RADICAL INTERLOCUTORS, ENTER STAGE LEFT: HERBERT MARCUSE, PETER WEISS, REVOLUTIONARY DIALOGUE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Abstract

This thesis explores the parallels between philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s efforts in Eros and Civilization (1955) to wed the ideas of Marx and Freud on the one hand, and the debate between Marquis de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat that playwright Peter Weiss stages, on the other, in his play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (1963). Marcuse’s innovations bled into the world of Weiss who, despite his own assertions to the contrary, I will argue, wrote a play that owes a great debt to the debates of his time as well as to critical theory. What is at stake in the fictional dialogues set forth by Marcuse and Weiss, as I will contend in this thesis, are basic questions about the role of fictional debate in revolutionary praxis. What work is done by polarizing or marrying two schools of thought? What is the role of the author synthesizing or bifurcating a dialectic in an era of social upheaval? These questions frame my individual consideration of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and equally my consideration of Weiss’s Marat / Sade. But the larger goal of setting the work of Marcuse in dialogue with that of Weiss is to consider the role of art in theoretical thinking and vice versa. Utilizing two prominent figureheads of the Left cultural moment of the 60s, this thesis argues that confrontation itself is a productive endeavor and that the two contexts dialectically bleed into one another. The worth of this project is thus to capture a specific scene of theoretical and artistic thought in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which are interconnected.