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Beyond Governance and Guilt:Marcuse’s Political Theology between Oedipus and Christ

Christoph Schmidt

1. From Psychoanalysis to Political ChristologyIn the wake of critical theory, Herbert Marcuse interprets

the dialectic of Enlightenment not only from a Marxianperspective, as the co-optation of the movements towards freedomby the capitalist regime. With Sigmund Freud, he also recognizesthe cyclic logic of the civilizing process, which appears in theoedipal dramaturgy. Until now, the father’s removal by the sonhas always been followed by a restoration of the ruling principlethrough the son, Marcuse writes in Eros and Civilization.1 For Marcuse,Enlightenment thus becomes transparent in its oedipal myth. Thepsychoanalytical insight into the role of eros for the civilizingprocess opens up a new existential-erotic perspective on theMarxian Utopia of a society free of domination, for this wouldrequire a suspension of the oedipal logic, a logic that hasdetermined the history of rationalization and technology untilnow as a history of class struggles. A society free of dominationthus always presupposes a suspension of the oedipal logic.Indeed, Marcuse repeatedly designates this revolution with1 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), henceforth EC. Moreover, I refer to: Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), henceforth EL; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002); Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 95-137. See also: Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 1982); Jürgen Habermas, Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Hans Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus (München: R. Piper, 1971); Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2005); Hanning Voigts, Entkorkte Flaschenpost: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno und der Streit um die Neue Linke (Berlin: Lit, 2010).

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eschatological terms: as “effacement of the original sin” or evenas “redemption” (EC 92, 117, 153), which he identifies with themessianic work of the so-called “heretical image of Jesus” (EC70). Here, Jesus indeed becomes the son who is to ultimatelysuspend the principle of sovereignty and guilt through the ruleof love. Whereas Oedipus removes his father in order to establishhis own regime, Christ represents that act of removing one’sfather which rejects the restoration of any governance.

The heretical Jesus thus functions for Marcuse as theeschatological archetype of a “last Oedipus” who is to found theutopian empire of love here and now through his “great refusal”to restore the ruling principle. Marcuse’s psychoanalyticalutopia on Marxian grounds thus corresponds to a politicalChristology which is to be implemented in real political history.Whereas the heretical Jesus represents the idea of “redemption”and a utopian liberation of eros, Marcuse delegates the propereschatological function to technology on the one hand, and to theaesthetic subject on the other. Technology frees man from directsubordination (ananke) to nature’s domination and work. Theaesthetic subject, as the son who is aware of himself, is to openup a new perspective on a different political practice throughcommemoration, fantasy and imagination. The aesthetic critique ofthe norms, forms, and rules of existing communication thusbecomes the paradigm of the “oedipal suspension” of the hereticalJesus who is to remove the ruling principle through an ultimateparricide. In an act of ultimate violence, the subject is to“redeem” himself from subjugation and guilt. Marcuseaesthetically illustrates this oedipal suspension, through thefigures of Orpheus and Narcissus, as a destruction of theexisting forms of communication in order to mobilize thisaesthetic as model for truly political action and erotic lifepraxis. Whereas the “son’s” political action targets directviolence against the “father’s” ruling system, the eroticpractice is to concentrate “real-utopically” on a “genitofugalsexuality.” Thus the son denies the principle of procreation andestablishes “redemption” through biological removal of the fatherprinciple.

In the metamorphosis of the last Oedipus from hereticalJesus to the poetic myth of Orpheus and Narcissus an eschato-

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logic is carried out, unveiling more and more sharply the dangerof this absolute politicization of the theological because of theultimate removal of rule. The radical re-conception ofEnlightenment as overcoming one’s self-caused immaturity mustescalate to a politics of violence against the father as absoluteenemy especially because this overcoming is understood asultimate overcoming of guilt. Marcuse has denied anycorrespondence between his teaching and the terrorist practice ofthe Baader Meinhof group by emphasizing that the revolutionarymoment had not arrived yet.2 Even though his thinking exerted adecisive influence on the liberalization and pluralization oflifestyles, Marcuse’s revolutionary eschato-logic opposed thisliberalization, understanding it as a mechanism of adapting tothe system. The Baader Meinhof group, a radical wing of themovement of ‘68, not only explicitly referred to Herbert Marcuse,but also drew direct practical consequences from theeschatological potential of Marcuse’s notion of revolution.3

Under the pressure of German sons’ special relations to their

2 Cf. Herbert Marcuse, “Murder Is Not a Political Weapon” in The New Left and the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 177-179. 3 Cf. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution 1967 -1977(Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001); Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005); Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968 – Ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008). Habermas already in 1968 posed the question of the violent dimension of Marcuse’s thought without taking notice of its eschatological dimension: “Marcuse’s most often quoted sentence has been creating confusion for one year. At the end of his essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’ Marcuse speaks in quotation marks about a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and subdued minorities: ‘If they use violence, they do not begin a new chain of violent deeds, but break the established one. Since they will be beaten, they know the risk, and if they are willing to bear it, no third person, educators and intellectuals least, have the right to preach abstinence to them.’ I wish that Marcuse would explain this sentence fully.” Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, p. 15.

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fathers, who had facilitated Auschwitz, the terror “against thefathers” became, together with the sexual escapades andhappenings in the communes, a precise illustration of thispractically implemented eschatology. The anarchists’ fanaticalfaces, disposed to any form of violence, indeed corresponded tothe ultimate (under eschatological circumstances inescapablydeformed) shape of this psychoanalytical-theological-aestheticmetamorphosis: Baader-Meinhof as political-eschatological grimaceof Oedipus-Orpheus.

