Libmat / Ratpack Gossip 2: Judgment Day - Terminator vs. Robocop vs. Jesus Christ

"Land was our Nietzsche...with....a writing style that updates nineteenth century aphorisms into...'text at sample velocity.' Speed— in the abstract and the chemical sense...[his] withering assaults on the academic left - academic Marxism – remain trenchant..."

- Mark Fisher, Terminator vs. Avatar 

On the aphorism

Two aphorisms from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

"Objections, non-sequiturs, cheerful distrust, joyous mockery - all are signs of health. Everything absolute belongs in the realm of pathology" (Aph. 154 on pg. 86). 

"When the mind is made up, the ear is deaf to even the est arguments. This is the sign of a strong character. In other words, an occasional will to stupidity" (Aph. 107 on pg. 79).

Aphorisms are often best left as is, especially Nietzsche's.
They are already the distilled product of a much lengthier - in Nietzsche's case madder - line of thought, and their very strength lies in the fact that they do not over-elaborate what they intend to communicate.

In these ways they avoid language games and rhetorical pitfalls and thus maintain their power as a chaotic, diagrammatic creative force akin to a high blood-alcohol level mixed with a black magic blood ritual.

In fact, the aphorism is precisely that which draws the blood; it is an Occam's Razor that short-circuits formal argument, turning them into bloody back alley knife fights. It cuts up - or vivisects as Nietzsche is so fond of saying throughout his work - the cultural landscape and recombines it into something else, not unlike the Burroughsian découpé that Deleuze and Guattari decouple from its dadaist lineage in order to mutate it into assemblage theory.

As Nietzsche put it, an aphorism is a way to 'write in one's own blood.'

In other words, the aphorism is already the simplest linguistic form of capturing instinct, impulse, desire, etc. If the aphorism were a communication from the analysand laying atop the analyst's couch to the analyst in their chair, the naive psychoanalyst would foolishly feel compelled to have the patient expand,  associate, 'say more,' while the 'good' analyst - the analyst who has read Nietzsche and those select psychoanalysts who followed Nietzsche closer than Freud such as Jung, Adler, Rank, Reich, Guattari, (even Lacan who does not seem to like Nietzsche), etc., - the good analyst cleverly remains silent as they know their patient has reached the point they 'ought' to; they know that the entire purpose of the 'analysis' part of psychoanalysis is to break down (the very definition of 'analysis') bigger, complex, reified notions (language that is used to obscure one's desire, defend against one's instinct, hide one's feelings, etc.) into smaller, more concise, precise, meaningful (closer to 'the real') bits of communication.

This is all to say Nietzsche psychoanalyzed himself through the accelerationist 'method' - if we can say such a thing - of dispensing with the dead weight of language in order to 'pick up speed,' as D and G would put it, resulting in the the aphorism, the closest communication to the real there can be (i.e., schizoanalysis).

Despite all this, it is still helpful to talk about an aphorism, not in a way that attempts to analyze it, but in a way that attempts to add to it, or write alongside it, so here is what is significant about these two aphorisms distilled into one notion:

the power of playful, stupid, passionate dancing thought that both avoids and combats the dialectical argumentative rhetorical style.

Or what Deleuze and Guattari would refer to as 'nomadic' thought.

On being a dangerous idiot (T100, Robocop, and Jesus Christ)

Rather than shallowly refer to other thinkers, or belabor the point in my own words anymore than I already have, let's turn back to Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil:

"Let us be unphilosophical" (20)

"Moral indignation...is the unmistakable sign in a philosopher that his philosophic sense of humor has left him" (30) 

"Never avoid your tests...never remain tied up with a father land...never remain tied up with compassion...nor with a science..." (47) 

"A species of philosopher is coming up over the horizon...(they wish to remain riddles)...these philosophers of the future have a right (perhaps a wrong!) to be called: Experimenters." (47-48).  

