"A Matter of Love and Death: Marcuse and Adorno on Narcissism"

Kathy Kiloh
Responses by Roberto Longoni & Rogelio Regalado
June 23, 2022

In "Eros and Civilization" (1955), Herbert Marcuse argued that Freud’s concept of primary narcissism (the happy and tensionless psychic stage prior to individuation to which the death drive seeks to return) could furnish a positive model for a new non-repressive society. Using Marcuse’s claims as a starting point, this talk explores Adorno’s alternate account of narcissism as a block on social transformation. While Marcuse highlights the emancipatory potential of narcissism, Adorno reads narcissism as an actual collective reaction to cold and repressive social conditions. A better reality, Adorno argues, would require a strengthening of the ego, not its dissolution in gratification. The lecture will suggest that the ego would then be capable of more than mere repression of the drives, directing the death drive against the reified and narcissistic self; we can find in Adorno’s "Negative Dialectics" (1966) and "Aesthetic Theory" (1970) attempts to correct Marcuse’s reading of Freud, and that Adorno develops there a more effective understanding of how drives might be organized in a society no longer dominated by the death drive.

SPEAKER

Kathy Kiloh is Associate Professor of Humanities at OCAD University in Toronto. Her past research includes work on ethics, aesthetics, and theories of embodiment in T.W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. She is the cofounder of the Association for Adorno Studies and the former editor of the journal Adorno Studies. She is currently writing a manuscript about love, autonomy, and solidarity in Adorno.

RESPONDENTS

Roberto Longoni is a PhD student in the Sociology program at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades ‘Alfonso Vélez Pliego’-BUAP, as well as a professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Puebla). He has been working on the updating of the “classical” Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (along with a critique of the “invented tradition” of Habermas and Honneth), the New Readings of Marx and the political philosophy of popular insurrections. In particular, his PhD research actually focuses on an interpretation of the popular revolt that broke out in Chile in October 2019 from the perspective of wertkritik and Open Marxism, enhanced by Adorno's negative epistemology and his understanding of critical theory as non-identical knowledge.

Rogelio Regalado is PhD student in Subjectivity and Critical Theory at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades ‘Alfonso Vélez Pliego’-BUAP, as well as professor in International Relations program at the same university. He is also editor of ‘Grietas. Revista Crítica de Política Internacional’, a publication of the Instituto de Ciencias Jurídicas de Puebla. His research interest revolve around the critique of nationalism and fascism from a non-orthodox Marxist perspective as well as different expressions of international anti-capitalism. His current research consist of a critical re-elaboration of the concept of fascism and its relation to capitalism.