On excessive pleasure: from Marcuse to Aristotle

Abstract

As Freud convincingly shows, civilised political life is a source of constant uneasiness. Desire propels the subject towards an end that remains unfulfilled and pleasure is reduced to a transition from one moment of displeasure to another. Freud conceives pleasure as suppression of an absence, as the result of a process. Marcuse in his turn showed that excessive pleasure works as a counterbalance for displeasure, the repression of sexual impulse and the hypertrophy of the genitalia producing intense pleasure. A post-Freudian theory of pleasure would complement Marcuse’s materialist critique of psychoanalysis by learning to conceive pure pleasure (with Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics) in a non-metaphysical way, segregated from the notion of superfluity.