Some accelerationist remarks on Marcuse’s drives theory and his dialectics of civilization
Some accelerationist remarks on Marcuse’s drives theory and his dialectics of civilization

Summary/Abstract: Marcuse’s theory of civilization offers a promising Freud-Marx synthesis. His approach, best articulated in Eros and Civilization, aims at a thorough reformulation of the Freudian drive doctrine to render it more historical and concatenate it to the problem of structural violence and the institutionalized (and internalized) mechanism of repression. I claim that the said reformulation provides a cornerstone for Marcuse’s highly idiosyncratic variant of a critical theory, which, according to my interpretation, possesses clear proto-accelerationist undertones. The article offers a concise recapitulation of Marcuse’s “dialectics of civilization” and points at the somewhat surprising close convergences with the accelerationist version of postcapitalism in his reflection on politics, technology, and the role of arts and aesthetic imagination in challenging the affirmative (desublimating) character of culture.

• Details
• Contents