Marcuse, "Eros and Thanatos"

[Dave Monroe]

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955])

The ability to forget ... sustains submissiveness and renunciation.  To
forget is also to forgive what should not be forgiven if justic and
freedom are to prevail.  Such forgiveness reproduces the consitions
which reproduce injustice and enslavement: to forget past suffering is
to forgive the forces that caused it--without defeating these forces.
The wounds that heal in time are also the wounds that contain the
poison.  Against this surrender to time, the restoration of remembrance
to its rights, as a vehicle of of liberation, is one of the noblest
tasks of thought.  (232)

Like the ability to forget, the ability to remember is a product of
civilization ....  Nietzsche saw in the training of memory the beginning
of civilized morality--especially the memory of obligations, contracts,
dues.  This context reveals the one-sidedness of memory-training in
civilization: the faculty was chiefly directed toawrd remembering duties
ratherv than pleasures; memory was linked with bad conscience, guilt,
and sin.  Unhappiness and the threat of punishment, not happiness and
the promise of freedom, linger in memory.  (232)

>From the myth of Orpheus to the novel of Proust, ahppiness and freedom
have been linked with the idea of the recapture of time: the temps
retrouve.  Remembrance retrieves the temps perdu, which was the time of
gratification and fulfillment.  Eros ... uses emory in his effort to
defeat time in a world that is dominated by time.  But in so far as time
retains its power over Eros, happiness is essentially a thing of the
past.  (233)

... remembrance alone provides the joy without the anxiety over its
passing and thus gives it an otherwise impossible duration.  Time loses
its power when remembrance redeems the past.  (233)

The silent "professional agreement" with the fact of death and disease
is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of the death
instinct--or, rather, of its social usefulness.  In a repressivee
civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression.  Whether
death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice,
or accepted as fat, the education for consent to death introduces n
elemnet of surrender into life from the beginning--surrender and
submission.  It stifles "utopian" efforts.  The powers that be have a
deep affinity to death; death ios a token of unfreedom, of defeat.
(236)

In contrast, a philosophy that does not work as the handmaiden of
repressionresponds to the fact of death with the Great Refusal--the
refusal of Orpheus the liberator.  Death can become a token of freedom.
(236)

But even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who have
died in pain.  It is the remembrance of them, and the accumulated guilt
of mankind against its victims, that darken the prospect of a
civilization without repression. (237)