This article takes issue with Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that physical exclusion depends on the hindrance of cognitive associations, emotional quandaries, and moral inhibitions, hence victims and their lot remain out of sight. It is counterargued that conscious engagement in directly physical forms of exclusionary behaviour is possible insofar as victims are known in ways that provoke emotional disdain and moralise violence. Such knowledge consists in the relegation of others to the status of morally lesser human beings, and is produced via (...) prior symbolic mediations. To the extent that mediations operate according to the power differentials they both reflect and help to sustain, there is a need to shift analytical attention from exclusion to the ‘meta-category’ of domination. (shrink)

In his inaugural lecture as director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Horkheimer points out the need for a new understanding of history that avoids the contemporary versions of the Hegelian Verklärung. He synthesizes this challenge with an imperative: to do justice to past suffering. The result of this appeal can be found in the works of the members of the Frankfurt School in the form of multiple, even divergent, trains of thought that reach with (...) unlike intensities the current debates on memory and its link with history. This paper focuses on three of these trains, which can be traced back to different periods of the work of Herbert Marcuse. It intends to systematize and present what can be considered alternative—although not necessarily contradictory—approaches aroused from the same concern over the critical power of nonreconciliatory memory: first, a genealogy inquiry that deconstructs the reified character of the given; second, a recollection of past images of happiness; and finally, a memory of the limits of all attainable freedom. Exploring these three moments, their shortcomings and tensions, may shed light on the complexity and present importance of the challenge they intend to face. (shrink)