Minnet av svunnen fantasi : Om det utopiska i Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civilization

Sammanfattning: As a member of the Institut für Sozialforschung, Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1955 Eros and Civilization in which he applied an elaborated and reformulated freudian meta-psychoanalytical perspective on the contemporary society, which both Freud and Marcuse had diagnosed as sick. Marcuse’s overall ambition was to seek man’s anamnestic abilities to negate contemporary capitalist society, re-structure the organization of products and reduce alienated labor and thereby liberate man from the most agonizing doing in life – living a life as an instrument. This political revolution Marcuse argues, would liberate man’s powerful subconscious energies stemming from Eros and mankind would no longer function as an alienated instrument. However, for the revolutionary agents to be conscious of their position, the mind of the human being must be transformed and only then a true negation of the prevailing system is possible. In his reading of Freud, Marcuse finds in the subconscious part of the mind a specific part that´s free from reality´s repression of the mind – fantasy. This essay seeks to illustrate and analyze how fantasy, alongside man’s ability of remembrance, has the ability to reform the consciousness of men, negate the structure of living imposed on them by capitalist domestic rationality and thereby formulate a new non-repressive society free from surplus repression and alienation. The overall purpose of this thesis is to explore and shed light on how the complex dynamic relation between memory and fantasy can achieve an intersubjective formulation of a new non-repressive society, free from the hegemony which is capitalist rationality.