1

Beyond Governance and Guilt:

Marcuse’s Political Theology between Oedipus and Christ

Christoph Schmidt

1. From Psychoanalysis to Political Christology

In the wake of critical theory, Herbert Marcuse interprets the dialectic of Enlightenment
not only from a Marxian perspective, as the co-optation of the movements towards freedom by
the capitalist regime. With Sigmund Freud, he also recognizes the cyclic logic of the civilizing
process, which appears in the oedipal dramaturgy. Until now, the father’s removal by the son has
always been followed by a restoration of the ruling principle through the son, Marcuse writes in
Eros and Civilization.1 For Marcuse, Enlightenment thus becomes transparent in its oedipal
myth. The psychoanalytical insight into the role of eros for the civilizing process opens up a new
existential-erotic perspective on the Marxian Utopia of a society free of domination, for this
would require a suspension of the oedipal logic, a logic that has determined the history of
rationalization and technology until now as a history of class struggles. A society free of
domination thus always presupposes a suspension of the oedipal logic. Indeed, Marcuse
repeatedly designates this revolution with eschatological terms: as “effacement of the original
sin” or even as “redemption” (EC 92, 117, 153), which he identifies with the messianic work of
the so-called “heretical image of Jesus” (EC 70). Here, Jesus indeed becomes the son who is to
ultimately suspend the principle of sovereignty and guilt through the rule of love. Whereas
Oedipus removes his father in order to establish his own regime, Christ represents that act of
removing one’s father which rejects the restoration of any governance.
The heretical Jesus thus functions for Marcuse as the eschatological archetype of a “last
Oedipus” who is to found the utopian empire of love here and now through his “great refusal” to
restore the ruling principle. Marcuse’s psychoanalytical utopia on Marxian grounds thus
corresponds to a political Christology which is to be implemented in real political history.
Whereas the heretical Jesus represents the idea of “redemption” and a utopian liberation of eros,
Marcuse delegates the proper eschatological function to technology on the one hand, and to the
aesthetic subject on the other. Technology frees man from direct subordination (ananke) to
nature’s domination and work. The aesthetic subject, as the son who is aware of himself, is to

1
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), henceforth EC. Moreover, I refer to: Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), henceforth EL; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies
in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002); Herbert Marcuse,
“Repressive Tolerance” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A
Critique of Pure Tolerence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 95-137. See also: Barry Katz,
Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 1982);
Jürgen Habermas, Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Hans
Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus (München: R. Piper, 1971); Herbert Marcuse, The
New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2005); Hanning Voigts,
Entkorkte Flaschenpost: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno und der Streit um die Neue Linke
(Berlin: Lit, 2010).
2

open up a new perspective on a different political practice through commemoration, fantasy and
imagination. The aesthetic critique of the norms, forms, and rules of existing communication
thus becomes the paradigm of the “oedipal suspension” of the heretical Jesus who is to remove
the ruling principle through an ultimate parricide. In an act of ultimate violence, the subject is to
“redeem” himself from subjugation and guilt. Marcuse aesthetically illustrates this oedipal
suspension, through the figures of Orpheus and Narcissus, as a destruction of the existing forms
of communication in order to mobilize this aesthetic as model for truly political action and erotic
life praxis. Whereas the “son’s” political action targets direct violence against the “father’s”
ruling system, the erotic practice is to concentrate “real-utopically” on a “genitofugal sexuality.”
Thus the son denies the principle of procreation and establishes “redemption” through biological
removal of the father principle.
In the metamorphosis of the last Oedipus from heretical Jesus to the poetic myth of
Orpheus and Narcissus an eschato-logic is carried out, unveiling more and more sharply the
danger of this absolute politicization of the theological because of the ultimate removal of rule.
The radical re-conception of Enlightenment as overcoming one’s self-caused immaturity must
escalate to a politics of violence against the father as absolute enemy especially because this
overcoming is understood as ultimate overcoming of guilt. Marcuse has denied any
correspondence between his teaching and the terrorist practice of the Baader Meinhof group by
emphasizing that the revolutionary moment had not arrived yet.2 Even though his thinking
exerted a decisive influence on the liberalization and pluralization of lifestyles, Marcuse’s
revolutionary eschato-logic opposed this liberalization, understanding it as a mechanism of
adapting to the system. The Baader Meinhof group, a radical wing of the movement of ‘68, not
only explicitly referred to Herbert Marcuse, but also drew direct practical consequences from the
eschatological potential of Marcuse’s notion of revolution.3 Under the pressure of German sons’
special relations to their fathers, who had facilitated Auschwitz, the terror “against the fathers”
became, together with the sexual escapades and happenings in the communes, a precise
illustration of this practically implemented eschatology. The anarchists’ fanatical faces, disposed
to any form of violence, indeed corresponded to the ultimate (under eschatological circumstances
inescapably deformed) shape of this psychoanalytical-theological-aesthetic metamorphosis:
Baader-Meinhof as political-eschatological grimace of Oedipus-Orpheus.

