Eros and Freedom in Planet Waves
Last updated 2/1/22
A note from the author: To prepare this essay for newsletter publication, I adopted a house style, mixing Chicago style citations (for printed texts with page numbers) — I used endnotes rather than footnotes for those sources since the post does not contain separate pages — with journalistic attribution and hyperlinks to sources available online.
I’m crestfallen—the world of illusion is at my door / I ain’t haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore / The prison walls are crumbling down, there is no end in sight / I gained some recognition, but I lost my appetite / Sweet beauty, meet me at the border late tonight
-Bob Dylan, “Tough Mama”
The lyrics quoted above are from Bob Dylan’s “Tough Mama,” a song featured on what I consider one of his most underrated albums, “Planet Waves,” released on January 17, 1974. Dylan recorded the album with The Band, the Canadian-American rock group immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), which also features Dylan. The singer-songwriter had previously toured with The Band in the mid-1960s and they released The Basement Tapes together a little more than a year after putting out Planet Waves.
To commemorate his 80th birthday last May, I wrote about how Dylan’s music speaks to the human condition, including our unending fascination with the ineffable and, dare I suggest, the divine.
In a more recently published essay I wrote for a philosophy journal, I briefly mentioned Dylan’s lyrics as part of a larger discussion, inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s work, concerning art, alienation and the movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex.
The point in the latter was not to suggest Dylan must be down with the theory or practice of PIC abolition, or to insinuate that his songs explicitly advocate abolition. None of that is the case, as far as I know.
Rather, by referencing Dylan in the journal article I merely wanted to suggest that his music has both indicted the ugliness of existing society and has provided a sensuous experience of a better, truly beautiful world waiting to be brought into being. But the song worlds he constructs resonate because they also tell the sorts of stories and express the sorts of desires that speak to shared human nature within our extant reality.
Now, I’d like to put a finer point on it. I intend to develop many of the following ideas elsewhere. For now, I just want to put them forward, using music from Planet Waves – along with a few references to songs by Dylan found on other albums – as a way to illustrate the ideas and using the ideas to better understand and to begin to explain the album as an illustrative aesthetic dimension. In that aesthetic universe, I argue, expressions of Eros and freedom dwell. By using relevant social theory and apropos heterodox texts, I hope to use the discussion of the album to show how the erotic relates to and in the appropriate contexts can nurture human freedom, putting us in proximity to the awesomeness of our endowed nature and in correspondence with the supernal from whence we came.
Thoughts on and Theories of Human Freedom
First, I’d like to suggest Dylan’s music invokes our innate instincts for freedom – or, our instincts geared toward enlarging the understanding, experience and scope of human freedom. In so doing, the music might be a conduit for or at least simpatico with what I referred to as the “spirit of abolition” in the aforementioned Eidos essay. If that spirit balks at infringements upon freedom and represents the collective instincts for liberation, as I assume any movement ethos related to abolition of the prison-industrial complex must, then it’s not a stretch to suggest Dylan, when writing and recording and performing, embodies and communicates that “spirit of abolition” to some degree or another, whether he is conscious of it or not.1 As Grammy-award winning songwriter Rodney Crowell recalled in his keynote conversation with Jeff Slate during the Dylan@80 virtual conference in May 2021, Dylan has said before that he never spent a second trying to figure out where his creative impulse comes from. Likewise, the (human) nature of (partially) liberated artistic creativity and the ethos it communicates are not always comprehended or expected when the artist creates. But that creativity provides a sensuous experience, a titillating taste of liberated living that echoes and nourishes a desire for freedom and, arguably, an abolitionist spirit.
Freedom is a loaded concept, no question. It has ideological serviceability for elite interests and institutions that attach themselves to and celebrate the idea but in practice prefer people’s freedoms remain merely formal, rather than substantive, to borrow a distinction used in “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published posthumously with respect to the lead author. The co-authors spelled out what a rich and substantive notion and practice of freedom might entail, including
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today.2
As they go on to suppose, human beings “may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.”3 Freedom can be thought of, then, as antithetical to authority that represses, crushes or tries to control and coerce. Absence of meaningful say in the decisions that affect you – the prevailing custom within the criminal punishment system – amounts to an absence of freedom. Freedom in that sense is also conspicuously missing from most workplaces within the capitalist system. They tend to function as forms of what philosopher Elizabeth Anderson (no relation) has termed “private government” because the governance of those enterprises typically conforms to the norms of class society and the dictates of constant capital accumulation; thus, the majority of laborers are excluded from participating in major decisions about their working lives.
Inspired by the work of Herbert Marcuse, George Katsiaficas has claimed the “unending need for freedom” exhibited by our species “constitutes the planet’s most powerful natural resource.”4 Katsiaficas has extensively researched Eros, our life-affirming and life-engendering instincts, in relation to social movements and uprisings. Marcuse’s son, Peter, wrote that Katsiaficas’s concept of the “eros effect” – a theory I touch on below but do not seriously engage here so as not to go too far afield – emphasizes “the instinctual foundation of the desire for freedom, in which a biologically based pleasure drive–eros–is given free play.”5 As Jason del Gandio and AK Thompson noted, Katsiaficas claims the human desire for freedom “is a general human quality that transcends space and time.”6 As they explained, he follows Marcuse in arguing “that the human species is hardwired for freedom and justice and that human nature is an aid to the revolutionary process.”7 Katsiaficas has called collective confrontation with and contestation of oppression “a conscious expression of humanity’s innate desire for freedom.”8
Keeping those conceptions of freedom in mind, we return to lyrics from “Tough Mama,” as the first two lines can be read as articulating an aspect of “The Great Refusal,” to borrow from Marcuse.9 On the track, Dylan sings, “I’m crestfallen–the world of illusion is at my door / I ain’t haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore.” The artist shares a sentiment many share or at least have felt before. The amount of what John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro, drawing on the work of Harry Frankfurt, refer to as “bullshit,” abounds and awaits us right outside the door. The notion of “bullshit” in this sense refers to the subversion “of intelligibility in order to belie the act of questioning,” demoralizing, dispiriting and dare I suggest dehumanizing deceptions “inimical to both curiosity and to wonder.”10 Dylan himself might’ve had in mind the illusion-producing culture/entertainment industries in which he’s enmeshed and through which his art and the art that reaches most people is funneled. In my article commemorating Dylan’s work for his 80th birthday last May, I mentioned Dylan’s prophetic words. It’s notable, then, that the second line from the song that’s quoted above can conjure the image of a biblical prophet as well as the proverbial shepherd responsible for a flock of sheep. In the song-world built by Dylan and The Band, the protagonist refuses to lead those who follow him or his music into the enormity of bullshit found within the world of cultural commodities controlled, in the main, by only a handful of corporations. That’s one reading. Another might stress the prophet-protagonist’s refusal to lead sheep to the slaughter, or to confinement followed by killing, and that metaphor could be interpreted as vocalized resistance to complicity with Thanatos, the necrophilic drive toward death – or, more dreadfully, the sadistic instinctual gratification, and in capitalist society, the profit derived from the suffering and disposability of others. The lyrics thus reveal a latent repudiation of Thanatos, a renunciation of the drive to extinguish freedom and a disavowal of that which mutilates Eros, our instinctual desires to affirm life and bestow joy onto each other and ourselves in the process.
