Politics as Radical Creation: Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt on Political Performativity

Introduction: Marcuse, Arendt, and the Idea of Politics

Chapter One: Marcuse’s Critique and Reformulation of the Philosophical Concept of Essence

1. Culture and Bourgeois Freedom
2. Critical Theory and the Ethical Imperative: Happiness-Reason-Freedom
3. Hegel and the Dialectic of Negativity
4. Essence and the Dialectic of Labour

Chapter Two: The Dialectic of Instinctual Liberation: Essence and Non-Repressive Sublimation

1. The Problem of Repression: Individual and Social, Basic and Surplus
2. The Affirmation of Sensuousness: Primary Narcissism and Non-Repressive Sublimation
3. Non-Repressive Sublimation and Non-Alienated Labour

Chapter Three: The Problem of Politics

1. Marx’s Political Ambiguity
2. The Limits of Western Marxism
3. Marcuse’s Reproduction of the Marxian Anti-Politics
4. Administration as Domination and Liberation

Chapter Four: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Public Freedom

1. Performativity and Essence: The Need for Radical Creation
2. The Subject of Radical Creation: Politics and the We
3. Agonism, Democracy, and Political Objectification
4. Arendt and Revolutionary History
5. The Institutionalization of the Revolutionary Impulse: The Council Tradition

Chapter Five: Marcuse Contra Arendt: Dialectics, Destiny, Distinction

1. Questioning Distinction: the Vita Activa and Marx’s Ontology of Labour
2. Arendt’s Critique of the Dialectic: On the Need for Distinction
3. Marcuse’s Critique of Non-Dialectical Dialectics

Chapter Six: Marcuse: Reconsidering the Political

1. The Theory of the Radical Act
2. The Affirmation of Socialist Nature
3. Politics and the New Left
4. Spontaneity and the Council Tradition

Conclusion: From the New Left to Global Justice and from the Councils to

Cochabamba

Works Cited