By Collin May · Monday, January 15, 2024 Gabriel Noah Brahm’s interview with Collin May appears here.
 The rapid expansion of woke ideology and its attendant cancel culture has produced both a popular and an academic backlash. The recent appearance by the trio of university presidents before the House of Representatives Education Committee has only served to focus that backlash against the conformism and anti-free speech culture that dominate many university campuses.
On a popular level, we are all familiar with concepts such as anti-racism, settler colonialism, and the ubiquitous EDI—equity, diversity, and inclusion. On the intellectual level, the backlash focuses on a growing sense of scholarly puritanism attributed to anti-Enlightenment theories that underly these public concepts. The theories include: neo-feminism; postmodernism, often with a Foucauldian inspiration; and critical theory. As far as critical theory is concerned, the spotlight shines on German-American critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse is famous for an essay he wrote in 1965 entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, he argued that tolerance in the liberal capitalist West was simply a veil that oppressive right-wing movements and state institutions used to dominate public discourse while silencing left-leaning activism. In response, Marcuse called for the outright suppression of speech and discourse deemed right-wing. In other words, intolerance for allegedly right-leaning narratives, with untrammeled promotion of the supposedly emancipatory left-leaning narratives.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Thursday, October 18, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” from Telos 4 (Fall 1969).
Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” (1928) continues his efforts at fusing a contemporary form of Marxism with the work of his doctoral supervisor Martin Heidegger and his phenomenological project in Sein und Zeit (1927). The central tenet that Marcuse uses to construct a thread between Marxism and phenomenology is the analysis of the concrete and the correctness of knowledge as a truth related to this concreteness. The significance of Marxism as a theory of analysis is its self-reflexivity, the means by which it reflects on the process of historicity itself and, in addition to this, the processes of becoming that it undergoes as a result of its historical analysis. The difference here is that phenomenology claims to investigate the essences of things but does not concern itself with its own method or with a dialectical approach between the abstract and concrete, which inevitably occur as one attempts to capture a representation of an object.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Monday, March 12, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013).
It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects.
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By Vincent Lloyd · Thursday, February 13, 2014 Vincent Lloyd’s “Marcuse the Lover” appears in Telos 165 (Winter 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 Why has Marcuse’s fame faded? I argue that the answer has to do with the way secularism and critical theory do and do not interact in the contemporary academy. We can read Marcuse as a critic of secularism, when secularism is understood as one of the ideas of the ruling class, taking its current form with the rise of identity politics in the 1960s and 70s. Marcuse criticizes the secularizing features of the Protestant Reformation, much like other recent critics of secularism. Further, he seeks to recover a deeper sense of freedom—what might be called a post-secular sense of freedom. In doing so, he appeals to the good, the true, the beautiful, and, in a way, to rightly ordered love. I read Marcuse fundamentally as a critic of idolatry, as a negative political theologian. His work suggests a promising path for conversations about critical theory and secularism to come together.
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By Caroline Edwards · Thursday, February 6, 2014 Caroline Edwards’s “From Eros to Eschaton: Herbert Marcuse’s Liberation of Time” appears in Telos 165 (Winter 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
This article explores what Gershom Scholem has called Herbert Marcuse’s “unacknowledged ties to [his] Jewish heritage.” At the core of Marcuse’s vision of transformed, non-repressive social relations, I argue, is a struggle over time, which rests upon a distinctly Jewish approach to the twin questions of remembrance and redemption. One example of this approach is the temporal dialectic between alienated labor time and the timelessness of pleasure’s desire for eternity, which underpins Marcuse’s analysis in Eros and Civilization (1956). This dialectic rests upon Marcuse’s reading of the Freudian Eros-Todestrieb dualism, whose phylogenetic reading of patricide has been read by critics as reformulating the biblical rebellion against an authoritarian Yahweh.
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By Zvi Tauber · Thursday, January 30, 2014 Zvi Tauber’s “Herbert Marcuse on Jewish Identity, the Holocaust, and Israel” appears in Telos 165 (Winter 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
The article focuses at three themes of Herbert Marcuse’s approach, views, and attitudes concerning Judaism, Jewish history and the State of Israel. Marcuse, whose research and philosophy only marginally addressed the “Jewish question,” never denied his Jewish origins, but at the same time he never used this objective fact as an exclusive or decisive argument to affect his views on various issues, not even regarding world-historical matters of particular relevance to the Jews. Even if generally, positively, Marcuse endeavored to constitute the Marxian Realm of Freedom, or at least strove to fathom scientifically why in the course of modern history, an authentic revolution for the liberation of man has failed repeatedly, his major, immediate, intellectual and socio-political concern was the struggle against the reemergence of an oppressive reign of horror, including a struggle against the possible recurrence of a genocide.
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