CfP: Reading Herbert Marcuse Today

In many ways, Herbert Marcuse was the critical theorist responsible for putting the Frankfurt School on the (world)map. Adopted by polymorphous revolts worldwide as a 70-year-old German émigré trained in Germanistik, Marcuse was the improbable nexus that bound together Angela Davis and T. W. Adorno, Rudi Dutschke and G. W. F. Hegel, Frantz Fanon and F. Schiller, Karl Marx and S. Freud. In the 1960s, his books on the ideology of late capitalism resonated with wide-reaching audiences and were almost instantaneously translated across the globe. Marcuse’s style and content captured the decade’s Zeitgeist, when most people were simultaneously euphoric and disgruntled. Although not in unproblematic formulations, his ideas sought to expand the cartography of Critical Theory by including “3rd World countries”, the Black radical tradition, and feminism alongside the working class in the task of reshaping history. Of all critical theorists, Marcuse was the one who dared the most to pinpoint the ways to liberation.

Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research at the same time the Nazis rose to power in Germany. During his U.S. exile, he developed his distinctive thought in close contact with a collective project of Critical Theory. As one of its prominent figures, he wrote fundamental works such as Reason and Revolution (1941) and Eros and Civilization (1955) before turning into a global phenomenon with One-Dimensional Man (1964). In the 1940s, Marcuse was also active in the war effort, assuming positions in Washington, DC to dissect and fight Nazism. He thus helped establish the foundations of a work that sought to understand how advanced capitalism obstructed the prospects of an emancipated social order. One ponders how the very idea of a “Frankfurt School” (both as a collective endeavor and radical scholarship that has, in the meantime, far exceeded the city of Frankfurt) would be shaped otherwise without his work and praxis.

However, while his books sold by the hundreds of thousands in the raging 1960s, when the market-and-prisons counterrevolution of the ensuing decades hit hard, interest in his work declined along with the cultural and social effervescence that dreamt of a qualitatively different society inhabited by human beings infused with a new sensibility. The domestication of the left’s most promising and risky ideas, the hardline right-wing assault in domestic and international affairs, the financialization of the economy – and its many ensuing bubbles –, and the social abyss that cast 99% of the world’s population to dead-end “gigs” turned out to be colossal obstacles for Marcuse’s critical theory. The end of utopia was quite different than Marcuse had expected – which does not imply that utopian claims have lost their validity or could be discarded.

In the last two decades, the existential crises of our times propelled a new generation of intellectuals and activists to re-engage with Marcuse’s work. The reality of climate cataclysm that reveals capitalism’s unsustainable relation to Nature; the normalization of war in everyday life not only in battlefronts but also in cultural artifacts that make society numb to its horrors; ubiquitous technological hallucinations that deliver a myriad of comforts and entertainments while shackling individuals through stealth mechanisms; neofascist eruptions that threaten life in society without barbarism – these are elements of our society’s apocalyptic landscape that reverberate in Marcuse’s books and are taken up today as analytical and political resources by an original wave of Marcusean scholarship worldwide.

To reflect on the manifold critical theory of Herbert Marcuse and its legacies today, Constelaciones invites contributions that engage directly with Marcuse’s oeuvre, whether in exegetical essays that dive deeply into his works or in articles that resort to Marcusean topoi to dissect our present and thus keep his distinctive style of critical theory alive. That includes undogmatically turning his radical questioning against his own concepts if history, society, and new ideas so require.

 

The following is a tentative and non-exhaustive list of possible article themes:

• Critical Theory of Technology: New Gadgets, Old Domination?
• Fascisms Abound: Marcuse’s Legacies to Analyze (and Fight) Fascism
• Beyond Frankfurt: Placing the Global South on the Map of Critical Theory
• Counterrevolutions: Marcuse and the Neoliberal Reaction
• The Many Faces of The Great Refusal Today
• Marcuse And Feminism: A Necessary (and Strained?) Relationship
• Marcuse’s Marx: Alienation, Ideology, Domination
• Nature’s Revolts: Marcuse And Climate Breakdown
• Reification and One-Dimensionality: Marcuse Reads Lukács
• Queering Critical Theory: Marcuse and Queer Theory
• Eros and Thanatos: Marcuse and Psychoanalysis
• Marcuse on Liberation and The Quest for a New Reality Principle
• Air From Another Planet: Marcuse’s Aesthetic Analyses
• The Wretched of the Earth: Marcuse and the Black Radical Tradition
• The German Scene: Kant, Hegel, and Schiller in Marcuse’s Thought
• The Critique of The Performance Principle Today
• Critique Of Capitalism and The Pursuit of a New Subjectivity

 

Articles may be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.

Deadline for Submissions: April 15th, 2025.

Anticipated Publication: December 2025.

Please check Constelaciones’ guidelines for authors.

For queries, please contact Constelaciones or the Special Issue’s guest editor.