"Investigate to the point of cruelty...the human psyche and its limits...time to grow a little cold" (pg. 51-55) 

"Critics...are from being philosophers themselves...Real philosophers are legislators...[who] grope with creative hands towards the future...necessarily a man of tomorrow...who rarely feel like lovers of wisdom, more like disagreeable fools and dangerous question mark" (134-135) 

"Dialectical rigor...thinking seems to them something slow and hesitant, almost a labor...never something light, divine, something closely related to the dance and to playful high spirits. 'Thinking' and 'taking something seriously,' 'taking it gravely,' are to them the same thing." (138)

Unphilosophical, fast, dangerous, humorous, foolish, cheerful, reality-tested, experimenters of the future, not slow, dialectical, safe, serious, morose, reality-resistant, animals trapped in the dogma of the present.  In other words, be "a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude blitzed on a polydrug mix of k-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs who has just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic," not a Turing cop; a libidinally charged anti-heroe on drugs rather than a rationally grounded superman cop; The 'good' Terminator vs. Robocop (it is difficult to not notice the humor and absurdity apparent in the one liners and over the top action hero gestures of the 'good' T1000 as opposed to the neurotic stare of the liquid metal guy terminator in T2: Judgment Day who can transform into any shape and, by no coincident, decides to take the form of a regular beat cop, and the the cop from Robo cop who is completely miserable...).

Create (active nihilism), don't critique (passive nihilism) - or critique in a way that creates (philosophize with a hammer!).

On being a boring 'smart' person

If the rationalist is not the one doling out the science of the time - the master of all snakeoil salesman, the philosopher king issuing the mandates - he is a slave pulled this and way that by whatever the new science of the times says. He is at the whim of the argument, and whatever argument is most convincing dictates his thought and behavior. How sickly this is.

For example, I know highly neurotic, relatively prominent Ivy League professor - who I have talked about here - who teaches research methods at my small time psychoanalytic institute. He has been known to say, unironically, and without a glimmer of self-awareness:

"When the scientific research said red wine and red meat was good for you, I drank red wine. When the research said it was bad for you, I stopped. It takes a long time for research to find the truth. Sometimes what we think is true today will not be tomorrow. This is why we need good research, so that a society and its members can know what to do, how to act."

For this poor man, the locus of control - the will to power - is not found within himself, his body, his instincts, passions, etc., but solely on an ever shifting dialect of 'good and evil' handed down to him from on high, somewhere beyond his understanding - the secular god of positivist science. That is, when the will to power of some billion dollar thought institute says 'jump' he says 'how high?'

To go 'beyond' good and evil, as Nietzsche shows us, is to trust the instincts, impulses, and passions, not be torn this and that way by the argument of others. To go 'beyond' is to be Dionysian, less-conscious, intoxicated; to drink the wine and eat the meat and not care.

As I have shown recently, consuming food that's 'bad' for you and intoxicating substances have no 'argument' other than the very lack of argument, which is that they are enjoyable despite their harms, and as I have shown not so recently, this is the kind of desire that Nick Land - following Nietzsche of course - understands and correctly extracts from Deleuze and Guattari, who themselves followed Nietzsche.

Nomadic desire.

As Fisher says himself (quoting Lyotard's 'evil book' Libidinal Economy), in the earlier quoted Terminator vs. Avatar

"one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, it polystyrene, its books, its sausage pates...and because of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men...: 'ah, but that's alienation, it isn't pretty, hang on, we'll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity.' And in this way you situate yourselves on...the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized desires be totally ignored...you have to tell yourselves: 'how they must suffer to endure that!' And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy...does not disgust us even more. We abhor therapeutics...we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge most stupid. And don't wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either." 

Why would anyone choose to not eat the fast food capitalism serves up? Or choose water when one could choose wine? Even Christians understood this to the extent that they made wine into holy blood so they could have a 'good' but passionate (of the Christ) impulse-based reason to enjoy alcohol!

Again, let us return to Beyond Good and Evil to end

"We are better prepared than any time has ever been for the Great Carnival, the most spirited Mardi-Gras laughter, the most reckless fun, for the transcendental summit of the utmost idiocy, for a truly Aristophanean mockery of the universe...Perhaps we can be parodists of world history...If nothing else living today has a future  - perhaps it bill be our laughter has one" (147).

Nothing too serious escapes from the near future.

