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Rethinking Reification MARCUSE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND GAY LIBERATION In his 1937 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” Herbert Mar- Kevin Floyd cuse proposed—in an almost offhand manner, and without addressing the implications of this claim for any larger Marxist tradition—that “in suf- fering the most extreme reification man triumphs over reification”: a tri- umph, he suggested, which was of a specifically erotic character. 1 Early in his career, Marcuse used the category of reification in an unusually mul- tivalent way, a way that has significant implications, I will argue, both for the Marxist tradition and for modern forms of antiheteronormative poli- tics. Marcuse’s deployment of this category—which constitutes a striking contrast with its more univocal sense in the work of his Western Marxist predecessors, including Georg Lukács, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—would take its most sustained theoretical form almost twenty years later, in Eros and Civilization, and would ultimately be indissociable from his investment in Freudian psychoanalysis. Over this twenty-year span, both before and during his sustained exploration of the revolutionary implications of psychoanalysis, Marcuse would, first of all, consistently link the estrangement of labor power to repression: the reification of the body under the interdependent regimes of what the Frankfurt school influentially called “instrumental reason” and of what Marcuse called pro- creative, “genital supremacy” required, he argued, the restriction of eroti- cism to the genital area of the body. But he insisted at the same time that only by polymorphously re-eroticizing the body—erotically objectifying it, reifying it, turning it into a thing, into a