The Specter of Liberation: Emancipatory Possibilities in the Political Theory of Marcuse and Žižek

Abstract

For Herbert Marcuse, the terrifying specter of communism at the end of the 1960s served the interests of counterrevolution in discrediting revolutionary aims and legitimizing all necessary repressive counter-measures against emancipatory programs. Slavoj Žižek adds a second function, namely, that during the Cold War the specter of communism also served to humanize Western liberal democracy, necessitating strong social welfare measures and thus forming capitalism with a human face. But with the fall of the Eastern Bloc the threat to this system has become more spectral than ever, because any mild deviations from a neoliberal vision of free market capitalism now bring with them charges of totalitarianism. In the face of such formidable obstacles, Marcuse and Žižek argue that the nature and means of emancipation necessarily remain indeterminate. Hence, the emancipatory possibilities that they do sketch out remain overwhelmingly negative and spectral. This raises the question of whether a political theory ought to be sufficiently detailed as to be directly actionable. I conclude that their work largely satisfies the set of justifiable criteria for a successful political theory articulated or implied by Kant and Horkheimer, and therefore, remains highly relevant to our thinking of the political.