ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses central perspectives on the possibilities for social transformation offered in modern critical theory. It traces the development of Herbert Marcuse's account of 'libidinal rationality' and of the transfiguration in social life that the realm is said to encompass. The chapter argues that notwithstanding its linkage of unconscious desire and the utopian imagination, there are serious difficulties in Marcuse's work. Marcuse argues that technological progress in Western industrial societies has reached a stage that makes the goal of overcoming scarcity, surplus-repression and alienated labour meaningful. In Marcuse's account of self-transformation the development of genuine emotional relationships is said to result from the transition from 'repressive desublimation' to an order of 'libidinal rationality'. The idea of political transformation must be retraced as the demand for a proliferation of discourses of power and sexuality.