2
Cf. Herbert Marcuse, “Murder Is Not a Political Weapon” in The New Left and the 1960s
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 177-179.
3
Cf. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution 1967 -1977 (Köln:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001); Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen
Terrorismus (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im
jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005); Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968 –
Ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008). Habermas already in 1968 posed
the question of the violent dimension of Marcuse’s thought without taking notice of its
eschatological dimension: “Marcuse’s most often quoted sentence has been creating confusion
for one year. At the end of his essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’ Marcuse speaks in quotation marks
about a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and subdued minorities: ‘If they use violence,
they do not begin a new chain of violent deeds, but break the established one. Since they will be
beaten, they know the risk, and if they are willing to bear it, no third person, educators and
intellectuals least, have the right to preach abstinence to them.’ I wish that Marcuse would
explain this sentence fully.” Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, p. 15.
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The following critical account of Marcuse’s political Christology will sketch, mainly on
the basis of Marcuse’s magnum opus Eros and Civilization, the relation of psychoanalysis and
theology, the role of technique and art for this political theology, and finally political theology’s
importance for Marcuse’s political “erotology.” By reconstructing the different metamorphoses
of the eschatologizing process of Marcuse’s political theology, this sketch is not intended to
generally criticize its soteriological dimension, which has been done by Michel Foucault and
Hans Albert.4 Instead, the three regional eschatologies -- the aesthetic, the political, and the
erotic -- and their inner correlation are to be explored. When today’s political eschatology returns
to aesthetics and philology, especially in Agamben’s thinking,5 Marcuse’s “notion of the erotic”
seems to be of particular relevance. It designates an obviously still efficient “last eschaton”
which has kept it in the current discussion on the future of love.6 The thesis of the “death of eros”
today appears as the last consequence of Marcuse’s eschatological radicalization of
Enlightenment and cannot be grasped in its deep dimension without a reconstruction of the
psychoanalytical, political, and theological presuppositions of his “erotology.”

2. Christ as Last Oedipus

The structural analogy between the Marxian critique of the history of class struggles and
the Oedipal logic of the civilizing process serves in Marcuse’s writings at first as a mutual
discourse critique. By means of political economy, Marcuse questions Freud’s static-mythical
notion of work, just as, by dint of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Marcuse wants to reveal the
existential-erotic foundations of the civilizing process and thereby the deep dimensions of
alienation, repression, and revolution. The point is essentially that the Marxian analysis of
production is to prove the economic possibilities of liberation from the necessity of work through
technology. With technique freeing the subject from the need to work, and with direct rule over
nature and thus freedom from the power of ananke, which Freud designates as static, erotic
potential is tapped which can unleash the true revolutionary energy of the subject.
With regard to the Freudian dimension of the logic of rule, Marcuse’s theory of
revolution indeed tends to emphasize the existential-erotic perspective. This tendency already

4
Cf. Hans Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus, especially the essays “Kritische
Rationalität und politische Theologie. Zur Analyse der deutschen Situation”, pp. 45–75 and
“Wissenschaft und Verantwortung. Max Webers Idee rationaler Praxis und die totale Vernunft
der politischen Theologie”, pp. 76–105; Michel Foucault ironically designates the discourse on
sex that is supposedly free of power as a messianic pseudo-theology. The History of Sexuality,
Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).
5
Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological
Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Cf.
Christoph Schmidt, “Die Rückkehr des Katechons“ in: Erik Peterson: Die theologische Präsenz
eines Outsiders, ed. Giancarlo Caronello (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012).
6
Cf. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love`s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Volkmar Sigusch, Neosexualitäten: Über den kulturellen
Wandel von Liebe und Perversion (Frankfurt Main: Campus, 2005); Jean-Luc Marion, The
Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Niklas Luhmann, Love: A
Sketch (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Alain Badiou and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love (New
York: New Press, 2012)..
4

results almost necessarily from the Oedipal “personalization” of the Hegelian dialectics of Lord
and Servant on the basis of the father-son configuration. The “father” corresponds to the
principle of the regime, the “son” to that of revolution. This personalization through the father-
son antagonism, dictated by the Freudian perspective, directly marks Marcuse’s conception of an
erotically founded revolution of society, insofar as the latter tends to transform into a revolution
of the son against the father.
Because of his rule over nature and the consequent necessity of work, man’s eros fully
succumbs to the bio-social dynamics of rule and violence as it emerges under the pre-civilizing
sovereignty of the primordial father. The order, which the primordial father imposes on the horde
of his family, serves his own maximal erotic pleasure, i.e. the daughters’ erotic exhaustion and
the sons’ enslavement for work so that they are excluded from the pleasure of women. With the
union of the sons against the father, which leads to murdering this “erotic sovereign,” the proper
civilizing process starts, but that means above all that the sons establish by totem and taboo their
own rule. “The rebellion against the father is rebellion against biologically justified authority; his
assassination destroys the order which has preserved the life of the group. … But the sons want
the same thing as the father: they want lasting satisfaction of their needs. They can attain this
objective only by repeating, in a new form, the order of domination.” (EC 64)
The transformation of the erotic sovereignty of the primordial father to the sons’ lawfully
founded rule does not only exemplarily anticipate the phenomenon of the political, but it also
illustrates what Marcuse calls “double guilt” and what will determine the history of the political
again and again. Whereas Freud explains this cyclicity through the ambivalence according to
which the sons, on the one hand, celebrate the father’s removal with the implantation of the
totem and, on the other hand, mourn the father’s loss and long for him, Marcuse emphasizes a
double guilt, namely the guilt of the crime of the murder and the guilt of restoring the ruling
principle, embodied through the father. (DOBLE CULPA)
Instead of corresponding to the promise of a possibly fatherless society7, the sons have
more than ever consolidated and theologically sanctioned this political rule by reproducing
sovereignty on a legal basis and installing the totem, the primordial animal symbol of the father,
as God. This religion of the father is, according to its essence, nothing else than the principle of
legitimizing political rule, the primordial principle of any political theology of sovereignty.
Emancipation from this cyclic mechanism of power as myth of Enlightenment, liberation from
the principle of the sovereign subject or the sovereign law, thus presupposes the possibility of a
suspension, in which the son withdraws the principle of rule with the father’s removal. It would
be, as it were, the deed of a last Oedipus, suspending the logic of rule itself through the removal
of the father who started this logic. Thus he would suspend the cycle of power and anti-power,
i.e., the exceptional status which has become historical normality through a last “absolute
exception,” which refuses any rule.
Marcuse reconstructs this last Oedipus as a fully eschatological figure of ultimate
liberation with the heretical image of Jesus. This “son of God” now represents the principle of an
Oedipal liberation from the father-religion without a reproduction of the latter’s rule. Jesus’
message of the rule of love corresponds for Marcuse to a liberation of the true eros from rule and
law. “The message of the Son was the message of liberation: the overthrow of the Law (which is

