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Death (and Life) of the Author

Peter Wollen: Kathy Acker, 5 February 1998

... Born and brought up in New York, she had first attended Brandeis University, and it was because Herbert Marcuse left Brandeis to become a Professor at UC. San Diego that Acker left to follow him out west to Southern California. Then, in San Diego, she not only continued her academic relationship with Marcuse: she ...

Why can’t he be loved?

Benjamin Kunkel: Houellebecq, 20 October 2011

The Map and the Territory 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd.
Heinemann, 291 pp., £17.99, September 2011, 978 0 434 02141 3
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... no other contemporary writer, left or right, has made the supposedly outdated Freudo-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse look like such a prescient glimpse into the future we now inhabit. Marcuse’s formula for the libidinal condition of the postwar capitalist era was ‘repressive desublimation’. The ...

In the bright autumn of my senescence

Christopher Hitchens, 6 January 1994

In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of ‘Socialist Worker’ 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1993, 0 906224 94 2
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Why You Should Join the Socialists 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 70 pp., £1.90, November 1993, 0 906224 80 2
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... his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert Marcuse. (This is important, because a feature of the IS, as it called itself, was that it was inoculated against certain Sixties fads in advance.) Over the next several months we continued to meet and (while I was doing a ridiculous job of teaching ...

Dream On

Katha Pollitt: Bringing up Babies, 11 September 2003

I Don't Know How She Does It 
by Allison Pearson.
Vintage, 256 pp., £6.99, May 2003, 0 09 942838 5
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A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother 
by Rachel Cusk.
Fourth Estate, 224 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 1 84115 487 3
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The Truth about Babies: From A-Z 
by Ian Sansom.
Granta, 352 pp., £6.99, June 2003, 1 86207 575 1
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What Are Children For? 
by Laurie Taylor and Matthew Taylor.
Short Books, 141 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 1 904095 25 9
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The Commercialisation of Intimate Life 
by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
California, 313 pp., £32.95, May 2003, 0 520 21487 0
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... aspects of the women’s movement have entered the mainstream of American life through a process Herbert Marcuse described as ‘resistance through incorporation’. American culture incorporated what of feminism fitted with capitalism and individualism, but it resisted the rest. It incorporated the idea of equal pay for equal work and diversity but ...

Gloomy Pageant

Jeremy Harding: Britain Comma Now, 31 July 2014

Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now 
by David Marquand.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 1 84614 672 5
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... were entitled to get.’ The defiant style of the 1960s, epitomised for Marquand by R.D. Laing and Herbert Marcuse, was also a ‘hyper-individualistic’, romanticised worship of choice by jejune students and lotus-eaters wearing paisley. ‘Slowly, incompletely, but unmistakably, today’s hedonistic and relativist culture elbowed aside the old culture ...

Like a Top Hat

Jonathan Rée: Morality without the Metaphysics, 8 February 2024

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography 
by Émile Perreau-Saussine, translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski.
Notre Dame, 197 pp., £36, September 2022, 978 0 268 20325 2
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... opportunity had passed.In 1970 he wrote a short book about the German-American leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who was, like him, disappointed with the labour movement, but hoped that the revolutionary slack would be taken up by a coalition of discontented students, sexual radicals and Third World insurgents. MacIntyre was not impressed. ‘To be in ...

Naughty Children

Christopher Turner: Freud’s Free Clinics, 6 October 2005

Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-38 
by Elizabeth Ann Danto.
Columbia, 348 pp., £19.50, May 2005, 0 231 13180 1
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... the revolutionary Freud as a myth. It was only in 1955 that a member of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, revived the more radical Freud in Eros and Civilisation, which came out two years before Reich’s death. Perhaps these vacillating positions represent some ambivalence at the heart of Freud’s politics, allowing us to grasp the ...

Much like the 1950s

David Edgar: The Sixties, 7 June 2007

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Little, Brown, 878 pp., £22.50, August 2006, 0 316 72452 1
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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Abacus, 892 pp., £19.99, May 2006, 0 349 11530 3
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... doesn’t mention the (equally chaotic) Dialectics of Liberation Congress of July 1967, at which Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg and Stokely Carmichael were brought together not by a university or a political party but by a group of dissident psychiatrists living in a commune in London’s East End. The role of R.D. Laing’s ...

Qui êtes-vous, Sir Moses?

C.R. Whittaker, 6 March 1986

Ancient History: Evidence and Models 
by M.I. Finley.
Chatto, 131 pp., £12.95, September 1985, 0 7011 3003 2
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... of the United States – over fifty of them according to Jay, including such towering figures as Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann, by whom Finley was influenced at Columbia. Several years later another exile from Nazi Europe, the Austrian Karl Polanyi, who had served as a WEA lecturer in Britain during the war, came as visiting professor to Columbia ...

Human Spanner

Stuart Jeffries: Kant Come Alive, 17 June 2021

Correspondence 1923-66: Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer 
edited by Wolfgang Schopf, translated by Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler.
Polity, 537 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 7456 4923 8
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Kracauer: A Biography 
by Jörg Später, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Polity, 584 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3301 5
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... And without their wealthy fathers, Adorno, Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Friedrich Pollock would all have struggled to spend as much time as they did finessing their neo-Marxist accounts of Verblendungszusammenhang, the system of delusion that prevents the masses from rising up in revolution. All were raised ...

Ecological Leninism

Adam Tooze: Drill, baby, drill, 18 November 2021

... according to Malm and the Zetkin Collective, at a deeper psychological level. Echoing what Herbert Marcuse, in his reading of fascist mass psychology, described as the desire to attack, split and pulverise, Trump praised the labourers who ‘break through rock walls, mine the depths of the earth, and reach through the ocean floor, to bring every ...

‘I’m not racist, but …’

Daniel Trilling, 18 April 2019

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities 
by Eric Kaufman.
Allen Lane, 617 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 31710 5
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National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy 
by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin.
Pelican, 384 pp., £9.99, October 2018, 978 0 241 31200 1
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... criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More important, Kaufmann gives too little consideration to the difference between top-down initiatives – the celebration of diversity in advertising ...

On Cruelty

Judith Butler: The Death Penalty, 17 July 2014

The Death Penalty: Vol. I 
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Chicago, 328 pp., £24.50, January 2014, 978 0 226 14432 0
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... its justification. But for Davis, the task is to move beyond vengeance. Her mentor was at one time Herbert Marcuse, who in Eros and Civilisation, his rejoinder to Civilisation and Its Discontents, suggested that Eros might be expanded to create forms of community that would counter the force of Thanatos, or the death drive augmented under capitalism. He ...

Heil Heidegger

J.P. Stern, 20 April 1989

Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie 
by Hugo Ott.
Campus Verlag, 355 pp., DM 48, December 1988, 3 593 34035 6
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... includes what may well be Heidegger’s only reference to the holocaust, in a letter to Herbert Marcuse, one of his former pupils. Marcuse’s reproaches are justified (Heidegger writes in January 1948): he can only add that ‘instead of “Jews” ’ Marcuse’s letter ...

Still Superior

Mark Greif: Sex and Susan Sontag, 12 February 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp., £16.99, January 2009, 978 0 241 14431 2
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... birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or leave. There isn’t much room for the complex, human Philip Rieff. He was famous ...

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