Whether the artist intended to convey the above is not of absolute importance. The artwork voices our liberatory instincts. As I suggested elsewhere, Dylan gave voice to that human thirst for freedom in a roughly contemporaneous song about the injustice of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s imprisonment, and he did so about a decade before that in “Chimes of Freedom,” which appears to conjoin the experiential awe of freedom with the eroticized ecstasy of shared, enriched sensuousness – a combination or equation to which I will return. As regards “Like a Rolling Stone,” which the eponymously named magazine ranked as the fourth best song of all time as of 2021, Jonah Lehrer noted Dylan once referred to it as “his first ‘completely free song... the one that opened it up for me,’” illustrating how creative experimentation with the aesthetic form can convey and announce our naturally endowed need for freedom. Also, in “Blowing in the Wind,” another one of Dylan’s iconic songs, the artist poses the question of human freedom while rhetorically interrogating the willful estrangement from other human beings associated with the others being deprived of the same instinctual need, singing, “Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist / Before they’re allowed to be free? / Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn’t see? / The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
As Sean Latham noted in the first episode of his four-part BBC series, “It Ain’t Me You’re Looking For: Bob Dylan at 80,” the melody for “Blowing in the Wind” “actually derives from a 19th century anti-slavery song called “No More Auction Block for Me” that had been performed by Black activist singers like Paul Robeson and Odetta.” (A young Dylan also performed a closer rendition of that song, titled, “No More Auction Block,” back in 1962.) “The beauty and power of this deceptively simple tune emerged not just from the lyrics, but from the alchemical process Dylan used to craft it,” Latham told BBC listeners. Building on older material, “the song that made Dylan famous,” as Latham explained, features “a sense of yearning that refuses to give up on the dream of liberation, even if that dream’s fulfillment might be infinitely deferred.”
But we want to focus here on Planet Waves. The next lyrics from the song “Tough Mama” directly references the destruction of a prison or of all prisons: “The prison walls are crumbling down, there is no end in sight / I gained some recognition, but I lost my appetite.” Again, it’s not Dylan’s individual belief about imprisonment that is at issue here. Rather, it’s the recognition of prison walls as symbolic of conditions of alienation and the horror of human confinement, an incontrovertible arrest of freedom. The next line could well be another autobiographical reflection, given Dylan’s immense rise to fame and how the cult of celebrity can eviscerate the desire to be seen and loved by one’s fellow human beings.
Erotic Representations in Planet Waves: Artwork Pushing Freedom’s Door Ajar?
Ironically, by way of the aesthetic dimension alienated from the restrictions of established reality, Dylan’s music speaks to our most intimate and erotic relations and experiences that are arguably keys to overcoming the institutionalized alienation actively thwarting human freedom. What I am still trying to parse out is whether erotic interpersonal relations and practices represent another dimension or component of freedom, or if instead they should more accurately be described as preconditions for or much-needed partners in the realization of greater freedom. Either way, we can locate and vicariously delight in the poetic portrayal of libidinal liberation and amorous connection within the domain of song.
There’s no shortage of that to be found on Planet Waves. The first track on the album, “On a Night Like This,” sets the stage. Within the first three seconds of the song, Dylan begins with the following verse, sandwiching tender imperatives within the repeated refrain:
On a night like this / So glad you've come to stay / Hold on to me, pretty miss / Say you'll never go away to stray / Run your fingers down my spine / Bring me a touch of bliss / It sure feels right / On a night like this
Indeed, the singer assumes the role of someone entreating a woman the singer intimates opted to stay there to hold him and not to leave. Then, several songs later, in the penultimate track on Planet Waves, “Never Say Goodbye,” Dylan tells the listener, “You’re beautiful beyond words / You’re beautiful to me / You can make me cry / Never say goodbye.” The power of direct physical embrace to dissolve feelings of estrangement ought not to be underestimated. Nor should the ability of ineffable beauty to bring one to tears upon departure. The power of a paramour’s touch to incite bliss bespeaks Eros in and through the flesh as well as the euphoric potential of physical union. Beholding embodied beauty can be akin to witnessing the trans-historical, universal impetus for such stunning embodiment and being awestruck by how striking the the personified, living, breathing works of art and the forces or source of said artistry are. A beautifully crafted song (and album, for that matter) yields the same effect and elicits similar affect, a mesmerizing attraction to the microcosmic and interconnected macrocosmic form and conception of conscious Beauty capable of bringing us to tears should she bid us adieu.
In “Hazel,” Dylan sings about needing someone to do more than refrain from tear-jerking egress. With “Hazel,” he desires not just a “touch of bliss,” but rather notes, “you got something I want plenty of / Ew a little touch of your love.” Here as before, “touch” functions figuratively to refer to a facet of love, like it referred to a bit of bliss in the previous, but the word choice is more than metaphorical. It also highlights the direct association between human bodies making deliberate contact with one another – along with the feel of flesh upon flesh – and the blissful sensation that ineluctably ensues as well as the desire to be loved and physically receive and partake in love.