7
Cf. Paul Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft (Vienna:
Anzengruber-Verlag, 1919).
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domination) by Agape (which is Eros). This would fit in with the heretical image of Jesus as the
Redeemer in the flesh, the Messiah who came to save man here on earth” (EC 69-70).
This heretical image of Jesus corresponds, on the one hand, to a traditional Christian
image by “suspending the law” through the principle of love, but it is, on the other hand,
simultaneously “hereticized” insofar as this Jesus now acts only as son and removes God the
Father.8 Freed from any dogmatic foundation, this Jesus is to redeem man “already here on
earth.” This de-dogmatized Christ is thus thought of from the perspective of an Oedipal eschato-
logic, which means a “de-dogmatization” of the Freudian Oedipus principle, consisting of a
“double guilt”: the father’s removal and the rehabilitation of the ruling principle through the son.
For Marcuse, Jesus and the last Oedipus are archetypes of that “great refusal” (to continue the
rule) who are to facilitate a “new sensibility” (of an erotic practice without rule).
This is not the place to delineate the history of psychoanalytic critique of the Christian
religion.9 It should only be pointed out that Marcuse refers in this context to a lecture of Erich
Fromm10 who, from the psychoanalytic and the Marxian perspective, installs the Christian
messiah in the role of a revolutionary on behalf of the exploited people of Palestine, in order to
characterize the notion of Christ reigning on the side of God the Father, according to dogma, as
ideology of the state church reconciled with rule and empire. With reference to Adolph von
Harnack’s critical dogmatic history, Fromm interpreted Christ as founder of a utopian “love
communism,” increasingly de-messianized and de-dogmatized through the transformation of the
social-political basis of this messianic religion. The later equation of the Son of God with the
Father in the dogma of the Trinity inverts, according to Fromm’s understanding, the sense of the
original Oedipal rebellion into an act of subordination of the Son to the Father. Instead of
removing the Father, the Son sacrifices himself for the Father in order to be “rewarded” with the
regime on his side. Marcuse takes up this interpretation in order to turn it pronouncedly against
the Freudian dogmatic of the eternal return of the same Oedipal principle. “Then the subsequent
transubstantiation of the Messiah, the deification of the Son beside the Father, would be a
betrayal of his message by his own disciples -- the denial of the liberation in the flesh, the
revenge on the redeemer. Christianity would then have surrendered the gospel of Agape-Eros
again to the Law; the father-rule would be restored and strengthened” (EC 70).
The revolt against sovereignty and fatherly authority without the self-appointment of the
son as ruler thus aims at a global critique of Freud’s deconstruction of religion as illusion and
neurosis. Whereas Freud worked out conceptual instruments through which Marcuse
reconstructed the dialectic of Enlightenment in its mythical cyclicity, Marcuse wants to convict,
from the eschatological perspective of the last Oedipus, Enlightenment of its own bondage to the
myth of rational rule, meaning nothing other than a continuation of the Oedipal rule. Marcuse
wants to rescue the theological “illusion” by interpreting it on the basis of the figure of the last
Oedipus. Freud “thought that the disappearance of this illusion would greatly accelerate the
material and intellectual progress of mankind, and he praised science and scientific reason as the

8
Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 154 describes Marcuse’s plan to
write a history of heresy, Corpus Hereticorum, together with Jacob Taubes.
9
This history probably starts with Theodor Reik, Dogma and Compulsion: Psychoanalytic
Studies of Religion and Myths (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975).
10
Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture
(London: Routledge, 2004).
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great liberating antagonists of religion. … Where religion still preserves the uncompromised
aspirations for peace and happiness, its "illusions" still have a higher truth value than science
which works for their elimination” (EC 72-73). When Christian theology is placed on its Utopian
grounds through psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis must reveal its own illusory faith in science
through an eschatology of love oriented towards the heretical Jesus. Freud’s ideal of the logos
who is to perfect culture proves to be, for Marcuse, the continuation of the dialectic of
Enlightenment because it is the continuation of the “rationality of the predominant reality
principle” which “supersedes the metaphysical speculations on Eros” (EC 126). By
reconstructing the Oedipal dynamics of progress and rule, Marcuse targets nothing less than
political theology, (TEOLOGÍA POLÍTICA) intending to ultimately liberate eros from
sovereignty and guilt and thus secularizing the idea of “redemption” in this political theology.
“Behind the definition of the subject … lies the image of the redemption of the ego” (EC 130),
Marcuse writes. The question remains: How are humans to cause this secular redemption here
and now?
The gesture towards “metaphysical speculations on Eros”, denied by Freud, suggests that
this redemption of eros from rule and guilt presupposes that eros is peaceful and non-violent
before its instrumentalization in the process of rationalization. Sensuality and practical reason,
desire and freedom, eros and law, sexuality and agape are “per se” always already reconciled
before being deformed by the dynamics of rule over human nature. Especially when Marcuse
wants to set into action this “redemption” through memory, i.e., on the basis of commemorating
eros, which was repressed in this process, eros must have subtly transformed, for Freud
conceptualized eros as sexual drive and aggressions and thus completely “naturalized” it.
Marcuse thus implicitly presupposes a theology or metaphysics of eros which has already
transcended the materialist prerequisites it demands itself. He presupposes a meta-historical
notion of eros which is deformed and repressed in real history, under the pressure of rule over
human nature, but which is to be actualized in its fullness within history through
commemoration.

