Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Marcuse's critical theory of modernity

Espen Hammer
Philosophy Social Criticism 2008 34: 1071
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708098538

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Espen Hammer

Marcuse’s critical theory of

modernity

Abstract Analyzing Eros and Civilization, in this article I argue that

Marcuse is incapable of offering an account of the empirical dynamics that
may lead to the social change he envisions, and that his appeal to the
benefits of automatism is blind to its negative effects. I then claim that
Marcuse’s vision of the good life as centered on libidinal self-realization, if
actualized, would threaten the freedom of individuals and potentially
undermine their sense of self-integrity. Comparing Marcuse’s position with
that of Adorno, I argue that the former fails to take temporality and tran-
sience properly into account. Unlike Adorno, Marcuse has no genuine appre-
ciation of the need for mourning. Instead, Marcuse’s concept of primary
narcissism, which is meant to represent the gist of his utopian vision, leads
him to recommend an essentially melancholic position. I finally argue that
political action requires a stronger ego-formation than what Marcuse’s
conception allows for.
Key words Adorno · ego-formation · Freud · Marcuse · modernity ·
mourning · narcissism · politics · transience · utopia

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is as much an embodiment of

the zeitgeist of the 1960s as it is a philosophical study in its own right.
Although published in the politically less turbulent 1950s, it quickly,
after being brought into conjunction with Marcuse’s interest in the early
Marx, became a significant stimulus for left-wing activism.1 Unlike most
of his associates in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, including
Adorno and Horkheimer, not only did Marcuse assert that Western
civilization, despite its alleged tendency towards ever-more effective forms
of domination, contains an objective potential for radical social and
libidinal change, but he did so with unprecedented acclaim and popu-
larity. For the first time in the history of the Frankfurt School, one of

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 9 • pp. 1071–1093

PSC
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and
Washington DC) and David Rasmussen
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708098538

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
its theorists produced a text that genuinely managed to engage and
inspire a wide variety of groups on the Left.
Perhaps the most important legacy of Marcuse, which no doubt has
been extended in the writings of Foucault, Butler and Žižek, is his insist-
ence that successful theorizing of the political can never take place
independently of the question of subjectivation and the possible forms
a subject may take. This article brings this issue into focus by relating
Marcuse to Adorno, and by looking at how the two thinkers, whose
social analyses were strikingly similar, can be said to have engaged in a
dialogue about the viability and meaning of the concept of utopia.
Whereas Marcuse understood utopia to involve its objectively possible
realization in a ‘non-repressive civilization’, Adorno remained predisposed
to deal only negatively with this concept. For him, the utopian impulse
arose from the quasi-metaphysical experience ‘that this cannot be all’,
yet any attempt at providing it with any content would violate his belief
that any image of reconciliation in what he thought of as an irrecon-
ciled society is false. In the latter half of this article I want to use the
discussion of this antinomy to suggest that Marcuse’s account of utopian
temporality commits him to a melancholic vision of reconciliation.
Whilst Adorno’s ‘melancholic science’ certainly does not lack an element
of melancholy, there is in his work a different and less aggressive atti-
tude towards transience and loss. In Adorno’s thinking of non-identity,
mourning rather than melancholy becomes the ethically and psycho-
logically preferred response to the otherness of the object. At the end of
this article I ask what consequences, if any, this might have politically.

The critique of civilization

Marcuse himself announces in the introduction to Eros and Civilization

that its purpose ‘is to contribute to the philosophy of psychoanalysis’,2
and there can be no doubt that its primary aim is to provide a critical
interpretation of Freud’s metapsychological and civilization-theoretic
writings. It was only in subsequent works such as Counter-revolution
and Revolt and An Essay on Liberation that Marcuse explicitly brought
his thinking about psychoanalysis into dialogue with his long-standing
interest in the early Marx of the Paris Manuscripts, thus bringing, like
so many radical theorists of the 1960s, his own synthesis of Freud and
Marx to the table. Although written with a practical intent, Eros and
Civilization is a theoretical essay; at the time of its conception, its impli-
cations for radical politics were, even for the author, still unclear.
Part of the ingenuity of Eros and Civilization lies in the fact that
its interpretation of Freud’s account of civilization forms the basis for
Marcuse’s critique of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlighten-

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
ment as well, at least in so far as this latter study is animated and perme-
ated by Freudian themes. By working his way through Freud, Marcuse
aimed to present an immanent critique of the totalizing diagnosis of
modernity presented in this book.
As Marcuse correctly points out, one of Freud’s central arguments
in Civilization and Its Discontents focuses on instinctual renunciation as
a precondition for man’s entry into, and building of, civilization. Progress
in the form of domination over the social as well as the outer and the
inner world, which in classical utilitarian models has always been viewed
as the only possible way to bring about ‘happiness for the greatest
possible number of men’ is, in Freud’s economic interpretation of culture,
thus generative of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.3 Marcuse and Freud
differ, though, about the underlying mechanism whereby civilization
progresses. While Marcuse often writes as though the life instincts have
some kind of priority over the death instincts (or that they both originate
in the fundamental urge to release tension), and hence that overcoming
repression is essentially a matter of transcending the conditions whereby
the life instincts are unduly repressed, Freud’s more pessimistic argument,
which presupposes a strict ontological dualism between life and death
instincts, suggests that the deep reason behind man’s dissatisfaction in
culture – its tragic character – is not only, or primarily, that culture
imposes sacrifices in the enjoyment of sexuality as such (as, for example,
through the prohibition of incest, the valorization of monogamy and
procreation, and the genital organization of adult sexuality), but that
man carries within himself the death instinct.4 The existence of culture
is predicated upon the containment of the anti-cultural consequences of
the death instinct (the primordial hostility and aggression of man toward
man) in the form of guilt. Whereas culture, according to Freud, represents
the interest of Eros in uniting individuals; in a single social body capable
of exploiting nature and securing survival, guilt, fuelled by the death
instinct in the establishment of a punitive super-ego, is the means whereby
culture, held together by the forces of Eros, uses individuals’ own self-
discipline to curb their aggression against others. As Paul Ricoeur puts
it, the supreme ruse of culture ‘is to make death work against death’.5
For Freud, a ‘non-repressive’ civilization of the kind Marcuse seeks
to anticipate would lack the guilt which keeps aggression in check and
hence ensures social stability and progress; indeed, a civilization without
guilt would, for Freud, be ultimately an impossibility. For Marcuse,
however, to be able, as I will return to later, to speculate about the conver-
gence between the death instincts and the life instincts in a state without
want, it is necessary to ignore or reject Freud’s insistence that since the
death and the life instincts are irreconcilable (the first strive towards
bringing living things back to the repose of an earlier, inorganic state,
the second towards establishing greater unities and to preserve them) the

