During a talk at Goldsmiths, University of London, on the then just-released fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality series, Les Aveux de la Chair, Stuart Elden referenced Foucault’s proclamation “I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist,” indicating that, whilst it was certainly true that he was not those things by the time of his death, one could well make the argument that all three statements were, indeed, a lie. Whilst History of Sexuality vol.1: The Will to Knowledge takes considerable pains to quash the “repressive hypothesis” upon which Marcuse’s Freudian, Marxist, structuralist critique is certainly based, I believe there remains just enough of a (for want of a better term) proto-poststructuralist insight in Eros and Civilization that some influence must be extant.
Indeed, to borrow from a passing joke made by Negri that, at some point in his career, Marx must have read some Foucault, I myself suggest that, when we read Marcuse discussing the “sub-individual and pre-individual factors which (largely unconscious to the ego) actually make the individual, [revealing] the power of the universal in and over the individuals” (p.58), or his appeal to the potentially liberationist pursuit of making, or indeed returning the human body to the status of “an instrument of pleasure rather than labour [or, indeed, ‘desire?’]” (p. xvi) that Marcuse as early as 1955 must have attended some of Foucault’s 1980s lectures in which he calls for the undoing of the psychoanalytical obsession with desire, and instead for a turn to an analysis and activation of pleasure.
It is certainly interesting when reading “What is an Author?” to see the firmly anti-psychiatry Foucault indicate both Marx and Freud as “instigators [or founders] of discursivity,” and then proceed to discuss the latter in such a way as to provide philosophical justification for his rival Lacan’s own “return to Freud” (returning in this case meaning not “setting our watches back to,” but rather “engaging with, reinterpreting and repurposing where necessary”). This exact passage might similarly provide justification for Marcuse’s own pursuit, only Marcuse would likely refuse the notion that his “return” is anything akin to Lacan’s, disparaging as he does so routinely the “neo-Freudian schools.”
Marcuse’s invocation of the libidinal drives of the subject, and their imbrication in various discourses and technologies of civilization, may to a certain degree also prefigure Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, although in many ways it is rather more timid in its analysis, largely due to its fairly singular emphasis on repression, rather than dissimulation through channelling. Similarly, Marcuse’s emphasis on the performance principle’s relation to the deathly Nirvana principle, contrasted to many of the concepts of libidinal excess, as discussed by Lyotard, jouissance as imagined by Lacan, or limit-experience as pursued by Bataille, does still allow for desire to maintain a productive capacity (not a position I would immediately associate with a traditionalist or anti-neo-Freudian – or, indeed, Foucauldian -model) that it might have been a significant contribution to the more postmodern analyses of Deleuze and Guattari. And yet, when Marcuse’s name is briefly and sporadically mentioned in Anti-Oedipus, it is with an air of polite disappointment that he “touched too lightly.”
It is perhaps most of all within its status as sociological ur-text that Eros and Civilization‘s shortcomings lie.
Wyrdsystyr 