Erotica, Aesthetics and Revolution: from Marcuse to our Present

Workshop with Amador Fernández-Savater

The “capitalist realism” that has taken hold in our societies could be summarised by a single, commonly used expression: “It is what it is.” But what does “what it is” mean? A market-life, a life that coincides with the market, a life that is confused with the market through its myriad everyday technologies.

Critical thinking per se is dominated by a kind of delight over powerlessness: endless descriptions of our submission to market-life, of how it absorbs even attempts at resistance and escape. Criticism has become victimising, content to repeat over and over again a complaint that changes nothing.

This is not the case when reading, or rereading today, Herbert Marcuse, who throughout his life was determined to locate the “escape routes” that help to unblock closed situations. These escape routes are both negative and affirmative. The suffering that says NO (to what is) and the longing that says YES (to what could be). Marcuse called this “The Great Refusal” and “concrete utopias”.

Marcuse found these potentials for change and transformation primarily in the realms of feelings, aesthetics and revolutionary politics. And today? Does the subversive potential of Eros, art, aesthetics, and political and collective action still exist, and what would it be? Are they holes and flaws in the totalitarian continuum of market-life?

2 July: Erotica
Introductory commentary on the work Eros and Civilisation (1955), recently reissued in Spanish by Ariel, its concepts and relevance today, followed by a discussion.

3 July: Revolution
Introductory commentary on the work One-Dimensional Man (1967), recently reissued in Spanish by Ariel, its concepts and relevance today, followed by a discussion.

4 July: Aesthetics
Introductory commentary on the books An Essay on Liberation (1969), Cultural Revolution (1970) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), recently published in Spanish in a single volume by Irrecuperables, their concepts and relevance today, followed by a discussion. 

Amador Fernández-Savater was born in Madrid in 1974. Through various channels, including reading workshops, school projects or media writing, he engages in what he terms “the battle of thought”, the daily struggle to forge our own identities in order to comprehend and transform our experiences, rather than having them imposed upon us by others. His contributions have been collected in recent books such as Habitar y gobernar (texts on the Indignados or 15-M movement, 2020), El eclipse de la atención (2022) or Capitalismo libidinal (2024), which explores the relationship between capitalism and desire, the struggle to remove desire from pure market consumption.