Later in the song, as Dylan informs the listener, “Oh no, I don’t need any reminder / To know how much I really care / But it’s just making me blinder and blinder / Because I’m up on a hill and still you’re not there.” The dearth of companionship can, as the old saying goes, make ‘the heart grow fonder,’ and sometimes it can remind the person left longing how much they care for another, as it’s easy to take the other person and what you create together for granted. But it seems the protagonist in “Hazel” doesn’t require separation to grasp the extent of concern with and for another. Standing alone makes the person “blinder and blinder,” as the lack of love, meaning the lack of opportunity to demonstrate how much one cares for another and the inability to exercise our erotic capacities in the most intimate of possible relations, results in a withering of an arguably essential human sense perception. Our ‘sixth sense’ of Eros suffers and fails to reach its potential absent the immediately shared sensuous experience. Eros withers when our erotically-charged capacity to care is restricted to a narrow experience of the self bereft of the bliss co-produced by coming together. As underscored in “Never Say Goodbye,” we humans will wait tenaciously for a person we adore, and we’ll withstand waves of emotion flowing from the vast sea of the unconscious until that special someone lends a helping, loving hand. “The crashing waves roll over me,” as Dylan described in the song, “As I stand upon the sand / Wait for you to come / And grab hold of my hand.”
One reason erotic relations relate to greater fulfillment of human freedom might have to do with the way physical merging, along with what some might consider a concomitant spiritual conjoining, makes possible and produces what one cannot engender alone. That can be true of a close relationship, romantic or otherwise, that does not involve sex. But the consummation of romantic relations through the sexual act also brings about a kind of synthesis that I think many people can attest transports combined human nature to an experiential level likely otherwise unachievable.
I think it helpful to re-introduce Katsiaficas here. His conception of freedom is of the more substantive variety, and it enriches the notion of what it means to be free. He’s referred to freedom as “the dialectical unity of what are generally regarded as opposites–autonomous individual existence and collective solidarity.”11 Freedom implies not being told what to do, yes; it implies not being forced against your will to do what you do not want to do. But it can also be thought of as requiring “collective solidarity” for its realization.
If we penetrate deeper, we might encounter explicitly erotic dimensions of freedom as well. Perhaps in addition to thinking about freedom in dialectical fashion, it also makes sense to understand Eros and freedom dialectically, as two sides of the same coin. Or, we might liken the relationship to that of two passionate lovers whose interests diverge as they ineluctably converge, transporting their vessels, human nature and the art we produce, to climactic heights unattainable without their interpenetration.Together, do they constitute a dialectical relationship? Or are they better conceived as inextricable complementary forces-cum-experiences?
To better formulate the problem and to better understand why it’s relevant here, we can again juxtapose Katsiaficas’s view with what Graeber and Wengrow suggested. In discussing the “dialogic encounter” between European colonists and indigenous Americans who schooled them on personal freedoms, civic debate and refusing arbitrary power, Graeber and Wengrow suggest the correspondence concerned “liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism.”12 They used the term ‘communism’ not in reference to “a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,’”13 drawing on that seminal Marxian definition. Mutual aid or communism in the sense described seems comparable to the pole of “collective solidarity” Katsiaficas considered constitutive of freedom.
Now, Graeber and Wengrow go on to suggest there’s “a certain minimal ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies,” referring to
a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly be extended.14
Extending that baseline metaphor could assist in extending that “baseline communism,” or the scope of mutual aid. One might ‘drive baseline,’ to borrow basketball lingo, as a form of reasoned debate in favor of social relations of solidarity. But might Eros also become an ally in that effort to make “baseline communism” more commonplace? If so, might it elicit corresponding hypertrophy of the figurative human heart and extension of already-existing communising practices in ways that enlarge the realm of human freedom?
For that to occur, I wonder if the eroticization of mutual aid might play an important role. We appear to have a natural instinct for freedom. Do we also exhibit natural inclinations toward mutual aid, and if so it would make sense to appreciate how Eros works in and through both? The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued humans, like other living organisms, are “subject to the great principle of mutual aid which grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life.”15 Taking that into account, the relationship between the life-preserving instincts associated with Eros and the practice of mutual aid (“baseline communism”) comes into focus. Perhaps mutual aid in most if not all its manifold forms possesses an erotic component insofar as it affirms and involves bringing pleasure to a human life – critically, another human life or other people’s lives. Dylan even endorses an ethic of mutual aid on Planet Waves. Small wonder, as we’ll see below, he links the ethical practice to the divine, insinuating a connection between our uncoerced cooperative instincts and a pleasurable path toward breathtaking interstellar space that’s worth savoring one step at a time, at least if we read the song verse with certain themes in tow. In “Forever Young,” May God bless and keep you always / May your wishes all come true / May you always do for others / And let others do for you / May you build a ladder to the stars / And climb on every rung / May you stay forever young.” The line at the end repeated throughout puts the idea of eternal youth in conversation with that journey to another miraculous world propelled by relations against and beyond any conditions of alienation currently keeping us down and dampening our spirits. Careful consideration of and attentiveness to another’s sensuous, even sensual pleasure could enhance the appeal of ‘baseline communism’ while bringing it into being by way of profoundly intimate connections, the antithesis to states of extreme separation or alienation that predominate today.
Eros Relishing in Sex: Beyond Stigma and Toward Supernal Realization
So let’s discuss sex. As I noted in a 2014 essay drawing on Marcuse’s “Eros and Civilization,” Marcuse borrowed from Freud to suggest repressive society upholds the “primacy of genitality” at the expense of a fuller eroticization of the human and social body. Katsiaficas claims Marcuse intimated “that the liberation of eros from its reification as sex sets a course of confrontation with society.”16 In a similar vein, Katsiaficas inquired, “In our age, when reversal of commodification of the life-world is paramount, can we reclaim eros from the throes of its reification as sex?”17 But that might be the wrong question.
To pose the problem more astutely, I borrow insights from the Kabbalistic tradition. I don’t do so dogmatically, or in concert with all halakha, or with professed fidelity to the Torah or to any religious doctrine. Rather, I do so because the heterodox Jewish tradition offers another way of thinking about human beings and the world germane to the discussion of Eros and freedom. Kabbalah is also a method and practice with a special relevance to the subjects of this essay. The late Leonard Cohen, one of Dylan’s friends and contemporaries, studied Kabbalah, as his former Rabbi and friend, Mordecai Finley, has acknowledged. Dylan appears to have been heavily influenced by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, who studied the philosophy of Kabbalah.18
As Rabbi Allen Maller has noted, the Jewish understanding of sex as sacred and intercourse as a Mitsvah, a commandment carried out in the name of divine law, differs from Christianity’s comparatively prim perception of sex since the Apostle Paul, who asserted it’s “good for a man not to touch a woman” (Corinthians 7:1).19 According to Maller, during the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent III called sex “so shameful as to be inehrently wicked.”20 Still today, sex is often considered profane within hegemonic culture. In contradistinction to culture industry commodification of sexual representations and to the enormous popularity of Internet-based companies like PornHub, we still frequently come to believe that “to describe people in sexual imagery is to degrade and insult them.”21 I’ll add that this is a phenomenon seemingly most pronounced in the United States, where images of making love have historically – and are typically still – treated far more severely in terms of ratings and viewed as comparatively dangerous vis-à-vis gratuitous violence on screen which disproportionately receives a pass when sexual ardor does not. Erotic imagery, be it visual or subtly constructed in a Dylan song, might be dangerous indeed. But the danger has more to do with how channeling and representing Eros in and through an aesthetic medium, a dimension alienated from our everyday lives, seems to stir within us affect and desire fundamentally opposed to pervasive conditions of alienation, and thus inimical to the institutionalized estrangement that we’ve already suggested militates against freedom.
