of marginality and of the marginal itself.
An epoch has come to an end. It marks a rupture in historical development, a change of epoch. Names such as Herbert Marcuse represent what must be attacked and destroyed, what must be eliminated from the world. At the beginning of this new epoch, in the years after 1967/68, there was an awakening in many sectors of capitalist societies. It was a peculiar combination of struggles against a certain bourgeois principle of reality: imagination was to come to power. Herbert Marcuse contributed important texts to the debates of the time and reflected on this phase of an emerging Left and a non-fascist, anti-conformist way of life, while observing a tendency towards preventive counterrevolution in democratic societies. As a Jewish Marxist and & eacute;migr & eacute;, as someone who, with his expertise as a social theorist, had studied and fought fascism and had taken part in the civil rights movement, the revolt, and the New Left, he warned of the threat of a new, second fascism. His later writings sketch this threat and include proposals for a non-fascist way of life.
Sport is one of the most emblematic phenomena of the contemporary, both materially and symbolically embodying many of the expectations of capitalist society: competition, performance, maximization, progress, control, planning, spectacle, etc. Its development process began in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the criticism directed at it emerged relatively late, inspired by Critical Theory of Society and driven by the New Left. The latter focused mainly on the replication of the dynamics of alienated labor in leisure-time practices. Theodor W. Adorno also dedicated himself to the topic, which suggests the presence of this social phenomenon within the destructiveness that shapes the body, its domination, and its corresponding transformation into spectacle. This article explores that trajectory and seeks to introduce new elements and analyses, in an attempt to update the critique of sport. It concludes by searching for a moment of self-deformation within sport that, for this very reason, might open up new possibilities for experience.
Although undoubtedly influenced by Adorno and even Heidegger, Marcuse was not the romantic technophobe for which he is often identified. He certainly holds that instrumental reason is historically contingent, but unlike Critical Theory and Heidegger, he thinks that human action can change the temporal structure of technological rationality and the designs that flow from it. A new kind of reason would generate new scientific discoveries and tech-nologies more benign to humanity. Marcuse is an eloquent advocate of this ambitious stance, although today the notion of a political transformation of science has a dwindling audience and this detracts attention from much of his approach.
The paper problematizes fascism through the distinction between its exoteric reading-which includes what we refer to as twentieth-century 'militant Marxism'- and an esoteric reading grounded in the logic of abstraction and rooted in Critical Theory. While the marxist exoteric interpretation identifies fascism as a counterrevolution articulated through class and oriented toward halting proletarian organization and, ultimately, proletarian revolution, the esoteric approach holds that its core lies in the historically specific form of capitalist domination constituted through value and its convergence with fetishism, reification, and real abstraction, all of which structure subjectivity in late capitalism. This shift makes it possible to understand why, in the absence of revolutionary movements, contemporary sociopolitical configurations emerge that no longer necessarily require mass mobilization or an openly terroristic state. Contemporary-posthuman-fascism manifests itself in the management of superfluous lives, social desensitization, algorithmic culture, and the channeling of social malaise into essentialized identities. By situating these dynamics within the terrain of real abstraction, the article argues that a theory of fascism appropriate for the twenty-first century must depart-taking into account both the continuities and discontinuities with its most consolidated twentieth-century European form-from a critique of the capitalist social form in its totality, rather than from the mere political instrumentalization of crisis.
Because the way society reproduces itself in consciousness is located in the imagination and desires of its members, and perceiving the penetration of social norms and values into the instinctual structure of individuals, we will examine (1) how Marcuse relates the movement of socio-political emancipation to transformations in mutilated perception, and (2) the place of the aesthetic di mension in forms of perception, considering the polysemy of the term derived from aisthesis: referring to the sensible, to the senses, to beauty, and to art. Marcuse emphasizes the active role of the senses in producing the matrix of intelligibility through which we experience, interpret, and order the lifeworld. We focus on reflections formulated from the 1960s onward, when Marcuse perceives, in the Zeitgeist, a "new sensibility" capable of opposing the experience of the senses as conditioned and contained by instrumentalized rationality. In this article, we consider that the new sensibility can lead to a "paradigm shift" capable of calling into question the very ongoing determination of the real. To conclude, we will show Marcuse's radical defense of the permanence of art as a phenomenon that transforms sensible perception, as it appears in his last work. Its alienation from reality allows the work of art to express both a refusal of the given and the experience of distinct situations.