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
only way to uphold civilization is to accept the Faustian bargain that
Eros makes with Thanatos.6 Without guilt, civilization would collapse
into chaos and war.
This is not to say that Freud could not be skeptical with respect
to the value of civilization. In a striking passage in Civilization and Its
Discontents, he writes that he can ‘at least listen without indignation to
the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural
endeavor and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the conclu-
sion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome
of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable
to tolerate’.7 However, like Max Weber, he did not envision any socially
acceptable, non-regressive alternative to rationalized modernity: ‘But
how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all, to strive for the abolition
of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature and
that would be far harder to bear’.8
In strongly emphasizing the irreducibility of the death instincts to
Eros, Adorno may seem closer to Freud’s bourgeois stoicism than he is
to Marcuse. However, his own model of instinctual renunciation as at
least a de facto precondition for the establishment and maintenance of
cultural order is strikingly similar to the one we find in Marcuse. In
Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous reading of Ulysses and the Sirens in
the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the movement towards civilization and
away from jouissant extinction at the hands of the alluring Sirens is made
possible by preventing the laboring sailors from experiencing their song:
Ulysses’ cunning bases itself on the unyielding compulsion of inner and
outer nature.9 ‘The history of civilization is the history of sacrifice. In
other words: the history of renunciation.’10 By exclusively serving the
purpose of self-preservation, reason itself becomes a piece of nature, and
the constitution of the subject becomes a function of the ruthless drive
for self-preservation.
Unlike Marcuse, however, Horkheimer and Adorno refuse to view
the reconfiguration of our relation to lost and regressive love objects as
politically relevant in the immediate sense. In their assessment of contem-
porary society (which Marcuse largely and notably subscribes to in One-
Dimensional Man) the drive towards domination takes on totalitarian
traits and seems to leave nothing outside its scope. In late modernity, they
argue, politics is under constant threat of being colonized by competing
subsystems of purposive-rational action, for which the demand for
rational and autonomous decision is devalued in favor of strategic
calculation and end-indifferent, instrumental intervention. Although they
neither present a detailed analysis of such processes, nor any theoretical
model by which they can be fully understood, Adorno and Horkheimer
view modern complex societies as under the spell of a mechanized, regi-
mented system of social integration for which no one can be accountable.

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
As a result of this closure, utopian consciousness – the capacity to
anticipate and imagine radical change – has shrunk: What people have
lost today, Adorno states, ‘is very simply the capability to imagine the
totality as something that could be completely different’.11 To be sure,
notions of utopia and transcendence had never been altogether absent
from the Frankfurt School, and some affiliated thinkers, Walter Benjamin
and Ernst Bloch in particular, did make extensive use of them. For Bloch,
if not for Benjamin, history itself is the teleological unfolding of objec-
tive socioeconomic forces that will lead civilization beyond the present
and into the ‘concrete utopia’.12 For the mature Adorno, however, the
only escape from the logic of civilization – the only revolt possible – is
to be found in certain advanced works of art and in philosophy in so
far as idealist tendency is reversed through the exercise of negative
dialectics. While art and philosophy do offer a promesse de bonheur, a
promise of utopian fulfillment, they can only do so as Schein: the tran-
scendence of immanent totality, as in the encounter with the not-I or
the Other in the experience of natural beauty on which Adorno, wary
of the danger of false reconciliation, grounds his account of aesthetic
experience can only take place as an apparition: it is not real but an
illusory prefiguration of the not-I.13
Freud, on the other hand, presents a theory of revolt which is anthro-
pologically grounded and not just obliquely determined through the inter-
mediary of aesthetic experience, yet for him any rebellion is ultimately
self-vitiating in that it always reestablishes the forms of domination it
rebels against. According to Freud’s account in Totem and Taboo, the
need for revolt arises in the form of an archaic desire to repeat the crime
of parricide whenever the appropriation of paternal attributes, brought
about by the original killing of the father, threaten to disappear.14 Thus,
in ritual sacrifice of the totem animal, the sons both reinstate the fear-
some authority of the paternal figure and overcome it by reappropriating
it and identifying with it. What Freud calls ‘filial rebelliousness’ is both a
transgression of authority and an introjective reenactment of it. Although
rebellion qua symbolic commemoration of the crime reasserts the social
bond by reinstating and establishing imaginary power, its psychological
effect is the establishment of guilt. As a consequence of this dialectic,
civilization becomes predicated upon the ongoing self-imposition of
repressive taboos amongst essentially guilty sons.
Marcuse’s general objection, then, to Freud, Adorno and Horkheimer,
is that, as a result of their totalizing account of civilization, they fail to
bring to light the positive, yet subterranean, essence of history. Their
diagnostic critique of consummate negativity lacks any counter-force or
counter-tendency that can save them from political retreatism.15

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
Beyond the reality principle

Marcuse’s view is not without ambiguities, however. One part of him

sides with Adorno and Horkheimer in theorizing the man-made disasters
of the twentieth century – Auschwitz and Hiroshima – not as historical
exceptions, but as events resulting from the very logic of civilization itself:
Throughout the world of industrial civilization, the domination of man by
man is growing in scope and efficiency. Nor does this trend appear as an
accidental, transitory regression on the road to progress. Concentration
camps, mass exterminations, world wars and atom bombs are no ‘relapse
into barbarism,’ but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements
of modern science, technology and domination.16