Contra the position of Marcuse and Katsiaficas – as well as in contrast to the cultural fear, debasement, dismissiveness of, skepticism surrounding sexuality, and in opposition to the alienation of Eros from practices of carnal connection – Kabbalists have historically associated sex with what is supernal. “If people had the elevated and exalted concept of sex that is called for in the Zohar,” Maller wrote in reference to the widely-cited Kabbalistic text, “they would realize that a description or an image involving sexual imagery is always a positive, beautiful image,” worthy or praise instead of denigration.22 We find some confirmation of this in Gershom Scholem’s edited selection of sections from the Zohar, that wondrous literary composition some believe to be authored by the 13th century Spanish Kabbalist Moses de Leon, who many also “regarded as the redactor of ancient writings and fragments, to which he may perhaps have added something of his own.”23 Moses de Leon or whoever authored the text several centuries ago poses an apropos question: “When is ‘one’ said of a man?” – and the writer responds to the rhetorical query with the following: “When he is male together with female and is highly sanctified and zealous for sanctification; then and only then he is designated one without mar of any kind.”24 I don’t doubt holy communion can be achieved in relations that are not heteronormative. I’ll focus here on relations between men and women, as I believe I can better speak to relationships of that kind. It’s also the focus of the tradition at hand, in the main, and the focus appears most relevant for a discussion of Dylan’s Planet Waves and the majority of the artist’s oeuvre.
The section from the Zohar quoted above goes on to state that once partners are “conjoined, they make one soul and one body: a single soul through their affection; a single body, for only when male and female are conjoined they form a single body,” and in such a state, “God abides upon ‘one’ and endows it with a holy spirit,”25 one befitting the union. In a commentary predicated upon Proverbs 10:25 (“The righteous is the foundation of the world”), the author of the Zohar suggests that “the female’s desire to pour forth lower waters to mingle with the upper waters” – referring to the “active and passive principles in creation,” according to a footnote – “is incited only through the souls of the righteous. And so, happy are the righteous in this world and the world to come, for on them the upper and lower beings are based.”26 A righteousness requirement determines whether sex becomes divine – or, put differently, righteous desire decides whether the force and experience we subsume under the concept of Eros are actualized – at least, that’s one way to read that passage. For his part, Maller quotes an excerpt from the Zohar which advises “a man should be as zealous to enjoy this joy,” meaning the covenant of making love with a partner, “as to enjoy the joy of the Shabat,”27 equating sex with ritualistic sacred observance.
We can identify verses within Planet Waves ripe with interpretations enabled by Kabbalistic ideas, and the aesthetic universe Dylan creates with his lyricism and with the instrumentation from The Band on that album, inadvertently or otherwise, bestows mediated knowledge of Eros and its affinity for human liberation. In Genesis 4:1, the Torah states, “Now the man knew his wife Eve,” and the Hebrew translation (yada) is often interpreted “in a sexual sense.”28 Not for nothing does it state that, according to Maller, who suggests that if the sexual partnership “did not partake of great holiness, it would not be called ‘knowing.29’” Without getting bogged down in perennial debates and without reducing what could be cultivated wisdom into agnostic criticism as my individual proclivities could lead me to do, suffice it to put forward here the notion that embodied if also transcendent ‘knowing’ perhaps amounts to a participatory encounter with the vitality and archetypal intentions we’ve termed Eros. Suffice it also to add in that regard that artistic rendering of the erotic, the likes of which we find in Planet Waves, could constructively also be considered an opportunity to, or dimension which listeners can, engage in a partial “participatory knowing,” to borrow the term popularized by John Vervaeke. The songs engage us in what could be a preparatory, anticipatory – not to mention recalled and recollected – knowledge of that knowing, mayhap. The album, perchance, represents an chance for participation in and awareness of the process of consciously sensing and perceiving the hitherto unrealized condition of expansive freedom bereft of alienation from fellow humans and fortified by erotic connection.
Examples abound, but we’ll begin with a return to “Tough Mama,” that roughly four-minute-long third track on the album. The title itself invokes allusions to the “supernal Mother,”30 if one uses a lens for viewing the artwork in a new light. One lens that lends itself to such intertextuality and revelatory dialogism is the Zohar. One selection from the book references Genesis 24:67, which notes that “Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent,” a statement Kabbalists “have interpreted to mean that the Divine Presence came to Isaac’s house along with Rebecca. According to secret doctrine, the supernal Mother is together with the male only when the house is in readiness and at the time the male and female are conjoined. At such times blessings are showered forth by the supernal Mother upon them.”31 When Dylan instructs, “Meet me at the border late tonight,” he could be referring to the border between oneself and the other as well as the border between the human experience and the experience of the divine that delightful, co-constitution of ourselves and our sense of self makes possible through mutual aid buoyed by intimacy and especially by means of sexual relations.
Singing and Experiencing the Shekinah
Within Planet Waves, Dylan and the Band portray other instances of angelic feminine intervention consonant with the transformational knowing against and beyond alienated existence. “For centuries the Jews have called God, She, when talking about the שכינה Shekinah, the female presence of Divinity,” Maller explained, adding that “we can benefit from the rich emotional associations evoked by an image of God introduced in the Talmud and developed by the Kabbalists–God viewed as a feminine principle, the Shekinah שכינה.”32 In point of fact, “She is God,” Maller wrote about the Shekinah, “our indwelling awareness of the Superpersonal, the transcendent aspect of the Divine in our lives.”33 Although Dylan reportedly referred to the song “You Angel You” as containing “dummy lyrics,” the song ostensibly distills down into easily comprehensible and immediately pleasurable form a description of Eros enlivened as the Shekinah. “You angel you / You got me under your wing / The way you walk and the way you talk / I feel I could almost sing,” Dylan belts out in the first verse. The form reflects the content, or the message meets the medium and the method of exposition fuses with the exposition itself, as the artist sings about singing.
