Explain in your own words Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation.
What will be an ideal response?
The conflict between sexuality (a central source of the pleasure principle) and society (the source of the reality principle) has produced a state of repressive desublimation or “institutionalized desublimation” as it “is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society” (Marcuse 1970:57). As Marcuse noted: “[T]o the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not “officially,” of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as “regular”), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control. In this sphere was the surreptitious freedom, the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the pleasure principle. . . . Now, with the integration of this sphere into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression itself is repressed: society has enlarged not individual freedom, but its control over the individual.” (ibid.)
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