The following critical account of Marcuse’s politicalChristology will sketch, mainly on the basis of Marcuse’s magnumopus Eros and Civilization, the relation of psychoanalysis andtheology, the role of technique and art for this politicaltheology, and finally political theology’s importance forMarcuse’s political “erotology.” By reconstructing the differentmetamorphoses of the eschatologizing process of Marcuse’spolitical theology, this sketch is not intended to generallycriticize its soteriological dimension, which has been done byMichel Foucault and Hans Albert.4 Instead, the three regionaleschatologies -- the aesthetic, the political, and the erotic --and their inner correlation are to be explored. When today’spolitical eschatology returns to aesthetics and philology,especially in Agamben’s thinking,5 Marcuse’s “notion of theerotic” seems to be of particular relevance. It designates anobviously still efficient “last eschaton” which has kept it in

4 Cf. Hans Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus, especially the essays “Kritische Rationalität und politische Theologie. Zur Analyse der deutschen Situation”, pp. 45–75 and “Wissenschaft undVerantwortung. Max Webers Idee rationaler Praxis und die totale Vernunft der politischen Theologie”, pp. 76–105; Michel Foucault ironically designates the discourse on sex that is supposedly free of power as a messianic pseudo-theology. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).5 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Cf. Christoph Schmidt, “Die Rückkehr desKatechons“ in: Erik Peterson: Die theologische Präsenz eines Outsiders, ed. Giancarlo Caronello (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012).

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the current discussion on the future of love.6 The thesis of the“death of eros” today appears as the last consequence ofMarcuse’s eschatological radicalization of Enlightenment andcannot be grasped in its deep dimension without a reconstructionof the psychoanalytical, political, and theologicalpresuppositions of his “erotology.”

2. Christ as Last OedipusThe structural analogy between the Marxian critique of the

history of class struggles and the Oedipal logic of thecivilizing process serves in Marcuse’s writings at first as amutual discourse critique. By means of political economy, Marcusequestions Freud’s static-mythical notion of work, just as, bydint of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Marcuse wants to reveal theexistential-erotic foundations of the civilizing process andthereby the deep dimensions of alienation, repression, andrevolution. The point is essentially that the Marxian analysis ofproduction is to prove the economic possibilities of liberationfrom the necessity of work through technology. With techniquefreeing the subject from the need to work, and with direct ruleover nature and thus freedom from the power of ananke, whichFreud designates as static, erotic potential is tapped which canunleash the true revolutionary energy of the subject.

With regard to the Freudian dimension of the logic of rule,Marcuse’s theory of revolution indeed tends to emphasize theexistential-erotic perspective. This tendency already resultsalmost necessarily from the Oedipal “personalization” of theHegelian dialectics of Lord and Servant on the basis of thefather-son configuration. The “father” corresponds to theprinciple of the regime, the “son” to that of revolution. Thispersonalization through the father-son antagonism, dictated bythe Freudian perspective, directly marks Marcuse’s conception of6 Cf. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love`s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy andLiterature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); VolkmarSigusch, Neosexualitäten: Über den kulturellen Wandel von Liebe und Perversion(Frankfurt Main: Campus, 2005); Jean-Luc Marion, The EroticPhenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); NiklasLuhmann, Love: A Sketch (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Alain Badiou andNicolas Truong, In Praise of Love (New York: New Press, 2012)..

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an erotically founded revolution of society, insofar as thelatter tends to transform into a revolution of the son againstthe father.

Because of his rule over nature and the consequent necessityof work, man’s eros fully succumbs to the bio-social dynamics ofrule and violence as it emerges under the pre-civilizingsovereignty of the primordial father. The order, which theprimordial father imposes on the horde of his family, serves hisown maximal erotic pleasure, i.e. the daughters’ eroticexhaustion and the sons’ enslavement for work so that they areexcluded from the pleasure of women. With the union of the sonsagainst the father, which leads to murdering this “eroticsovereign,” the proper civilizing process starts, but that meansabove all that the sons establish by totem and taboo their ownrule. “The rebellion against the father is rebellion againstbiologically justified authority; his assassination destroys theorder which has preserved the life of the group. … But the sonswant the same thing as the father: they want lasting satisfactionof their needs. They can attain this objective only by repeating,in a new form, the order of domination.” (EC 64)

The transformation of the erotic sovereignty of theprimordial father to the sons’ lawfully founded rule does notonly exemplarily anticipate the phenomenon of the political, butit also illustrates what Marcuse calls “double guilt” and whatwill determine the history of the political again and again.Whereas Freud explains this cyclicity through the ambivalenceaccording to which the sons, on the one hand, celebrate thefather’s removal with the implantation of the totem and, on theother hand, mourn the father’s loss and long for him, Marcuseemphasizes a double guilt, namely the guilt of the crime of themurder and the guilt of restoring the ruling principle, embodiedthrough the father.

Instead of corresponding to the promise of a possiblyfatherless society7, the sons have more than ever consolidatedand theologically sanctioned this political rule by reproducingsovereignty on a legal basis and installing the totem, theprimordial animal symbol of the father, as God. This religion of7 Cf. Paul Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft (Vienna: Anzengruber-Verlag, 1919).