Beyond that, the line, “You got me under your wing,” echoes the tradition’s “references to bringing a convert to Judaism ‘under the wings of the Shekinah,’” a phrase that could similarly refer to the close relations of care provided by a partner, including in and through the copulation that is supposed to bring forth the Shekinah, exciting “our indwelling awareness of the Superpersonal”34 or our conscientization with respect to Eros and freedom. “Yes, I never did feel this way before,” Dylan continues in a later verse, “I never did get up and walk the floor / If this is love then give me more / And more and more and more and more.” On the subject of love, Katsiaficas wrote the following:
Love binds us together, gives us the courage to make history, to stare down our fears, and to act decisively. Love makes our blood sparkle with courage, makes us willing to take risks, and gives us the nerve to be resolute. Love gives us senses more powerful than touching, smelling, tasting, seeing and hearing.35
In “You Angel You,” part of the singer-protagonist’s tacit confusion regarding whether his experience qualifies as love could be attributed to that awakening of dormant senses and sensibilities that Katsiaficas contends love imparts upon us.
Love, a polysemic and fraught word as well as a transmutational feeling and activity, is also, Erich Fromm argued, an artistic practice demanding, as other art forms do, concentration, patience and even discipline developed “as an expression of one’s own will.”36 Fromm claimed a person “does not begin to learn an art directly, but indirectly, as it were.”37 Not unlike the way Kabbalists have conceptualized different worlds (e.g. Upper and Lower) which sustain and are apprehended in the mode determined by souls, as they’ve claimed, the indirect approximation of love in song lyrics – within a work of art – perform a critical pedagogical function and appear to inspire appreciation, and to activate a thirst, for learning “the art of loving” as Fromm would have it. Putting love in lyrics and to music excites a sensibility keen on the carnal knowledge crucial to traversing what Dylan described in a song from another album as “the borderline that separated you from me.” The yearning for “more and more and more and more” reflects activation of our “inner desire for freedom, which is the greatest force for liberation on the planet,”38 per Katsiaficas.
The seeming accessibility of the Shekinah through erotic relating and sexual intercourse also appears recollected and represented within the aesthetic universe of Planet Waves, alienated as it is from our less harmonious everyday existence. Dylan’s “Something There is About You,” starts with a verse that we could read as illustration of this:
Something there is about you that strikes a match in me / Is it the way your body moves or is it the way your hair blows free? / Or is it because you remind me of something that used to be / Somethin’ that crossed over from another century?
The other person ignites a passion in the singer-protagonist. Possibly, the feminine features and nature displayed by the object of the narrator’s affection light that proverbial fire, stimulating instincts for activity that’s potentially procreative in the conventional sense but also in the sense of engendering experience that puts us in touch with what a loving embrace of Eros has to offer. Through such an experience we acquire surreptitious, archaic knowledge and simultaneously produce the new kinds of ‘knowing’ needed for us to become better human beings fashioned from preferable, pleasure social relations. The last two lines from the song quoted above comport with a notion of Eros advanced by Katsiaficas, who drew on the work of Carl Jung and emphasized archetypal “instinctual impulses” residing deep in our unconscious that “function to return our unknown lives from a distant past to consciousness–from the world of communalism at the dawn of human existence.”39 Whether that mythic age existed as supposed, the sentiment seems right. Eros emanating from what Jung called the “collective unconscious” obliterates or at least contests and stands to displace the now-dominant conditions of alienation, reuniting us with each other and that supernal glory presumably produced or adjured by sacred (re-)union.
Could Dylan and The Band have bottled that erotic energy better by explicitly representing communalism and the collective? Not necessarily, in my view. Coming back to the Kabbalistic perspective for help unpacking what’s significant and salient, Maller wrote that “the Shekinah rests upon individual human beings when they act lovingly, with kindness and joy. When She touches people’s lives, her Presence can be felt. She is warm and comfortable and personable. She has been called the Divine Presence, an awareness of spirituality.”40 Consecration of romantic relationships, making love as Mitsvah, if I may (without being violently blasphemous in any truly harmful way, I hope), ushers in that awareness, and its summoning in the aesthetic dimension opens the door – another door of perception, to borrow Aldous Huxley’s phrase used in relation to psychedelic experience – ever so slightly to reveal the divine potentiality intrinsic to human beings who help each other actualize it. In other words, art offers the possibility of awareness of that “awareness of spirituality” associated with the Shekinah. It highlights that holiness in us all so we can adore and exalt in the divinity in each other. The dualistic separation of the sacred and the supposedly profane, and the dichotomous treatment of body and ‘soul’ recede as the awareness increases. That happens through art and it occurs when the sexual act is approached intentionally. Art illuminates the soul. In reference to Dylan’s work, Marcuse observed that, “Beauty returns, the soul returns.”41 Moreover, art helps us intuit how making love to another human being means making love to, directly receiving pleasure from and in turn pleasing the “soul of all souls, incognizable and inscrutable” yet ascertainable in another human being, particularly in the sacred act. No surprise, Dylan’s songwriting bespeaks insight into the startlingly awesome awareness of another’s ensouled and embodied manifestation of that “one supernal soul,” ordinarily outside the ambit of perception except when replicated in the aesthetic dimension and when revealed through intense attraction. “Suddenly I found you,” we hear Dylan articulate in “Something There is About You,” “And the spirit in me sings / Don't have to look no further / You're the soul of many things.” The supreme discovery of what our species shares elicits our own spiritual rejoice.
Are Erotic and Intimate Interpersonal Relations the Foundation for Human Freedom?
Here I arrive at another ostensible point of departure between me and the Marcusean theory of Eros developed within Katsiaficas’s work. Katsiaficas has concerned himself with the “eros effect,” which he has called “ a means of rescuing the revolutionary value of spontaneity,” as well as “a way to stimulate a reevaluation of the unconscious and strengthen the will of popular movements” and a way of describing “those moments when the intelligence of the multitude expresses itself on a global scale.”42 He has, in the main, downplayed other interpenetrating facets of Eros and freedom we might find fruitful.