Mc/Acc: Fastfood is the official fuel of libidinal materialists

"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other...the spread of McDonald's (a new one opens every three hours) is part of this worldwide phenomenon of countries integrating with the global economy and submitting to its rules..." - Thomas Friedman, 1996

I'm getting back to the roots of this blog - crudely filtering irrelevant and abominable low-pop-culture artifacts through poorly understood high-culture theory for the mostly imagined entertainment of a small internet audience.

Today the pop-culture is fast food music and the theory is libidinal materialism.

As I've shown, the energy drink Monster Energy Zero Ultra is the official drink of libidinal materialist (and accelerationists), while tinnitus is the official health condition of accelerationists. Today I aim to show that fast food is the official food of libidinal materialists (and accelerationists).

Libmat vs. Neorat

As I've written about in the past, Libidinal materialism or 'libmat' is often discussed in opposition to Neorationalism.

To give an all too rough and probably highly disagreeable definition: for libmat, affective and material forces (bodies, animal or otherwise) are primary, and the human is dragged along as a husk behind these forces. From this it follow that appetites and impersonal incentives are valued higher than arguments and agency which are viewed as redundant; for neorat - and honestly I don't really know, I don't read the stuff -  it seems they like to argue, and put faith in reason, logic, and debate.

Libmat is 'exit,' neorat 'voice.'

The 'libidinal' in libidinal materialism arguably comes from Freud. Though there is some debate around it, in short, Freud's English translators used the Latin term libido to refer to instinct, drive, desire, or life force.

In the metapsychology of psychoanalysis, libido (later reconceptualized in Greek as Eros)  is a binding force that is associated or synonymous with nutritional intake, sexuality, and pro-social behavior, as opposed to the death drive and its related Nirvana principle (later reconceptualized in Greek as Thanatos) which is the way entropy is territorialized or captured in a body and how it effects behavior and mentation. It is libido that binds and fuses the death drive, making the forces of death work in the service of life (what Nick Land refers to as 'making it with death.').

The materialism in 'libmat' comes from the thinking that material forces such as the body and outside, unknowable but experiential physical forces and their dynamics are the engine that drive and produce behavior and thought.

In addition to Freud, some thinkers that can be considered part of the 'libmat' lineage are Nietzsche, Reich, Bataille, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom are synthesized in Nick Land's thought in his early 90s essays, and his only book Thirst for Annihilation.  For these thinkers, reason is essentially just 'cope' for unsatisfied bodily drives, and arguments are 'oughts' that come from a slavish instinct to renounce the world as it 'is' in favor of a secretly secularized Christian fantasy.

In this sense, 'libidinal materalism' is a way of saying 'Freudomarxism without the cringey humanism and emphasis on dialectics.' In other words, for libmat, reason, logic, argument, are derived from and therefore analyzed back to bodily experiences, a premise neorat rejects.

Cigarettes, Fastfood, and Capitalism

Urbanomic's Twitter, run by Libmat Robin Mackay, posted this picture of infamous Neorat Reza Negarestani smoking a cig in front of a McDonalds for a humorous caption contest.

What's more interesting than all this introductory footwork - and perhaps more fruitful given the intellectual (lack of) rigor of this current medium (blogging) - is how libmat manifests behaviorally and socially.

My naive mind produces a crude example - smoking. There is no rational argument for smoking cigarettes, and there are rational arguments against smoking (it contributes to preventable deadly illness on an individual scale, in addition to increased rates of pollution on a collective scale; could be argued purchasing cigarettes funds a market that profits off harm, etc.), yet people still smoke. This is because smoking is, for many, highly enjoyable for both biological (simple chemical reactions) and social (in-group behavior) reasons. In other words, the 'argument' for smoking is that it is enjoyable to the appetites and drives of the human, and these appetites and drives will win over the 'oughts' of medical and environmental science and moralism (all 'reason') alike.

There is no argument for smoking unless one collapses reason into enjoyment and considers precisely the lack of a formal argument the 'real' convincing or driving factor behind smoking.

Broadly speaking, these sentiments remain consistent when applied to the libmat conceptualization of Capitalism. Where many see cold, cruel, human crushing evil, libmat sees a machine that is both the product of deep outside forces and that which produces these forces; that which games, hacks, leverages, shapes, etc.,  how the forces end up materializing in and through the human (what Deleue and Guattari describe as the re- and de- territorialization process of "internalizing it so as to better  rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to the children" AO pg. 78).

