Herbert Marcuse, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Eros and Civilization synthesizes Marx and Freud not by mechanical superimposition but by reading Freud's metapsychology through the dialectic. Surplus repression names the historically specific repression in addition to what Ananke (scarcity) requires — repression administered for the sake of domination rather than civilization as such.123
The performance principle is the historical form Freud's reality principle takes under late capitalism: the demand to produce, to compete, to subordinate gratification to exchange-value-realization, internalized as character structure. Repressive desublimation names the false sexual liberation that capitalism distributes — the loosening of overt prohibition that strengthens rather than dissolves repression by routing libidinal energy into consumption and conformity.4
The non-repressive civilization the book sketches would have liberated labor and free Eros converge, the realm of necessity made transparent to the realm of freedom; phantasy, art, play are the critical-anthropological categories pointing at what under capitalism cannot be. The Freudian apparatus is mobilized for what it does — accounts for the psychic continuation of repression beyond economic necessity, gives critical- theoretical anthropology a basis in instinctual structure, refuses the orthodox-Marxist reduction of consciousness to ideology — not defended as orthodoxy.
The synthesis grounds everything that follows: the new sensibility of An Essay on Liberation (1969), the biological foundation of socialism, the late aesthetic dimension.
EROS AND CIVILIZATION A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud Herbert Marcuse with a preface by Douglas kellner Analysis of the interpretation of history in Freud's psyology Distinction between repression and "surplus-repression" Alienated labor and the performance principle Organization of sexuality: taboos on pleasure Organization of destruction instincts Fatal dialectic of civilization 3.Eros and Civilization, pp. 5–10
Terminologically, this extrapolation calls for a duplication of concepts: the Freudian terms, whi do not adequately differentiate between the biological and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts, must be paired with corresponding terms denoting the specific socio-historical component. Presently we shall introduce two su terms: (a) Surplus-repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination.Eros and Civilization, pp. 41–42
The first book that really caught the attention of people outside of academia was Eros and Civilization in 1955. And it does seem that that book suggests many of the ideas that you later elaborated in future work. Marcuse: Yes. Hawkins: You've called that an "extrapolation" of Freud. Marcuse: Because I use hypotheses of Freud's, going beyond them.VII. LATE PHILOSOPHICAL / POLITICAL REFLECTIONS, pp. 227–228
Consequently, the elimination of surplus-repression would per se tend to eliminate, not labor, but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor. If this is true, the emergence of a non-repressive reality principle would alter rather than destroy the social organization of labor: the liberation of Eros could create new and durable work relations.Eros and Civilization, pp. 120–121
The book has been attacked from three directions. The orthodox-Freudian reception (Erich Fromm, then the institutional psychoanalysts) charged that the synthesis misreads Freud — the death drive is not disposable, the instinct theory is not optional, the hermeneutic-unconscious dimension Marcuse minimizes is essential to the actual Freudian project. The orthodox-Marxist reception charged that the Freudian turn evacuated political economy and substituted psychoanalytic anthropology for class analysis. The post-1970s feminist reception charged that the book has no analysis of women's specificity, that the mythopoetic Narcissus and Orpheus are male figures of solitary aesthetic withdrawal, and that the non-repressive civilization is sketched without reference to the gendered division of labor. Kellner's Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) Chapter 6 raises all three sets of worries from sympathetic ground. The position defends the synthesis against the orthodox-Freudian and orthodox-Marxist charges as productivism in different garb, and acknowledges the gender critique as identifying a real lacuna that the 1974 "Marxism and Feminism" lecture begins to address without retracting the framework.