Herbert Marcuse

In this course

Marcuse theorizes the relationship between repression, desire, and social control—a critical framework for understanding how technological and political systems manage human subjectivity. The course readings invoke his *Eros and Civilization* to complicate the necessity of repression in social life, while simultaneously using his critique of administered society to question whether post-1970s "democracy" and cybernetic systems represent genuine liberation or refined mechanisms of control. His work provides the philosophical vocabulary for interrogating whether contemporary AI and computational systems reproduce the "repressive desublimation" he identified in earlier technological capitalism.

Background

Herbert Marcuse was a German and American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and then at the University of Freiburg, where he received his PhD under the supervision of Martin Heidegger. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, which later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.

Mentioned in 3 readings