There is considerable tension between this assessment, which seems to

link humanity forever to the self-vitiating logic of progress, and Marcuse’s
view that utopia can now be achieved as a historical reality (implying
that the very notion of utopia as referring to a forever deferred state or
place has become obsolete).17 By contrast to more orthodox Marxist
positions, which, like most associates of the early Frankfurt School, he
rejects as being deterministic and incapable of explaining the longevity
of late capitalism, Marcuse offers no real account of the empirical
dynamics that may lead to the radical social change he envisions. He
does, as we will see, provide a theory describing how the present level
of productive forces is a necessary component in bringing about change,
but he never understands this to be sufficient to generate revolution.
How, then, can he coherently claim that the realization of utopia is an
objective possibility to be seized upon by revolutionaries today? How
can Marcuse’s concept of utopianism avoid the charge, which Marx
made against so many of his contemporary socialists, of abstraction and
empty idealism?
Critical of both Adorno and Freud, Marcuse’s answer consists in
finding a way to break out of the logic of illusion and the cycle of rebel-
lion and guilt, thereby conceiving of a rebellion that can liberate the ego
for pleasure rather than ensnaring it in ever-further cycles of self-sacrifice
and violence. Of course, organized capitalism, as Marcuse viewed it, while
geared towards the constant creation and satisfaction of essentially false
needs, presents its own images of subversion and freedom, and despite his
interest in the notion of repressive desublimation, there are embarrassing
parallels between Marcuse’s vision of an aestheticized, playful culture
promoting narcissistic, polymorphous-perverse pleasure and the opera-
tions of, say, today’s interactive entertainment industry. While not obli-
vious to the ability of the marketplace to co-opt whatever subversive
energies there may be, Marcuse’s strategy for reconciling the reality prin-
ciple and the pleasure principle, the demands of objective reality that

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
call for renunciation and the desire for immediate gratification, consists
in making two correlated sets of distinctions: between the so-called
performance-principle and the reality principle; and between surplus
repression and basic repression.18 Both distinctions are based on Marcuse’s
more general complaint that Freud did not pay enough attention to the
sociohistorical vicissitudes of the instincts, and that he illegitimately
sought to present what are mere historical contingencies as biological
necessities. If the reality principle calls for adjustment to, and respect
for, the ‘fundamental fact of scarcity’ (or what Freud called Ananke),
the performance principle represents ‘the prevailing historical form of
the reality principle’.19 In conditions of severe social domination, when
groups or individuals struggle for political and administrative privilege,
and the response to the fact of scarcity is such that it generates glaring
distributive inequalities and a failure to satisfy vital needs, a surplus
repression arises as a necessary corollary to the additional controls intro-
duced by the specific institutions of domination. Freud, Marcuse argues,
failed to acknowledge that
[W]hile any form of the reality principle demands a considerable degree and
scope of repressive control over the instincts, the specific historical insti-
tutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination intro-
duce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civilized
human association.20

Having established these distinctions, Marcuse’s next claim is that moder-

nity, and late capitalism in particular, is in tension with itself: while the
technological means now exist for shortening the working day and less-
ening the burden of labor significantly without running into conflict with
the fact of scarcity, its hierarchical division of labor and monogamic-
patriarchal family structure function such as to sustain surplus repres-
sion. In a fully automatized society, in which science and technology,
rather than colluding to maintain the current socioeconomic order, are
jointly aimed at satisfying genuine needs in a non-repressive manner, men
could be liberated from the yoke of necessity and finally reconcile their
quest for happiness (as registered by the pleasure principle) with reality.
By failing to take into account the extent to which increases in the
level of automatization have often brought about new forms of domi-
nation (and not simply a decrease in the burden of labor), Marcuse’s
optimism about the liberating potential of technology may seem un-
grounded. Marcuse is never arguing, however, that the implementation
of new technology as such can generate emancipatory effects. Only
technological mastery in conjunction with a radically restructured social,
economic and libidinal space can have that capacity.21 Indeed, even the
most cursory look at contemporary society may lead one to conclude that
there is no internal connection between automatism and a lessening of

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
the burden of labor. The spatio-temporal flexibility and flow created by
computers and information technology seem to have made workers less
independent of the workplace and its demands than they were in the
classical industrial phase when tasks, although highly regimented, were
well-defined, requiring relatively little skill and readiness for competi-
tion, as well as permitting a stricter division between work and free time.
Moreover, in a capitalist economy, the introduction of labor-reducing
machinery tends to drive prices down, thereby stimulating demand and
increasing the work that goes into production and services. The average
working day in the US and in Europe is significantly longer today than
it was some 20–30 years ago. While Marcuse is likely to be right in
thinking that a non-competitive, non-market-based organization of the
economy – an economy based on the virtues of cooperation and soli-
darity, aiming for the common good rather than the creation of private
wealth – would be better able to cater for real needs than unbridled
capitalism is, he fails to consider the limits and downsides of increased
automation. For one thing, Marcuse is too sanguine about the extent
to which automated systems can make material labor redundant: there
will always be a need for people designing new machines, making them,
maintaining them and dismantling them when they have run their course.
Moreover, as Marcuse occasionally acknowledges, soft technologies and
cybernetics may be just as prone to have dehumanizing and alienating
effects as the old-style industrial environments that Marcuse, following
the young Marx, criticizes.22 It seems implausible to believe that even a
very successful and egalitarian social organization would be able to
eliminate these problems.23 Why would the considerable level of techno-
logical sophistication required for Marcuse’s utopian society to function
– a level of sophistication that late capitalism has allegedly already
reached but not been able to avail itself of in a reasonable manner – not
simply continue to keep mankind in a state of destructive domination
with regard to external nature and encourage it, more than ever before,
to satisfy its needs according to the standards and norms of anonymized
mass-behavior? Perhaps his confidence in the saving powers of socialized
technology is best understood when seen in the context of the more wide-
spread techno-optimism of the 1950s. At no point in his exposition,
however, is Marcuse in a more open conflict with his own (Schillerian)
humanist vision of a society liberated for beauty and self-creation.24
Indeed, if the argument about technology fails, then the whole idea of
overcoming the current level of repression will do so as well.
The contrast with Adorno’s position is striking. Although the concept
of utopia has often been associated with technological progress, Adorno,
even if he occasionally toys with the notion of automatism, views tech-
nology as inextricably linked to the administration of mass-societies and
an ever-growing objectification and control of living subjectivities and

