The materialist approach of One-Dimensional Man emerges in a later work in which Marcuse connects the notion of “new sensibility” to a “complex intermediary function of the intellect.” Revolutionary praxis “is not simply negation but contradiction,” and thus Marcuse’s “new idea of reason” constructs a liberating rationality upon a technological one. This is accomplished by moving from an abstract “concept” of possibility to the perception of possibility as a “social alternative.” Here I examine the “dialectical logic” of human rights, which critiques an unfree world and asserts itself as a political determinant dependent on the rupturing of established power.

With a focus on the social and political conjuncture in Greece following interventions by the troika of the International Monetary Fund, European Union, and European Central Bank, as well as with an analysis of historical trends in Greek capitalism, the end of the Metapolitefsi period, and the rise in authoritarian statism, I argue for a revival of Marxist state theory in understanding the current global crisis. I identify this moment in Greece as a battle for hegemony between the dominant narratives of disaster that perpetuate the vicious cycle of debt-and-austerity and an alternative, radical narrative of here-and-now.

The common sense that queer liberation is based upon a linear or progressive trajectory fails to account for the complexities and contradictions surrounding the current demand for LGBT equality and its place within intersecting social movements. This article uses the history of Marxist praxis, including Marcuse’s contributions, to argue for abandoning linear and stagist assumptions of gradual change in favor of a dialectical approach toward the intersection of identity formation and social struggle.

In his later work, Marcuse concerned himself with the nexus between social movements and unconscious dimensions of human nature. He understood Nature (including instincts) as an “ally” in the revolutionary process. In this paper, I seek to explore his insight through the concept of the “eros effect,” which I first uncovered while analyzing the global revolt of 1968. Forms of direct democracy and collective action developed by the New Left continue to define movement aspirations and structures. Although contemporary rational choice theorists (who emphasize individual gain as the key motivation for people’s actions) cannot comprehend instinctual motivations, a different understanding is central to my conception.

This paper argues that community gardens, in addition to being economically practical, offer a promising example of an environment that fosters the new sensibility. After exploring Marcuse’s new sensibility and his critique of aesthetic experience under capitalism, the paper turns to some empirical studies of the benefits of the aesthetic qualities of community gardening. These studies correspond to Marcuse’s proposition that aesthetic environments can play a role in challenging domination. The last section of this paper considers how those involved in the D-Town Farm in Detroit self-consciously assert the community garden as a political project that challenges domination.

A new wave of global protest movements offers the opportunity to reassess Marcuse’s work in the early twenty-first century. Before engaging with the Occupy movement and its analogs, it is necessary to scrutinize Marcuse’s assumptions about the affluent society. This examination suggests that the conditions of neoliberal accumulation diverge significantly from those Marcuse more or less took for granted as permanently stabilizing capitalist societies in the Global North. While much of what Marcuse offers retains relevance, its appeal to the new movements is not immediate because these can no longer take for granted the prosperity of the earlier era.

This essay challenges the belief in the superiority of capitalism as practiced today, and outlines an alternative economic system aimed at avoiding current capitalism’s main weaknesses. This alternative, built around employee ownership, is designed to result, over time, in a more equal distribution of income and wealth, while surpassing current capitalism’s main strength, its extraordinary economic productivity. It is an economic system that spreads economically beneficial incentives around more widely than today, and helps equalize opportunities. At its core is a buy-in and payoff scheme that avoids what are often said to be the major problems with employee ownership.

This paper explores practical application of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to lived human experience and practical concerns beyond those he addressed, specifically the phenomenon of gender. We are so committed to gender norms that we ostracize or even kill those who violate them, yet rarely question the reasonableness of our expectations. Gender needs to be examined from a phenomenological stance, a) because of the ubiquity of gendering, b) because presuppositions regarding gender go largely unquestioned in most Daseins’ everyday existence, and c) because cases in which actual fact contravenes our expectations offer insight into what it means to be human.

Many socialists agree that socialism must be democratic, in the political as well as in the economic arena. But socialist democracy is very different from democracy in a capitalist country. Socialist democracy, it is widely believed, will be participatory: everyone will be a full participant in all decisions affecting his or her life. In this paper I argue that this conception of socialist democracy needs a lot more work. Not all decisions can be made by everybody affected by a decision. Many decisions that affect large numbers of persons must be made by representatives. But representation is subject to several serious weaknesses which are not products of capitalism. They will be obstacles to democracy also under socialism. Today we do not know what a socialist democracy would look like.

