ISSN: 2641-9130
Authors: Mandara L
These pages try to retrace the philosophical background of the concepts of happiness and pleasure in Herbert Marcuse’s Critical Theory. I would argue, in fact, that they can still provide us with a key to reading the politics of pleasure of our time. Nowadays, indeed, it seems that people are asked to accept austerity and sacrifice at work in change of the extraordinary wide world of commodities, advertising and Hi-Tech goods. Besides, they are also supposed to enjoy something like YouPorn and, at the same time, to tolerate the supporters of the patriarchal family or, worst case scenario, to support it activelya. Exploitation and sacrifice, consumerism and spectacularismb, traditionalist movements: the integration of so contradictory politics and moralities in the same whole is shocking. Reading again Herbert Marcuse on this issue is not naïve. Well before he integrated Freud’s theory into Marxism, Marcuse had already made pleasure one of the main concerns of his Critical Theory in the essays The Affirmative Character of Culture and On Hedonism from the 1930s, whether not his peculiar contribute to itc. According to him, happiness, which comes from pleasure, was the main goal of the «struggle for a rational society»d. To be sure, as stated by Marcuse himself, this was due to historical reason. As far as happiness and pleasure had become objects of false promises and mechanisms of domination by capitalism, they were to become object of a struggle of liberation: the Great Refusal of Eros and Civilization.
Keywords: Herbert Marcuse’s; Critical Theory; Happiness; Pleasure