To recover the myriad dimensions of the Eros-freedom dialectic, we first note that loving, understood as art, does not merely emerge spontaneously. We often have to fight for love. But labor propelled by Eros differs appreciably from the alienating labor reproducing a society laden with alienation. To extend Fromm’s metaphoric conception alluded to above, that labor process is tantamount to the process of artistic creation. And labors of love, like works of art, alienated as they are from existing social relations replete with alienation, similarly require sustained commitment, which in turn establishes the foundation for the spiritual ecstasy of interest here and summoned in Dylan songs.
Second, we reintroduce Graeber and Wengrow, who cited the examples of ancient Rome and France during the Ancien Régime and noted that in each case,
household and kingdom shared a common model of subordination. Each was made in the other’s image, with the patriarchal family serving as a template for the absolute power of kings, and vice versa. Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects or rulers whose authority came from God.43
Historical realities buttress the feminist adage that “the personal is political” insofar as domination, and its inverse of care coupled with the freedom it affords, crops up directly in “the most intimate interpersonal relations,”44 which Graeber and Wengrow identified as a web of concern as regards how we humans got stuck in a system of authoritarian – as well as alienating – institutions responsible for our haplessly abridged baseline for communism and the forceful repression of our erotic predilections. In their 2018 essay, Graeber and Wengrow previously, pertinently concluded that
Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.
In their subsequent book based on the same line of research, the authors mention a man whose germane work might help us grasp the implications of the suggestion spelled out above. Graeber and Wengrow entreat us to “consider one of Sigmund Freud’s two favorite students: Otto Gross, an anarchist who in the years before the First World War developed a theory that the superego was in fact patriarchy and needed to be destroyed so as to unleash the benevolent, matriarchal collective unconscious, which he saw as the hidden but still-living residue of the Neolithic,” which the anti-authoritarian psychoanalyst endeavored to do in part through “polyamorous sexual relationships; Gross’s work is now largely remembered for its influence on Freud’s other favourite student Carl Jung, who kept the idea of the collective unconscious but rejected Gross’s political conclusions.”45 Despite coming up with key concepts in psychology, Gross’s contributions were suppressed and erased within the field, almost assuredly thanks to their political significance.46
Given Katsiaficas’s use of Jungian depth psychology to understand Eros, putting that work in conversation with recovered contributions from Gross could envisage new liberatory vistas begging for human contact. I do not have space to develop the point in this essay. Brief and suggestive commentary here will have to serve as food for thought in future work.
To begin to chart those future lines of inquiry, we can note that Gross acknowledged being influenced by the anarchist Kropotkin and his theory of mutual aid,47 and by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy.48 Gottfried Heuer, a Jungian psychoanalyst and the co-founder of the International Otto Gross Society, recalled Gross’s “emphasis on replacing the will to power” – a Nietzschean notion – “with the will to relating,” which Heuer claimed could “be used as a practical tool for creating a liveable future.”49 The transvaluation of values Nietzsche championed reappeared as a heartfelt rescue mission in Gross’s mind. He argued the “psychology of the unconscious” could reveal and restore to conscious apperception “the area of hidden values” concealed, perverted and “repressed from consciousness through the psychic pressure” exerted by “all forms of authoritarianism” that impede human freedom and our erotic fulfillment. In the same piece, Gross highlighted the use of such psychology to recover our “predisposed-social and innate-ethical propensity,” a drive, he observed, which “has already been made known to us in the discovered of Krapotkin [sic]: the inborn ‘instinct to help each other.’” For Gross, we can tentatively infer, freeing that instinct from its submerged state in the collective unconscious appears linked to sexual liberation and the interpersonally-produced transformation of human beings. The transformative process stems from refamiliarizing ourselves with key values obscured by our extremely alienated consociation. The ensuing social transformation would result from catalyzing the erotic ethic that largely lies latent in the recesses of the ethereal mind or spirit that our species shares and that under the right circumstances we enact. Following Gross, in the introduction to his book about the man, Heuer wrote with and about an orientation containing “a redemptive and numinous dimension — numinous in the sense in which intimate interrelating, conditional for healing, invokes the presence of the holy,” and Eros frees and escorts the numen as it reaches us through the aesthetic dimension abounding in erotic verve and animates our mutually affording instincts.
Giving and Receiving
Artistic depictions play an important role in recuperating our dormant human nature and its heavenly or Messianic aspirations, as demonstrated by Dylan and The Band in songs that speak to and deliver something akin to foreknowledge of a “Messianic age”50 defined by mutually affording pleasure and an orgiastic sense of unrealized creative possibility. Dylan, who as recently as 2020 reminded us with the release of his latest album (as of early 2022) that he’s “no false prophet,” might well have had some prophetic dreams or, I reckon, at least some that spurred artistic composition, including the creation of artwork representing dreamworld imagery. “Because my dreams are made of iron and steel / With a big bouquet / Of roses hanging down / From the heavens to the ground,” we hear Dylan sing with perfectly placed changes in pitch and extemporaneous-sounding, expertly-timed elongated enunciation in “Never Say Goodbye,” a song that clocks in at under three minutes. As if daring psychoanalytic theorists to explore what’s emanating from our unconscious with the song’s vivid description of dreams, Dylan’s voice combines with the classic rock provided by The Band to reverberate the connection between worlds also emphasized in Kabbalistic praxis. The juxtaposition of cold iron and steel with flowers also echoes the united opposition of the harmoniously connected and benevolent ‘masculine’ side and the ‘feminine’ side of firm judgment and justice within what’s sometimes termed the Tree of Life, a sefirot structure according to a popular Kabbalah account. The counterintuitive inversion of commonsense gender and/or sexual associations within that tradition of Kabbalah is notable, as is Dylan’s lucid aesthetic actualization of Eros through a divinely feminine medium in the rose-adorned dreamscape constructed through verse. The common denominator is the indwelling within one another and how that creates a resonant, complementary and — when approaching pique moments of tranquil rapture — eroticized magnetism. It’s like “the noblest and best of music,” as Socrates referred to philosophy in Plato’s “Phaedo,” except it’s the corporeal and libidinous wisdom of mutuality in sustained perpetual motion.
