'The human being is the cruellest animal'
Reading Freud and Marcuse on civilisation and cruelty
In essay four of Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud mythologically reworks Darwin’s hypothesis, itself deriving from observation of ‘the habits of the higher apes’, that the most rudimentary social form of the beasts who became human was the ‘comparatively small’ horde ruled by a single despotic father (TT, 490). According to Freud’s myth, the other males of the horde, the sons in whom a jealous loathing raged, eventually consolidated themselves into a ‘band’ of sufficient strength to depose their father, who exclusively possessed the horde's females — for Freud, ‘it goes without saying that [the sons] devoured their victim as well as killed him’ (TT, 500-01). With the primal father liquifying in the sons’ stomachs, there was nothing to forbid their sexual enjoyment of the horde’s women — except their agonising guilt. The murder of the father dispelled all the roiling hatred for him; streaming into the resulting emotional void was the sons’ underlying feelings of awe at and love for their father, restructured as terrible remorse. Now, the brothers ‘created out’ of this remorse — which, on Freud’s account, conferred more power upon the father than ever before, even if he had been physically reduced to fecal matter — the two fundamental totemic ‘taboos’, the renunciations of parricide and incest, that organise the Oedipal drama later formalised by Freud as childhood’s decisive psychic and sexual event (TT, 501). Dolar therefore remarks in A Voice and Nothing More that the excremental father was actually ‘never quite dead’; this feces, the murdered father’s living ‘remnant’, has a haunting ‘voice’ — the voice of moral Law founded on the pair of renunciations that the guilty sons imposed upon themselves (VNM, 53, 102-03). But Freud’s grisly fable of the founding of morality is also a narrative of the achievement of a social contract among the remorseful sons — they prevented mutual annihilation by abandoning their individual ‘claims to the women’ that the father once possessed (TT, 501; SA, 33). But, crucially for this article, this social contract also founded civilisation itself, from the start a ‘scar tissue […] of violence and destruction’, a ‘piece of history’ deriving from the carnality of human struggles (to use Jacoby’s words in Social Amnesia) (SA, 31).
The second chapter of Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) asserts that the ‘programme of the pleasure principle’ — whose governance of the psyche is initially uncontested — inexorably collides with, and is thus compromised by, corporeal deterioration, environmental calamities and ‘relations with others’ (CD, 15). These relations with others are configured by the civilisation whose beginning is speculated upon in Totem and Taboo. This is also the civilisation which Discontents defines as humanity’s key rupture from its animal ancestry, an evolutionary continuum stretching back to primordial slime with no psychology at all; the horde that Freud discusses in the 1913 work is — on this view — nothing more than a pack of hairless apes, beasts whose humanity had not yet been violently constituted.1 As a result of the pleasure principle’s collisions with ‘the external world’, it is overthrown by, or rather beaten into, the reality principle (CD, 15). This principle, as an expression of external (though especially social) forces inside the apparatus of the psyche, does not decree the total surrender of pleasurable satisfaction of the drives, which are localised in the id. Instead, it mandates that this pleasure be pursued (and if necessary, deferred) in conformity with the outside world’s threats of punishment and destruction. Despite preserving the individual’s existence by aligning them — at the level of their psychic life — with the menace of exterior reality, the traumatic mortification of the pleasure principle, or the institution of repression upon which 'civilisation is built up', inflicts a truly ‘great suffering’ (CD, 17, 34). Indeed, there is a painful tension between the submission of the drives to the nub of an ego arranged and governed by the reality principle and the wild impulse in the human being — a shred of their ‘untamable’ animality — for immediate and unadulterated gratification of the drives (CD, 45). Precisely as the infinite dialectic of repression and repressed, this pain amounts to the ‘universal neurosis of mankind’, or rather, the specifically psychoanalytic vision of what human beings possess and transmit across the generations, the vast edifice of their history, as an ‘ever increasing neurosis’ — to use the terms of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (LAD, 12, 15).
