ABSTRACT
In Chapter 10, Chris L. Smith turns to the seminal work of the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, to explore the complex relation between desire and culture. In his text of 1955, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud, Marcuse unpicked Freud’s account of the antagonistic relation between civilisation and desire. He located in the work of Freud an opportunity for a richer relation between libidinal forces and those mechanisms that structure society and civilisation itself. It is this account that makes Marcuse an important figure in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Alongside the work of Marcuse, Smith explores a conceptually similar moment in the architectural writing of Reyner Banham. Smith focuses on Banham’s essay “The New Brutalism” (1955), where the question of architecture’s place with respect to civilisation and desire is raised.
