Interesting predecessor to Deleuze and Guattari

books:

	• Eros and Civilization : A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud Herbert Marcuse Beacon Press, 1974 - 278 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Interesting predecessor to Deleuze and Guattari

The most annoying feature of this book is the the continual use of the Freudian concepts of ego, Es, and so on... in the first part. To accept that, you really need to believe in the orthodox psychoanalytical theory, which maybe is a bit hard these days.
But Marcuse trascends the boundaries of psychoanalytical theory, and develops a range of arguments that stand on their own.
He thinks that society throughout History ha s been one huge repressive endeavour, accepted by the individuals because it allowed them to survive, even though it deprived them of the possibility of happiness.
But nowadays, we should have reached the stage where everyone's basic needs can be satisfied with a minimal amount of work; in fact, penury subsists only because those detaining power create it in order to justify their domination.
If everyone could free their libido, the Death instinct would disappear, because it exists only on the basis of the "Nirvana principle"(we desire destruction because death equalls with the quiet of complete satisfaction).
A porttrait of a society where everyone wouold be free to apply their libido to everyone else, and to engage in work in a way more akin to playing follows.
This sounds bit distressing, especially the concept of "jolly work", if I dare name it so. The most interesting parts are in fact the "asides", where Marcuse explains how we imagine "complete satisfaction" always to reside in a past which our memory conserves as a token both of the oppression of the individual and of the human species, how art is limited by form, the existence of which defines it as something incapable of influence on reality, the way that philosophy since Plato has cooperated with oncoming Christianity to define "Nirvana" as finding itself substantially "beyond" our world etc..
And of course, the parts where he speaks of libido applied to everyone and everything reccalls our friends Deleuze and Guatari's "desire" tracing its rhyzomatic paths.

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Indispensable reading

Marcuse's attempt to combine Marx and Freud, and his vision of a non-repressive civilization (as well as his views on phantasies, art, myths and even perversions as anticipiations of such a society) is one of the masterpieces of utopian thought. After reading it your daydreams will never be the same again. It is not an easy text: the first part is certainly dry at times, and presupposes some familiarity with Freud (it is useful to read his Civilization and its discontents along with Marcuse's text). But the second part is truly of masterpiece. Anybody intesested in art, sexual liberation, ecology or psychoanalysis will find this essential reading. Far from being a rehash of Fromm, Marcuse accuses Fromm et. al. of removing the truly subversive elements from Freud. But read it, anf find out for yourself.

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interesting parallels

I read this book perhaps 20 years ago then came across a copy again quite recently. For those interested in an anthropological approach to psychology-as-myth (the chapter on 'Origin of Repressive Civilization' is especially interesting not least because it is so very clearly wrong!) that more or less parallels a similar approach to myth and culture in the (somewhat contested) spirit of Frazer, De Santillana, Graves or even Weston this book will be of interest -- although I must say that anyone familiar with those authors will almost certainly be familiar with this one.

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savage teenagers in the sixties

In my opinion this is a book written for teenagers. It seems that we are reading Erich Fromm. If you want to read Marcuse, try One Dimensional Man, that is one of his best books. It's impossible a comparison between this book and Christopher Lasch's "Culture of narcisism". To know the real Frankfurt ideas try Adorno or even the founding father of that school Walter Benjamin.

Essential reading for all Freudo-skeptics

Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization" lays the foundations for a major critique of the fundamental tenets of Freud's theory of the mind. The German philosopher demonstrates how Freud transformed what was essentially a psychology of society into a sociology of the mind. ('Freud's "biologism" is social theory in a depth dimension"'). For Marcuse Freud's mistake was to see the repression of istincts not as a historically situated pheomenon due to particular (and therefore mutable) social conditions, but as an absolute given indispensable to the growth of civilization. Perhaps for reasons of expediency(Freud's ideas might have been still too influential in 1956 for an overt attack), Marcuse elaborates his counterargument that a non-repressive society IS possible within a Freudian framework. But the damage is done: once you read this book Freud's idea that repression is salutary and necessary for psychic development will look a lot more like what it was(late Victorian moralism) and much less like what it wasn't (science). For more along these lines try Rieff, Freud: the Mind and the Moralist.

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reviews: page 1, 2

A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

"A philosophical critique of psychoanalysis that takes psychoanalysis seriously but not as unchallengeable dogma. . . . The most significant general treatment of psychoanalytic theory since Freud himself ceased publication."
-Clyde Kluckhohn, The New York Times

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