Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia Five Lectures

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““Against the lies and mystifications of a cynical ‘realism,’
IMarcuse insists on the real basis of utopia — an insistence
vwe need today more than ever.”
— Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Dean College,
author of The Communist Horizon

“Marcuse’s synthesis of Marx and Freud explains the

interaction of the social and psychic forces that have blocked
the revolution Marx anticipated. His theory gives insight
into the role of the irrational in the historical process. We
need that insight now more than ever. But Marcuse also
shows a path to a concrete utopia made possible by the
achievements of the existing society. The essays in this
volume are once again timely as rising social conflict on the
right and the left challenges conventional thinking.”
— Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University,
author of The Philosophy of Praxis:
Marx, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School

“Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia presents important

articles that illuminate Marcuse’s appropriation and
use of Freud and psychoanalysis while indicating their
relevance to politics and utopian concepts of liberation and
revolution. These texts indicate how and why Marcuse was
a key influence on the New Left and radical politics during
the last two decades of his life in the 1960s and 1970s,
and his continuing relevance for radical theory and politics
today.”
— Douglas Kellner, UCLA, author of Herbert
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism
PSYCHOANALYSIS,
POLITICS,
AND UTOPIA
 PSYCHOANALYSIS,
POLITICS,
AND UTOPIA
FIVE LECTURES

HERBERT MARCUSE

Edited and with an introduction by Ray Brassier

Translations by Jeremy J. Shapiro

and Shierry M. Weber

Repeater
Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11 Sheppcrton House
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www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2022
1
Distributed m the United States by Random House, Inc., New York
Copyright © 1970 by Herbert Marcuse
Translations from German Copyright © 1970 by Beacon Press
The German texts are copyright by Europiische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main, and by Verlag
Peter von Maikowski, Berlin
Introduction copyright © Ray Brassier 2022
ISBN: 9781914420405
Ebook ISBN. 9781914420412
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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CONTENTS

Introduction
Utopian Possibility by Ray Brassier 1

Chapter One
Freedom and Freud's Theory of Drives 13

Chapter Two
Progress and Freud's Theory of Drives 43

Chapter Three
The Obsolescence of the Freudian
Concept of Man 62

Chapter Four
The End of Utopia 83

Chapter Five
The Problem of Violence and the
Radical Opposition 108

Bibliographical Note 138

Notes 139
INTRODUCTION
Utopian Possibility by Ray Brassier

Marx sought to move communism from the utopian into

the historical domain, bringing it down to earth. But in
the wake of its abortive historical realizations, it seemed
even to the most critical Marxists that only communism’s
utopian dimension might redeem its unfulfilled promise.
If communism was no longer programmed by the “iron
laws” of historical necessity, then salvaging its possibility
required displacing it once more into the utopian realm.
The collapse of “actually existing socialism” reinforced
communism’s utopian exile. In its wake, capitalism not
only secured its grip upon the domain of the actual but
began to colonize the realm of the possible. The recourse
to utopia is an attempt to prize possibility free from the
grip of capitalist actuality and salvage communism in the
paradoxical figure of an impossible possibility. But from
this attempted salvage two distinct configurations of
utopian possibility follow: one negative, relocating it in the
subject; one positive, rediscovering it in the object.
For Theodor Adorno, the ban on positively figuring
utopia desacralizes it while preserving its emancipatory
promise. Utopian promise is the secularized redemption of
a transcendence now usurped by capital. Since the unity of
theory and practice perpetuates capitalism’s identification
of subject and object, only thinking from the standpoint
of redemption can safeguard the possibility of things being
otherwise.1 Thought’s resistance to the “pseudo-activity”
that cannot but betray its realization is utopian: “The

i
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

utopian moment in thinking is stronger the less it — this

too a form of relapse — objectifies itself into a utopia and
hence sabotages its realization.”2 It is thought’s refusal to
integrate itself into the object, or the object into itself, that
safeguards the utopian dimension.
Registering an irrefragable defeat is not defeatist;
Adorno’s rejection of pseudo-activity is not the rejection
of revolutionary possibility for which it is often mistaken.
But the decoupling of utopian possibility from capitalist
actuality comes at a price. It severs communism’s “real
movement” from the actual to the possible.3 If activity
directed against capitalism turns out to reinforce it, then
to think from the standpoint of redemption is also to
abjure the desire to realize utopia as illusory at best (a
failure of thought) and criminal (“totalitarian") at worst.
The refusal to affirm capitalism is shadowed by the refusal
to affirm its practical overcoming. We must think rightly
while living wrongly. Utopian possibility is salvaged at the
cost of rendering “the wrong state of things”, i.e., capitalist
actuality, practically if not cognitively ineluctable. We know
another world is possible but not how it might be realised.
A Marxian critique of capitalism that refrains from
affirming the real movement of its abolition is compatible
with the brand of liberalism for which it is capitalism’s
“excesses”, not its existence, that shapes the horizon of
political contestation. Liberalism can accommodate the
claim that capitalism is wrong, but not that it can and
should be abolished. Herbert Marcuse, Adorno’s friend and
colleague in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research,
also acknowledged the defection of communism’s historical
necessity and the severity of revolutionary defeat. But he
rejected the ineluctability of capitalist actuality just as he
refused to sequester utopian possibility within the realm
of thought. This is why Marcuse remains an object of
opprobrium even for those otherwise willing to admit that