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
nature. While some passages in Adorno seem to suggest a Marxian
sympathy with the notion of technological development and change as
the motor of historical development, he generally asserts that techno-
logical society encourages standardization both of behavior and social
environment. Even the crucial invocation, in the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, of an ‘unleashing of productive forces’ is feared by
Adorno for its ‘affinity to the violent domination of nature. . . . The very
word “unleashed” has undertones of menace’.25
According to Marcuse, if men, thanks to the use of automated tech-
nology in a rational society, reach a state of relative liberation from the
repressive necessity of labor, they will be free to take part in activities
that involve a non-repressive restructuring of their instinctual organiz-
ation. Where the young Marx, still in thrall to an essentially bourgeois
(or indeed neo-Aristotelian) vision of human self-realization, yet in agree-
ment with Marcuse that communism would have to involve a large-scale
shift from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, had dreamed
of a state in which all citizens would be free to pursue ‘higher activities’,
Marcuse associates the reappropriation of time (as well as labor time)
with the timelessness of the id and the hedonism of the narcissistic
pleasure-ego. Alluding to Nietzsche’s attempt to transcend Christian
ressentiment, such a transformative event would take place in an aestheti-
cized culture of play, a culture liberated from the monogamic-patriarchal
family and the hierarchical division of labor, in which people are free
to cultivate and satisfy pregenital instincts.
Critics have often been puzzled by the quasi-scientific, monological
certainty with which Marcuse presents his blueprint for radical social
change and indeed a utopian transfiguration of Western civilization.26
While convinced that his critical reading of Freud will provide him with
the means to anticipate a global dialectical shift from the realm of neces-
sity to the realm of freedom, he seems to have little or no awareness of
the essentially authoritarian nature of his scheme. To those who may have
other conceptions of how to realize the good life than that of libidinal
self-realization along polymorphous-perverse lines, Marcuse can only
inform them that they are alienated and that liberated members of a new
society will teach them to think differently. To those who may find the
transformation of genital sexuality into Eros a trivial or stifling vision
of freedom – a bit too closely aligned with Aldous Huxley’s infernal
imagery of somatic happiness without dignity – Marcuse offers no answer.
There is, in his account of the non-repressive society, no democratic
space in which to deliberate about how society is to define its concep-
tion of the common good. When it comes to creating a viable demo-
cratic structure, it is difficult to see that Marcuse brings more to the
table than a vision of spontaneous self-organization along Schillerian
lines.27 In Marcuse’s favored society, one exclusive vision of the good

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
life seems to be meant to direct the design of each single institution. In
its disregard for the open-endedness and post-conventional nature of
democratic politics, and indeed for politics as such, this could all too
easily be a recipe for anti-democratic practices.28
A related problem with Marcuse’s political vision is that its realiza-
tion would seem to threaten the integrity and sense of self-respect that
agents in a non-authoritarian society need in order to exercise their
private and civic duties. Marcuse has no other means to conceptualize
mutual recognition than that which is entailed by his account of narcis-
sistic love (and even that may be a meager basis for conceptualizing social
recognition); and he has little or no sense of how agents’ self-definitions
and self-understandings may be conditional upon being recognized as
individuals who are morally responsible (and thereby capable of sacri-
ficing the immediate satisfaction of interest in favor of the pursuit of some
larger good whose actualization they see their moral self-interpretation
as implicated with) in addition to taking part in successful affective
relationships. ‘Happiness? What’s that for? Why would I want that?’ a
young Bob Dylan replies in response to a question about the aim of life
in Martin Scorcese’s recent documentary No Direction Home. Dylan’s
point is, of course, not that he would like a life of misery, but that there
are situations, acknowledgments, talents and aspirations that seem to call
for the pursuit of dignity and self-esteem over happiness. Dylan is not
saying (although it is arguable) that the world would be a worse place
had he chosen not to actualize his potential for artistic genius; he is
saying that he would not want to be someone who failed to do that. A
life organized around the pursuit of instinctual satisfaction, even if it
involves many activities that we would otherwise regard as valuable,
does not, as Plato and Aristotle would be the first to remind us, quite
seem able to pose as a good life. Lives that most people in the Western
tradition tend to see as exceptionally good – the lives of great saints,
artists, statesmen or philosophers – are lives that have involved some
sort of self-overcoming, or some sort of sacrifice. They are lives that, in
Freudian terms, have required the establishment of a strong ego.

Narcissism and the Nirvana principle

At the ontogenetic level, Marcuse agrees with Freud that the super-ego,
and hence conscience (and the potential for guilt), is first and foremost
established through the constitution of genital supremacy – or, as Joel
Whitebook puts it, ‘surplus genitalization’29 – via the resolution of the
Oedipus complex and the internalization of paternal authority. Thus, in
order to find the good Other of the guilty, repressive, self-sacrificing ego,
Marcuse looks to a pregenital polymorphous sexuality and argues that

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
only this would be capable of providing the desired transformation of
genital sexuality into Eros:

No longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body would be re-

sexualized. The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first
manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently,
in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of
genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of
cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed: an instrument of pleasure. This change in
the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of
the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been
organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal families.30

