The contemporary subject’s territory and the “machine of the world” (50 years of Eros and Civilization)

Abstract

In spite of being a classic theme in West, the ‘mundi machina’ or machine of the world is a polysemic sign whose manifestation in the present time has resemblances with the critical theory in its analysis of the new forms of mass culture repression. The sign unveiled itself as a promise of fidelity of the thought to the being and true, but after the XX century, it assumed regressive forms that do not cease to desolate the subject in politics, science and reason. As a representation of a collective aesthetics, the ‘mundi machina’ can be understood through a culture psychoanalysis ruled by science and technology. Such enterprise was performed by Herbert Marcuse in the work Eros and Civilization - a philosophical inquiry into Freud (1955). This essay, when remembering the 50 years of this work’s publication - aims at a new reading of the Marcuse’s challenge, who carried out a certain psychoanalysis of the great refusal to the “mundi machina”, in order to identify the repressed character of this refusal before the destructive power of civilization, using the essay to express the principle of contradiction.