The song “Hazel” offers insight into how that might be achieved. “Hazel, stardust in your eye,” Dylan waxes melodic while relating the astral to the individual, “You’re goin’ somewhere and so am I / I’d give you the sky high above / Ooh, for a little touch of your love.” The lyrics conjure visions of a shared cosmic journey and place that symbolic slice of sensuous love on par with heavenly bliss. In “Tough Mama,” Dylan indirectly addresses the erotic demands of love. “Dark beauty, won't you move over and give me some room? / It's my duty, to bring you down to the field where the flowers bloom,” the man who would years later become a Nobel laureate croons on the 1974 record in his raw, maturing voice, adding: “Ashes in the furnace, dust on the rise, you came through it all the way, flying through the skies / Dark beauty, with a long night's journey in your eyes.” The question posed at the start of the verse could be interpreted as a request for consent and an earnest indication of desired physical invitation to conjugation. The second line lends itself to another Kabbalistic reading. Riffing on Exodus 21:10, the Zohar makes mention of a man traveling and declares “it is his duty, once back home, to give his wife pleasure, inasmuch as she it was who obtained for him the heavenly union.”51 Expounding upon the theme elsewhere, the Zohar also states, “The genital member itself,” in reference to sexual organ of a man, “is kindness, called after and depending upon its orifice. It is not called kindness until this orifice has been uncovered.”52 The preceding commentary stresses uncovering of the organ with circumcision reveals, kindness, but the orifice that kindness calls after and depends upon could refer to distinctly feminine genitalia in which the kindness is realized and even materialized as ejaculate. “The culmination of the male sexual function,” Fromm averred, “lies in the act of giving; the man gives himself, his sexual organ, to the woman. At the moment of orgams he gives his semen to her.”53 In so doing a man “experiences himself as one who can confer of himself to others.”54 When we hear, “It’s my duty, to bring you down to the field where the flowers bloom,” we can appreciate the imagery-fortified euphemism for vaginal intercourse and the orgasm that flows from it.
Moreover, Maller cites “A Letter on Holiness,” also called Iggeret Hakodesh, an apropos “sex manual by a thirteenth century Kabbalist,”55 which differs from the self-help books and the pick-up artistry taught in YouTube videos today devoid as they are, in the main, of any concern for the transfigurative nature of sex. The manual rebukes that taboo and instructs a man on best practices to prepare oneself and one’s partner for a sacral act of coitus. The Iggeret Hakodesh advises a man to
engage her first in conversation that puts her heart and mind at ease and gladdens her. Thus your mind and your intent will be in harmony with hers. Speak words which arouse her to passion, union, love, desire and eroticism and words which elicit attitudes of reverence … Never may you force her, for in such union the Divine Presence cannot abide.56
We hear words of arousal throughout Planet Waves, augmented by the instrumentals courtesy of Rick Dango, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson – the members of The Band who helped make the album a refined work of art. Whether appreciating the artwork together with a partner aids in establishing a harmonious connection that helps synchronize souls in preparation for a sacred sexual act or assists in accentuating and amplifying erotic transcendence, listeners/readers can decide through their own experimentation.
Following the Kabbalistic tradition a bit further, the Zohar obliges a reader to make a total commitment to that which is sacred. “According to secret doctrine,” it states, “the mystics are bound to give their whole mind and purpose to the one [the Shekinah].”57 Again, human nature’s feminine form and its receptivity coalesces with goddess-like manifestation of the divine.
The devotion described in the Zohar is also depicted, as we’ve already seen, throughout Planet Waves. The final track, titled, “Wedding Song,” admittedly reaffirms certain facets of patriarchal convention that could contribute to needless repression, not unlike the other tradition(s) in this essay, yet the aesthetic representation transcends that institution even as it operates within it, mirroring the movement of the other tradition(s) while simultaneously tracking the course of Eros from the intimately interpersonal to the eroticized collective. The Old Testament overtones are hard to overlook. “You breathed on me and made my life a richer one to live,” explains Dylan, “When I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give / Dried the tears up from my dreams and pulled me from the hole / I love you more than ever and it binds me to the soul.”
The first line in the verse is reminiscent of the mythic human origin story in Genesis, in which God breathes life into Adam to create the human being. Sam Krause recounted the Kabbalistic take on our creation, claiming the “metaphor is used, because when one exhales, he exhales something from deep within.” The divine exhalation transmitted the “Divine soul” into humanity, which “obligated Adam, (and by extension, Adam's progeny)” – the entire human species, we might say – “to behave like a mentsch (a ‘humane’ human),” a person guided by the spark of divinity within us all. If we attribute the exhale to the feminine logos, to the ensouled Shekinah Kabbalists have seen as synonymous with the supernally articulated tetragrammaton, then we can appreciate the conjoining of spirit and body, the conflation of the celestial and sensuous found in the unusual interpretation of the lyrics afforded by the esoteric tradition. In the Zohar, it’s written that “If male and female are not together, [then] hé is erased and there remains only dalet [poverty],”58 binding the Hebrew letters of the tetragrammaton to the union of masculine and feminine energies that enrich life and make it worth living. The angelic other alluded to in the lyrics who taught the singer “how to give” even amid abject deprivation approximates the divine “will to bestow” that the Kabbbalist Tony Kosinec intimates we humans, with our preponderant “will to receive,”59 can learn through the intentional overcoming of our obsessive and possessive desires. Nevertheless, when a person – a woman, we assume, if we’re thinking about a song by Dylan – exercises the honorific “will to bestow” by delighting in the delight she brings to another human being heretofore driven by the “will to receive,” it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that erotic exercise of mutual aid, the Grossian “will to relating” in the flesh can induce a transfiguration in the other.
Fromm evinces the basis for that in part in his commentary on a woman giving by receiving and receiving in order not just to give but also to enlighten her companion. During the sexual act, a woman “gives herself too; she opens the gates to her feminine center; in the act of receiving, she gives.”60 The enlightenment comes when one grapes that “giving is in itself exquisite joy.”61 Giving oneself in life and in the act of love “enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing” one’s “own sense of aliveness.”62 With giving, a person “cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to” the giver, who “cannot help receiving that which is given back,”63 as Eros courses through human bodies and social relations like an electric current. As Fromm artfully observed, the act of giving helps make “the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life.”64 Like allusions to it in art, sex, as concretized creativity properly appreciated, revives and revivifies the erotic imagination as regards what’s humanly possible and enjoyable.
