The displacement of the social place of negation in Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse's thoughts are profoundly marked by the dialectic tradition. The concept of negation, however, acquires specific meanings in its theory. Hegel's merit was to find negation as a motor and creative principle, with Marx it is understood as a social transformation process. Thus, the proletariat, as a universal suffering class, gets negative centralization in Marx theory. Marcuse, in turn, innovates by broadening the social place of negation. Marcuses claims that the totality can be denied even out of the system, suggesting that it is not a matter of substituting one totality for another, but instigating a new reality principle.