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the father is, according to its essence, nothing else than theprinciple of legitimizing political rule, the primordialprinciple of any political theology of sovereignty. Emancipationfrom this cyclic mechanism of power as myth of Enlightenment,liberation from the principle of the sovereign subject or thesovereign law, thus presupposes the possibility of a suspension,in which the son withdraws the principle of rule with thefather’s removal. It would be, as it were, the deed of a lastOedipus, suspending the logic of rule itself through the removalof the father who started this logic. Thus he would suspend thecycle of power and anti-power, i.e., the exceptional status whichhas become historical normality through a last “absoluteexception,” which refuses any rule.

Marcuse reconstructs this last Oedipus as a fullyeschatological figure of ultimate liberation with the hereticalimage of Jesus. This “son of God” now represents the principle ofan Oedipal liberation from the father-religion without areproduction of the latter’s rule. Jesus’ message of the rule oflove corresponds for Marcuse to a liberation of the true erosfrom rule and law. “The message of the Son was the message ofliberation: the overthrow of the Law (which is domination) byAgape (which is Eros). This would fit in with the heretical imageof Jesus as the Redeemer in the flesh, the Messiah who came tosave man here on earth” (EC 69-70).

This heretical image of Jesus corresponds, on the one hand,to a traditional Christian image by “suspending the law” throughthe principle of love, but it is, on the other hand,simultaneously “hereticized” insofar as this Jesus now acts onlyas son and removes God the Father.8 Freed from any dogmaticfoundation, this Jesus is to redeem man “already here on earth.”This de-dogmatized Christ is thus thought of from the perspectiveof an Oedipal eschato-logic, which means a “de-dogmatization” ofthe Freudian Oedipus principle, consisting of a “double guilt”:the father’s removal and the rehabilitation of the rulingprinciple through the son. For Marcuse, Jesus and the lastOedipus are archetypes of that “great refusal” (to continue the8 Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 154 describes Marcuse’s plan to write a history of heresy, Corpus Hereticorum, together with Jacob Taubes.

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rule) who are to facilitate a “new sensibility” (of an eroticpractice without rule).

This is not the place to delineate the history ofpsychoanalytic critique of the Christian religion.9 It shouldonly be pointed out that Marcuse refers in this context to alecture of Erich Fromm10 who, from the psychoanalytic and theMarxian perspective, installs the Christian messiah in the roleof a revolutionary on behalf of the exploited people ofPalestine, in order to characterize the notion of Christ reigningon the side of God the Father, according to dogma, as ideology ofthe state church reconciled with rule and empire. With referenceto Adolph von Harnack’s critical dogmatic history, Fromminterpreted Christ as founder of a utopian “love communism,”increasingly de-messianized and de-dogmatized through thetransformation of the social-political basis of this messianicreligion. The later equation of the Son of God with the Father inthe dogma of the Trinity inverts, according to Fromm’sunderstanding, the sense of the original Oedipal rebellion intoan act of subordination of the Son to the Father. Instead ofremoving the Father, the Son sacrifices himself for the Father inorder to be “rewarded” with the regime on his side. Marcuse takesup this interpretation in order to turn it pronouncedly againstthe Freudian dogmatic of the eternal return of the same Oedipalprinciple. “Then the subsequent transubstantiation of theMessiah, the deification of the Son beside the Father, would be abetrayal of his message by his own disciples -- the denial of theliberation in the flesh, the revenge on the redeemer.Christianity would then have surrendered the gospel of Agape-Erosagain to the Law; the father-rule would be restored andstrengthened” (EC 70).

The revolt against sovereignty and fatherly authoritywithout the self-appointment of the son as ruler thus aims at aglobal critique of Freud’s deconstruction of religion as illusion

9 This history probably starts with Theodor Reik, Dogma andCompulsion: Psychoanalytic Studies of Religion and Myths (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1975).10 Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).

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and neurosis. Whereas Freud worked out conceptual instrumentsthrough which Marcuse reconstructed the dialectic ofEnlightenment in its mythical cyclicity, Marcuse wants toconvict, from the eschatological perspective of the last Oedipus,Enlightenment of its own bondage to the myth of rational rule,meaning nothing other than a continuation of the Oedipal rule.Marcuse wants to rescue the theological “illusion” byinterpreting it on the basis of the figure of the last Oedipus.Freud “thought that the disappearance of this illusion wouldgreatly accelerate the material and intellectual progress ofmankind, and he praised science and scientific reason as thegreat liberating antagonists of religion. … Where religion stillpreserves the uncompromised aspirations for peace and happiness,its "illusions" still have a higher truth value than sciencewhich works for their elimination” (EC 72-73). When Christiantheology is placed on its Utopian grounds through psychoanalysis,psychoanalysis must reveal its own illusory faith in sciencethrough an eschatology of love oriented towards the hereticalJesus. Freud’s ideal of the logos who is to perfect cultureproves to be, for Marcuse, the continuation of the dialectic ofEnlightenment because it is the continuation of the “rationalityof the predominant reality principle” which “supersedes themetaphysical speculations on Eros” (EC 126). By reconstructingthe Oedipal dynamics of progress and rule, Marcuse targetsnothing less than political theology, intending to ultimatelyliberate eros from sovereignty and guilt and thus secularizingthe idea of “redemption” in this political theology. “Behind thedefinition of the subject … lies the image of the redemption ofthe ego” (EC 130), Marcuse writes. The question remains: How arehumans to cause this secular redemption here and now?