In Closing, Consideration of Creative Destruction
Paradoxically, erotic creativity also implies death and destruction as part of a metamorphosis. One of Jung’s patients and his lover, Sabina Spielrein, authored a paper in the early 20th century arguing that “preservation of the species is a ‘dynamic’ drive that strives for change, the ‘resurrection’ of the individual in a new form. No change can take place without destruction of the former condition.”65 In the paper, Spielrein details examples from literature and Biblical myth, and in an allegorical understanding of the symbolic Garden of Eden, she wrote, “If one eats of the forbidden fruit, that is, if one indulges in the sexual act, one is doomed to a death from which resurrection brings new life.”66 The reign of Thanatos has been disastrous for humanity, “yet death in the service of the sexual instinct, which includes a destructive component,” according to Spielrein, “is a salutary blessing since it leads to a coming into being.”67 That might not only occur in the procreative-reproductive sense, but also in the sense of the newly amenable people preoccupied with pleasing, collaborating and caressing each other – new psychic organisms produced through sexual union. I’d argue the destruction of our excess alienation entailed therein similarly beckons a humane world waiting to be brought into being by eroticization of mutual aid and through counter-institutionalization or sublimation of Eros within enduring relations of love, punctuated by passionate climax.
To reiterate and tie a few loose threads together, accessible works of art alienated from the alienating world in which we live, like an album such as Planet Waves, if attended to carefully, might recall, elicit and incite within us and from within our communal psychic pool a profoundly personal desire. But artistic testament to euphoric feelings of freedom in generative tension with Eros, along with the sexual sphere serving as the muse and subject of aesthetic creation – as well as a site of sacred, sensual elucidation – if examined in light of fertile texts and traditions, arouse us in a manner that cannot tolerate partial gratification of merely personal urges. Instead, intentional engagement with our artful powers of creative destruction prompts a revaluation of our capacities to please one another and a reappraisal of the sexual act. As regards Dylan’s professed “duty to bring you down to the field where the flowers bloom,” or put differently, the duty to provide one’s partner pleasure as spelled out in an influential Kabbalistic text, when honored, the Zohar also informs us, gives “joy also to the divine presence, and it is an instrument for peace in the world, as it stands written, ‘and thou shalt know that they tent is in peace: and thou shalt visit thy habitation and not sin.’ (Job 5:24).”68 We can use the instruments available to co-produce that peace and perhaps to spur or prefigure its production through art, as Dylan and The Band arguably did when they recorded and released Planet Waves. Either way, requires crossing the border between rational human consciousness and the ocean of human nature’s unconscious and trespassing into the uncharted liminal space where boundaries dissolve and new knowledge of who we are and what we can become displaces estranged being in the world. To redeploy Dylan’s seductive solicitation, “Sweet beauty, meet me at the border late tonight.”
Endnotes
1. This is not to suggest Dylan’s work is any more exemplary of art in the “spirit of abolition” than is artwork from those most directly impacted by and held captive within the PIC or that it’s more exemplary than artwork that advances an explicitly abolitionist perspective. I’m just pointing out an apparent undergirding thrust for human freedom, and despite the often ineffable source of that drive, great artists are able (and are arguably compelled) to communicate it.
2. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 132-133.
3. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 133.
4. George Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” in Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, ed. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2017), 41.
5. Peter Marcuse, “Foreword,” in Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, ed. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2017), viii.
6. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson, “Introduction,” in Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, ed. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2017),10.
7. Del Gandio and Thompson, “Introduction,” 3.
8. George Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect,” in Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, ed. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2017), 53.
9. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), ix.
10. John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro, “Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis,” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5, no. 2 (2021), 65.
11. Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect,” 53-54.
12. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 47.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021), 108.
16. Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect,” 55.
17. Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” 45.
18. David Boucher and Lucy Boucher, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Deaths and Entrances (Broadway, NY: Bloomsbury Academic), 267.
19. Quoted in Allen Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah (Messianic Speculations) (Los Angeles: Ridgefield Publishing Company, 1983), 63.
20. Quoted in Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 71.
21. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 77.
22. Ibid.
23. Gershom Scholem, “Introduction,” in Zohar: The Book of Splendor. Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed. Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 13.
24. Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 115.
25. Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 116.
26. Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 73-74.
27. This spelling (Shabat) is used in the text. The day of rest is also commonly spelled Shabbat. Here’s the citation: Quoted in Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 70.
28. Quoted in Adele Berlin and Mark Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.
29. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 71-72.
30. Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 36.
31. Ibid.
32. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 96. Note that the English translation of the word is also often spelled with an “h” after the “k”: Shekhinah.
33. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 97.
34. Ibid.
35. Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect,” 69.
36. For the direct quote: Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 101. See also: Fromm, The Art of Loving, 97-101.
37. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 100.
38. Quoted in AK Thompson, “Remembering May ‘68: An Interview with George Katsiaficas,” in Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, ed. Jason Del Gandio and AK Thompson (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2017), 30.
39. Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” 44.
40. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 97.
41. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 117.
42. Quoted in Thompson, “Remembering May ‘68,” 28.
43. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 513.
44. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 519.
45. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 215.
46. Ibid. See also: Gottrried Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague / Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’: The suppressed psychoanalytic significance of Otto Gross (New York: Routledge, 2017).
47. Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague / Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’, 63.
48. Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague / Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’, 69.
49. Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague / Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’, 158.
50. In my understanding of the Hebrew/Jewish tradition(s), there’s typically less emphasis placed on the coming of a Messiah in human form. The Messiah as a person is more symbolic of a new stage in history marked by collective liberation and communal veneration of the divine. For more on this conception of the anticipated Messianic age (also referred to as the Messianic time or the Messianic period or Messianic epoch), see: Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Traditions (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1966), 96-120. See also: Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 134-152; Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).
51. Quoted in Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 65.
52. Quoted in Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 75.
53. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 21.
54. Fromm seems mainly to be referring to generosity in the material world here, but the statement could also apply to the sexual sphere he discusses just prior in the text. See: Fromm, The Art of Loving, 22.
55. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 66.
56. Quoted in Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 66.
57. The bracketed words are in the cited text: Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 36.
58. Quoted in Scholem, ed., Zohar, 40.
59. Kosinec’s Kabbalistic philosophy views this instinct or inclination as naturally endowed. From where I stand, it’s no doubt encouraged by social structures functioning to maintain relations of alienation as well.
60. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 22.
61. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 23.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 39 (1994), 174.
66. Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” 175.
67. Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” 183.
68. Maller, God, Sex and Kabbalah, 65-66.