Marcuse’s idea of redemption presupposes along with the idea of an intact eros either the
pre-existence of a personal logos of love, i.e., the dogma of Christ, or an a-personal logos of
eros. Indeed, an analogy to Heidegger’s metaphysics is obvious.11 Whereas Heidegger wants to
liberate Being (das Sein) from its metaphysical occupation by being (das Seiende) which is
determined by reason and science, from the forgetting of Being, Marcuse conceptualizes a kind
of forgetting of eros, which, determined by reason, science and rule, forces a critical revision of
the origin of the metaphysical abundance of eros.12 Metaphysical eros corresponds, like
Heidegger’s Being, to an abundance of experience which has been instrumentalized and
deformed by rule into deficient eros. The image of the heretical Jesus and the last Oedipus
always presupposes in any case the pre-existence of an eros which destroys the onto-erotological

11
Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 58 et seq. reconstructs very precisely
Marcuse’s relationship to Heidegger’s project of an existential ontology, but does not mention
the conspicuous parallel between Heidegger’s construction of being and oblivion of being and
Marcuse’s eros and oblivion of eros.
12
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge; Cambridge University
Press, 2002), especially “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’,” pp. 157-199; Martin Heidegger,
Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
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presuppositions of Freud. This destruction is neither psychoanalytically explicitly conducted nor

really substantiated in any “theology” or metaphysics.
Either Marcuse resorts to a metaphysics of love or a theology of a pre-existent abundance
of love, or he has to construct a mechanism immanent in history which can facilitate a
“redemption” from the ruling eros through human work. Marcuse’s political Christology
attempts to think of this “redemption” at first as “autopoiesis” of the subject, as a self-creation by
through “techne”, i.e. by the means of technique and art. One therefore needs to ask whether
technique can assume this expected task of changing all ruling presuppositions of social being or
whether it stays, in Marcuse’s work, finally a kind of dues ex machine, which only conceals and
defers the problem of a possibility of changing the biological presuppositions of human nature.

(LA REDENCIÓN EN MARCUSE ESTÁ MARCADA EN UN INICIO POR UN ACTO

AUTOPOIÉTICO DEL SUJETO, ES DECIR, POR UNA AUTOCREACIÓN DEL MISMO
QUE LO LLEVE A RECHAZAR EL PRINCIPIO DE ACTUACIÓN QUE LE HA SIDO
IMPLANTADO)

III From Political Christology to Aesthetic-Technological Autopoiesis

If the coercion to work is not only a mythical axiom, as it is for Freud, but is subjected to
the Marxian laws of political economy and technical rationality, i.e. historical chance, then,
Marcuse concludes, technical rule over nature can bring about not only an alleviation of the
circumstances of work, but also a liberation from the ruling forces of society. If sovereignty is,
in Marcuse’s construction, only a function of man’s coercion to rule over and manipulate nature,
imposed on him by nature, then the technical rationalization of this rule over nature is said to
contain the key to an unexpected emancipation not only from the coercion to work, but also from
the principle of rule. The political-erotic utopia of the last Oedipal liberation first finds its
utopian substratum in the idea of freed technology. If all class struggles had to end in the
(Oedipal) reproduction of sovereignty so far, Marcuse considers the chance that late-capitalistic
technology has a real possibility of abolishing sovereignty for the first time in history. On the
basis of this historical teleology, “redemption” from sovereignty is facilitated only through
technology. Technology thus functions as deus ex machine, the secret which the last Oedipus
only needs to decode in order to begin his “redemption.”
This context illustrates once more Marcuse’s reservations vis-à-vis the proletariat as
revolutionary agent. The proletariat has been integrated into the system of late capitalism for a
long time because its work and life conditions have qualitatively changed significantly for the
better. For Marcuse, the proletariat thus becomes the victim of total mystification through the
cultural industry and is about to degenerate into the one-dimensional man who is no longer able
to envision the abolition of the system, now possible through technology.13
Even though Marcuse places emphasis on the revolutionary energy of marginal groups
and ghetto inhabitants which were excluded by integrative capitalism on the one hand and
liberation movements in the pre-modern third world on the other hand, the proper task of
breaking the ban of the historical logic of nature and rule over nature is now up the subject of a
“new sensibility”, capable of revealing the metaphysical correlation between Utopia and

