ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Marcuse and the Frankfurt School contribute important perspectives for criticizing the traditional concept of the subject and for rethinking and reconceptualizing subjectivity to develop conceptions potent enough to meet post-structuralist, postmodern, materialist, feminist, and other forms of critique. In delineating Marcuses reconstruction of subjectivity, it offers a rereading of Eros and Civilization to demonstrate how it anticipates the post-structuralist critique of the subject and offers an alternative conception of subjectivity. Marcuse will link the emancipatory dimensions of memory with phantasy and argues that both human beings and their cultural tradition contain resources that can be mobilized against suffering and oppression in the present. Habermas's primary focus on the ego-alter relation and his subsequent treatises on morals and moral development, democracy and law, and the social obligations and constraints on subjectivity offer an important correction to Marcuses analyses.
