Notes on Marcuse
on desire and limitation
In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse writes of the liberation and self-sublimation of Eros. He departs from Freud in refusing to reduce Eros simply to the sex drive, although sex and sensuousness continues to serve as its origin. For Marcuse, under conditions of repression, sexuality is channelled in restricted and socially acceptable ways—such as through monogamous marriage. Therefore, an imagination of a society beyond repression must entail a becoming large of sexuality, a sexualisation of the entire individual and social organism, an unravelling of Eros.
Interestingly, Marcuse argues that beyond the repressive techniques of modern society, there is an inbuilt repression within Eros. A repression that is necessary to keep it in order, to maintain it as a game of perpetual block and tackle. At first blush, this might seem counter-intuitive. It might be said that the internal repressive mechanism of desire is no different from social discipline: both are repression, but called by different names. There is an anxiety to keep the intensity of Eros in check, such that it does not wreak havoc, as it sometimes must.
I think a different reading of Marcuse is possible. The internal repression he speaks about is, in my reading, qualitatively different from mechanisms of social discipline. Discipline, we learn from Foucault, emerges as a technique of power. Power unravels itself through management and regulation. It coalesces around categories of the “normal” and “abnormal”; in other words, it is founded by a genealogy of discourses of knowledge that privilege certain ways of life over others, certain conduct as the normatively desirable conduct. Repression follows the logics of power. It marks off deviant sexuality as abnormal and it manages normal sexuality through techniques of governance. Repressed Eros is thus, Eros imbricated in power.
The liberation of Eros attempts to escape this normative regulation. It establishes a singular relationship with the world. Marcuse argues that the liberation of desire leads to a sexualisation tout court such that the object of desire is not any one body but the world at large. Here, its self-limitation emerges not as a form of disciplinary control but an inherent promise of non-fulfilment. Marcuse writes:
But is there perhaps in the instinct itself an inner barrier which “contains” its driving power? Is there perhaps a “natural” self-restraint in Eros so that its genuine gratification would call for delay, detour, and arrest? Then there would be obstructions and limitations imposed not from outside, by a repressive reality principle, but set and accepted by the instinct itself because they have inherent libidinal value (Eros and Civilization, p. 174).
It is important to pay attention to Marcuse’s choice of words: “contain” instead of regulate or manage, “natural” instead of moral or normative, “delay,” “detour,” and “arrest” instead of prohibition. The inherent limit of the erotic instinct is unlike the taboo imposed by repressive apparatuses of power because it neither directs nor makes moral judgment on how desire should play out in the world. Moreover, it does not prohibit desire from tending towards any given object. In a non-repressive imaginary of Eros, one may desire for anyone or anything—indeed, one always desires for an ensemble, per Deleuze, never for an object.
The catch is that in any singular intensity of desire, there is a limitation of non-fulfilment. The object of desire is never achieved: desire is always delayed, detoured, deferred, arrested. The use of these words suggests that desire may start and stop, pause and resume, but it never ceases to exist, it is never prohibited. Most importantly, this limitation, Marcuse tells us, is crucial because it has “inherent libidinal value.” Desire ceases to be desire if it reaches its object, if it consummates itself. It must always be an intensity in action, a becoming, never a being.
It might be argued here, again, that even in conditions of repression, the prohibitions of power perform a libidinal function insofar as it is the prohibition that keeps desire in operation. I concede. The crucial difference, however, is that this prohibition operates to channel desire in particular ways. In conditions of repression, power operates in particular ways to ensure that certain forms of desire are permitted, others not, that the libidinal energy of the individual and society is carefully regulated. The object or the end of prohibition is not the sustenance of desire, but the sustenance of power: the sustenance of a particular social formation. In the imagination of non-repression, the only end of the inherent limitation is the perpetuation of desire itself.
Desire becomes, in this imagination, the life force of Being and the world that must constantly flow, and flow in all possible directions, without prohibition, without judgment, without totalising objects. Its only limit is its own non-fulfilment, its promise of non-consummation. This is because liberated desire becomes ambivalent, indifferent even, to its object. It does not matter whether one desires a man, a woman, or an animal. The permissibility or the lack thereof of desire is irrelevant. It has no normative charge: it is neither right nor wrong, neither normal nor abnormal. It simply is. And its condition of being is a perpetual deferral—what Derrida might call différance—that ensures that it never ceases to be, and thus replenishes itself and the world, without prohibition.
Feature Image: The Dying Slave by Michelangelo, The Louvre, photograph mine.