Consciência infeliz, unidimensionalidade e a possibilidade de transformação social (original) (raw)
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The present article departs from concepts and ideas thoroughly developed by Herbert Marcuse. As such, it deals with his approach concerning the possibility of social transformation, looking to problematize the obstacles and hardships associated to the ongoing forms of social domination. To take this through, central works such as Eros and civilization and One-dimensional man are taken up, along with a number of lesser known texts and posthumously published reflections. Asserting the influence of Hegel, Marx and Freud, it is considered possible to criticize some of the existing contradictions that mark capitalist relations, interpreting them dialectically and immanently to unveil the potentials for social change through democratic attunement.
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As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.
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For Herbert Marcuse, the terrifying specter of communism at the end of the 1960s served the interests of counterrevolution in discrediting revolutionary aims and legitimizing all necessary repressive counter-measures against emancipatory programs. Slavoj Žižek adds a second function, namely, that during the Cold War the specter of communism also served to humanize Western liberal democracy, necessitating strong social welfare measures and thus forming capitalism with a human face. But with the fall of the Eastern Bloc the threat to this system has become more spectral than ever, because any mild deviations from a neoliberal vision of free market capitalism now bring with them charges of totalitarianism. In the face of such formidable obstacles, Marcuse and Žižek argue that the nature and means of emancipation necessarily remain indeterminate. Hence, the emancipatory possibilities that they do sketch out remain overwhelmingly negative and spectral. This raises the question of whether...
Further Reflections on Work, Alienation, and Freedom in Marcuse and Marx
Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1973
Le socialisme tel que décrit par Marx donnerait-il naissance à un « homo ludens » ou à un « homo faber » ? Cette question a fait l'objet d'une vigoureuse controverse entre les critiques de l'œuvre de Marx depuis plus d'une décade, controverse qui portait principalement sur les premières œuvres de Marx dont l'absence de rigueur philosophique pouvait accréditer les interprétations les plus diverses. Une lecture attentive du Grundrisse de Marx, écrit dont on a peu fait cas jusqu'à tout récemment, permet de résoudre la controverse. Le présent article analyse le concept de travail chez Marx, tel qu'exposé dans le Grundrisse, et établit un rapport d'identité entre ce concept et la notion marcusienne de « loisir » (play). Il appert que Marx et Marcuse partagent la même opinion sur la nécessité de l'abolition du travail tel que nous l'avons connu jusqu'à présent, de même que sur les postulats ayant trait à la domination que l'homme est appelé ...
Toward a Politics of Non-Identity: Rethinking the Political Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
Radical Philosophy Review, 2013
This paper will reconsider the contemporary relevance of the long-ignored political thought of Herbert Marcuse, implicitly in light of certain contemporary trends in radical democratic theory which affirm the productive and generative capacities of social division and difference. Rejecting those readings of Marcuse which interpret the latter as a prophet of identity, desiring the actualization of a terminal historical state which permanently reconciles human conflict, it will nevertheless be suggested that Marcuse's politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for radical creation in all of those spheres within which the human being is active. Specifically, Marcuse far too often posits a model of politics marked by instrumentalism and managerialism. Although it is this political model which most often reveals itself in Marcuse's work, this paper will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain counter-tendency in his philosophy, a counter-tendency demonstrating the extent to which he can be seen as affirming a negative and non-identitarian politics of overcoming which looks always towards creation, towards the transcendence of never conclusive social actualities.
The principle ill of capitalist development is the growing alienation it imposes upon the people it affects, to the extent that a truly just society results unthinkable to them. Thus, a revolutionary theory must address the roots of the alienating processes and counter them. Such intents have been made in the work of Herbert Marcuse, and specific revisions that mirror the contemporary state of capitalism, i.e. its evolution into biocapitalism that however have not changed its essential configuration, of his work could lead to a revolutionary theory suitable to present day society. Building upon certain key concepts and notions of Marcuse’s work, Preslav Tabakov examines the different forms the alienation takes in the developed world and their consequences, while at the same time engages critically views that justify or mystify these forms of alienation. The Marcusean concept of “false needs” may well be extended to other types of embodiment such as labour, corporality and abilities, and those likewise appear as false, i.e. repressive to the individuals but beneficial to the capitalist society as a whole. After determining that the confluence of such alienating attacks produces human bodies that are inherently repressed, repressive to others and to any resistance, thus useless bodies, Tabakov goes on to propose various measures of counter-alienating tactics building upon another Marcusean concept, that of the “radical acts”. The principal finding results to be that very often the very process of alienation presents the possibilities for its subversion. This fact provides for the sketching of a more generalized revolutionary strategy that intents to not only restore the productive capacities to the individuals, but create new capacities and thus found the productive (or economic) base for a socialist society. Methodologically, Tabakov employs a variety of approaches apart from critical theory, such as Marxist analysis, phenomenology and world-systems theory, but the guiding principle is the methodological suspicion that the alienation of the individuals is not somehow a by-product of capitalist development, a certain irrationality, but its primal engine of accumulation of value.