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NEWS & LETTERS, February-March 2006Marcuse conferenceA "Reading Herbert Marcuse’s EROS AND CIVILIZATION After 50 Years" conference was held at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Nov. 3-6. There were nearly as many themes as speakers, 34 over the four-day event. This diversity of themes could be interpreted in one of two ways: either as a reflection of the richness of Marcuse’s text or as the fragmentation, which all of Marcuse’s theoretical works attempted to forestall, of the philosophic effort to grasp the current moment of the social and intellectual crisis. Perhaps the most controversial subject emerged during a discussion period after papers by Steven Bronner on Marcuse and "the birth of critical political theory" and Peter-Erwin Jansen on "the Marcuse reception in Germany." Bronner explained Nazism as a pre-Enlightenment cultural response to economic, political and social crises. Jansen, to the contrary, argued that Nazism--including the technologically-based manipulation of culture and politics--was one outcome among several possibilities opened up by the science, technology and social values rooted in the Enlightenment itself. The issue is important in "placing" EROS AND CIVILIZATION, since this, Marcuse’s "Freud book," had been Marcuse’s first publication since his very different and seminal work, REASON AND REVOLUTION: HEGEL AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL THEORY, which had appeared 14 years earlier, just before the Nazi Holocaust began to unfold. As I argued in my paper, "The Marcuse/Dunayevskaya Correspondence and Marcuse’s 'Philosophic Interlude’ in EROS AND CIVILIZATION," Marcuse himself indicated in the chapter on philosophy in EROS AND CIVILIZATION that Hegel’s dialectic, the height of philosophic thought defining the Enlightenment, resigned itself to achieving freedom in thought only, a process of "endlessly projecting and transcending productivity of being" coming to "fruition in the perpetual peace of self-conscious receptivity." Marcuse’s conclusion on Hegel’s dialectic was the endpoint of a philosophic trajectory of his own, which between the 1930s and 1950s decreasingly attributed practical intention and potential to Hegel’s dialectic. In contrast, the 1954-1979 correspondence between Marcuse and Dunayevskaya clearly shows that Dunayevskaya, in the year before she initiated correspondence with Marcuse and two years before EROS AND CIVILIZATION, was published interpreted the culmination of Hegel’s philosophy as integral to achieving freedom in a post-capitalist society. In the initial correspondence with Marcuse and elsewhere she debated Marcuse on this issue and later continued to develop the "culmination" of Hegel’s philosophy as a vital dimension of Marx’s Marxism. Douglas Kellner argued that Marcuse’s work "from beginning to end" was Hegelian and Marxist: EROS AND CIVILIZATION was primarily an attempt to understand Nazism by investigating the concrete individual in Western society. In response to a question from the floor, whether Nazism might be better explained by the failures of non or anti-philosophical types of "Marxism" prevalent in the first half of the 20th century--Social Democracy and Stalinism--Kellner conceded both explanations were needed. --Russell Rockwell |
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