While Freud resigns himself to the assumption that the pleasure principle is doomed to be mortified by the decay of the body and the turbulence of outer nature, he posits that the domain of civilisation, as a configuration of social relations that men invent and prolong through their violence, does not totally resist human intervention. Civilisation can thus be ‘raised as a problem’ by the humans which were brutally fabricated from the ape (CD, 17). Resultantly, adjustment of the painful ‘suppression’ and ‘repression’ of the animal drives is possible, and so the discontent — the suffering — which sinks into the human being wrenched from the wilderness may be reduced (CD, 33-34). Motivated by his liberal benevolence and humanitarian sensibilities, Freud proclaims his opposition to ‘Western European’ civilisation’s narrowing of the human being’s ‘choice of [sexual] object to the opposite sex’ and condemnation of ‘most extra-genital gratifications’ as perversions (CD, 40). The enforcement of these unnecessary sacrifices inflicts enormous amounts of neurotic suffering, for they defy the fact that human beings do not share a single 'sexual constitution' (CD, 41). Despite this principled political intervention, Freud ultimately does not desert his fundamental position that — as he initially stated in Totem and Taboo — the founding and necessary structure of civilisation is renunciation.
The problem announced by Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents is confronted again in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation. This book, written amidst the economic boom of the fifties, eventually became an important articulation of the utopian dreams which energised the counter-cultural revolt in the United States — the mass uprising against the social mutilations of racism, sexism and homophobia and the imperialist massacre then befalling Indochina, a region left cratered and defoliated by American bombs and napalm. In part, the enduring interest of Eros and Civilisation — despite, perhaps, being best-known today only through its afterlife as an implicit target of Foucault’s political polemic in History of Sexuality 1 — derives from Marcuse’s assertion that Freud only reifies the repressiveness of civilisation into an eternity because he is blind to the variable historical determination of the reality principle itself, the fact that this principle is constitutively mediated by history. Now, Marcuse maintains that the 'specific historical form’ of the coordination of the psyche with the world, the history currently in the entrails of the human being, is the 'performance principle' (EC, 102, 112, 151). This particular reality principle had a certain justification before economic accumulation and technological progress created the empirical possibility of abolishing material 'scarcity' (EC, 103). The brute fact of deprivation, entailing a savage struggle for existence, inevitably delayed the gratification of the drives, or rather, demanded their deflection into the miserable work necessary for sheer survival. But the rule of the performance principle, the material wealth that this order has accumulated, has ensured that plenitude can now replace scarcity. The renunciation of the drives that this principle currently enforces is thus historically obsolete — and only functions to perpetuate capitalist domination.2 Marcuse contends that the oppressive ‘historical conditions’ articulated by this reality principle freeze repression into the structure of the drives themselves — the supposedly natural life of the human being is the drives frozen into a repressed form by the civilisation of the performance principle (EC, 105). (In Whitebook’s Perversion and Utopia, Marcuse’s reading of the Freudian notion of Anneke or necessity as material scarcity is exposed to sustained criticism.)
But to envision his ‘hypothesis of a non-repressive civilisation’ — that is, one that is beyond 'surplus repression' (a variation on Marx's surplus-value) — Marcuse has to surmount this challenge: Freud does not believe that the human being merely renounces fulfilment of their sexual drives (EC, 107). Indeed, he asserts that the abandonment of the immediate gratification of the drives to vent aggression, or cruelty, is also a sacrifice demanded by the inner order of civilisation. Gesturing towards the putative evidence of the global outburst of imperialist slaughter from 1914-1918, as well as the butcheries and the rampages of Crusaders, Huns and Mongols, Freud insists that ‘a savage beast’ lurks in the depths of every human being — the monster that for Nietzsche was the ‘hidden centre’ of the primordial master that gleefully tortured and murdered their slaves and that for Adorno was the snarling face of the resentful, ‘hard-done-by’ German struggling amidst ‘manifest abundance’ (CD, 48; GM, 23; MM, 96-97). Of course, Freud passed away in London during September 1939, weeks after Poland was cleaved between Hitler and Stalin and the carnage of World War Two finally arrived on the European peninsula; the devouring of Austria by the Third Reich, the hoisting of the Swastika in the Vienna where psychoanalysis was invented by Freud and patients drawn from his Jewish community, forced him into exile in 1938. One cannot escape wondering how Freud’s dissection of human aggression and cruelty would have developed if he had, like Adorno, been a witness to the extermination camps, the killing factories — as well as the shedding of seas of blood in Operation Barbarossa and America’s bathing of entire Japanese cities in atomic fire, among nearly countless other atrocities.3