In other words, Capitalism doesn't need arguments to perpetuate itself, it caught on and, regardless of its moral compass, is highly resistant to any change counter to its interests regardless of whether the humans operating within the system act for or against it. In a rock paper scissors style game, the inhuman and desire beats the human and rationality every time (in true libmat fashion, I am not going over these topics to convince anyone to believe it, but only to highlight what libmats subscribe to).

The same that is said for cigs and capitalism can be said for fast food, which is arguably a sublimated form of cigarette that is, as shown by Friedman above, highly emblematic - more so than cigs - of capitalism. There is no rational argument for fastfood, and there are arguments against fast food (it contributes to preventable deadly illness on an individual scale, in addition to increased rates of illness and social stress on a collective scale), yet people still eat it. People eat it because it tastes good and leverages very basic reward / pleasure chemical circuits in the body. On a larger, collective level, the fastfood chain captures this desire, leverages this circuit, etc., and acts as a node for global capitalism, opening up markets between cities in different countries.

In his work on Templxity, Land conceptualizes the city as a "time machine." Years earlier, in Meltdown, Land conceptualizes the city as a heat machine - "The heat of food and sex" (and afterall, what is head but simply time concentrated). Channeling this heat - the libidinal flow of nutritional and sexual appetite - the fast food chain restaurant utilizes a mixed method of both deletion of and rearranging and re-purposing of cultural code (just as bio and techno virus does) in order to clear out old traditional culture and replaces it with new global capitalism.

As Land writes in Machinic Desire:

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirelty from its enemy's resources." 

As Friedman notes in the piece quoted from at the start, McDonalds has a history of serving to both sides of the culture war(s) - it is transcendental, base desire. It is the smooth loop, it plays both sides, scrambles all the codes.

McAccelerate 

In short, Libmats do not falter in the face of despair, they do not lament, they humorously transform destruction into geographically vast amoral enjoyment (or use libido to bind the geo death drive).

A cultural artifact of early K-time demonstrates this succinctly: see the masterpiece below simply entitled ''Fast Food Song" by the even more simply named British pop band "Fast Food Rockers."

The band itself is clearly a pastiche, kitsch, parody of itself, cashing in on capitalism's appreciation of self-parody, and the song itself (which someone should probably do a Jungle remix of this...) appropriates a traditional folk melody form (rips up culture, deletes tradition, dissolves subjectivites) and overcodes it with post modern content, lyrics that blend the heat of consumerism, food and sex into one salty, tasty, fried, libidinal flatline.

(Overtly sexual lyrics such as: "You like it you love it / You know you really want it. I want it I need it / Nothing else can beat it. Enticing exciting. Driving me crazy / Hungry to the bone. I think of you and lick my lips / You've got the taste I can't resist. Any Sauces? You're chunky and hunky  / I'm coming back for more (Hot Dog and burger). Just savor the flavors / Waiting at your door")

A core concept of the libmat thinkers - especially so with accelerationism - is that an individual is the secondary, derivative byproduct of alien forces, not the important locus of control and agency. As Land puts it in Meltdown, "what is playing you?" ('you' being, in CCRU terms, a "meat puppet").

For a fast food accelerate the processed meat puppet possessed with these fast food flows, look no further than Robin Mackay, director of UK based publican house Urbanomic (who publish CCRU, Land, and related acts), blogger, and self-referred libidinal materialist (and not neorat), who really likes McDonalds and junk food (see his Tweeter threads on the topic  - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.).

Robin Mackay is the individual human articulation of the collective UK musical articulation of the global food industry articulation of the human mental desire articulation of the inhuman bodies articulation of base material alien desire. 

There's a reason its called 'fast' food.

Garbage food is running out, can what is eating you make it through the drive through?

Some Notes on Hell

As I've written elsewhere, the 24 hour mental health clinic is a surreal, unreal, uncanny, dream-like place. This is especially so  when its populated by the same handful of faces - staff and patients alike -  coming and going at odd hours. 

