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

Abstract

Marcuse’s theory of civilization offer a promising Freud-Marx synthesis. His approach, best articulated in Eros and Civilization, aims at thorough reformulation of the Freudian drive doctrine to render it more historical and concatenate it to the problem of structural violence and 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 protoaccelerationist undertones. The article offers a concise recapitulation of Marcuses’s “dialectics of civilization” and points at the somewhat surprising close convergeneces with acceleraconist version of post-capitalist in his reflection on politics, technology, and the role of arts and aesthetic imagination in challenging the affirmative (and desublimating) character of culture.

Keywords

• accelerationism
• doctrine of the drives
• dialectics of civilization
• post-workerism
• technology
• ideology