Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse is invoked as a point of reference in the book’s account of utopian transformation, not as a narrated character with a developed biography or personal plot. His significance lies in a contrast: the utopian longing associated with his late work points toward a wholly Other beyond the potentials that revolutionary change might simply liberate from within global capitalism.

Role in the Argument

The reference occurs in a comparison of competing visions of what political emancipation could achieve. The book distinguishes a leap that frees capacities already generated by capitalism from a redemptive movement toward nonmediated Otherness. Marcuse’s late work is placed on the latter side of that distinction, alongside the late work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

This placement is carefully framed as a comparison of utopian longing, rather than a detailed account of Marcuse’s arguments. The book does not supply biographical information or a specific political program attributable to him here. Instead, his name helps mark the difference between transforming the existing order’s latent possibilities and imagining an alternative not reducible to those possibilities.

Contrast with Revolutionary Negation

The contrast is expressed through the distinction between determinate and abstract negation. The revolutionary leap associated with Hardt and Negri is characterized as determinate negation: it reverses the existing arrangement by freeing potentials developed within global capitalism, understood as already containing a kind of communism in itself. That approach changes what the system permits without, in this account, necessarily reaching a wholly different mode of existence.

Against that model, the utopian longing linked to Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer is described as nearer to a redemptive leap into a nonmediated Otherness. The distinction does not amount to a claim that Marcuse personally supplies a fully specified alternative in the passage. Rather, his late work serves as a reference point for a hope that cannot be explained simply as the completion or reversal of capitalism’s own development.

Thematic Significance

Marcuse’s brief appearance gives the argument a second horizon for thinking about political change. One horizon treats emancipation as the release of existing social potential; the other preserves the possibility of an alternative not already contained in the present order. By invoking Marcuse with Adorno and Horkheimer, the book locates this latter possibility within a tradition of utopian thought, while distinguishing it from the revolutionary leap it calls determinate negation.