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published on March 15, 2016
Raffaele Laudani
The Relevance of an Untimely Book
Critical Theory, and Radical Movements Fifty Years Later
This essay discusses the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man for contemporary radical politics. It approaches the topic from an unconventional perspective: the untimely nature of One-Dimensional Man, i.e., its being conceived in the 1940s as an answer to the crisis of Marxism after the defeat of European communist revolutions in the early twentieth century, and published in the 1960s in the very moment when the postwar stabilization was to collapse. From this perspective, its relevance for a political theory and praxis of global radical movements is not to be found in its main concepts and categories (e.g., “totalitarianism”), but on its shortcuts and limits, especially those related to political subjectivity. Shortcuts and limits which are, mutatis mutandis, still ours.