True sublimation preserves awareness of repression and the need for liberation.

Evidence

In contrast to the pleasures of adjusted desublimation, sublimation preserves the consciousness of the renunciations which the repressive society inflicts upon the individual, and thereby preserves the need for liberation. To be sure, all sublimation is enforced by the power of society, but the unhappy consciousness of this power already breaks through alienation. To be sure, all sublimation accepts the social barrier to instinctual gratification, but it also transgresses this barrier. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 335

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The 1960s counterculture parallel to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: Marcuse’s claim that liberalized sex is itself a repressive control mechanism inverts the common moral-panic story — the panic misses that the ‘liberation’ is itself administered.
• DEFINE: This is the chapter’s operative distinction: repressive desublimation (adjustment) vs. sublimation (which keeps the refusal alive).
• XREF: connects to: The last twenty-five years ran on controlled desublimation rather than open repression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 983; The most effective suppression of liberation works by implanting false needs. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 112