50 Years of Herbert Marcuse’s  Counterrevolution and Revolt 

In 1972, the first pages of Herbert Marcuse’s Counterrevolution and Revolt present a scenario of a “preventive counterrevolution”, a political strategy against a revolution that never comes. In this sense, countless wars are waged against the “external Enemy” or, even internally, countries — especially in the center of capitalism — adopt many security policies against social groups in revolt. It announces new trends for the political order, in which a previous “fear of revolution” organizes various levels of governments, from dictatorships to democracies of that period.

Some years after Marcuse´s work, there is the advertisement of global paradise in the so-named “post-ideological” world. However, preventive counterrevolution kept going even after the fall of the soviet system. Capitalism has waged not few wars since 1989, as Eric Hobsbawm remembers. The “War on Terror” has remarked a new stage for Orientalism, as Edward Said notes. The Alt-Right movement has arisen among the ruins of neoliberalism, Wendy Brown affirms. Nor would have been reduced the numbers of precarious and ungrievable lives waiting for our recognition, as Judith Butler remarks. Facing this contemporary scenario, alongside Marcuse (but also Fanon), how to think about violence from then on?

The “fear of Revolution that never comes” announces a central point: a politics of affects blocking any possibility of consensus with the alterity. As Achile Mbembe affirms, the new political order renders the other into a “fantasy of annihilation”. The Establishment depends structurally on violence as a brutal power used to protect itself from any minimal threat against its civilized image of itself. We must question then: which politics is still possible? Étienne Balibar notes how reduced political philosophy becomes if it disregards violence as a constitutive part of politics. It does not mean a justification for any violence but a consideration about how intrinsic is the relation between politics and violence. Violence as the “other” of politics expresses an “extimate” relation between them both. Politics is not a mere abstract “negation” of violence. They both are as “close” as they are “strange” from each other. By the Lacanian concept of “extimacy” we invite scholars to think about the relation between politics and violence.

Rereading Counterrevolution and revolt 50 years later invites us to one more effort. At that time, Marcuse observes that the “technical and economic integration of the system is so dense that its disruption at one key place can easily lead to a serious dysfunctioning of the whole.” So, what would be the key-place of the Left-wing movements into a counterrevolutionary situation? Liberation appears as violence for the Establishment not only in the decolonial wars but also as “conspicuous minorities who appear as disturbing aliens to the established system”. The violence for liberation opposes to the structural violence for domination in Capitalism, which perpetuates itself reproducing a system of exploitation and expropriation. This position claims for a dialectics of violence between perspectives of domination and liberation. It is not a blind defense for violence, but a critical effort to think disruptive movements. In this sense, Marcuse relates liberation to a Cultural Revolution based on a “new sensibility” which operates a symbolic order against the capitalism, in which even nature waits for revolution. Does it make sense in the present time, when economic and ecological crises correspond to a contradictory limit of capitalism?

Our invitation follows Marcuse’s Counterrevolution and Revolt as a reading for contemporary questions on violence, considering the following points:

a)      Dialectics of violence: exposing questions about the concept of “violence”, especially the dual aspects of violence for domination and violence for liberation.

b)     Art, Memory, and Revolution: presenting the debate on the “new sensibility” as a rearticulation for the symbolic field in social struggles, the historical memory of the political imaginary, and the bodies in conflict.

c)      Nature, Violence, and Politics: remarking a critical epistemology announced by violence and nature as extimate relation with political representation and social life.

These proposals join the effort of the project Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South, supported by the Andrew W. Mellow Foundation. Dialectics of violence and Extimacies of politics will be the last international workshop of this project, which has connected Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Decolonial Theory. The workshop is also supported by the International Herbert Marcuse Society, from which we appreciate the trust and permanent partnership.