The gesture towards “metaphysical speculations on Eros”,denied by Freud, suggests that this redemption of eros from ruleand guilt presupposes that eros is peaceful and non-violentbefore its instrumentalization in the process of rationalization.Sensuality and practical reason, desire and freedom, eros andlaw, sexuality and agape are “per se” always already reconciledbefore being deformed by the dynamics of rule over human nature.Especially when Marcuse wants to set into action this“redemption” through memory, i.e., on the basis of commemorating

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eros, which was repressed in this process, eros must have subtlytransformed, for Freud conceptualized eros as sexual drive andaggressions and thus completely “naturalized” it. Marcuse thusimplicitly presupposes a theology or metaphysics of eros whichhas already transcended the materialist prerequisites it demandsitself. He presupposes a meta-historical notion of eros which isdeformed and repressed in real history, under the pressure ofrule over human nature, but which is to be actualized in itsfullness within history through commemoration.

Marcuse’s idea of redemption presupposes along with the ideaof an intact eros either the pre-existence of a personal logos oflove, i.e., the dogma of Christ, or an a-personal logos of eros.Indeed, an analogy to Heidegger’s metaphysics is obvious.11

Whereas Heidegger wants to liberate Being (das Sein) from itsmetaphysical occupation by being (das Seiende) which is determinedby reason and science, from the forgetting of Being, Marcuseconceptualizes a kind of forgetting of eros, which, determined byreason, science and rule, forces a critical revision of theorigin of the metaphysical abundance of eros.12 Metaphysical eroscorresponds, like Heidegger’s Being, to an abundance ofexperience which has been instrumentalized and deformed by ruleinto deficient eros. The image of the heretical Jesus and thelast Oedipus always presupposes in any case the pre-existence ofan eros which destroys the onto-erotological presuppositions ofFreud. This destruction is neither psychoanalytically explicitlyconducted nor really substantiated in any “theology” ormetaphysics.

Either Marcuse resorts to a metaphysics of love or atheology of a pre-existent abundance of love, or he has to

11 Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 58 et seq.reconstructs very precisely Marcuse’s relationship to Heidegger’sproject of an existential ontology, but does not mention theconspicuous parallel between Heidegger’s construction of beingand oblivion of being and Marcuse’s eros and oblivion of eros.12 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge;Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially “Nietzsche’s Word:‘God is Dead’,” pp. 157-199; Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking(New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

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construct a mechanism immanent in history which can facilitate a“redemption” from the ruling eros through human work. Marcuse’spolitical Christology attempts to think of this “redemption” atfirst as “autopoiesis” of the subject, as a self-creation bythrough “techne”, i.e. by the means of technique and art. Onetherefore needs to ask whether technique can assume this expectedtask of changing all ruling presuppositions of social being orwhether it stays, in Marcuse’s work, finally a kind of dues exmachine, which only conceals and defers the problem of apossibility of changing the biological presuppositions of humannature.

III From Political Christology to Aesthetic-Technological Autopoiesis

If the coercion to work is not only a mythical axiom, as itis for Freud, but is subjected to the Marxian laws of politicaleconomy and technical rationality, i.e. historical chance, then,Marcuse concludes, technical rule over nature can bring about notonly an alleviation of the circumstances of work, but also aliberation from the ruling forces of society. If sovereignty is,in Marcuse’s construction, only a function of man’s coercion torule over and manipulate nature, imposed on him by nature, thenthe technical rationalization of this rule over nature is said tocontain the key to an unexpected emancipation not only from thecoercion to work, but also from the principle of rule. Thepolitical-erotic utopia of the last Oedipal liberation firstfinds its utopian substratum in the idea of freed technology. Ifall class struggles had to end in the (Oedipal) reproduction ofsovereignty so far, Marcuse considers the chance that late-capitalistic technology has a real possibility of abolishingsovereignty for the first time in history. On the basis of thishistorical teleology, “redemption” from sovereignty isfacilitated only through technology. Technology thus functions asdeus ex machine, the secret which the last Oedipus only needs todecode in order to begin his “redemption.”

This context illustrates once more Marcuse’s reservationsvis-à-vis the proletariat as revolutionary agent. The proletariathas been integrated into the system of late capitalism for a longtime because its work and life conditions have qualitatively

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changed significantly for the better. For Marcuse, theproletariat thus becomes the victim of total mystificationthrough the cultural industry and is about to degenerate into theone-dimensional man who is no longer able to envision theabolition of the system, now possible through technology.13

Even though Marcuse places emphasis on the revolutionaryenergy of marginal groups and ghetto inhabitants which wereexcluded by integrative capitalism on the one hand and liberationmovements in the pre-modern third world on the other hand, theproper task of breaking the ban of the historical logic of natureand rule over nature is now up the subject of a “newsensibility”, capable of revealing the metaphysical correlationbetween Utopia and technology. Since, at the same time, thesystem’s traditional ruling authorities have become more and moredepersonalized and anonymous, the last revolutionary subjectfinds itself opposed to a “system” of rule relying on thefunctioning of technology. This immediate access to the systemand its mechanical conditions principally sets the subject, fromthe revolutionary stance, into a “privileged” situation becauseshe or he is potentially released from the immediate pressure ofrule over nature and essentially relieved through creative work.From the perspective of this quotidian confrontation, it isespecially the intellectual and the artist who can grasp thestatus of the system and its technological conditions. Beforetechnology becomes an instrument of completed rule in the system,fully concealing its essence, it is important to understand ruleand concealment in the moment of this ultimate danger. Then thesensible subject is able to change technique’s function and thatmeans abolishing the system which it presupposes.