2
 HERBERT MARCUSE

capitalism is fundamentally unjust. Consider, for instance,

this recent assessment:

[I]n the decades since the New Left crested and collapsed,
has the stature of any intellectual fallen more dramatically
than that of Herbert Marcuse? [...] Marcuse’s stature has
shrunk even as scholarly interest in other exemplary figures
of the Frankfurt School has intensified. Consider Theodor
W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Each of them dealt
directly, explicitly and frequently with cultural questions,
and far less with political ones [...] Insofar as the most
pressing challenge that confronts the left today is how to
enlist the political will to address the injustice of economic
inequality, the intellectual and moral legacy of Herbert
Marcuse won’t be due for a revival anytime soon.4

Here, tellingly, Marcuse is chastised for foregrounding

politics at the expense of culture and for targeting capitalist
production as a whole, including culture, rather than
capitalist distribution alone. But the two are linked for
Marcuse, as they were for Marx. The primacy of politics over
culture is of a piece with the critique of capitalism as a mode
of production, not just of distribution. Like Marx, Marcuse
politicizes culture on the basis of production, whereas
liberals culturize politics on the terrain of distribution.
In his 1969 essay “The Relevance of Reality”,5 Marcuse
cites a striking formulation from the Introduction to
Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right: “It is not enough for thought to strive for realisation,
reality must itself strive towards thought.”6 The real
movement of communism is the junction of thought’s
realization and of reality’s idealization, its transformation
by human hands. The subjective impulse of realization
corresponds to the objective impetus of idealization. If
thought’s movement towards reality is correlative with

3
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

reality’s movement towards thought, then a blockage in

the former indicates a blockage in the latter. The subjective
pseudo-activity sabotaging the realization of communism
indexes an objective obstacle in the practical activity
shaping communism’s material preconditions. But what is
important for Marcuse is not just that falsity in subjective
orientation is the obverse of a true objective tendency but
that this objective tendency possesses a libidinal as well
as a practical social dimension. The anticapitalist desire
that compels pseudo-activity has an effective, objective
reality independent of the subjectivity of those it compels.
That this desire originates in capitalism does not entail
that it must terminate there. This is Marcuse’s wager. The
objective corollary to the blockage of subjective realization
is not only a practical-material obstacle but also a libidinal
switch-point; what compels pseudo-activity and blocks
realization is also a social materialization of desire that
objectively counteracts subjective blockage and converts it
into a gateway for practical transformation. Where Adorno
saw capitalism colonizing the unconscious and reshaping
drives to serve its own ends, Marcuse — perhaps more
Hegelian in this regard than Adorno was willing to be —
discerned within this apparent overpowering of resistance
the possibility of resisting overpowerment. Marcuse was
not so naive as to identify activity with resistance per
se; but he saw in pseudo-activity a symptom of effective
activity harbouring a revolutionary potential not in spite
of but precisely because it is objectively programmed. Thus
Marcuse relocates utopia within the historical universe:
"what is denounced as ‘utopian’ is no longer that which
has ‘no place’ and cannot have any place in the historical
universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming
about by the power of the established societies.”7 But if this
blockage is objectively programmed, then so, for Marcuse,
is the possibility of its overcoming.

4
 HERBERT MARCUSE

Both Marcuse and Adorno cleave to Freud’s hypothesis

in Civilization and its Discontents that the progress of
civilization is inextricable from the progress of repression.8
The repression of outer and inner nature frees humans
from inhuman compulsion, but this repression reinstates
compulsion in the form of socially sanctioned law and
mandatory labour, which subjugates the individual to the
social organism as second nature. Liberation from social
domination requires resistance to socially sanctioned
repression. For Adorno, the resistance to repression is
utopian to the extent that it cannot be aligned with concrete
social and historical conditions — doing so would reinstate
the unity of theory and praxis as bad totality. But for
Marcuse, the overcoming of repression is made possible by
a specific historical conjunction of the forces and relations
of production. Indeed, Marcuse refuses to oppose utopian
to historical possibility because he insists that the realm of
freedom (liberation from natural compulsion) is immanent
to the realm of necessity (subjugation to social compulsion,
i.e., labour):

