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: Althouse

"We are witnessing a new sexualization of politics, something quite other from 'repressive desublimation,' the term made famous by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s..."

"... to describe the way an advanced industrial culture uses a mix of technology and partially satiated consumer desires to neutralize any potential working-class revolt. We might call it promiscuity in its psychotic mode. Brazenly, it displays itself without apology to a world excited and repelled in equal measure by unconscious forces?lust, greed, hatred, and rage?that no one readily admits to and that are being harnessed on behalf of everyone. No point, therefore, asking how bad it can get, how far they are willing to go, or how on earth they can get away with it all. Going too far is the point. The transgression is the draw and the appeal?transgression always carries a sexual tremor even when it is not manifestly about sex.... It is a truism of psychoanalysis that the law always nurtures the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of its own demise, because the super-ego, the agent of the law inside the head, is too tyrannical to be obeyed with any consistency...."

Full post as published by Althouse on October 26, 2020 (boomark / email).