As mentioned, the concept of polymorphous-perverse sexuality involves

reference to psychoanalytic accounts of narcissism. While Freud and
many of his followers have tended to see narcissistic object-choice as
inferior and even pathological in comparison to object love, and ulti-
mately as an egotistical withdrawal from reality, Marcuse finds that
‘narcissism may contain the germ of a different reality principle: the
libidinal cathexis of the ego (one’s own body) may become the source
and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the objective world – trans-
forming this world into a new mode of being’.31 Narcissistic love creates,
as it were, the conditions for a transfigured relation between subject
and object – beyond the instrumental attitude displayed by the narrowly
reality-oriented ego. By contrast, Freud, in his paper ‘On Narcissism:
An Introduction’, broadly construes narcissism as the withdrawal of
libido from the external objects to the ego.32 Whether directly or through
projection, the narcissist seeks herself as a love-object. How can Marcuse
arrive at his expanded conception of Eros from considerations based on
Freud’s apparently much more narrow construal of narcissism? Indeed,
how can narcissism both mean an ‘egotistical withdrawal from reality’
and ‘an expansive identification with the Other’?
The resolution of this paradox is to be found in Marcuse’s orientation
towards Freud’s reference, in Civilization and Its Discontents, to a sense
of deeper connectedness to reality, ‘a limitless extension and oneness
with the universe’, which he calls ‘the oceanic feeling’.33 This particu-
lar experience, which in its sublimated form is said to form the basis
for what we think of as religious feeling, represents, Freud argues, a
regression to primary narcissism or the early stages of postnatal develop-
ment when the child experiences a state of non-differentiation between
itself and its maternal environment. In this state there is no distinction
between external and internal world, or between ego and id. The only
object-choice there is tends to be anaclitic, as in the use of the mouth
to suck and incorporate the breast into the infant’s own body, and yet
the whole body is eroticized.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
In order to determine the nature of this attitude further, Marcuse
invokes the mythological figures of Narcissus and Orpheus. Being associ-
ated with the Nirvana principle, Narcissus symbolizes sleep and death,
the merging of self with the Other, and ultimately the end of the prin-
cipium individuationis. Orpheus, on the other hand, represents the ability
to communicate with objects: just as Orpheus’s lyre liberates objects from
their petrifaction, so does the wide identification of primary narcissism
set the performance principle aside and reconciles man and nature. While
figuring, for Marcuse, the transgression of Oedipal law, it is important
to notice (and Marcuse fails to do so) that both Narcissus and Orpheus
willfully destroy their relations to others. Narcissus does so by rejecting
Echo, or rather Echo’s independence in relation to him; Orpheus does so
by seeking secure visual possession of Eurydice in the underworld despite
Hades’ command not to do so. Both of them want absolute possession;
none of them can accept or cope with transience and otherness. The
utopian fulfillment promised by these figures is thus essentially tinged
with loneliness and tragedy.
As mentioned, Marcuse’s extraordinary speculation about the psycho-
political potential of narcissism makes extended reference to the Nirvana
principle, which Freud understands as the tendency, inherent in all organ-
isms, towards ‘reducing to nothing, or at least of keeping as low as pos-
sible, the sums of excitation which flow in upon [the mental apparatus]’.34
The utopian promise inherent in the concept of the Nirvana principle,
which Marcuse sees as the origin of both the death and the life instincts,
is jouissance and Liebestod, the abolition of will, separation, instrumen-
tality and objectification. It is important to acknowledge the radicality
of this maneuver. Not only does he thereby venture into what, despite
his earlier interest in the concept of hedonism, at the time for him was
uncharted territory, but this is the point at which Marcuse starts to go
beyond the theoretical framework set up by Adorno and other represen-
tatives of the first-generation Frankfurt School, in which true happiness
is seen as inseparable from active self-determination.35
Like Marcuse, Adorno also seems to outline the possibility of a trans-
gression of the representational together with a somatic realization of
the object which excludes the intermediation of both concept and image.
Indeed, deeply buried in the semantic layers of Adorno’s materialism
there is an almost Schopenhauerian longing not only for an unguarded
encounter with the not-I, but a submersion into an unmasterable,
Dionysian alterity, culminating in the complete indistinction between
subject and object. While predominantly associated with a regressive,
narcissistic sexuality, Adorno relates this to the Freudian death instinct
and Caillois’ mimétisme, viewing it as ‘the trend to lose oneself in the
environment instead of playing an active role in it; the tendency to let
oneself go and sink back into nature’.36

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
Adorno’s objection to Marcuse would not primarily be that Marcuse
conceives of the supersession of a repressive relation between subject
and object in terms of narcissistic regression, and he himself, in terms
of a reconciliation modeled on the resurrection of nature; it would rather
be that Adorno – not retreating from the paradoxical consequence of
his position – seeks to affirm the subject in its moment of involuntary
annihilation. Whereas Marcuse envisions a total overcoming of the ego-
principle, Adorno seeks to strengthen it by exposing it, as if in a moment
of illusion or semblance, to the primary processes from which it has
arisen.
Throughout all of Adorno’s work, there is a sense of profound ambi-
guity about the notion of ego strength. Defending it passionately, he
refers to it as a condition of political resistance and deplores its demise
in late modernity. Indeed, thinking itself, insofar as it involves a moment
of identification and logical stringency, presupposes a coercive moment
of self-discipline. On the other hand, though, and in stark contrast to
the celebration of ego-strength, ‘the identifying principle of the subject is
itself the internalized principle of society’.37 In a society organized around
the production of exchange value for its own sake, the individual finds
herself entirely under the spell of compulsory identity; hence the iden-
titarian dimension of the self is ultimately false.
At his closest to Marcuse, Adorno argues that the full realization of
utopia would involve the end of compulsive identity and the reconcili-
ation of ego and id.38 A reconciliation of this kind would collapse the
distinction between primary and secondary processes, pleasure principle
and reality principle, and bring about the conditions of true happiness.
Adorno is, however, very careful not to play the utopian card too quickly.
In a false society, even intimations of utopia tend to be false. Given the
impossibility of pointing to positive tendencies that would suggest the
imminence of radical change, as well as his insistence on the historical
mediation of all experiences of transcendence, Adorno’s policy is always
to keep the utopian impulse at an arm’s length distance. Most decisively,
it occurs in the relationship of aesthetic experience to the psychic subject,
where it is said to break through rigid self-preservation, yet only as anti-
cipatory illusion [Schein].39

Mourning and melancholia

If considered in the light of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, which

Marcuse unfortunately does not discuss, an Adornian critique of Marcuse
can be extended even further. The Freudian melancholic responds to loss
and dissatisfaction, including Ananke (scarcity) itself, by attempting to
arrest time and deny loss. Whereas mourning is a reaction to loss

