On Marcuse's Study of the Negative Erotic Subject -- the Suppressed Subject in the Positive Culture

Abstract
In the real society where qualitative culture prevails, people's psychological level is gradually losing their demand for freedom and liberation after being controlled. It seems to be a Utopia to expect some top-down political or economic liberation. In this regard, Marcuse shifted the starting point of liberation from the state and society to the individual. He wanted to launch a bottom-up sexual liberation movement to find the hope of individual liberation from human psychological instinct. The core of the theory of Eros liberation is the liberation of the subject of Eros, that is, the liberation of human beings through the liberation of eros as human instinct, and then the liberation of the whole society from bottom to top. Marcuse reconstructed his subject philosophy in the theory of sexual liberation. He constructed a radical theory of sexual subject based on the sexual instinct in Freud's instinct theory. Marcuse's construction of the erotic subject is neither a romantic Utopian movement nor an irrational Nuss spirit against the western traditional logocentrism. The core attribute of the erotic subject is a negative spirit, which is the inheritance of Hegel's negative thought to a certain extent. Even the whole structure of the erotic subject can be seen as Marcuse's negation of technical rationality and the recovery of critical rationality in order to resist the positive culture of the dominant reality. Thus, we can connect the break between Hegel's rationalism and Freud's irrationalism in Marcuse's ideological career. In short, his theory of erotic subject has both theoretical and practical significance. It not only provides rich theoretical resources for human liberation theory, but also provides a new research perspective for the liberation of alienated and suppressed people in modern society.

Keywords
marcuse;eros;subject;negativity

Cite this paper
Weikang Zhu, On Marcuse's Study of the Negative Erotic Subject -- the Suppressed Subject in the Positive Culture , SCIREA Journal of Philosophy. Volume 4, Issue 5, October 2024 | PP. 122-131. 10.54647/philosophy720106

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