Prompted by the idea of reading Marcuse today, our article deals with a very important subject for the author: education. As a starting point, we follow the Marcusean critique of the double tendency of education in a one-dimensional society: to educate for domination or to educate for liberation (contained in its potency). Of course, a dialectical reading of the problem understands the two tendencies in relation between them. In this sense, Marcusean critique avoids hypostatizing one side of these tendencies, forgetting the possibilities of resist-ance in the face of dominating education. So, the article will first analyze aspects of the educational policy of international organizations, such as that promoted by the OECD, centered on the economic perspective of educational processes. We then relate this educational model as a representation of "education in sickness", the educational processes of the present, as named by Marcuse. To read this question today in the light of Marcuse's thinking is to break with the neoliberal and unidimensional model of curricular standardiza-tion and highly competitive rankings. Finally, we suggest reading the education question from the point of view of possible resistance, asking what a Marcusean school would be like. Here we offer some clues: to recover the psychoanalytic content of a school with the erotic pleasure of living and shaped by the intercultural solidarity that makes the school space a permanent encounter with otherness.
In this article, we offer a critical theory of the internet grounded in Marcuse's dialectical theory of technology, starting from what we contend to be the fundamental and indispensable core of his thinking: the dialectic between eros and technological rationality. We proceed below in three parts: First, we critically reconstruct Marcuse's dialectic of eros and technological rationality to set the stage for our discussion of the internet. Second, we use Marcuse's distinction between technology and technics to interrogate the internet as a material reflection of the social process out of which it emerged. Under conditions of advanced industrial civilization, it is not surprising that the internet appears as a material reflection of technological rationality. In the final section, we seek to answer the questions raised by the preceding sections: If the internet frustrates our need for erotic connection, rendering desire onedimensional, would an erotic technology of liberation include the internet? If so, would that internet look anything like what it does now?
The essay reconstructs the antinomy between progress and repression in Adorno and Marcuse through Freud. Against linear historicism, it follows Benjamin's messianic discontinuity and, with Adorno, reframes progress as resistance to the compulsion of domination and to the idolatry of history. Countering Marcuse's promise of a historical culmination in which repressive progress is sublimated into freedom and play, the text questions the split between "basic" and "surplus" repression and the substantialization of libido. In dialogue with Lacan and Zupan & ccaron;i & ccaron;, it proposes understanding repression as an originary process that constitutes jouissance and twists historical time. Emancipation is thus relocated in identifying the specific knots where enjoyment and repression mutually sustain each other.
This article addresses Walter Benjamin's interpretation of Kafka's work with a twofold aim: first, to argue that its main value lies in the way it helps illuminate the problems and themes that shape Benjamin's thought; and second, to explain its unfinished character in light of the evolving concerns that run through his writings. From this perspective, the article traces the connections between Benjamin's texts on Kafka and some of his most emblematic works, grounding the analysis in a hermeneutic approach that highlights how these texts reflect his understanding of modern society as intrinsically bound up with the capitalist mode of production. Within this framework, the discussion focuses on: (1) what Benja-min identifies as the object of Kafka's work, located in the distortions of human existence brought about by capitalism; (2) the way this object intersects with the themes of guilt, forget-ting, and remembrance; and (3) the problematic status of Kafka's narrative forms. The article concludes by turning to those aspects of Benjamin's legacy that make clear the unfinished character of his exegesis of Kafka's literature.
Through a comprehensive reconstruction of the problematic inherent in the two-dimensional concept of labour developed by Herbert Marcuse at different moments of his theoretical production, this study aims to delineate the fundamental contours of Marcuse's lifelong discussion with the oeuvre of Karl Marx. Thus, taking Marcuse's late determination of the gratifying and emancipatory transubstantiation of the labour in play as a guiding thread, it will first elaborate an intellectual history of Marcuse's concept of labour, to then characterise the different phases of Marcuse's conversation, whether complacent or critical, with Marx's work.
