ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several perspectives developed in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno concerning subjectivity, the fragmentation of the self, and the nature of modern social relations. It examines certain threads of consensus in their writings on the self and modern identity. The chapter presents a critical assessment of Marcuse's and Adorno's reliance on Sigmund Freud's early theory of the drives. It argues that the critique of domination developed by Marcuse and Adorno, whilst powerful, is based on a rather simplified and schematic interpretation of certain tendencies in modernity. In order more adequately to separate the specific forms of socio-historical domination from their biological underpinnings, Marcuse introduces two crucial neologisms: surplus-repression and the performance principle. A central purpose of Adorno's appropriation of psychoanalytic theory is to juxtapose the stasis of nature with the dynamism of the social-historical world.
