Not quite a century after Nietzsche wrote, Herbert Marcuse considered desublimation from a different angle to theorize the nonliberatory release of instinctual energies in postwar capitalism. What Marcuse famously termed “repressive desublimation” occurs within an order of capitalist domination, exploitation, and “false needs” as technology reduces the demands of necessity and as desire is everywhere incorporated into a commodity culture enjoyed by a growing middle class. This order features plenty of pleasure, including that obtained by radically reduced strictures on sexuality (less grueling work requires less sublimation), but does not feature emancipation. Instinctual energies, no longer directly opposed by the mandates of society and economy and thus no longer requiring heavy repression and sublimation, are now co-opted by and for capitalist production and marketing. As pleasure and especially sexuality are everywhere incorporated into capitalist culture, the pleasure principle and the reality principle slip their ancient antagonism. Pleasure, instead of being an insurrectionary challenge to the drudgery and exploitation of labor, becomes capital’s tool and generates submission. Far from dangerous or oppositional, no longer sequestered in aesthetics or utopian fantasy, pleasure becomes part of the machinery.