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
whereby libidinal investment is recathected, thus liberating the ego from
the fixation on the lost object, melancholy conceals an aggressiveness
toward the lost object, revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person
with respect to the object of mourning.40 The melancholic imbeds the
lost object in herself so as not to lose it. However, since the love for the
object has been effected on a narcissistic basis, which places the self
in a relationship both of identification and aggression, it ends up de-
valorizing itself with the same passion as it formerly valorized the object.
The psychic malady of melancholy is therefore potentially infinite: it
knows no work of mourning, no positive or symbolic law to be acknowl-
edged, but only an infinite (or timeless) self-divestiture and self-negation
before the Other with whom the ego identifies.
The essential melancholia of Marcuse’s construction comes to the fore
most clearly in his assumption that human liberation involves a struggle
against, and an eventual overcoming of, time, and indeed that the quest
for happiness can never be reconciled with the fact of transience, separ-
ation, and otherness.41 In terms that could be taken straight out of
Freud’s paper on melancholia, Marcuse strikingly defines the famous
‘Great Refusal’ as the ‘refusal to accept separation from the libidinous
object (or subject). The refusal aims at liberation – at the reunion of
what has become separated.’42 In making this claim, Marcuse refers to
Freud’s assertion that the id and the primary processes are timeless,
hence that the events taking place in the unconscious are not organized
in accordance with any kind of temporal or narrative scheme. However,
he also links the timelessness of the id with a Platonic or perhaps
Schopenhauerian longing for reunification with some transcendent,
unconditioned Other, and with Aristotle’s nous theos, the self-thinking
highest being which joyfully incorporates everything else – past, present,
and future – in its own ‘being-in-and-for-itself’.43 At this point, Marcuse
presents his own version of Bloch’s essentially religious claim in The Prin-
ciple of Hope that death, the finality and finitude of life, is the strongest
non-utopia there is.44 Without confronting the fact of death, no genuine
utopian anticipation is possible.
It is instructive to compare Marcuse’s negative attitude towards
temporality and transience with that of Freud. While Freud certainly does
view the id as timeless, he sees the acceptance and mourning of loss as
crucial both for the experience of happiness and beauty, as well as for
the development of the ego through identification. In the 1915 text ‘On
Transience’, Freud contends that a genuine appreciation of beauty pre-
supposes the capacity to mourn the object’s transience: sublimation is
the counterpoise of the loss to which the libido so enigmatically fastens
itself.45 To the pessimist who depreciates the beautiful on the ground
that its ephemeral fate leads to a decrease in value, Freud retorts that,
if we are able to mourn it, it is precisely the object’s ephemerality that

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
makes it so beautiful. Through mourning, the progressive replacement of
cathectic energy onto new objects, even death, exemplified for Freud by
the First World War, can be withstood, sublimated and symbolically ideal-
ized.46 In ‘The Ego and the Id’, Freud generalizes this view by arguing
that the ego must be viewed as a sedimentation of loved and lost objects
with which one has previously identified.47 Even though, on this model,
the interiority of the psyche tends to be structured around the melan-
cholic internalization and incorporation of lost objects, aggressively
monitored by the punitive ego-ideal, the autonomy of the ego remains
predicated upon the ability to mourn these objects and recathect desire.
Indeed, mourning and autonomy are, for Freud, extensionally equivalent:
they represent the same psychic processes and produce the same outcome.
In Julia Kristeva’s account of melancholia, which in addition to Freud
draws on the works of Hanna Segal and Lacan, symbolic activity arises
from the lack which emerges with the separation from the maternal
object. Through symbolization, the child makes up for the lack and
becomes able to identify ‘no longer with the lost object but with a third
party – father, form, schema’.48 The melancholic is someone who actively
negates the negation of the maternal object; who refuses to commit the
matricide necessary for autonomy, and seeks to reunite with it by regress-
ing to the primal narcissistic position. Since the ego as imaginary object
is what stands in the way of such reunification, the melancholic directs
all his aggression inwards and refuses to participate in the symbolic
sphere. According to Kristeva:
the entire ego of those who are depressed sinks into a diseroticized and yet
jubilatory anality, as the latter becomes the bearer of a jouissance fused
with the archaic Thing, perceived not as a significant object but as the self’s
borderline element. For those who are depressed, the Thing like the self is
a downfall that carries them along into the invisible and unnamable.49

Although Marcuse may be right in arguing that while Ananke qua scarcity
is possible to overcome, Ananke qua loss and separation (and especi-
ally the losses of childhood) is not possible to transcend.50 Indeed, since
the individual’s emergence from timeless narcissistic omnipotence is
predicated upon the capacity to mourn lost objects and develop a related
capacity for symbolization to deal with ineluctable loss, it is unclear that
seeking liberation from temporality is even desirable. With Hegel, one
could therefore assert that Marcuse lacks an awareness of the ‘work of
the negative’ – that the indispensable condition for autonomy is a series
of splitting – birth, weaning, separation, frustration, castration – and
that those processes, as Kristeva puts it, ‘necessarily structure our indi-
viduation’.51
To be sure, Marcuse is equivocal about the notions of pleasure and
gratification. In his extended discussion of Kant’s Critique of Judgment

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, he sees the
release of repression as involving an aesthetic reconciliation between
sensuousness and reason. In a culture devoted to free play, gratification
arises when there is a balance between primary and secondary processes,
transgression and form. However, when Marcuse tries to translate this
vision into psychosexual terms, he seems to suggest something much
more radical, namely a leap into omnipotence in which reality – its
independence from me, its transience, its potential to disappoint me –
is rejected. It is a commonplace of psychoanalytic theory that omni-
potence must come to grief for genuine object-love to be possible. By
downplaying or forgetting the need to mourn, Marcuse’s utopianism
runs the risk of being genuinely regressive and in denial of reality.

Adorno and Marcuse

Despite many agreements, especially at the level of social analysis, the

differences between Adorno and Marcuse run deep. Their views of history,
for example, while similar in that both replace a Marxian scheme of dia-
lectical materialism with a Freudian emphasis on instinctual renunciation
and domination, differ on whether there is a positive historical essence
capable of pointing beyond the present. Marcuse is adamant that such
an essence exists and that the task of philosophy is to reveal the true situ-
ation in the light of its secret potential for change. Thus, in Reason and
Revolution Marcuse writes about Marx that ‘his categories are negative
and at the same time positive: they present a negative state of affairs in
the light of its positive solution, revealing the true situation in existing
society as the prelude to its passing into a new form’.52 For Adorno,
however, influenced as he was by Benjamin’s critique of theodiciacal
thinking, no social category can ever disclose the subterranean move-
ments of history as leading towards redemption.53 Not only was he
skeptical about the actual existence of such a subterranean history, but
even if it existed, the consummate negativity of the current social whole
meant that its articulation would have to take place beyond, as it were,
the given symbolic order. Only in retrospect, when the ciphers of
redemption have been presented (or at least been anticipated as Schein),
will it be possible to distinguish correctly between the negative and the
positive. No imminent critique of totally false conditions can escape this
predicament.
Yet is there a moment in Adorno when the forces of redemption can
be figured as transcending the identitarian constitution of subjectivity
and lead to the constitution of something like a political subject? Or is
Adorno’s alternative to Marcuse’s activism some form of resignation and
an indefinitely prolonged hibernation in the negative? In his recently