It is not difficult to recognize in these reflections sometraits of Heidegger’s late metaphysics of technology as thecompletion of onto-theological metaphysics. It is important torightly understand the character of metaphysics that pervades

13 Cf. Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man, p. 9: “The more rational,productive, technical and total the repressive administration ofsociety becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways bywhich the administrated individuals might break their servitudeand seize their own liberation.“

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technology in order to break its exclusive power.14 For Marcuse,technology designates the completion of metaphysics’ essence asrule over nature, revealed by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the willto power, which threatens to irrevocably elude its self-completion. Whereas, in Heidegger’s work, only an experience of“deprivation”, oriented towards being itself, is capable ofcomprehending the double character of technique betweencatastrophe and rescue, Marcuse considers the experiences ofsuffering and deprivation from the Freudian perspective of thecivilizing power of eros. With technology concealing andmutilating the proper essence of eros despite of and because ofthe new possibilities of sexual practice in late capitalism, thisnew erotic deprivation becomes the starting point of a possibleturnabout of this ruling logic.

As in Heidegger’s work, the aesthetic subject, the artist,becomes for Marcuse the proper subject of a possible “metanoia”.The artist, whose fantasy and imagination set into motion theerotic ground of experience of his subjectivity, is capable notonly of articulating the traits of erotic oppression, but also ofturning the secret of the technical sphinx into the utopian: asliberation of erotic fantasy and its possibilities. Thus, theaesthetic subject assumes the task of implementing the utopia ofthe heretical Jesus and of the last Oedipus by means oftechnological possibilities.

Similar to Heidegger, Marcuse is geared to poetry and art aspossibilities of a subjectivity “beyond the will to power”, whichthe critical theoretician attempts to conceptualize against thebackground of Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic and of PaulValery’s and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry. Above all, Marcuseemphasizes Kant’s notion of uninterestedly autonomous perceptiblebeauty, which Schiller expanded with the idea of the self-satisfying game, in order to sketch the utopian space of thepolitical game and of eroticism free of rule, commemorating theerotic potential of subjectivity.

From this aesthetic perspective, the heretical Jesus as thelast Oedipus finally undergoes an aesthetic metamorphosis as the14 Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper Colophon, 1977), pp. 115-154.

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aesthetic Oedipus has to assume the eschatological-theologicalintention of the messiah at the same time. Oedipus/Jesus nowturns into the poetic-mythical figure of Orpheus/Narcissus, whois to symbolize nature liberating itself through art and poetry:the nature of eros “beyond rule and guilt”, being in and foritself. This liberation first of all applies to technology, the“mechanic” art, which, having been an instrument of rule so far,now becomes an aspect of “free” creative art, through which theaesthetic subject is to discover himself with his eroticpossibilities of being and to recreate -- spoken theologically,to “redeem” -- himself in the end.

For Marcuse, art’s function is to recognize thepossibilities of being which are buried by rule, but also toimagine the true realization of the erotic possibilities. Thus itis, at first, critical fantasy which rebels against the rulingdeformation of subject-object by playing eros off against logos.“In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed uponfreedom and happiness by the reality principle, in its refusal toforget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy” (EC149). As such a principle of refusal, art reminds of the utopianpossibilities of erotic being by destroying the forms, norms, andrules of language and communication that rule via the realityprinciple. A “break”, a “destruction” always accompaniesaesthetic practice – indeed, aesthetic violence against the formsof communication which are deformed by rule, explained by Marcusewith the example of the surrealist Andre Breton. “The newsensibility and the new consciousness which are to project anddrive such reconstruction demand a new language … [T]he rupturewith the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with thevocabulary of domination” (EL 32-33). Only with this rupture doesthe possibility of genuine self-consciousness – eschatologically,of self-creation – appear.

Poetry which makes the “process of production a process ofcreation” (EL 21) aims at a radical “autopoiesis” of the subject,requiring that aesthetics does not stand autonomous,uninterested, and “for itself”, but that it transcends theboundaries of the atemporal aesthetic game in order to be apolitical-erotic practice here and now. Art no longer onlydesignates the moment of contemplation beyond the will to power,

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of an uninterested and satisfied contemplation, or, in the termsof the late Heidegger, a “willing of the non-willing.” Now, artis to transform its utopian imagination of the satisfied subjectinto a personal practice and finally into actively “willing”politics with proper strategies of destruction and violence. Artis thought to become a creative technology for recreating thereal conditions of man and society. In the last instance, thisidea of a creative technology of art points to a change of thesubject’s biological structure of drives: autopoiesis is tofulfil itself in an aesthetic-biological self-creation. “But theconstruction of such a society presupposes a type of man with adifferent sensitivity as well as consciousness: men who wouldspeak a different language, have different gestures, followdifferent impulses” (EL 21).

It is not difficult to recognize in the double aspect ofaesthetic behaviour, in the destruction and the imagination of autopian pacification, the two actions through which the lastOedipus is to free himself from double guilt. Aestheticdestruction corresponds to the last violence against the regimeand the father, the aesthetic utopia imagines its suspension.Marcuse imputes the first form of action, destruction and break,to concrete political action, whereas he understands eroticpractice already as expression of the “new sensibility” and thusas a change of the biological structure of drives “here and now”.Before analyzing the direct consequences of the aestheticpractice for eroticism in the next sequence more precisely, Iwill briefly sketch its transposition into political action.