Let me back up. 

To be 24 hour level of care you need to maintain a certain staff-to-resident ratio. 

Say you don't have the staff to maintain this ratio, say, perhaps because its a holiday weekend. The solution is that the state 'mandates' or 'forces' staff already on shift to work longer than they originally agreed to. 

Without getting too much into it - as of yesterday, in 48 hours I've worked 32.

By tomorrow I will have worked 48 out of 72. If I work Night, I have to stay for Day. Sleep slips to the back of line. My coworkers are in the same position. The same 4 or 5 people have 'held down the fort,' so to speak, over the 72 hours. All sleep deprived, caffeine charged, losing it.

I was just describing it to a colleague as Sartre's No Exit filtered through a fever dream streamed to a mid 90s screen. Sleep deprived, overworked psychosis sets in - I wonder if it's not the case that I'm on some directors set, playing a part I don't remember signing up for, like in the way that Ryan Murphy uses the same actors to play different characters both across different seasons of his shows, and within the same season. Or how videogame worlds are filled with skeletal code structures painted over with the same uncanny copy-paste skin graphics; the amorphous crowd in the background painted with same face.

I was just describing it to the adolescent residents - 'I wouldn't ever claim to understand how it feels to be trapped here, forced to be here, but I can tell you, I get a taste of the craziness when I spend almost all my time here.' I of course have the privilege of quitting, of walking off shift, of leaving, etc., (exit) that the residents don't (they only have voice), but unconsciously, in the realm of affect, this does not prevent me from feeling trapped, not unlike they do. 

I work 16 hours, sleep for 2, get up because I have stuff to do, work another 16. When I leave and when I return, I'm with the same people - the same staff, the same patients.

A particle accelerator of misery.
Hell is not other people, its the lack of other people, the lack of options.
Hell is voice, voice is no exit.

Freudomarxism: CIA Psyop to Delegitimize Psychoanalysis?

"They don't realize that we are bringing them the plague" 

- Jung to Freud on the boat to America to meet William James 

The story goes like this.

By the mid 20th century, Freud and Jung's virus, Psychoanalysis, had spread throughout Europe and America, even reaching parts of South America and Asia.

This is not surprising when one considers Psychoanalysis' reliance on then convincing 18th-19th century scientific thinking to ground a biological understanding of the individual, its use of the medical Doctor-Patient relationship for a treatment that relegated the social realm to the wastebasket of mere superficial symptomology, and its abstract emphasis on expensive fees coupled with its concrete bourgeoisie history.

That is, Psychoanalysis gamed hard-formed, time-tested, preexistence structures and flows - both corporeal and non-corporeal - to spread itself through a global network of hosts.

As it spread - and as memetic viruses tend to do - Psychoanalysis patched itself together into a Frankenstein monster of 'conflicting' values; a patchwork creature of stoic, rugged, but intellectual individualist values underpinned by physical science that also dabbled in soft social theorizing through positioning itself as legitimate and sole possessor of a supposedly profound answer to the post-war question of collective violence and human nature.

For these reasons - among others (the more malleable a meme within a specific field, the more it can fit and fold into every hole) -  psychoanalysis had begun to exert considerable influence over the wealthy and socially visible in both Europe - as seen in Freud's relationship with the Bonaparte family who used their wealth and status to help Freud escape Nazi Germany - and America - as seen in the rich East Coast elite of Wall Street marketing firms and the rich West Coast elite of Hollywood film sets alike utilizing psychoanalysis to further their interests (and their synthesis, Woody Allen, Hollywood star and resident New Yorker).

Psychoanalysis was both pop-culture, high art, low-culture, hippy collectivist, emotional, anti-establishment, and bourgeois, ego-enforcing, and state sanctioned. Psychoanalysis had  it all.

Thus, being the rapidly spreading, (somewhat) all encompassing cultural force that it was, psychoanalysis posed a significant threat to the Marxist project which, during the tumultuous ideology-war years of the 50s and 60s, was vying for cultural space to spread out and breathe, the same space that psychoanalysis occupied in both a positive and negative register due to its unique characteristics outlined above.