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
published lecture course Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der
Freiheit, Adorno turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and introduces his diffi-
cult yet crucial notion of the addendum [das Hinzutretende]. Finding
himself in a post-medieval world devoid of moral certainties, Hamlet,
the intellectual, is to be regarded as a victim of the new and early modern
demand for autonomous reflection. As opposed to the active Fortinbras,
who represents the medieval world of chivalry, Hamlet famously cannot
bring himself to act and constitute himself as a political subject. Rather
than revealing himself to others, he remains stifled, passive, locked inside
his own interior monologue, incapable of translating the father-ghost’s
demand for revenge into the decisive deed. In philosophical terms, the
fundamental problem for Hamlet is that unless an experience can provide
motivation from outside the space of reasons, the sheer reflection itself
retrogrades into an empty gesture, leading to skepticism and nihilism.
In order to do what he so desperately wants and thinks is right but is
unable to justify, he needs to undergo a shock, or what Adorno calls ‘a
sudden impulse’ that can throw him into action. It is the wound – hence
a bodily, indeed somatic, intervention – being inflicted at the end of the
fifth act which brings about the necessary addendum for action to occur.
‘The realization of Hamlet’s political and moral project’, Adorno writes,
‘requires regression, the return to an earlier, anarchic level’.54
It is strange to see Adorno advocate regression in any form. Why is
this not simply a lapse into the heteronomy he otherwise so adamantly
criticizes? Adorno considers this objection and claims that the impulse,
the addendum, rather than weakening the rational, identical self of moral
and political deliberation, in fact strengthens it. The regression should
not be viewed undialectically, as a suspension of the ego’s mastery, but
rather, along Hegelian lines, as a movement of self-identification in
otherness. Referring directly to Freud, Adorno supports this argument
by recalling how, in psychoanalytic theory, the free and reality-oriented
ego, in so far as respect for reality is a function of the more general
pleasure principle which governs the primary system, can be viewed as
an extension of libidinal energy into the secondary system.55 Unlike the
Kantian system of moral psychology, the ego and the id, rationality and
desire, are not antithetical and foreign to one another. Certainly, Adorno
would resist both an undialectical invocation of libidinal transgression,
as in Deleuze and Guattari, and a call for a dialectical mediation between
ego and id, as in Marcuse. The point of the dialectic, rather, is to conduct
what the Dialectic of Enlightenment refers to as a ‘remembrance of
nature in the subject’.56
A problem with relating the notion of addendum so closely to Freud’s
theory is that Freudian regression is a movement towards repressed
infantile desire whose irresistible and repetitive urge for outlet, when met
with resistance from the ego, produces a symptom-formation. What is

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
it that distinguishes the addendum from the impulse which gives rise to
a dream or a parapraxis? Or why, to put it bluntly, is Adornian regres-
sion liberating and Freudian regression just the occasion upon which
a neurotic symptom is being created? While there is hardly any answer
to this question in Adorno’s own exposition, it might be added to his
analysis that the moment in which Hamlet finds himself capable of
acting is simultaneously the moment in which he overcomes his melan-
choly and starts to mourn by recathecting libido onto external objects.
I would argue that the addendum can be understood as the moment of
release that initiates mourning and transforms the state of debt into
autonomous political action. Such action would here entail the libera-
tion of the ego from its deadly fixation on the lost object (the father)
and the achievement of an independent social positioning of the self in
relation to others. Mourning would thus be equated with autonomy, and
it would allow the individual to affirm the lost father-object’s indepen-
dence and transience, which itself is required for autonomy to be possible.
Such a reading would be consistent with larger strands of Adorno’s
thinking, in particular his intention of conceiving the ‘correct’ relation
between subject and object as requiring an act of confession according
to which the subject acknowledges its distance and otherness vis-a-vis
the object. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno hence defines as the task of
philosophy to ‘release the nonidentical’ and ‘rid it of coercion’.57 There
can be no reconciliation unless the subject recognizes its separation from
the object and accepts its transience. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
on which Adorno bases so many of his arguments, such a confession
takes the form of acknowledging that the ‘hard heart’ performs when it
experiences the consequences of its separation from the community. In
desperately seeking to authorize its normative relation to the world from
the standpoint of a purely individual and isolated act of ‘authentically’
projecting meaning onto the object, the ‘hard heart’ learns that in order
to discover meaning and acquire communal recognition it needs to release
the object from its own holds.58 In Freudian terms it needs to mourn –
to accept transience and otherness. The weak Messianic moment in
Adorno asserts itself precisely in this act of sudden acknowledgment of
difference whereby the object is retained, as it were, in its absence – and
as a promise.59 Would this be a new beginning? At least it would recreate
the possibility of form, meaning and love – the requisite for the subject’s
survival and action.

