Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse

Glenn Scheper glenn_scheper at earthlink.net
Wed Aug 24 08:42:46 CDT 2005


Warning: Objects in this mirror ain't pretty.
I see I am a victim.
I want.. my M..T..V.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/epilogue.htm
 EPILOGUE. Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism

 As a result, productiveness, love,
 responsibility become "values" only in so far as
 they contain manageable resignation and are practiced within
 the framework of socially useful activities (in other words,
 after repressive sublimation); and then they involve the
 effective denial of free productiveness and responsibility
 -- the renunciation of happiness.

 The style suggests the Power of Positive Thinking to which
 the revisionist critique succumbs. It is not the values that
 are spurious, but the context in which they are defined and
 proclaimed: "inner strength" has the connotation
 of that unconditional freedom which can be practiced even in
 chains and which Fromm himself once denounced in his
 analysis of the Reformation.

 Freud recognized the work
 of repression in the highest values of Western civilization
 -- which presuppose and perpetuate unfreedom and
 suffering. The Neo-Freudian schools promote the very same
 values as cure against unfreedom and suffering as the
 triumph over repression.


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/ch01.htm
 CHAPTER ONE. The Hidden Trend in Psychoanalysis


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/preface.htm
 Political Preface 1966

 Today, this union of freedom and servitude has become
 "natural" and a vehicle of progress.

 No philosophy, no theory can undo the democratic
 introjection of the masters into their subjects.

 Liberation of the instinctual needs for --
 peace and quiet, of the "asocial" autonomous
 Eros presupposes liberation from repressive affluence:
 a reversal in the direction of progress.

 It was the thesis of Eros and Civilization, more fully
 developed in my One-Dimensional Man, that man could avoid
 the fate of a Welfare-Through-Warfare State only by
 achieving a new starting point where he could reconstruct
 the productive apparatus without that "inner-worldly
 asceticism" which provided the mental basis for
 domination and exploration.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/index.htm
 One Dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.





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