Abstract
Herbert Marcuse believed that the development of a society that is free of oppression, domination, and surplus repression required the development of a “new sensibility”. That is, he believed that the human instinctual structure would have to be radically modified. This is possible insofar as the human instinctual or drive structure often reflects the present organization of society. This chapter explores the possibility of developing this new sensibility by rethinking it through the lenses of intersectionality and democratic attunement. The theory of intersectionality discloses the ways in which multiple forms of oppression are intertwined and how they coexist in one and the same individual. Intersectionality opens up a space for the deconstruction of identities that have been formed within oppressive social structures. This deconstruction allows for the possibility of what the author calls democratic attunement. The chapter claims that Marcuse’s concept of the new sensibility can be developed by engaging the theory of intersectionality and democratic attunement.
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Notes
- 1.
See Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse ‘s 1974 Paris Lectures At Vincennes University, edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz, p. 13.
- 2.
See Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s, edited by Douglas Kellner, p. 167.
- 3.
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 1969, p. 23.
- 4.
Even Marcuse adopted the traditional English term “instinct” and chose to use this term instead of drive. However, his analysis of the malleability of human instincts implies the use of Trieb (drive) instead of instink.
- 5.
Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twentieth-First Century is a great body of scholarship by a contemporary non-Marxist economist who basically vindicates Marx’s claims about the growing gap between the two economic classes in capitalism. Piketty uses recent empirical research to show that in capitalism the gap between the very rich and the poor is rapidly expanding and there is no reason to believe that it will slow down any time soon.
- 6.
I have provided a more detailed discussion of this second form of one-dimensionality in “When Liberation Movements Become One-Dimensional: On Critical Theory and Intersectionality” with Amahlia Lena Perry-Farr and Louisa Nayir Perry-Farr. This paper was presented at the fifth biennial meeting of the International Herbert Marcuse Society in Salisbury Maryland in November 2015. It is under review for publication in New Political Science.
- 7.
See Rene Girard, “Mimesis and Violence” In The Girard Reader, edited by James G. Williams, pp. 9–19.
- 8.
The fact that mimetic rivalry between oppressed groups prohibits the development of revolutionary consciousness as these groups are more inclined to engage in revolt against each other and not the Establishment is the point of our paper “When Liberation Movements Become One-Dimensional: On Critical Theory and Intersectionality”. Our claim is that the intersectionality framework could greatly mitigate this problem.
- 9.
See Angela Davis: An Autobiography,
- 10.
See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Best and Kellner argue for a type of social theory that would combine the micro-level analysis such as Foucault’s analysis of power within institutions with the type of macro analysis of society that is characteristic of the Frankfurt School.
- 11.
See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 114–122, and Anna Marie Smith Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary, pp. 55–74.
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Farr, A. (2017). The New Sensibility, Intersectionality, and Democratic Attunement: The Future of Critical Theory and Humanity. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_32
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