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question, a number of other questions arise. How accurate are Mar–
cuse and Schiller in representing the aesthetic? What of the disciplin–
ary and repressive side of aesthetic consciousness that we find in
Gustave Aschenbach (in Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice),
for exam–
ple? And how desirable is such a solution? The fully realized artist or
artist type (Marcuse is envisaging a society of artists) is an
aristocratic character, whose triumphant emergence in the world
would coercively eliminate ordinary men and ordinary life. Rilke's
formulation is memorable :
Not for all time will the artist live side by side with ordinary
men. As soon as the artist - the more fl exible and deeper type
among them - becomes rich and virile, as soon as he
lives
what
now he merely
dreams,
man will degenerate and gradually die
out. The artist is eternity protruding into time.
Despite Marcuse's vision of a utopia of play , his view of
nonrepressive civilization is remote from anarchy. Unlike Leo Ber–
sani, a romantic anarchist who conceives of desire as fragmentary,
scattered, disordered, the very antithesis of reason, Marcuse im–
agines desire as a simulacrum of the reason it renounces. "Civiliza–
tion begins when the primary objective-namely, integral satisfac–
tion of needs - is effectively renounced." In imagining an
integral
satisfaction, Marcuse is doing little more than appropriating the
totalizing habit of Hegelian thought, producing, so to speak, a ra–
tionalism of desire that has the features of its adversary.
The extraordinary affinities between Marcuse and Norman O.
Brown, whose book
Life Against Death
appeared only four years after
Eros and Civilization,
confirm the operation of the zeitgeist , the sense
that a new psychological tyranny had been created by the very
discipline that stood for psychological liberation and that any new
liberation would have to occur within the categories of the discipline ,
that is, by valuing the repressed terms in the Freudian dualisms.
The gesture is a familiar one. R eformations are not created
ex nihilo,'
they receive their authority from an interpretation of the very texts
on which the established authority bases itself.
Like Marcuse, Brown radicalizes Freud's insights. Where
Freud speaks of all human beings as more or less neurotic or as more
or less diseased , Brown characterizes man in Nietzschean fashion as
a disease. And the disease is to be found in the repression of the true
"essence" of man , desire. " ... the essence of man consists not , as
