Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic

Abstract

Marcuse’s historicization of Freud’s eternal conflict between the reality and pleasure principles sought to redeem the cognitive and moral status of phantasy for utopian socialism. To save the pleasure principle, Marcuse also revised the cultural myths of Narcissus and Orpheus in place of the productivist myth of Prometheus. It is argued that this move committed him to patriarchal revisionism at the expense of the historicist reading of matriarchy in Bachofen’s Mother Right (1861), to which he alludes without sufficient study. The consequences of this move for later feminist critique of Marxism is also examined.