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)

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)




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