13
Cf. Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man, p. 9: “The more rational, productive, technical and total
the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by
which the administrated individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation.“
8

technology. Since, at the same time, the system’s traditional ruling authorities have become more
and more depersonalized and anonymous, the last revolutionary subject finds itself opposed to a
“system” of rule relying on the functioning of technology. This immediate access to the system
and its mechanical conditions principally sets the subject, from the revolutionary stance, into a
“privileged” situation because she or he is potentially released from the immediate pressure of
rule over nature and essentially relieved through creative work. From the perspective of this
quotidian confrontation, it is especially the intellectual and the artist who can grasp the status of
the system and its technological conditions. Before technology becomes an instrument of
completed rule in the system, fully concealing its essence, it is important to understand rule and
concealment in the moment of this ultimate danger. Then the sensible subject is able to change
technique’s function and that means abolishing the system which it presupposes.
It is not difficult to recognize in these reflections some traits of Heidegger’s late
metaphysics of technology as the completion of onto-theological metaphysics. It is important to
rightly understand the character of metaphysics that pervades technology in order to break its
exclusive power.14 For Marcuse, technology designates the completion of metaphysics’ essence
as rule over nature, revealed by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power, which threatens to
irrevocably elude its self-completion. Whereas, in Heidegger’s work, only an experience of
“deprivation”, oriented towards being itself, is capable of comprehending the double character of
technique between catastrophe and rescue, Marcuse considers the experiences of suffering and
deprivation from the Freudian perspective of the civilizing power of eros. With technology
concealing and mutilating the proper essence of eros despite of and because of the new
possibilities of sexual practice in late capitalism, this new erotic deprivation becomes the starting
point of a possible turnabout of this ruling logic.
As in Heidegger’s work, the aesthetic subject, the artist, becomes for Marcuse the proper
subject of a possible “metanoia”. The artist, whose fantasy and imagination set into motion the
erotic ground of experience of his subjectivity, is capable not only of articulating the traits of
erotic oppression, but also of turning the secret of the technical sphinx into the utopian: as
liberation of erotic fantasy and its possibilities. Thus, the aesthetic subject assumes the task of
implementing the utopia of the heretical Jesus and of the last Oedipus by means of technological
possibilities.
Similar to Heidegger, Marcuse is geared to poetry and art as possibilities of a subjectivity
“beyond the will to power”, which the critical theoretician attempts to conceptualize against the
background of Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic and of Paul Valery’s and Rainer Maria Rilke’s
poetry. Above all, Marcuse emphasizes Kant’s notion of uninterestedly autonomous perceptible
beauty, which Schiller expanded with the idea of the self-satisfying game, in order to sketch the
utopian space of the political game and of eroticism free of rule, commemorating the erotic
potential of subjectivity.
From this aesthetic perspective, the heretical Jesus as the last Oedipus finally undergoes
an aesthetic metamorphosis as the aesthetic Oedipus has to assume the eschatological-theological
intention of the messiah at the same time. Oedipus/Jesus now turns into the poetic-mythical
figure of Orpheus/Narcissus, who is to symbolize nature liberating itself through art and poetry:
the nature of eros “beyond rule and guilt”, being in and for itself. This liberation first of all
applies to technology, the “mechanic” art, which, having been an instrument of rule so far, now

14
Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper Colophon, 1977), pp. 115-154.
9

becomes an aspect of “free” creative art, through which the aesthetic subject is to discover
himself with his erotic possibilities of being and to recreate -- spoken theologically, to “redeem”
-- himself in the end.
For Marcuse, art’s function is to recognize the possibilities of being which are buried by
rule, but also to imagine the true realization of the erotic possibilities. Thus it is, at first, critical
fantasy which rebels against the ruling deformation of subject-object by playing eros off against
logos. “In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by
the reality principle, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy”
(EC 149). As such a principle of refusal, art reminds of the utopian possibilities of erotic being
by destroying the forms, norms, and rules of language and communication that rule via the
reality principle. A “break”, a “destruction” always accompanies aesthetic practice – indeed,
aesthetic violence against the forms of communication which are deformed by rule, explained by
Marcuse with the example of the surrealist Andre Breton. “The new sensibility and the new
consciousness which are to project and drive such reconstruction demand a new language …
[T]he rupture with the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with the vocabulary of
domination” (EL 32-33). Only with this rupture does the possibility of genuine self-
consciousness – eschatologically, of self-creation – appear.
Poetry which makes the “process of production a process of creation” (EL 21) aims at a
radical “autopoiesis” of the subject, requiring that aesthetics does not stand autonomous,
uninterested, and “for itself”, but that it transcends the boundaries of the atemporal aesthetic
game in order to be a political-erotic practice here and now. Art no longer only designates the
moment of contemplation beyond the will to power, of an uninterested and satisfied
contemplation, or, in the terms of the late Heidegger, a “willing of the non-willing.” Now, art is
to transform its utopian imagination of the satisfied subject into a personal practice and finally
into actively “willing” politics with proper strategies of destruction and violence. Art is thought
to become a creative technology for recreating the real conditions of man and society. In the last
instance, this idea of a creative technology of art points to a change of the subject’s biological
structure of drives: autopoiesis is to fulfil itself in an aesthetic-biological self-creation. “But the
construction of such a society presupposes a type of man with a different sensitivity as well as
consciousness: men who would speak a different language, have different gestures, follow
different impulses” (EL 21).
It is not difficult to recognize in the double aspect of aesthetic behaviour, in the
destruction and the imagination of a utopian pacification, the two actions through which the last
Oedipus is to free himself from double guilt. Aesthetic destruction corresponds to the last
violence against the regime and the father, the aesthetic utopia imagines its suspension. Marcuse
imputes the first form of action, destruction and break, to concrete political action, whereas he
understands erotic practice already as expression of the “new sensibility” and thus as a change of
the biological structure of drives “here and now”. Before analyzing the direct consequences of
the aesthetic practice for eroticism in the next sequence more precisely, I will briefly sketch its
transposition into political action.
Marcuse formulates the transposition of the aesthetic logic into the arena of the political
mainly in Max Weber’s notions of legality and legitimacy. The aesthetic destruction on behalf of
utopia becomes political by going beyond the existing scope of legality on behalf of utopian
legitimacy free of rule. Especially since politics stands under the sign of eschatological removal
of all rule, politics is not only destructive, it also needs to break down the democratic system
itself. “Consequently, the struggle for changes beyond the system becomes, by virtue of its own
10