Marcuse formulates the transposition of the aesthetic logicinto the arena of the political mainly in Max Weber’s notions oflegality and legitimacy. The aesthetic destruction on behalf ofutopia becomes political by going beyond the existing scope oflegality on behalf of utopian legitimacy free of rule. Especiallysince politics stands under the sign of eschatological removal ofall rule, politics is not only destructive, it also needs tobreak down the democratic system itself. “Consequently, thestruggle for changes beyond the system becomes, by virtue of itsown dynamic, undemocratic in the terms of the system, andcounterviolence is from the beginning inherent in this dynamic”(EL 69-70). Since the act of liberation from rule always lags

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behind the ideal of that freedom from rule it imagines in autopian manner, the ideal of liberty from violence and rule turnsinto an act of liberation through counter-violence to be repeatedalways again, at least as long as rule, especially liberaldemocratic rule, persists. “If and when men and women act andthink free[ly], … they will have broken the chain which linkedthe fathers and te sons from generation to generation. They willnot have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but they will havebecome free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement” (EL24-25). The aesthetic revolt of the sensitized subject has tochange into a provisionally permanent revolution against thefathers, according to the eschato-logic of the last Oedipus.Consequently, Marcuse has to exhort his audience again and againto assume the revolt against the fathers. The eschatologicalsituation proves to be a final separation of father and son, ruleand innocence, which needs to affect all political decisions inthe end. Since the sons are said to be innocent because theybreak through the circle of violence and counter-violence, thefathers finally bear all the guilt. Thus, the innocence of theson produces an endless exponentiation of the father’s guilt, andthe father as enemy not only needs to be defeated but entirelyremoved. “[N]ot we, but the fathers, are guilty; they are nottolerant but false; they want to redeem their own guilt by makingus, the sons, guilty” (EL 9). Thus, the idea of erasing originalsin, i.e. the double guilt of removing and installing rule, hasto escalate into a kind of absolute Oedipal exception status. Thetransition of the aesthetic to the political, through which theaesthetic destruction of rule becomes the principle of destroyingdemocratic legality, corresponds to a sovereign decision in thespirit of Carl Schmitt, which draws its legitimacy now“autopoetically” from a final metaphysical decision between ruleand innocence, and that is more concretely between friend andenemy.15

15 Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 63, notes thatMarcuse strongly criticized Carl Schmitt in a review of SiegfriedMarck’s Die Dialektik der Philosophie in der Gegewart published as “On theProblem of Dialectic I“ in 1930, but in Marcuse’s writing thelater switch to Schmitt’s rhetoric from a left-wing activistperspective is clear. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters

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For Marcuse, the son’s counter-violence does not match thescope of the historically accumulated violence of the father. Butthat means that this violence must be “redeemed” on a one-to-onescale through counter-violence before the son can fully return toinnocence, imagined as original. “If the guilt accumulated in thecivilized domination of man by man can ever be redeemed byfreedom, then the ‘original sin’ must be committed again: ‘Wemust against eat from the tree of knowledge in order to fall backinto the state of innocence’” (EC 198). The entry into paradisewhich here is settled before and beyond real history and is to beset into motion through an act of aesthetic-biologicalautopoiesis, necessitates, due to its eschato-logic of“effacement of the original sin’s traces”, the unleashing ofendless violence, through which the ultimate removal of rulemoves into an endless future.

Marcuse’s “Anti-Oedipus” thus confirms against his ownintention Sigmund Freud’s suspicion that eros can be domesticatedonly through the civilizing process according to its nature inalliance with aggression and violence and that the revolutionagainst this civilizing principle of rule and violence can onlyresult in a return to the barbaric state of nature. DespiteMarcuse’s attempts to block Freud’s reduction of eros toaggression with its suggestive force, Schiller’s aesthetic of thegame and Plato’s metaphysics of eros cannot conceal the violentnature of such erotic liberation. Where technology offers itselfa as way out, i.e. as that deus ex machina which is to facilitatea total liberation from the principle of rule, the emancipationfrom the coercion of the rule over nature did not prove to“redeem” man’s erotic nature, but to condemn it to the violencewhich it sought to extinguish.

From the beginning, Marcuse’s radical eschatology thusobstructs the possibility of a critical democratic practice, onewhich understands the “system” of the democratic constitutionalstate as prerequisite for a critical self-correction by itscitizens. The political situation of the Federal Republic ofGermany in 1969 corresponds to this theoretical analysis: the

on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); CarlSchmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2007).

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radical avant-garde of the students’ revolt took up terror andmurder exactly in that moment when Chancellor Brandt pleaded, inhis inaugural speech, for “daring more democracy”. 16 At thattime, the radical Baader-Meinhof group had translated Marcuse’seschatological decisionism against the fathers’ system into animmediate and relentless practice and had labelled as treason anycritical practice within the existing democratic system, the sortof critical practice attempted by the moderate wing of thestudents’ movement.

IV The Return to Paradise as Orgiastic End GameThe notion of Oedipal innocence determines the target of

man’s radical departure from his self-caused immaturity, which isto become practical and political, formulated as radical poetry,in order to liberate man from all guilt. Insofar as eroticpractice does not only negate civil norms for freed sexuality,but also alters the existing structure of drives of the subject,even entails a utopian change of the latter’s biologicalconstitution, eroticism corresponds to the actual core of theeschatological dimension of this political theology.

Marcuse writes, “[T]he radical change which is to transformthe existing society into a free one must reach into a dimensionof the human existence hardly considered in Marxian theory – the‘biological’ dimension in which the vital, imperative needs andsatisfactions of man assert themselves” (EL 16-17). Thus, thepoint is that the revolution “by virtue of this ‘biological’foundation, would have the chance of turning quantitativetechnical progress into qualitatively different ways of life” (EL19). What that concretely means follows from the idea of a formof sexuality copied from the aesthetic game.

