Marcuse's critical theory of modernity

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 34, Issue 9, 2008, Pages 1071-1093

  Hammer, Espen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

Adorno; Ego formation; Freud; Marcuse; Modernity; Mourning; Narcissism; Politics; Transience; Utopia

Indexed keywords

EID: 54249121639     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708098538     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966).
2. For Marcuse's subsequent attempts to bring the results of Eros and Civilization to bear on his socialist politics, see in particular Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969)
3. and Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
4. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 7.
5. For a good discussion of Marcuse's psychology, see Edward Hyman, 'Eros and Freedom: The Critical Psychology of Herbert Marcuse', in Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg and Charles P. Webel (eds), Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988), pp. 143-66.
6. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York/London: Norton, 1989), p. 45: 'We recognize, then, that countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature - everything, in short, which is of use to him - is attended to and effectively carried out.'
7. See for example Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 25: 'Out of the common nature of instinctual life develop two antagonistic instincts. The life instincts (Eros) gain ascendancy over the death instincts.'
8. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 309.
9. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 234-5. On p. 135 Marcuse speculates about how Eros, freed from surplus-repression, 'would be strengthened, and the strengthened Eros would, as it were, absorb the objective of the death instinct'.
10. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.111.
11. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 15.
12. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London/New York: Verso, 1979), pp. 32-4.
13. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 55.
14. Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch, 'Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing', in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 3-4.
15. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 17: 'Everything that is non-illusory, real-possible about the hope-images leads to Marx, works - as always, in different ways, rationed according to the situation - as part of socialist changing of the world'.
16. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 108-9.
17. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 13.
18. Kristeva refers of course to Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), especially p. 145.
19. See Jürgen Habermas, 'Psychic Termidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity', in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, p. 3: 'Marcuse did not, in contrast to Adorno, only encircle the ineffable; he made straight appeals to future alternatives'.
20. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 4.
21. The argument to this effect is to be found in Herbert Marcuse, 'The End of Utopia', in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 62-82.
22. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 35.
23. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 35. ibid.
24. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization ibid., p. 37.
25. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 12: 'Is it still necessary to state that not technology, not technique, not the machine are the engines of repression, but the presence, in them, of the masters who determine their number, their life span, their power, their place in life, and the need for them? Is it still necessary to repeat that science and technology are the great vehicles of liberation, and that it is only their use and restriction in the repressive society which makes them into vehicles of liberation?' Andrew Feenberg restates this point by asserting that 'Technology still represents for Marcuse the hypothetical possibility of overcoming scarcity and the conflict to which it gives rise, but capitalism "represses" this technical potential for emancipation by casting society in the form of an ever renewed struggle for existence.'
26. See Andrew Feenberg, 'The Bias of Technology', in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, p. 227.
27. For Marcuse's remarks in this regard, see Five Lectures, p. 71.
28. Since Marcuse took little or no interest in defending the 'real existing socialism' in the East, it may be unfair and irrelevant to point to its experiences with automatism. It is worth keeping in mind, though, that Russian and East European industrialism during communism was predominantly less technologically developed than in the West and considerably less clean.
29. There is much to be said, however, for thinking of the demand for greener technologies and alternative sources of energy as being in alignment with Marcuse's general desire to see the means of production 'softened'.
30. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 306-7.
31. For critical discussions of this issue, see Jürgen Habermas, Sylvia Bovenschen et al., Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 30 ff.;
32. and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 337.
33. For Schiller, aesthetic, spontaneous experience alone offers the means of realizing the true society. See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. L. A. Willoughby and E. M. Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 8-9: 'if man is ever to solve the political problem in practice he will have to take the aesthetic way, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom'.
34. Passages such as this led Georg Lukács, in Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern: Paderborn, 1947), p. 109 ff., to see in Schiller's letters a flight from politics into an aesthetic utopia.
35. For a penetrating analysis of Schiller's politics, see Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 133-84.
36. In Five Lectures, p. 17, Marcuse refuses to rule out the need for dictatorship in order to curb opposition.
37. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 31.
38. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 201.
39. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, ibid., p. 169.
40. Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 67.
41. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 11ff.
42. Freud, 'The Economic Problem of Masochism', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, p. 413.
43. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 227.
44. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 241.
45. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ibid., p. 281: 'The subject's nonidentity without sacrifice would be utopian'.
46. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 475: 'Aesthetic experience - and this thought was already familiar to Schopenhauer - transcends the spell of mindless self-preservation, becoming the paradigm of a new stage of consciousness where the ego no longer fends for its particular interests in a framework of material reproduction.'
47. Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, pp. 257-60.
48. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 191: 'But the fatal enemy of lasting gratification is time, the inner finiteness, the brevity of all conditions. The idea of integral human liberation therefore necessarily contains the vision of the struggle against time'.
49. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, ibid., p. 170.
50. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, ibid., p. 112.
51. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, p. 1103.
52. Sigmund Freud, 'On Transience', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, pp. 287-90.
53. Sigmund Freud, 'On Transience', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, ibid., p. 290: 'Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.'
54. Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, p. 368: 'When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices.'
55. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 23.
56. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, 1989, ibid., p. 15.
57. For the distinction between Ananke qua scarcity and Ananke qua loss, see Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 40.
58. See also 'The Marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis', in Fred Rush (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 88, where Whitebook argues that Marcuse's 'central fallacy [...] is the conflation of the idea of material scarcity with Freud's notion of Ananke (reality or necessity).
59. Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 132.
60. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 295.
61. For an alternative comparison between Marcuse and Adorno which makes reference to the final entry of Minima Moralia, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 503.
62. For a brilliant discussion of Adorno's critique of theodicy, see Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (New York/London: Continuum, 2003).
63. See also my review of Cohen's book in the British Journal for the Society of Phenomenology, 36(1) (2005), pp. 105-7.
64. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 326. I further develop my interpretation of Adorno's take on Hamlet in Adorno and the Political (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 118-21.
65. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit (2001) ibid., p. 329: 'Ja, man könnte sich denken - um es einmal ganz kraß auszudrücken -, daß das reflexhafte Reagieren schließlich selbst in den Dienst des Ich-Prinzips tritt; was übrigens genetisch deshalb gar nicht so absolut Abwegiges hat, weil ja das Ich selber abgespaltene und auf Realitätsprüfung verwandte libidinöse Energie ist; also gar nicht etwas diesem Hinzutretenden oder Impulshaften, das ich gemeint habe, absolut Fremdes.'
66. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40.
67. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6.
68. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 405-9.
69. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6: 'Reconciliation would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Reconciliation would be the thought of the many as no longer inimical, a thought that is anathema to subjective reason.'
70. See also Kristeva's affiliated reflections on the nature of confession and forgiveness in Black Sun, pp. 175-217.