dynamic, undemocratic in the terms of the system, and counterviolence is from the beginning
inherent in this dynamic” (EL 69-70). Since the act of liberation from rule always lags behind the
ideal of that freedom from rule it imagines in a utopian manner, the ideal of liberty from violence
and rule turns into an act of liberation through counter-violence to be repeated always again, at
least as long as rule, especially liberal democratic rule, persists. “If and when men and women
act and think free[ly], … they will have broken the chain which linked the fathers and te sons
from generation to generation. They will not have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but
they will have become free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement” (EL 24-25). The
aesthetic revolt of the sensitized subject has to change into a provisionally permanent revolution
against the fathers, according to the eschato-logic of the last Oedipus. Consequently, Marcuse
has to exhort his audience again and again to assume the revolt against the fathers. The
eschatological situation proves to be a final separation of father and son, rule and innocence,
which needs to affect all political decisions in the end. Since the sons are said to be innocent
because they break through the circle of violence and counter-violence, the fathers finally bear
all the guilt. Thus, the innocence of the son produces an endless exponentiation of the father’s
guilt, and the father as enemy not only needs to be defeated but entirely removed. “[N]ot we, but
the fathers, are guilty; they are not tolerant but false; they want to redeem their own guilt by
making us, the sons, guilty” (EL 9). Thus, the idea of erasing original sin, i.e. the double guilt of
removing and installing rule, has to escalate into a kind of absolute Oedipal exception status. The
transition of the aesthetic to the political, through which the aesthetic destruction of rule becomes
the principle of destroying democratic legality, corresponds to a sovereign decision in the spirit
of Carl Schmitt, which draws its legitimacy now “autopoetically” from a final metaphysical
decision between rule and innocence, and that is more concretely between friend and enemy.15
For Marcuse, the son’s counter-violence does not match the scope of the historically
accumulated violence of the father. But that means that this violence must be “redeemed” on a
one-to-one scale through counter-violence before the son can fully return to innocence, imagined
as original. “If the guilt accumulated in the civilized domination of man by man can ever be
redeemed by freedom, then the ‘original sin’ must be committed again: ‘We must against eat
from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence’” (EC 198). The entry
into paradise which here is settled before and beyond real history and is to be set into motion
through an act of aesthetic-biological autopoiesis, necessitates, due to its eschato-logic of
“effacement of the original sin’s traces”, the unleashing of endless violence, through which the
ultimate removal of rule moves into an endless future.
Marcuse’s “Anti-Oedipus” thus confirms against his own intention Sigmund Freud’s
suspicion that eros can be domesticated only through the civilizing process according to its
nature in alliance with aggression and violence and that the revolution against this civilizing
principle of rule and violence can only result in a return to the barbaric state of nature. Despite
Marcuse’s attempts to block Freud’s reduction of eros to aggression with its suggestive force,
Schiller’s aesthetic of the game and Plato’s metaphysics of eros cannot conceal the violent nature

15
Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, p. 63, notes that Marcuse strongly criticized
Carl Schmitt in a review of Siegfried Marck’s Die Dialektik der Philosophie in der Gegewart
published as “On the Problem of Dialectic I“ in 1930, but in Marcuse’s writing the later switch to
Schmitt’s rhetoric from a left-wing activist perspective is clear. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Political
Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985);
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
11

of such erotic liberation. Where technology offers itself a as way out, i.e. as that deus ex machina
which is to facilitate a total liberation from the principle of rule, the emancipation from the
coercion of the rule over nature did not prove to “redeem” man’s erotic nature, but to condemn it
to the violence which it sought to extinguish.
From the beginning, Marcuse’s radical eschatology thus obstructs the possibility of a
critical democratic practice, one which understands the “system” of the democratic constitutional
state as prerequisite for a critical self-correction by its citizens. The political situation of the
Federal Republic of Germany in 1969 corresponds to this theoretical analysis: the radical avant-
garde of the students’ revolt took up terror and murder exactly in that moment when Chancellor
Brandt pleaded, in his inaugural speech, for “daring more democracy”. 16 At that time, the radical
Baader-Meinhof group had translated Marcuse’s eschatological decisionism against the fathers’
system into an immediate and relentless practice and had labelled as treason any critical practice
within the existing democratic system, the sort of critical practice attempted by the moderate
wing of the students’ movement.

