There Is an Alternative With Herbert Marcuse and Mark Fisher Towards a Political Aesthetics of Neoliberalism

The book aims at interrogating the contemporary problematic of neoliberalism and its relationship to culture and ideology through the lens of a theoretical synthesis interweaving the emancipatory aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, and the late Mark Fisher's work on "post-capitalist desire" and "acid communism." The main imperative is to formulate a possible (and, as it turns out, necessary) opening for aesthetic critique in the climate of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. This mode of aesthetic critique is then operationalized through an exemplary reading of the emancipatory poetics of Ben Lerner's 2014 novel "10:04."

Lukas Schutzbach is a PhD candidate at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. His research focusses on the intersection of neoliberalism, contemporary American literature, and questions of critical theory and aesthetics.