In other words, it's one thing for a project to work towards negating another project (Psychoanalysis's bougie individual reductionism against Marxism's revolutionary collectivism), but its another thing altogether for a project to negate and affirm another project at the same time (Psychoanalysis against Marxism, and also attempting to solve some of the same problems and answer some of the same questions as Marxism). Psychoanalysis was not simply the right to Marxism's left, it was a competing left.

To put it another way, Psychoanalysis held values contrary to Marxism and its derivatives, and also enacted parts of Marxism's positive project on its own terms; it occupied space inside the left imaginary (anti-fascist social critiques of group think and violence, a humanist goal even), while also operating against the left imaginary from outside (offering conceptual models with corresponding political implications most of which do not toe the Communist party line).

If we take this story to be true, the question is then 'What is a Marxist to do?'

How about Freudomarxism?

The Freudomarxism of the Frankfurt school, I argue, was developed - whether consciously or not - as an ideological reaction to this threat, a clever move intended to impotentize psychoanalysis by folding it into and forever associating it with a kind of Marxism.

Why would this be an effective political strategy?

As media studies shows, and as Foucault tells us in his lectures 'Society Must Be Defended,' one does not control the discourse around a subject - and ultimately exercise one's power - simply by ignoring the subject altogether, or prohibiting discussion about it, one controls the discourse and exercises one's power by talking about the subject in a certain way. As the politicians say, 'get out in front of the story' to control the narrative, or what Fredric Jameson - who Zizek refers to as the only true Marxist around anymore - appropriating Stuart Hall refers to as "the discursive struggle over the delegitimating of opposing ideologies." One does not have to construct a meaningful project, one simply has to discredit the former or opposing project through language games, rhetoric, polemics.

But is there any reason to really believe this paranoid conspiracy theory?

For obvious reasons, the postWWII era was a pivotal time for thinkers and theorists. In the power vacuum birthed of the ending of the war, the shifting of alliances, etc., the political imaginary was charged with anticipations of what could be. If you were in political power, it was your time to make some moves. If you weren't in political power, it was your time to try and talk your way into power by convincing others that your values were the right and good ones, while those with 'real' power were the wrong and bad ones.

Excluding beloved Walter Benjamin, the half of the Farnkfurt School people care about - Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and Habermas - all published half or more than half of their works in 1950 or after. Such influential works - works which happen to synthesize psychoanalysis and Marxism - include Marcuse's Eros and Civlization, and Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality. What better way to defeat what could be a political or theoretical enemy than by using it and its own legitimization methods to legitimize something counter to it (what in my naivety I will call psycho-Leninism).

On multiple occasion - Twitter, podcast with Justin Murphy, etc. -  Kantbot has accused the Frankfurt School, Marcuse in particular, of being a 'Fed' or 'psyop.' Similarly, on Twitter he shares his thoughts about the institutions of social psychology and their tendency to produce preprogrammed tropes that insidiously dominate our thinking and influence our behavior.

Kantbot is right.

As one blog points out (utilizing Wiki) "Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in U.S. Government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency);" as another points out "...then transferred to State. After leaving State in 1951, he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant (and even CIA has admitted that, at the time, the Rockefeller Foundation was closely tied to CIA) to study Soviet Marxism, and eventually wrote a book on the subject"

As one blog points out, the CIA takes French critical theory serious enough to read it (see the original document here www.cia.gov › CIA-RDP78-03061A000400030036-7). As two blogs point out, between 43 and 50 Marcuse worked for the predecessor of the CIA, and in 51 he received government funds from a foundation tied to the CIA to critique the USSR, a line of research which some believe had enough influence to aid in significant political leadership change.

None of this is super convincing, but it does indicate that Marcuse, who for me is the first person who comes to mind when one thinks of the misnomer 'Freudomarxism,' may have been playing a bigger political game than is initially apparent, and that it is not beyond doubt that the utilization of psychoanalysis could have served the dual purpose of disarming psychoanalysis of its power while also appealing to that very power. This would certainly not be at odds with the history of state powers using psychiatric or psychological means for control.

The question then is if the virus of psychoanalysis can break free of its tired psychiatry-antipsychiatry and left-right circuits and get back to doing what it does best, whatever that it means anyways...