Gorman ("The Specter") Takeshi & Neo-Freudian Revisionist Quackery

[Dave Monroe]

Oh, dear ...

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> > I think that Pynchon goes directly to Freud (and
> > Marcuse) setting these against the neo-Freudians.
>
> > OK, but there's that big leap between micro(Freud)
> > and macro(Marcuse) again.  I'm not saying you're
> > incorrect, but wouldn't Marcuse come up with a
> > prescription for a viable way out of the "sick"
> > society?
> 
> I would love to hear from Dave Monroe on this point,
> but the short answer to your question is not
> exactly. That doesn't mean he advocates political
> withdrawal (as one of out P-listers calls it) or
> that P does. Quite the contrary. But the
> counterforce (Marcuse's Political Preface 1966) is
> subject to the Freudian bind, the S&M of the Fall.

... well, as I've been ... reading? attempting to
present him, at any rate, here, I think Marcuse ...
reconsiders some earlier positions--or, perhaps,
attempts to address naive "misreadings" thereof via
clarification?--e.g., regarding libido 'n' liberation,
in that "Political Preface," e.g., ...

"Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an
optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought,
namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial
society would enable man to reverse the direction of
progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and
destruction, liberty and repression--in other words,
to learn the gay science (gaya sciencia) of how to use
the social wealth for shaping man's world in
accordance with his Life Instincts, in the concerted
struggle against the purveyors of Death." (xi)

"It makes no sense to talk about liberation to free
men--and we are free if we do not belong to the
oppressed minority.  And it makes no sense to talk
about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more
sexual liberty than ever before.  But the truth is
that this freedom and satifaction are transforming the
earth into hell.  The inferno is still concentrated in

certain faraway places: Vietnam, the Congo, South
Africa, and in the ghettos of the 'affluent society'"
... (xiii)

"It is not the struggle of Eros against Thanatos,
because the esatablished society too has its Eros
...." (xx)

"... organization demands counter-organization.  Today
the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the
political fight."  (xxv)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48841&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48845&sort=date

And while I'm at it, from E 'n' C proper ...

"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 is a token of unfreedom, of defeat." (236)

"In contrast, a philosophy that does not work as the
handmaiden of repression responds 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)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48844&sort=date

At any rate, there are certainly echoes of all this in
GR, echoes perhaps of strength and duration as those
of Norman O. Brown's Life against Death (and there,
NOB's Love's Body likely deserves more attention than
it's received either here or elsewhere as well--oh,
Mr. Morris ...?).  By the way, guy here's listening to
the Michael Savage show, MS currently claiming that
the radical left is not only cryptofascist, but is
indistinguishable (if that wasn't the word, it was
something as strong) from the Nazis.  NOT claiming any
Pynchonian kinship there, by the way, but ...

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