This Side of the Pleasure Principle

Peter E Gordon

doi:10.21827/krisis.41.2.38068

Abstract

This Side of the Pleasure Principle

Highlights

“He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure [...] has a stable and valid idea of truth.”This surely ranks among the more memorable and provocative statements in Adorno’s Minima Moralia; it appears in the re ection (§ 37) in which the author o ers critical remarks on the more repressive or anti-utopian themes in psychoanalysis
The title itself is intended as a sly riposte to Freud, whose Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) introduced the controversial idea of a destructive instinct (Todestrieb) alongside the instinct for pleasure (Lustprinzip) or libido.Written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Freud’s revisionist argument for a second and competing instinct of aggression arguably marked a conservative turn in psychoanalytic theory, insofar as it prepared the theoretical terrain for the idea that civilization can only survive if it represses the instinct for aggression that is a piece of the human being’s own psychic constitution
In my own ongoing encounter with Minima Moralia, these critical re ections on psychoanalysis remain of greatest importance, not least because they o er a corrective to the dominant interpretation of Adorno as an embittered negativist who looks upon modern society as a place of unremitting darkness in which true happiness is impossible and “life is not lived.”

Summary

Introduction

Licence “He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure [...] has a stable and valid idea of truth.”This surely ranks among the more memorable and provocative statements in Adorno’s Minima Moralia; it appears in the re ection (§ 37) in which the author o ers critical remarks on the more repressive or anti-utopian themes in psychoanalysis. “He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure [...] has a stable and valid idea of truth.”This surely ranks among the more memorable and provocative statements in Adorno’s Minima Moralia; it appears in the re ection (§ 37) in which the author o ers critical remarks on the more repressive or anti-utopian themes in psychoanalysis.

Results

Conclusion