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repressed was carried out ceases to be a historical possibility in the present.
The transfiguration of modern industrial-technological civilization must begin with an act of Erinnerung which sets free the forgotten, repressed, denied meanings, and Utopian hopes and aspirations of past revolts. Instead of a critique of Western ontology and identity logic, Marcuse undertakes to reconstruct the latent Utopian dimension of Western ontology. By revealing the polarities of Logos and Eros, of the endless passage of time and the wish to transcend all time, of the bad infinity of the existent [die Seienden] and the fullness of being [die Vollkommenheit des Seins] to be the dual structures within which Western ontology unfolds, Marcuse upholds the redemptive function of memory. 69
But this redemptive memory cannot be reactivated within the continuum of history, precisely because history now unfolds in such a way as to deny its own past, its own history. The one-dimensional society created by the industrial-technological world obliterates the ontological horizon within which it has developed and in which it unfolds. This means that the critical theory of society, which speaks in the name of redemptive theory, is itself outside the historical continuum; in an effort to negate the domination of time, it appeals to the memory of the wish to end all time from a point outside time. 70 Reviving the primordial polarities between Eros and Logos, Narcissus and Orpheus, Marcuse seeks to disclose the revolutionary potential of an emancipated sensuality [Sinnlichkeit]. Narcissus emerges as the messenger of a new ontological principle. 71 To be transformed into a new ethics [Sittlichkeit], the subversive potential of this new sensuality must be reimmersed in the tissues of history; but according to the one-dimensionality thesis, there can be no collective historical carriers of this process.
If, however, the subversive potential of the redemptive memory evoked by the theory remains outside the historical continuum, then has not critical theory acknowledged a fundamental aporia, namely, the conditions of its own impossibility? Critical social theory analyses a subsisting society from the standpoint of the possible transformation of its basic structure, and interprets emerging needs and conflicts in light of this anticipatory transformation. If it is exactly the continuum of history that critique must reject, then the vision of the emancipated society which it articulates becomes a privileged mystery that cannot be related to the immanent self-understanding of needs and conflicts arising from within the continuum of the historical process. Critical theory must either revise the one-dimensionality thesis or it must question its own very possibility. This was recognized by Claus Offe in
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