Yotam feldman Dialectics of liberationKevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence, 1954–1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, Lexington Books, Lanham MD and Plymouth, 2012, 269 pp., £49.95 hb., £21.95 pb., 978 0 73916 835 6 hb., 978 0 73916 836 3 pb. Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but […]
'Herbert Marcuse' tag archive
Historicism and Lacanian theory
In 1977 Luce Irigaray published a passionately written article in the journal Critique, entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’. The text is a richly woven tapestry of diverse references and poetic resonances, and merits a close reading. However, rather than using Irigaray’s essay as an exercise in textual analysis, I will use it here as a […]
The Eupsychian Impulse
The Eupsychian Impulse Psychoanalysis and Left politics since ’68 Barry Richards My purpose here is to offer some reflections on the part flayed by psychoanalysis in Left politics in Britain since 1968. I will attempt a broad and critical characterisation of the major uses to which psychoanalytic theory has been put in political discourse during […]
The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique
The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]
What Makes Critical Theory Critical?
What Makes Critical Theory IC riticaI’? Joseph McCarney The toplc of this paper is the project of a critlcal theory of society. It considers that project in the form it takes in the work of its best known exponents, the theorists of the socalled ‘Frankfurt School’. The main question to be answered is the question […]
Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse
Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse Joanna Hodge Thoughts occasioned by reading Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Roberts, Waiter Benjamin (Macmillan, 1982) There are five grand’ ‘o’ld me~ of’ twentieth-century European Marxism: Adorno , Benjamin , Bloch , Lukacs , and Marcuse . Their works loom bulky and ominous […]
Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979
NEWS & COMMENT HERBERT MARCUSE: A PIECE OF THE PAST DISLODGED Russell Jacoby Herbert Marcuse is dead. At the age of 81, he succumbed to a world he always resisted. His list of credits or crimes is long, and includes inciting the student revolts of the 1960s. For those who collect evidence that the ’60s […]
Technology and Liberation
Technology’ aDd LlbeJlaIIOD Robert Eccleshall critics of capitalism have traditionally considered technological development as subject to the control of dominant interests and thus as one aspect, albeit crucial, of a broader strategy aimed at reproducing existing social relations. In opposition to technological determinists (who hold material progress to be dependent on the number of individuals […]
3 Reviews
REUIEWS THEORIES OF PRACTICE Richard Norman Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, Duckworth – 1972; £3.95 One of the declared aims of Radical Philosophy is to draw on alternative philosophical traditions as a way of overcoming the inadequacies of analytical philosophy. This is not to say that any of the other dominant traditions offers a […]
The Theory of Ideology in Capital
IHE IHEORY OF ·IDEOlOIiV In [APIIAL John mepham •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• “There must be some way out of here” Said the joker to the thief “There’s too much confusion I can’t get no relief” (Dylan) Where do incorrect ideas come from? In What is to be Done? Lenin argues that “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement […]
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 1
Entsetzen Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving wohlfarth * The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two col ective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of […]