University of Oslo, Norway

PSC

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
Notes
1 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966).
For Marcuse’s subsequent attempts to bring the results of Eros and Civiliz-
ation to bear on his socialist politics, see in particular Herbert Marcuse,
An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969) and Counter-
revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
2 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 7. For a good discussion of Marcuse’s
psychology, see Edward Hyman, ‘Eros and Freedom: The Critical Psychol-
ogy of Herbert Marcuse’, in Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg and Charles
P. Webel (eds), Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (South
Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988), pp. 143–66.
3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New
York/London: Norton, 1989), p. 45: ‘We recognize, then, that countries
have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything
which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protec-
tion against the forces of nature – everything, in short, which is of use to
him – is attended to and effectively carried out.’
4 See for example Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 25: ‘Out of the common
nature of instinctual life develop two antagonistic instincts. The life instincts
(Eros) gain ascendancy over the death instincts.’
5 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 309.
6 See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 234–5. On p. 135 Marcuse specu-
lates about how Eros, freed from surplus-repression, ‘would be strengthened,
and the strengthened Eros would, as it were, absorb the objective of the
death instinct’.
7 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.111.
8 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 15.
9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (London/New York: Verso, 1979), pp. 32–4.
10 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 55.
11 Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion
between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of
Utopian Longing’, in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Litera-
ture, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989), pp. 3–4.
12 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and
P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 17: ‘Everything that is
non-illusory, real-possible about the hope-images leads to Marx, works –
as always, in different ways, rationed according to the situation – as part
of socialist changing of the world’.
13 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London:
Routledge, 1984), pp. 108–9.
14 Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits
of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 13.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
Kristeva refers of course to Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points
of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans.
James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), especially p. 145.
15 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Psychic Termidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious
Subjectivity’, in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, p. 3:
‘Marcuse did not, in contrast to Adorno, only encircle the ineffable; he
made straight appeals to future alternatives’.
16 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 4.
17 The argument to this effect is to be found in Herbert Marcuse, ‘The End of
Utopia’, in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia, trans. Jeremy
J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 62–82.
18 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 35.
19 ibid.
20 ibid., p. 37.
21 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 12: ‘Is it still necessary to state that
not technology, not technique, not the machine are the engines of repres-
sion, but the presence, in them, of the masters who determine their number,
their life span, their power, their place in life, and the need for them? Is it
still necessary to repeat that science and technology are the great vehicles
of liberation, and that it is only their use and restriction in the repressive
society which makes them into vehicles of liberation?’ Andrew Feenberg
restates this point by asserting that ‘Technology still represents for Marcuse
the hypothetical possibility of overcoming scarcity and the conflict to which
it gives rise, but capitalism “represses” this technical potential for emanci-
pation by casting society in the form of an ever renewed struggle for
existence.’ See Andrew Feenberg, ‘The Bias of Technology’, in Marcuse:
Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, p. 227.
22 For Marcuse’s remarks in this regard, see Five Lectures, p. 71.
23 Since Marcuse took little or no interest in defending the ‘real existing
socialism’ in the East, it may be unfair and irrelevant to point to its experi-
ences with automatism. It is worth keeping in mind, though, that Russian
and East European industrialism during communism was predominantly
less technologically developed than in the West and considerably less clean.
24 There is much to be said, however, for thinking of the demand for greener
technologies and alternative sources of energy as being in alignment with
Marcuse’s general desire to see the means of production ‘softened’.
25 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973), pp. 306–7.
26 For critical discussions of this issue, see Jürgen Habermas, Sylvia Bovenschen
et al., Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981),
pp. 30 ff.; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of
the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 337.
27 For Schiller, aesthetic, spontaneous experience alone offers the means of
realizing the true society. See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education
of Man, trans. L. A. Willoughby and E. M. Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967), pp. 8–9: ‘if man is ever to solve the political problem
in practice he will have to take the aesthetic way, because it is only through

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
beauty that man makes his way to freedom’. Passages such as this led
Georg Lukács, in Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern: Paderborn, 1947), p. 109 ff.,
to see in Schiller’s letters a flight from politics into an aesthetic utopia. For
a penetrating analysis of Schiller’s politics, see Bernard Yack, The Longing
for Total Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992),
pp. 133–84.
28 In Five Lectures, p. 17, Marcuse refuses to rule out the need for dictator-
ship in order to curb opposition.
29 Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and
Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 31.
30 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 201.
31 ibid., p. 169.
32 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in The Penguin Freud
Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 67.
33 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 11ff.
34 Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, in The Penguin Freud
Library, vol. 11, p. 413.
35 For Marcuse’s early thoughts on hedonism see ‘On Hedonism’, in his
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 159–200.
36 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 227.
37 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 241.
38 ibid., p. 281: ‘The subject’s nonidentity without sacrifice would be utopian’.
39 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 475: ‘Aesthetic experience – and this thought
was already familiar to Schopenhauer – transcends the spell of mindless
self-preservation, becoming the paradigm of a new stage of consciousness
where the ego no longer fends for its particular interests in a framework
of material reproduction.’
40 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Penguin Freud
Library, vol. 11, pp. 257–60.
41 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 191: ‘But the fatal enemy of lasting grat-
ification is time, the inner finiteness, the brevity of all conditions. The idea
of integral human liberation therefore necessarily contains the vision of the
struggle against time’.
42 ibid., p. 170.
43 ibid., p. 112.
44 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, p. 1103.
45 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’, in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14,
pp. 287–90.
46 ibid., p. 290: ‘Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to
a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost,
then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as
we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally
or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the
losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found
that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from
our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has
destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.’

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (9)
47 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Penguin Freud Library, vol.
11, p. 368: ‘When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object,
there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described
as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the
exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that
by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the oral phase, the ego
makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible.
It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id
can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases
of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose
that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes
and that it contains the history of those object-choices.’
48 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 23.
49 ibid., p. 15.
50 For the distinction between Ananke qua scarcity and Ananke qua loss, see
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 40. See also ‘The Marriage of Marx
and Freud: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis’, in Fred Rush (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2004), p. 88, where Whitebook argues that Marcuse’s ‘central
fallacy [. . .] is the conflation of the idea of material scarcity with Freud’s
notion of Ananke (reality or necessity)’.
51 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 132.
52 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social
Theory (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 295. For an alternative comparison
between Marcuse and Adorno which makes reference to the final entry of
Minima Moralia, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,
Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 503.
53 For a brilliant discussion of Adorno’s critique of theodicy, see Josh Cohen,
Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (New York/London:
Continuum, 2003). See also my review of Cohen’s book in the British
Journal for the Society of Phenomenology, 36(1) (2005), pp. 105–7.
54 Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 326. I further develop my interpretation
of Adorno’s take on Hamlet in Adorno and the Political (London/New
York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 118–21.
55 ibid., p. 329: ‘Ja, man könnte sich denken – um es einmal ganz kraß auszu-
drücken –, daß das reflexhafte Reagieren schließlich selbst in den Dienst
des Ich-Prinzips tritt; was übrigens genetisch deshalb gar nicht so absolut
Abwegiges hat, weil ja das Ich selber abgespaltene und auf Realitätsprü-
fung verwandte libidinöse Energie ist; also gar nicht etwas diesem Hinzutre-
tenden oder Impulshaften, das ich gemeint habe, absolut Fremdes.’
56 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40.
57 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6.
58 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 405–9.

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Hammer: Marcuse’s critical theory of modernity
59 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6: ‘Reconciliation would release the non-
identical, would rid it of coercion including spiritualized coercion; it would
open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of
its power over them. Reconciliation would be the thought of the many as
no longer inimical, a thought that is anathema to subjective reason.’ See also
Kristeva’s affiliated reflections on the nature of confession and forgiveness
in Black Sun, pp. 175–217.

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