ABSTRACT
Any attempt to identify the plural legacies of Herbert Marcuse's life and work must seriously engage the political contexts of his writings as well as the discourse that has entombed his theoretical contributions within the history of radical activism during the 1960s. Academics and activists alike find it difficult to disassociate Marcuse from the era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His persona and his work are often evoked as a marker of a radical era, his primary relationship to which tends to be defined by nostalgia. An uncritical and nostalgic version of Marcuse, which, for example, fails to acknowledge the limits of an aesthetic theory that maintains a rigid distinction between high and low art, one that is not willing to engage seriously with popular culture and all its contradictions, would not be helpful to those who are seeking to forge radical political vocabularies today.
