Society without Opposition: Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man Meets Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism

Abstract

This text seeks to read Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism together in the context of what Marcuse calls the ‘society without opposition’. It seeks to extract a conception of hope as method from within these two otherwise rather bleak analyses. This shared conception of hope is understood as the attempt to speak from a conception of capitalism as hell, and to continue to speak anyway. The text concludes by defending a conception of hope that haunts rather than a hope that promises.