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January 12 - December 10, 2021
sexual ...
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sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what i...
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sexual preferences, once considered private and personal, are now matters of public interest,
foundational part of this myth: the idea that selfhood is to be understood in inner, psychological terms.
happiness is the desired goal of all human beings, then for Freud the pleasure principle—the quest for pleasure focused on sexual gratification—is central to what it means to be a self.
purpose of procreation is subordinated to the purpose of personal pleasure.
Freud not only places sex and sexual gratification at the center of adult human identity, he also extends sexuality back to infancy.
the sight of even prepubescent girls dressed in a manner that is apparently designed to indicate their sexuality is an unexceptional commonplace today, albeit a somewhat vexing one in a world in which pedophilia is one of the few remaining sexual taboos and something that generates considerable public outrage.
Such approaches, predicated on the innate innocence of the child, saw children as asexual and regarded childhood sexual activity as therefore an alien, corrupting force, something that was not part of the child’s natural condition.
masturbation was something that involved self-inflicted damage on the individual’s psyche and, quite possibly, the body—hence the popular myth that it caused its practitioners to go blind.
defer to the experts of the medical profession rather than the churches in matters of child-rearing, something of great social significance down to the present
masturbation was no longer considered by the medical profession to be either a moral or even a medical problem. It had come to be seen simply as a harmless childhood activity, a perfectly natural,
in this context that Freud articulated his theory of childhood sexuality.
If the authentic self is the one whose outward actions are the expression of inward, uncoerced instincts, thoughts, and desires, then Freud’s view of children is a sexualized version of the idea of humanity in Rousseau’s hypothetical state of nature.
Freud
making sex the central element in what it means to be human.
purpose of human life at every stage becomes that of finding happiness via sexual satisfaction.
Those who condemn the other [sexual] practices (which have no doubt been common among mankind from primeval times) as being perversions, are giving way to an unmistakable feeling of disgust, which protects them from accepting sexual aims of the kind. The limits of such disgust are, however, often purely conventional: a man who will kiss a pretty girl’s lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her tooth-brush, though there are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he feels no disgust, is any cleaner than the girl’s. Here, then, our attention is
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Yet it is worth noting that Freud sees morality as fundamentally irrational and ultimately subjective.
will see in chapter 9 that the Supreme Court of the United States has in one of its judgments codified the notion that objection to homosexuality and gay marriage is ultimately rooted in animus—or basic, irrational prejudice—against homosexuals.
he actually thinks the social consequences of traditional sexual codes are better than the alternatives. Rather, he sees them as problematic because of their individual consequences—they inhibit the basic drive for personal sexual satisfaction and therefore preclude the possibility of society allowing individuals to achieve true happiness.
First, Freud regards religion as literally infantile: it is the result of the carrying over of childish hopes and fears into adulthood.
importance. It is this idea that lays the foundation for adult codes of sexual behavior: unless children are schooled in the sexual mores of society from an early age, they will not conform to such as adults.
“The Ascendance of Eroticism,”
To be truly human requires that one is immodest, for to be otherwise—to be modest—is to be abnormal.
And it is domination with which Marcuse, as a Marxist, is most interested, because domination constitutes what he calls the specific historical form of Freud’s
reality principle.
reality principle.
trade-off between sexual satisfaction and civilized life, rooted in such basic matters as scarcity, the need for survival, bearable common life, and so on.
Marcuse refers to as the “performance principle,”
principle, only specific local manifestations of behavior shaped by the economic context.42
sexual relations in that these are part of the behavior that is designed to serve the economic status quo.
“surplus repression,” which is the result of domination. In short, the ruling, dominant class imposes repression
vested interest in maintaining its own special status and control over others.
Marcuse sees as central to domination sexual desire and the need for any given culture to curb this desire in such a way as to preserve itself.44
sexual mores of late capitalism, focused as they are on the maintenance of monogamy and the patriarchal family, are actually no longer as necessary as they once were.
Taboos and the concept of perversions are means by which the bourgeoisie demonizes any type of sexual behavior that threatens this control.
behavior deemed by bourgeois society to be perverted or deviant is therefore by inference actually part of the subversive protest against the status quo. Sex focused on procreation and family is the repressive weapon of bourgeois capitalist society.
Marcuse does not actually provide any vision of what this sexual liberation might look like.48
Marcuse’s
sees sex at the center of what it means to be human.
Reich’s immediate background was the rise of Nazism and therefore the need to explain the way one of the most technically and culturally advanced nations on the planet submitted so easily to barbaric totalitarianism.
To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically, a point that places psychological categories at the heart of revolutionary political discourse.
“Repressive Tolerance” (1965).
Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which
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This means that words and ideas then come to be the most powerful weapons available—for good and for ill.
would bad words and ideas be allowed when their only purpose is to inflict psychological damage on and cause oppression of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and other victims of the ruling class’s practices of domination?
his sneering at this culture, his claims to be the one who truly understands it, and his view of its impact, Marcuse also thereby ironically shows his disdain for ordinary people.
So who, one might ask, knows the truth and would thus be able to decide what should be taught in schools and universities? The answer, of course, is Herbert Marcuse and those who agree with him.
And how is this gnostic knowledge to be imposed? In the short term, by destabilizing the status quo through the constant critiquing of dominant narratives that support the established order and through transgressive actions, such as the practical shattering of bourgeois sexual codes.
