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
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