I believe that one of the new possibilities, which gives

an indication of the qualitative difference between the
free and the unfree society, is that of letting the realm of
freedom appear within the realm of necessity — in labor
and not only beyond labor. To put this speculative idea
in a provocative form, I would say that we must face the
possibility that the path to socialism may proceed from
science to utopia and not from utopia to science.9

Marcuse’s starting point is the contrast between what

he calls a "quantitative-technical” conception of progress
and a "qualitative-humanitarian” one. The former is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter:
there can be no human freedom worthy of the name

5
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

without freedom from natural strictures. But capitalist

civilization reifies this negative freedom and turns it into
a transcendent value. Negative freedom — the domination
of outer and inner nature — becomes the telos of progress
in the form of compulsive productivity. Freedom from
libidinal gratification is not only transcendence, but the
autonomy of transcendence: “Just like the productivity to
which it belongs, this transcendence that is essential to
freedom finally appears as an end in itself.”10 The autonomy
of production (i.e., capital) becomes a transcendent end
to which every human goal must be sacrificed. Thus the
autonomy of Kantian reason, which demands the sacrifice
of inclination to duty, aligns with the sovereignty of
capital, which requires the subordination of use-value
to exchange. Just as alienated labour is the substance of
value, alienated reason is the substance of duty. Progress
requires productive renunciation, the repression of
satisfaction that transforms individuals from “bearers of
the pleasure principle” into bearers of labour-power. It is
through this repression that libidinal energy is released for
unpleasurable but socially productive labour. But the social
sublimation of pleasure presupposes a prior interiorization
of repression: it is the introjection of external sanction, in
the form of the superego, that enables the divestment of
individual satisfaction for the sake of collective gratification,
and hence the productive sublimation of libido. Collective
repression enforces the self-repression of the individual,
which in turn consolidates collective repression, which then
further intensifies individual repression. This circuit of self­
reinforcing repression underlies what Marcuse describes as
“the automation of progress”. But this automation is driven
by negation: the repression of individual satisfaction that
enables collective satisfaction is seconded by a repression
of collective satisfaction; the repression of satisfaction,
whether individual or collective, serves only the limitless

6
 HERBERT MARCUSE

expansion of capital. Thus, the progress of the means

to satisfy human needs must negate this satisfaction to
perpetuate the progress of those means:

Just as progress becomes automatic through the repressive

modification of drives, so it cancels itself and negates itself.
For it prohibits the enjoyment of its own fruits and in turn,
precisely through this prohibition, it augments productivity
and thus promotes progress.11

Individual enjoyment is sublimated to ensure social

productivity, but collective enjoyment is sublimated to
enforce individual productivity. Marcuse calls this “the
vicious circle of progress”:

Progress must continually negate itself in order to remain

progress. Inclination must continually be sacrificed to
reason, happiness to transcendental freedom, in order that
through the promise of happiness men can be maintained
in alienated labor, remain productive, keep themselves
from the full enjoyment of their productivity, and thereby
perpetuate productivity itself.12

Yet this circle is a function of historically specific relations

of production and thus is bounded by an internal limit.
This limit is the point at which the progress of repression
generates such an abundance of means that they negate
the needs which made repression necessary. Or, as Marcuse
puts it: “the technification of domination undermines the
foundation of domination.”13 The quantitative increase of
repressive means yields a qualitative decrease in the need
to repress. In other words, renunciation yields such an
abundance of means for satisfaction that these cancel the
need for renunciation. The dialectical crux of Marcuse’s
argument is the claim that repression produces a surplus

7
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

of satisfaction that negates the satisfaction of productive

repression:

The achievements of repressive progress herald the

abolition of the repressive principle of progress itself. It
becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no
productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation
and no alienated labor: a state in which the growing
mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the
compulsive energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated
labor to return to its original form, in other words, to be
changed back into energy of the life-drives [...] Alienated
labor time would not only be reduced to a minimum but
would disappear and life would consist of free time [...] A
qualitatively different reality principle would replace the
repressive one, transmuting the entire human-psychic as
well as socio-historical structure [...] Sublimation would
not cease but instead, as erotic energy, would surge up in
new forces of cultural creation.14

The contradiction between individual and collective

gratification conditions capitalism’s reality principle:
renunciation is the condition for reconciling individual
and collective interests. The abolition of this contradiction
together with the capital relation would entail a new
reality principle — which could be called “communist”’—
in which the libidinal surplus released by mechanized
labour would no longer be repressed for the purposes of
social production but would instead create new forms of
individual and collective gratification. This would be to
reintegrate what capitalism has separated, productive
sublimation and unproductive gratification, or work
and play. Where capitalism autonomizes production as
contentless transcendence — a contentlessness echoed
by purely formal freedom — the transformation of work