This paper considers the nature of Heidegger’s Eurocentrism in regard to philosophy. Focusing primarily on “A Dialogue on Language,” I argue, first, that Heidegger recognizes the limits of the Eurocentric idea of philosophy and proposes its overcoming. Secondly, I suggest that the proposal to overcome philosophy is made in an attempt to protect philosophy from the encroachment of an otherness that challenges its very identity. This leads me to the view, thirdly, that Heidegger’s Eurocentrism about philosophy is compromising insofar as he is willing, to a certain degree, to let go of philosophy’s European origin. This “thinning” out of Heidegger’s Eurocentrism, finally, opens the door to a consideration of the possibility for a non-Western, namely, a Latin American, or Mexican “philosophy.”

This short discussion piece invites readers to consider two questions: What does “pluralism” mean in philosophy? and What should it mean? Brian Leiter’s assault on Linda Martin Alcoff and The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy is taken as an opportunity to reflect on several conceptions of philosophical pluralism: the “philosophical gourmet’s” conception, the “three white men” conception, and Scott Pratt’s epistemological pluralism. In each, there is a failure to come to terms with both history and power. What is at stake in philosophy’s pluralism debates is the aspiration to judgment, in the Arendtian sense, among philosophy’s others—this aspiration is both unsettling to the discipline and important for its future.

In 1979, Audre Lorde delivered a paper at a conference celebrating feminism that proceeded to undermine the self-congratulatory tone of the participants by alerting them to the ways that they too were in need of radical critique. In this paper I explore the nature and importance of what it means to be radical by analyzing Lorde’s place within the broader trend of philosophical self-criticism as it specifically relates to the feminist movement. My goal is to argue that while radical theory must always stretch out toward the world, it must always turn back on itself in order to avoid the very injustices it seeks to correct.

In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young misinterprets her model of responsibility as a new type of responsibility that is conceptually completely distinct from liability responsibility rather than as offering a new ground for holding people responsible.

This essay urges us to complement work on the philosophy and social science of race that has focused on the “visual” and “epistemic” dimension of racism with work on affect or what is here called the somatological dimensions of racism. The racist self hears race before he sees it. The racist self is convulsed by race before she experiences it as an epistemic affair. It is argued here that we dwell in the sound house of race. Before racism is chromocratic, it is phonocratic. The technologies of the racist self are the technologies of racializing aurality and phonology. Racism brands us sonically. Race, it will be argued, is a sonic stigmata. More specifically, the focus will be on voice, accent, what here is called the prosody of race. The aim is make those racialized and racializing accents in philosophy resound, echo, and reverberate so that we can hear the prosody of race. The racist does not dwell in the silent chamber of the mind’s “I.” The viscera of racism dwells in the body our racist habits have domesticated.

Max Stirner pioneered a radically existentialist thinking in which the ego or the Unique One is able to appropriate its “predicates” or determinations as objects of consumption. In this sense the singular event is privileged over the intellectual “spooks” that express the predicate’s independence from and mastery over its subject. Karl Marx’s thinking was decisively altered by his encounter with Stirner, to whom he replied at length (with Engels) in The German Ideology. I propose that Marx and Engels’s critique and appropriation of Stirner provides the basis for what I call “communist existentialism,” and that this is the proper standpoint for radical philosophy today. After giving an account of this position, I briefly adopt it to critique two of the communist standpoints associated with “communization,” those of Tiqqun and Theorie Communiste.

Are traditional models of ethics sufficiently action-guiding? It is customary for moral philosophers to formulate substantive normative theories that advance principles of right conduct. The purpose of these principles is to act as a guide to judgment and action. I propose that normative models of ethics fail to be sufficiently action-guiding. In so doing, I advocate a reform of traditional ethics and propose a radical reformulation of ethics—an ethic that makes education a moral imperative.

Over the course of the twentieth century, nationalistic approaches to the obstacles of racism in the United States have increasingly come to be seen as the more revolutionary of the various forms of anti-racist struggle. This paper explores several historical instances of Black Nationalism and seeks to demonstrate that, despite the many points on which they might diverge, they share in common a tendency to naturalize and embrace the category of race as a basis for political struggle, and that they therefore constitute an ideologically accommodating and hence essentially regressive approach to the questions of race and racism. It is suggested that a critique of the modern category of race and a political practice aimed at its denaturalization will be a necessary aspect of any attempt to overcome racial oppression and inequality.

This paper draws on the (explicit and implicit) dialogs of Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler to reconsider Marx’s contribution to an understanding of political agency and subjectivity. It suggests that through engaging with certain voices of Marx, there emerges a complex and dynamic understanding that allows for a thinking of subjectivity as produced through structural conditions in a way that both enables and limits agency. These insights allow us to imagine the transformative political agency of those subjects marginalized within the current global order to engage in an emancipatory struggle marked by its openness and indeterminacy.