16 Cf. Jillian Becker, Hitler`s Children. The Story of the Baader MeinhofTerrorist Gang (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977); Gerd Koenen, Das roteJahrzehnt: Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Köln: Kiepenheuer &Witsch, 2001); Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany´s 1968Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press,2009); Christoph Schmidt, “The Israel of the Spirit: The GermanStudent Movement of the 1960s and its Attitude to the Holocaust,”Studies on the Shoah 24 (2010): 269–318.

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Due to the aesthetic foundation of the political, a radicalchange of erotic practice occurs. Sexuality which isfunctionalized by the law of reproduction is replaced by aplayful-experimental sexuality. The idea of the aesthetic game,as defined by Friedrich Schiller in his “Letters on AestheticEducation” as the ideal of the self-determined man who no longer– unlike Kant – opposes affection, i.e. desire and sensuality, isnow to be actualized in a practice of an erotic-sexual game:“from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy toerotization of the entire personality. It is a spread rather thanexplosion of libido” (EC 201). Erotic games and experiments areto serve a radical “resexualization of the body” in which Marcusefinds the “restoration of the primary structure of sexuality”.The aim is, as Marcuse emphasizes again and again, a break with“the primacy of the genital function.” The organism is to becomeentirety a “substratum of sexuality” (EC 205). Apart from thefact that the biological “primary structure of sexuality”corresponds to the structure of reproduction, Marcuse thinks ofthis “primary structure” as a utopian idea of libido, “aninherent trend in the libido itself toward "cultural" expression,without external repressive modification.” This sexuality has itsown eschatology insofar as it attempts to strive “away fromgenital supremacy toward the erotization of the entire organism”(EC 208).

The real possibility of sexual experiments and the playfulintegration of the so-called “perversions” (homosexuality,sadism, etc.) in pluralization and liberalization of individuallifestyles is, from the beginning, placed by Marcuse on aneschatological horizon, in which the last Oedipus as hereticalJesus is to recreate himself through this eroticism and so tobiologically transform and, in theological language, to redeemhimself. Eroticism is soteriologically made absolute. The resultis that the corresponding politics overcharge so that eroticismhas to emerge in the mode of pure violence.

Genitofugal eroticism, far from facilitating only anexpansion of sexual pleasure, necessarily corresponds to aneschatological principle of autopoiesis which Marcuse describesas a particular form of apotheosis. By deploying his aestheticpractice as Oedipus/Narcissus, the last Oedipus and son of God

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Jesus does not only reject the ruling laws of genital sexuality;this genitofugal sexuality designates the son’s refusal tobiologically become a father! “The Orphic-Narcissistic images arethose of the Great Refusal: refusal to accept separation from thelibidinous object (or subject). … Orpheus is the archetype of thepoet as liberator and creator: he establishes a higher order in theworld – an order without repression. … He is the poet ofredemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifyingman and nature, not through force but through song” (EC 170).

The self-creating God of poetry and pleasure does not onlyabrogate his own sonship through his libidinous practices andpoetry, he also rejects the principle of procreation, refusing tobecome a father, and thus refusing the old biological order as awhole. Leaving one’s self-caused immaturity thus culminates inleaving the old created order. This departure now corresponds toa totalization of the pleasure principle which necessarilyconcentrates in a Narcissian manner on the own self and thusdeprives pleasure of the ethical dimension in parentalresponsibility and care. “Like Narcissus, he [Orpheus] rejectsthe normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros.Like Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order ofprocreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to theend the negation of this order – the Great Refusal” (EC 171). Atthe end of the day, the sexual-biological order is repressiveinsofar as the biology of the father inescapably means actingfalsely. Through the revolution against rule the principle of thefather’s rule turns into an only biological principle which hasto be eliminated with bio-erotic practice because of theeschatological aim. The erotically pacified practice, far fromthe naïve-paradise ideal of sexuality free from rule and guilt,proves to be the utopian-metaphysical core of the same violencewhich manifests itself in political action as provisionallycontinuing counter-violence against the father.

By suspending the succession of generations, the Oedipalcyclicity, erotic art-for-art’s-sake becomes the absolutepleasure of the self, the apotheosis of an erotic egoism whichsuspends historical time due to the refusal to become a father.Whereas for Friedrich Schiller the utopia of homo ludensmotivates self-transformation into an autonomous subject of

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history, describing this as “suspending time in time”, Marcuse’serotic-poetic God Narcissus appears as metonymy of a realsuspension of historical time. The erotic orgiasticism and itsrefusal to become a father as eschatological program cannot beanything else – beyond its existential possibilities – than theapotheosis of an erotic self-pleasure and egoism, celebrating afinal orgiastic presentation of sexual desires and perversion asthe erotic kairos, the end of mankind in an orgiastic self-annihilation.