Such speculation aside, the later chapters of Civilisation and its Discontents reveal Freud’s marked interest in precisely how civilisation represses the aggressive drives through the cultivation of certain ‘psychical counter-forces’ (CD, 48). Freud portrays the super-ego — the mental incarnation of the child’s harrowing admission to civilisation, the petrification of the law of the Oedipal father in their mind — as ‘a garrison in a conquered town’ (CD, 61). When patients lament that their ‘thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised’, Freud reports, they are voicing their painful oppression by the occupying force, the social power, that is marching through their heads (ON, 557). Civilisation — in the delegated, internal violence of the super-ego — restrains the human being from unleashing their cruelty upon others. (But the super-ego is far from a reasonable torturer; as Zupančič says, its economy is ‘perverse’, ‘obscene’ — the capitulation to the super-ego whose name is ‘virtue’ only emboldens it to torture more, rather than satiate its appetite for psychic violence (SBU, 55). The more we submit to the super-ego, the more it devours; ‘every renunciation of the drives’, Freud declares, nourishes the ravenous super-ego and intensifies its tyranny over what remains (CD, 60, 64-65, 73).) Even further to all this, however, is Freud's contention that civilisation must — to preserve its very existence — ‘bind the members of the community libidinally to one another’ by enslaving their sexualities; to create this primordial social tie, and thereby institute a libidinal barrier to the explosion of murderous cruelty, civilisation acts as if it was a mere ‘tribe’, one that ‘exploits’ a vanquished enemy, towards sexuality itself (CD, 40, 46). The fundamental question arises, then: what happens, in Marcuse’s hypothesis of a non-repressive civilisation, a civilisation that is no longer built upon renunciation, to the aggressive drives whose social management Freud is so attentive to in Civilisation and its Discontents?
Here, Marcuse retreats to the fact that the dark god that Freud calls the death drive — cruelty being one of its avatars — is defined in the stunning (and confounding) Beyond the Pleasure Principle as ‘the urge inherent in all organic life to restore an earlier state [of] inanimate matter’, to become a corpse that is — in the tranquillity of its putrefaction — cleansed of the relentless ‘tension’ of living existence (BPP, 612-13). Marcuse’s move to the death drive — disavowed by his ‘neo-Freudian’ antagonist Fromm — exemplifies his theoretical courage in working with ‘Freud’s most extreme, and apparently most pessimistic, psychological assumptions’, as Paul Robinson writes in Freudian Left (FL, 201). Now, as mentioned, Marcuse is committed to the notion that drives’ inner structure is ‘not inherent in [their] ‘nature’’; thus, the creation of new historical conditions, the refounding of civilisation itself, would reconstitute the drives (EC, 105).4 To coordinate the portrayal of the death drive by Freud and his own insistence on the drives’ historicity, Marcuse asserts that the abolition of material scarcity — which is, again, empirically possible — would eliminate the tension of the bitter struggle for sheer existence. A new reality principle, the successor of the performance principle, would ‘be reconciled’ with the bent of the death drive — or Thanatos — towards the tensionless inertia of matter expunged of all life (EC, 165).
The inexorable correlate of this, Marcuse holds, would be the progressive dissipation of human cruelty, its draining from the world. The unmutilated Eros that still shines in ‘the perversions [which] uphold sexuality as an end in itself’, the inherently revolutionary evasions of the genital and procreative sexuality repressively moulded by the performance principle, would gradually usurp the aggression which disfigures our planet (EC, 142, 146-47). In the end, ‘the free, playful creativity of phantasy, the imagination and the aesthetic’ (Allen's words in Critique on the Couch) would by enthroned by Eros (CC, 128). (In his later One-Dimensional Man, whose unrelenting bleakness locates it in closer proximity to Adorno and Horkheimer's wartime Dialectic of Enlightenment than Eros and Civilisation, Marcuse is acutely sensitive to the political danger of what he calls the ‘repressive desublimation’ of sexuality — a mere function ‘of the social controls of technological reality’, a freeing of sex in order to dominate the individual more effectively (ODM, 75-76).)
I think Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was clearly right when he declared that 'the human being is the cruellest animal’ (TSZ, 176).5 The debate between Freud and Marcuse, as I have construed it, is so essential because it raises the question of whether human cruelty — evident absolutely everywhere: the government bureaucrat that condemns the unemployed to hunger and ice, the bomber pilot that obliterates children from the clouds or the screen, and countless other unremarkable figures — can be historically transcended. There are fine studies of atrocity by historians such as Christopher Browning and David Chandler. Books such as Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Browning) and Voices from S-21: History and Terror in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Chandler) carefully consider the complex causation of mass murder, how factors such as the virulence of propaganda and the deference to authority can turn virtually anyone into a killer, even if tears run down their face and vomit flies from their mouth. Extending the dialogue with Freud and Marcuse by rigorously thinking the historical status of cruelty, in parallel to sophisticated inquires like Ordinary Men and Voices from S-21, may reveal atrocity in a new perspective — and discover prospects for preventing it through radical social transformations which either ameliorate or, ideally, eliminate the drive to be cruel. Nothing seems more important.
