In 1960, Herbert Marcuse wrote to the organizer and Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya to ask her opinion on atmospheric claims about an exhaustion of revolutionary consciousness in the working class that were circulating across the political spectrum in America. Dunayevskaya’s fiery response, drawing on her work in Black radical organizing communities in Detroit, would constitute a crucial but neglected bibliography for One-Dimensional Man and Marcuse’s writings moving forward. Her correspondence offered not only sociological counterevidence; it also provoked methodological challenges concerning the relevance of race for Marcuse’s philosophical, economic, and libidinal categories. This article lays out the development of Marcuse’s account of negativity, need, and exhaustion, first, in Hegelian-Marxist and, second, in Freudian terms, to reconstruct the specter of what Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation.” Third, in the mode of intellectual history, it disrupts and remaps Marcuse’s analysis from the perspective of his correspondence with Dunayevskaya, demonstrating how their encounter drove him to revise and sharpen his psychoanalytic critique of the possibility of radical transformation by incorporating the question of racial formation not only on the side of praxis but also at the philosophical heart of his reading of Freud’s libidinal and political economy.
Nica Siegel (Fri,) studied this question.