In a strange distortion, the eschatological subject oferotic fulfilment – the heretical Jesus – appears in his Oedipal,Orphic-Narcissistic metamorphosis like a negative caricature of acelibate monk who wants to symbolize with his asceticism asuspension of the succession of generations and of the existingorder of creation in the sign of love. But in contrast toMarcuse’s God of eros, who rejects fatherhood and the successionof generations on behalf of his own egoistic sexual pleasure, themonk’s asceticism does not mean an elimination of the other andof the self, but the act of self-sacrificing for the other onbehalf of charity, love, and care for those oppressed in theorder of creation by eros and power. By creating the last Oedipusand the last lover and thus eliminating the “other”, especiallythe “enemy”, all forms of otherness necessarily prove to be forthe monk the proper and direct object of his love, culminating inlove of enemy and martyrdom. The practice of Marcuse’srevolutionary as the last son, who sacrifices his father in afinal Oedipal act in order to satisfy his own erotic desires,does not only seem to designate the inversion of theuniversalizing practice of the monk who sacrifices himself forGod and mankind in order to dedicate himself to an all-embracingpractice of love. In the end, this political Christology with itscompleted eschato-logic also inescapably points to the Christiandogma, which it rejects with the figure of the heretical Jesus.

V. The Post-messianic Fate of Three Regional EschatologiesMarcuse’s political theology is deployed on three “regional”

levels: political, aesthetic and erotic. If the radical messianicform of this political theology has not become obsolete, itsurvives today primarily in aesthetic and philological forms of

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thought, which have neutralized eschatology. Politicaleschatology has retired into aesthetic practice. Even thoughMarcuse’s erotic eschatology shows all symptoms of exhaustionafter the sexual revolution, its reconstruction could assume aninteresting role in the current discussions of the “end of eros”:

1. The political eschatology. With the end of the radicalstudents’ movement in the so-called “German Fall” in 1977, therevolutionary conjunction of politics and eschatology in thecontext of the existing parliamentary democracy was finallyrejected. The students’ rebellion abandoned Marcuse’s politicaltheology. Subsequently, the students adopted Jürgen Habermas’practice of a critical intervention within the parameters of theexisting democratic constitution and reconciled with the existingdemocracy through liberalization and pluralization of individuallifestyles.17 Or they retained the idea of a global revolution,but, due to its provisional failure, returned to private life, tomore civilized forms of the denial of civilization such as artand philosophy. Thus, Marcuse’s political theology was indeedfinally “finished”. 18

2. The aesthetic eschatology. This new orientation did notend in a return to the original teachers, to Theodor W. Adornoand Max Horkheimer, who had cautioned against any form ofeschatological action again and again. Rather, it entailed anunprecedented renaissance of interest in Walter Benjamin whichcontinues to the present. Benjamin’s thinking contained the key

17 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: BeaconPress, 1984-1987); Jürgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Jürgen Habermas, NachholendeRevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Jürgern Habermas,Die Moderne. Ein unvollendetes Projekt (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994).18 The thesis of the end of any political theology was formulatedby Erik Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem” inTheological Tractates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011),against Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Peterson theologicallysubstantiates this end with trinitarian theology. The legacy ofthis end of any political theology ranges from Carl Schmitt,Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge:Polity, 2008) to Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory.

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to a post-eschatological practice because it moved betweenhistorical action and messianic intervention.19 Both adherents ofthe reform agenda and the revolutionaries who had failed couldcultivate revolutionary rhetoric without having to stand the testof practice. The new life in delay designated for reformers ofthe German Greens and for Social Democrats like Joschka Fischerand Otto Schily the moment they moved into the Bundestag.20 Forthe unsettled revolutionaries a return to the lecture rooms,where the revolt had started, was closer. In the meticulous studyof Benjamin’s writings, political action now replaced aestheticinterpretation and philology, which culminated in GiorgioAgamben’s meritorious philological interventions into to depthsof political theology and political economy. In this way, thesuspension of revolutionary eschatology was fully confirmed.21

3. The erotic eschatology. Marcuse’s relevance seems toconsist in that he has unwillingly anticipated the currentdiscussion on the possible “end of eros” with his dialectic oferos. It is not necessary to share Jean-Luc Marion’s dramaticdiagnosis, that modernity suffers from a radical oblivion oflove, in order to recognize the symptoms of the dialectic ofautonomization and emancipation of eros since the 18th century.22

19 Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London:Verso, 2009); Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History“ inSelected Writings, Volume 4 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of arvardUniversity Press, 2002), pp. 389-400; Walter Benjamin, „PoliticalTheological Fragment“ in Selected Writings, Volume 3 (Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 305-306.20 For Joschka Fischer’s change from a radical anarchical streetfighter to a democratic reformist politician, see JoschkaFischer, Von grüner Kraft und Herrlichkeit (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984);Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz. 21 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory; Cf. Christoph Schmidt, “DieRückkehr des Katechons,“ in Erik Peterson, Die theologische Präsenzeines outsiders (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012).22 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon. Cf. Luhmann, Love. The sociologistreconstructs the process of love’s autonomization as passion,beginning in the 18th century, which does not only suspend theexisting social and religious norms, but also start a double

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Whereas the sexologist Volkmar Sigusch describes thetransformations of rule, violence, and sexuality of the 60s assymptoms of an impending death of eros, the philosopher AlainBadiou complains about the end of love in a radical-capitalisticsexual consumer attitude which does not take any risk and thusexclude the other through a Narcissistic reduction of eros toself-centered sexual pleasure.23 Indeed, these concerns cannot beunderstood without recognizing the deep eschatological dimensionof eros’ autonomization. Instead of a history of the modernobsolescence of love, a critical archaeology of modern eros needsto reconstruct this “logic of disappearance” through theeschatological conditions which have brought about the downfallof Marcuse’s political utopia of eros.

Translated by Simon Kerwagen

process of reflecting on the essence of love and itssexualization.23 Sigusch, Neosexualitäten; Badiou and Truong, In Praise of Love.