Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia: Five Lectures

(Paperback, New edition)

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An impassioned plea for overcoming capitalism, whose urgency is more timely today than when it was first published fifty years ago. Back in print after fifty years and with a new introduction by Ray Brassier, this often overlooked but prescient collection of Marcuse's lectures makes an impassioned plea for the overthrowing of capitalism. Analysing the work of Freud and Marx, and taking in topics like automation, work, postcapitalism, utopia, and technology, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia excavates the psychic roots of the current crisis of capitalist civilisation, and gives us a blueprint for the emancipation of humanity from the toils of capitalism. In a world reeling from the ongoing collapse of the neoliberal consensus, coupled with the accelerating pace of catastrophic climate change wrought by capitalism, Marcuse's radical insights in Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia are as urgently relevant today as they were in 1970.

Reviews

Against the lies and mystifications of a cynical realism, Marcuse insists on the real basis of utopia an insistence we need today more than ever.
"Marcuse also shows a path to a concrete utopia made possible by the achievements of the existing society. The essays in his volume are once again timely as rising social conflict on the right and the left challenges conventional thinking.
These texts indicate how and why Marcuse was a key influence on the New Left and radical politics during the last two decades of his life in the 1960s and 1970s, and his continuing relevance for radical theory and politics today.

Author Bio

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a philosopher and critical social theorist. He was a member of the Institute for Social Research, along with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. His best-known works are Reason and Revolution (1940); Eros and Civilization (1955); and One Dimensional Man (1964). His work exerted a profound influence on the New Left and the radical counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.