A recent post on Fetlife led me to realise that I’ve never really got my head around the notion of ‘repressive desublimation’ (hereafter ‘repdesub’), and in so far as I had I didn’t know whether or not I thought it useful. The following is my attempt to work this out (see NOTE 1 for materials and my referencing abbreviations).
Part of the problem here is that the notion of repdesub emerges from Marcuse’s immanent critique of Freud in Eros and Civilization; which itself assumes that Freud’s metapsychology and his reconstruction of prehistory are (in some sense) true. Could the notion of repdesub stand on its own if these scaffoldings are removed? I don’t know.
This essay begins with a discussion of Eros and Civilization (EC) I think this can probably be skipped, especially if you don’t want ‘spoilers’ by going to the section One-Dimensional Man Continue reading “Repressive Desublimation”
The Dada Meinhof Column 