IV The Return to Paradise as Orgiastic End Game

The notion of Oedipal innocence determines the target of man’s radical departure from
his self-caused immaturity, which is to become practical and political, formulated as radical
poetry, in order to liberate man from all guilt. Insofar as erotic practice does not only negate civil
norms for freed sexuality, but also alters the existing structure of drives of the subject, even
entails a utopian change of the latter’s biological constitution, eroticism corresponds to the actual
core of the eschatological dimension of this political theology.
Marcuse writes, “[T]he radical change which is to transform the existing society into a
free one must reach into a dimension of the human existence hardly considered in Marxian
theory – the ‘biological’ dimension in which the vital, imperative needs and satisfactions of man
assert themselves” (EL 16-17). Thus, the point is that the revolution “by virtue of this
‘biological’ foundation, would have the chance of turning quantitative technical progress into
qualitatively different ways of life” (EL 19). What that concretely means follows from the idea
of a form of sexuality copied from the aesthetic game.
Due to the aesthetic foundation of the political, a radical change of erotic practice occurs.
Sexuality which is functionalized by the law of reproduction is replaced by a playful-
experimental sexuality. The idea of the aesthetic game, as defined by Friedrich Schiller in his
“Letters on Aesthetic Education” as the ideal of the self-determined man who no longer – unlike
Kant – opposes affection, i.e. desire and sensuality, is now to be actualized in a practice of an
erotic-sexual game: “from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to erotization of the
entire personality. It is a spread rather than explosion of libido” (EC 201). Erotic games and
experiments are to serve a radical “resexualization of the body” in which Marcuse finds the
“restoration of the primary structure of sexuality”. The aim is, as Marcuse emphasizes again and
again, a break with “the primacy of the genital function.” The organism is to become entirety a

16
Cf. Jillian Becker, Hitler`s Children. The Story of the Baader Meinhof Terrorist Gang
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977); Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine
Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001); Hans Kundnani, Utopia or
Auschwitz: Germany´s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009); Christoph Schmidt, “The Israel of the Spirit: The German Student Movement of the
1960s and its Attitude to the Holocaust,” Studies on the Shoah 24 (2010): 269–318.
12

“substratum of sexuality” (EC 205). Apart from the fact that the biological “primary structure of
sexuality” corresponds to the structure of reproduction, Marcuse thinks of this “primary
structure” as a utopian idea of libido, “an inherent trend in the libido itself toward "cultural"
expression, without external repressive modification.” This sexuality has its own eschatology
insofar as it attempts to strive “away from genital supremacy toward the erotization of the entire
organism” (EC 208).
The real possibility of sexual experiments and the playful integration of the so-called
“perversions” (homosexuality, sadism, etc.) in pluralization and liberalization of individual
lifestyles is, from the beginning, placed by Marcuse on an eschatological horizon, in which the
last Oedipus as heretical Jesus is to recreate himself through this eroticism and so to biologically
transform and, in theological language, to redeem himself. Eroticism is soteriologically made
absolute. The result is that the corresponding politics overcharge so that eroticism has to emerge
in the mode of pure violence.
Genitofugal eroticism, far from facilitating only an expansion of sexual pleasure,
necessarily corresponds to an eschatological principle of autopoiesis which Marcuse describes as
a particular form of apotheosis. By deploying his aesthetic practice as Oedipus/Narcissus, the last
Oedipus and son of God Jesus does not only reject the ruling laws of genital sexuality; this
genitofugal sexuality designates the son’s refusal to biologically become a father! “The Orphic-
Narcissistic images are those of the Great Refusal: refusal to accept separation from the
libidinous object (or subject). … Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator: he
establishes a higher order in the world – an order without repression. … He is the poet of
redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through
force but through song” (EC 170).
The self-creating God of poetry and pleasure does not only abrogate his own sonship
through his libidinous practices and poetry, he also rejects the principle of procreation, refusing
to become a father, and thus refusing the old biological order as a whole. Leaving one’s self-
caused immaturity thus culminates in leaving the old created order. This departure now
corresponds to a totalization of the pleasure principle which necessarily concentrates in a
Narcissian manner on the own self and thus deprives pleasure of the ethical dimension in
parental responsibility and care. “Like Narcissus, he [Orpheus] rejects the normal Eros, not for
an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order of
procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to the end the negation of this order –
the Great Refusal” (EC 171). At the end of the day, the sexual-biological order is repressive
insofar as the biology of the father inescapably means acting falsely. Through the revolution
against rule the principle of the father’s rule turns into an only biological principle which has to
be eliminated with bio-erotic practice because of the eschatological aim. The erotically pacified
practice, far from the naïve-paradise ideal of sexuality free from rule and guilt, proves to be the
utopian-metaphysical core of the same violence which manifests itself in political action as
provisionally continuing counter-violence against the father.
By suspending the succession of generations, the Oedipal cyclicity, erotic art-for-art’s-
sake becomes the absolute pleasure of the self, the apotheosis of an erotic egoism which
suspends historical time due to the refusal to become a father. Whereas for Friedrich Schiller the
utopia of homo ludens motivates self-transformation into an autonomous subject of history,
describing this as “suspending time in time”, Marcuse’s erotic-poetic God Narcissus appears as
metonymy of a real suspension of historical time. The erotic orgiasticism and its refusal to
become a father as eschatological program cannot be anything else – beyond its existential
13