The three sections of this article consider the influence and presence of idealist elements in Herbert Marcuse's thought. The reception of the German idealist tradition, especially Hegel and his left-wing disciples, can be seen as a constant throughout his work. Still, it gained ascendancy over the years, especially in the last decade of his intellectual trajectory. It is argued that this idealistic deviation from materialism must be understood in the context of the socioeconomic and psychological transformations from liberal to postliberal capitalism. Against the background of the Hegelian notion of 'Idea', the first point analyzes the various readings of Hegel's work in the successive stages of his thought. The second point deals with the problem of the reification of consciousness and its emancipation. Finally, the Spirit-mass dichotomy is discussed concerning the search for new historical agents and the dangers, which Marcuse did not always avoid, of vanguardism and elitism.
This paper reconstructs the consideration of the aesthetic experience of art in Marcuse's critical theory, with special emphasis on the problem of freedom. In this sense, it unfolds in three central moments: (1) Marcuse's diagnosis of the mechanisms of domination in the capitalism of his time and the characterization of the ideological sense that technology acquires in this framework; (2) the development of what the author calls the affirmative character of art; and (3) the central aspects of his theory of social emancipation, which finds in the aesthetic dimension a key element of its historical concretization. Finally, (4) the relevance of Marcuse's philosophy for addressing the problems raised is highlighted, while proposing some questions in the direction of a critical review of this influential theory, which allows us to evaluate the theoretical fertility of its postulates to address, today, the problem of liberation.
Over four decades after his death, Herbert Marcuse remains crucial for analyzing the ecological crisis through a critical lens. Though he never developed a systematic environmental theory, his critique of capitalist instrumental rationality-which reduces nature to an exploitable resource-remains relevant amid ecological collapse. Marcuse exposed how capitalism not only degrades the environment but also alienates individuals through consumerist false needs. His nascent ecological critique, alongside his call for the Great Refusal, inspires contemporary ecosocialist proposals to transcend the system. This article examines three dimensions: 1) Marcuse's ecological foundations, focused on society-nature reconciliation; 2) possibilities for radical anti-capitalist praxis; and 3) dialogues with contemporary theorists like Reitz, Fraser, and Saito. His legacy proves the environmental crisis is structural, not technical, and that alternatives do exist.
The following paper constitutes a critical approach to Herbert Marcuse's perspective on the limits and possibilities for radical social transformation in advanced capitalism and beyond. In expounding his concept of the objective transformations characteristic of advanced industrial society and its tendency to constitute what he calls a one-dimensional society, I will highlight the impasses of his perspective and develop the moment of immanent critique contained in his theory. In this regard, I will analyze Marcuse's concept of the new quality of social revolt emerging in the 1960s and the development of a global preemptive counterrevolution as a condition of the perpetuation of advanced capitalist society in a further phase of its development, a transformation that signals a growing blockage to qualitative social change as a result and condition of possibility of the intrinsic dynamics of advanced capitalism. In proceeding in this way, I hope to account for the important moment of truth of Marcuse's critical theory, but to develop it in the sense of an immanent critique that grounds the possibilities and limits for radical social transformation not in an antagonism between Eros and a repressive civilization, but in the very contradictions of the society of capital and the intrinsic dialectic of developed capitalism.
Douglas Kellner is one of the most influential critical theorists of his generation and a central figure in the reception of Herbert Marcuse. Professor Emeritus at UCLA, Kellner authored more than thirty books that helped redefine media studies, critical social theory, political philosophy, and the critique of advanced capitalism. His landmark studies on media culture and spectacle established him as a leading analyst of ideology, communication, and the political economy of information. At the same time, Kellner remains one of Marcuse's most dedicated interpreters. His Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) is widely regarded as a foundational study that established Marcuse scholarship worldwide. As the general editor of the sixvolume Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Kellner opened unprecedented archival access to Marcuse's unpublished essays, wartime reports, lectures, and political writings. Through his scholarship, teaching, and editorial work, Kellner not only preserved Marcuse's intellectual legacy but also demonstrated its continuing relevance for analyzing technology, authoritarianism, domination, and the possibilities of radical social transformation in the twenty-first century.
