Herbert Marcuse Archives - Public Seminar

Philosophy

When I Was One-Dimensional

How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life

July 20, 2022 • by James Miller

"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...

Social Research

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its last issue

July 20, 2022 • by Social Research

The current issue of Social Research is based not on a special theme but rather on the conviction that words matter, books and ideas matter—and some books, special ones, deeply affect our lives and how we think and what we think about. To bring home this perhaps trivial truism—that books ...

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

Feature

Critical Love

Night of Philosophy Love Symposium

March 27, 2018 • by Samantha Rose Hill

Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was ...

Feature

Populism and Freudian Mass Psychology

Three Paradoxes

January 26, 2017 • by Eli Zaretsky

Paradox one: Populism is generally described as irrational, emotional, intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and so forth, yet the main populist insight, namely that the system is rigged against the ordinary person, is correct. On the main question, in other words, populism is far more rational than the putatively rational dominant ...

Feature

Libidinal Ecology: Sex and the Anthropocene (I)

January 26, 2016 • by Dominic Pettman

In 2013, reports starting circulating in the media that the global best-seller 50 Shades of Grey was beginning to outstay its welcome as a cultural artifact. In the UK alone, it sold 5.3 million copies to that point, even before the film based on the story was released. A large percentage of ...