My friend George has his own writing on Freud and animals available here.
It is worth noting that Eros and Civilisation — as a critique of the repression that reigns in the society of the performance principle — only briefly mentions the Oedipal drama that Freud considered to be the key discovery of psychoanalysis. While he concedes to Freud that Oedipus is ‘the primary source and model of neurotic conflicts’, the motive of Marcuse's cursory discussion of this turmoil is to fundamentally isolate it from his political project — the performance principle, not the family romance, is the ‘central cause’ of human suffering, and so it is the fundamental antagonist of his Freudo-leftism (EC, 133). Of course, Marcuse's dismissive treatment of Oedipus contrasts interestingly with the elaborate displacement of this figure in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment — Odysseus looms over that black masterpiece.
Though he was — like so many of his contemporaries — enraptured by its outbreak, Freud came to consider the First World War to be the murder of European civilisation. The hideous spectres, the ‘evil spirits’, that were released in the Somme and at Verdun were the incontrovertible evidence that the cultural achievements of the West were — in a decisive sense — trash; a humanity beyond its primitive savagery had not been cultivated by Europe’s ‘noble men’, its artists and philosophers (T, 198-99). Despite this, Freud (writing in a Vienna starved and frozen by the Allies’ blockade of the Central Powers) clung to this hope: even if an entire civilisation had died in the trenches, the void left by this death may be filled with new splendours — perhaps with ‘firmer foundations and more lastingly than before’ (T, 200). Before the sublime, the beautiful, could be resurrected, the world which was lost had to be mourned; the task of the ego here was to forcibly coordinate libidinal energy with the desolation of reality, the effacement of the ‘beloved’ West in which the libido had been invested (MM, 203-04). This ‘work of mourning’ would free the libido for creative reinvestment in a fresh cathexis — a gleaming new world (MM, 202). However, if he had lived through the apocalyptic years after ‘39, years in which the great evil that sleeps in man was even more catastrophically reawakened, it is hard to see Freud’s hope for the construction of a better world surviving. It goes without saying that Freud should have already learned that European culture was garbage from the hands, feet and genitals cut off and piled up in Leopold's Congo, the campaign of extermination that the nation of Goethe and Kant unleashed upon the Herero, the holocausts that the settler-colonies of America and Australia were built upon, and so forth.
Taking exactly the reverse position, the right-Freudian insists that the drives that psychoanalysis works with are essentially ahistorical. Which is to say, the deep infantile wishes at the root of psychical suffering are, in essence, internal, pre-social. To ascribe the suffering intrinsic to the 'human condition' to external, historically-determinate causes — to, in the same movement, locate this history inside the psyche — is fundamentally 'projective and paranoic', as the arch-conservatives Chasseguet-Smirgel and Grunberger say in their critique of Reich and, subsidiarily, Marcuse and Deleuze-Guattari (FR, 208, 211). Chasseguet-Smirgel and Grunberger flatten all political ideologies, no matter their specific discursive coordinates, into this projection and paranoia. For them, the Nazi's delusion that the Jewish people connive to create his suffering is structurally identical to the left-Freudian, and indeed the wider Marxist tradition in which he participates, denouncing the capitalist system of domination as an actual cause of misery. But Civilisation and its Discontents, as I have discussed here, is clearly interested in locating the drives in the historical field — the adjustable political space arranged by the violence of men, the space whose genealogy stretches back to the murder of the primal father. Freud pleads for the reduction of sexual repression; in rewriting the reality principle as the performance principle, Marcuse radically exaggerates this political intervention, taking it far beyond what Freud dared to imagine.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, one of the key operations of Nietzsche’s thought is the excavation of the cruelty that underlies, or is inscribed in, the reputed glories of humanity — our cultures and languages, our values and religions, our philosophies and rationalities and, of course, our subjectivities themselves; books such as the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist find more than a drop of blood in all of them.