Glossing Freud, Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1955 that the methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture.' Freud's thesis concerning the costs of progress, enunciated most clearly in his 1939 speculations on Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, is, of course, well known. Nowhere else did state more clearly that the repression of libido is neither biographically nor historically contingent but rather a pan-cultural imperative. negotiations involved in the transition from pleasure principle to reality principle involve both significant gains and substantial losses for individuals and whole cultures alike. More important, the losses appear unavoidable; is no cultural value, Marcuse quotes Freud, whereas the gains seem tenuous.2 While the sacrifice of libido is a necessary condition for the attainment of civilizing progress, renunciation by no means guarantees this progress. Moreover, a return to a supposedly natural, i.e., pre-civilizational, libidinal state is neither possible nor desirable: The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct.3 Marcuse's reading of anticipated a reaction to in general and specifically to Das Unbehagen in der Kultur that would gather its full force during the 1960s, era that maintained, against Freud, that eros can be liberated without loss, that the emancipation of sexuality was a positive political force, that happiness, in other words, was a cultural value-or at least ought to be. Marcuse's reading is, of course, much more nuanced than this, but he does insist, seminally, that Freud had established a substantive link between human freedom and happiness on the one hand and sexuality on the other: the latter provided the primary source for the former and at the same time the ground for their necessary restriction in civilization, and he argues against the revisionist of psychoanalytic thinkers like Fromm and Horney with their call for a spiritualization of freedom and happiness [which] demanded the weakening of this link.114 For Marcuse (and for Freud, according to Marcuse), an enormous gulf separated real freedom and happiness from the pseudo freedom and happiness that are practiced and preached in a repressive civilization.5 In the late '60s and '70s the revaluation of the sex/culture dichotomy initiated by thinkers like Marcuse led Germanists to explore with considerable urgency libidinal utopias in literature. From the 1970s on Dantons Tod has held a privileged position within this search;6 Buchner's Robespierre appeared like a personification of the principle of repressive civilization,7 and Camille's vision of the erotic state in scene one seemed like early promise of a reconciliation between politics and libido. Within this relatively recent hermeneutic tradition, the prostitute Marion-the focus of this article-has been fashioned into a fantasy of erotic salvation, a vision of a sexuality freed from shame and guilt, a powerful promise of life lived in the name and service of pleasure. On the following pages I shall demonstrate that this reading itself entails a massive repression symptomatic ofboth pre- and post-Freudian fantasies of a world without loss. Marcuse, for all his accurate objections to the Pollyannish revisionism of Freud, may still underestimate the full force of Freud's pessimism concerning not merely the fate of libido in battle with the forces that oppose it but rather with regard to the positive potential of libido itself. While his reading is largely inspired by Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, a text in which allows for a sharp distinction between eros and thanatos, Marcuse largely neglects Freud's more sobering reflections on the affinities between death and pleasure as profoundly related forms of homeostasis in Jenseits des Lustprinzips.9 Contemplating and modifying Schiller's and Kleist's quintessentially Romantic visions, Marcuse conceives of a place where erotic pleasure can be regained in the same way the grace of a hypothetical prehistoric innocence can be regained through heightened self-consciousness. …