Historical Materialism as Hermeneutics in Herbert Marcuse
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Herbert Marcuse's critical theory of capitalist society is perhaps not the first we tend to associate with the project of hermeneutics. Arguably, however, a hermeneutical dimension consistently inflects Marcuse's concern with articulating historical materialism on a renewed basis-one that would account for the transformation of subjectivity a revolutionary politics not only requires as an outcome , but indeed presupposes as a necessary condition. This necessity, I shall argue, forms the ground of Marcuse's understanding of hermeneutics as simultaneously a gesture of reactivating historical memory and as critique. In this sense, Marcuse's historical materialist hermeneutics offers us a way to engage in a critique of the capitalist present and its fetishistic logic of dehistoricization, the reification of historically specific social relations as immutable, thingly laws. Indeed, for Marcuse the articulation of a revolutionary subjectivity concerns the development of radical needs, critical consciousness, and aesthetic sensibilities that would undermine and begin the process of interrupting the hold of capitalist society over our libidinal and bodily, as well as over our conscious and unconscious, life. The problem here, then, will be to clarify the mediations between the development of such radical needs and the kind of historical memory hermeneutical reflection itself occasions.
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