possibilities – than the apotheosis of an erotic self-pleasure and egoism, celebrating a final
orgiastic presentation of sexual desires and perversion as the erotic kairos, the end of mankind in
an orgiastic self-annihilation.
In a strange distortion, the eschatological subject of erotic fulfilment – the heretical Jesus
– appears in his Oedipal, Orphic-Narcissistic metamorphosis like a negative caricature of a
celibate monk who wants to symbolize with his asceticism a suspension of the succession of
generations and of the existing order of creation in the sign of love. But in contrast to Marcuse’s
God of eros, who rejects fatherhood and the succession of generations on behalf of his own
egoistic sexual pleasure, the monk’s asceticism does not mean an elimination of the other and of
the self, but the act of self-sacrificing for the other on behalf of charity, love, and care for those
oppressed in the order of creation by eros and power. By creating the last Oedipus and the last
lover and thus eliminating the “other”, especially the “enemy”, all forms of otherness necessarily
prove to be for the monk the proper and direct object of his love, culminating in love of enemy
and martyrdom. The practice of Marcuse’s revolutionary as the last son, who sacrifices his father
in a final Oedipal act in order to satisfy his own erotic desires, does not only seem to designate
the inversion of the universalizing practice of the monk who sacrifices himself for God and
mankind in order to dedicate himself to an all-embracing practice of love. In the end, this
political Christology with its completed eschato-logic also inescapably points to the Christian
dogma, which it rejects with the figure of the heretical Jesus.

V. The Post-messianic Fate of Three Regional Eschatologies

Marcuse’s political theology is deployed on three “regional” levels: political, aesthetic
and erotic. If the radical messianic form of this political theology has not become obsolete, it
survives today primarily in aesthetic and philological forms of thought, which have neutralized
eschatology. Political eschatology has retired into aesthetic practice. Even though Marcuse’s
erotic eschatology shows all symptoms of exhaustion after the sexual revolution, its
reconstruction could assume an interesting role in the current discussions of the “end of eros”:
1. The political eschatology. With the end of the radical students’ movement in the so-
called “German Fall” in 1977, the revolutionary conjunction of politics and eschatology in the
context of the existing parliamentary democracy was finally rejected. The students’ rebellion
abandoned Marcuse’s political theology. Subsequently, the students adopted Jürgen Habermas’
practice of a critical intervention within the parameters of the existing democratic constitution
and reconciled with the existing democracy through liberalization and pluralization of individual
lifestyles.17 Or they retained the idea of a global revolution, but, due to its provisional failure,
returned to private life, to more civilized forms of the denial of civilization such as art and
philosophy. Thus, Marcuse’s political theology was indeed finally “finished”. 18

17
Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-1987);
Jürgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Jürgen
Habermas, Nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Jürgern Habermas,
Die Moderne. Ein unvollendetes Projekt (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994).
18
The thesis of the end of any political theology was formulated by Erik Peterson, “Monotheism
as a Political Problem” in Theological Tractates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2011), against Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Peterson theologically substantiates this end
with trinitarian theology. The legacy of this end of any political theology ranges from Carl
14

2. The aesthetic eschatology. This new orientation did not end in a return to the original
teachers, to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had cautioned against any form of
eschatological action again and again. Rather, it entailed an unprecedented renaissance of interest
in Walter Benjamin which continues to the present. Benjamin’s thinking contained the key to a
post-eschatological practice because it moved between historical action and messianic
intervention.19 Both adherents of the reform agenda and the revolutionaries who had failed could
cultivate revolutionary rhetoric without having to stand the test of practice. The new life in delay
designated for reformers of the German Greens and for Social Democrats like Joschka Fischer
and Otto Schily the moment they moved into the Bundestag.20 For the unsettled revolutionaries a
return to the lecture rooms, where the revolt had started, was closer. In the meticulous study of
Benjamin’s writings, political action now replaced aesthetic interpretation and philology, which
culminated in Giorgio Agamben’s meritorious philological interventions into to depths of
political theology and political economy. In this way, the suspension of revolutionary
eschatology was fully confirmed.21
3. The erotic eschatology. Marcuse’s relevance seems to consist in that he has
unwillingly anticipated the current discussion on the possible “end of eros” with his dialectic of
eros. It is not necessary to share Jean-Luc Marion’s dramatic diagnosis, that modernity suffers
from a radical oblivion of love, in order to recognize the symptoms of the dialectic of
autonomization and emancipation of eros since the 18th century.22 Whereas the sexologist
Volkmar Sigusch describes the transformations of rule, violence, and sexuality of the 60s as
symptoms of an impending death of eros, the philosopher Alain Badiou complains about the end
of love in a radical-capitalistic sexual consumer attitude which does not take any risk and thus
exclude the other through a Narcissistic reduction of eros to self-centered sexual pleasure.23
Indeed, these concerns cannot be understood without recognizing the deep eschatological
dimension of eros’ autonomization. Instead of a history of the modern obsolescence of love, a

Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge:
Polity, 2008) to Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory.
19
Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2009); Walter
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History“ in Selected Writings, Volume 4 (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of arvard University Press, 2002), pp. 389-400; Walter Benjamin, „Political
Theological Fragment“ in Selected Writings, Volume 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 305-306.
20
For Joschka Fischer’s change from a radical anarchical street fighter to a democratic reformist
politician, see Joschka Fischer, Von grüner Kraft und Herrlichkeit (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984);
Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz.
21
Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory; Cf. Christoph Schmidt, “Die Rückkehr des
Katechons,“ in Erik Peterson, Die theologische Präsenz eines outsiders (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 2012).
22
Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon. Cf. Luhmann, Love. The sociologist reconstructs the process
of love’s autonomization as passion, beginning in the 18th century, which does not only suspend
the existing social and religious norms, but also start a double process of reflecting on the
essence of love and its sexualization.
23
Sigusch, Neosexualitäten; Badiou and Truong, In Praise of Love.
15

critical archaeology of modern eros needs to reconstruct this “logic of disappearance” through
the eschatological conditions which have brought about the downfall of Marcuse’s political
utopia of eros.

Translated by Simon Kerwagen