The Resurrection of the Body:
The Work of Norman O. Brown
David Greenham
[Draft Lexington Books, March 2005]
2
Contents
Preface
3
Abbreviations
9
Chapter 1. Between Chaos and Cosmos
10
Chapter 2. The Dialectics of Eros, Part 1: Thanatos and Civilization
53
Chapter 3. The Dialectics of Eros, Part 2: Life Against Death
88
Chapter 4. The Mystic Imagination
130
Chapter 5. The Poetry of Origins and the Origins of Poetry
185
3
Preface
The Resurrection of the Body, taken from the title of the last chapter of Life Against Death,
could be subtitled “Introducing the Work of Norman O. Brown.” This subtitle would not only intend to signify a “way in” to the work but also something in the manner of a letter of “introduction.” Such an introduction in needed because Brown has somewhat fallen off the
scope in recent years. This is no doubt to do with the difficulty inherent in precisely locating
Brown’s contribution and the near impossibility of categorising his output. Brown’s work is
difficult to classify because of his vast erudition, but it is the precise task of The Resurrection
of the Body to bring an order beyond something as loose as “Western Culture” to the subjects
that make up Brown’s field of engagement, subjects as diverse as Classical Studies, Philosophy, Philology, Psychoanalysis, Theology, Literature, History, Marxism, to name only the
main ones. For Brown each of these subjects is in a very real sense an emanation of the body,
or, referring to my title, Western Culture is the body’s attempt to resurrect itself. This becomes something more than a metaphor. The body is the unity within Brown’s work, it is the
arche and eschaton (but not the telos) of his long project that, for my purposes, begins with
Hermes the Thief (1947) and ends with Closing Time (1973). Of course, this is far from obvious, and it is what the monograph will need to have proven.
Though I cannot claim expertise in every area across which Brown’s mind ranged, I
have attempted to do justice to his project and there are a series of recurring figures that I
have used to explain Brown’s work. Some of these he was himself either interested in or
committed to, namely Freud, Frazer, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Locke, Hobbes, Marcuse, Rieff, and
Joyce; others I have used to triangulate my interpretation of Brown’s method, though he did
not engage directly with them, for example, Cornelius Castoriadis, Luce Irigaray, Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. A central part of The Resurrection of the Body, contextually and in terms of content, is the intellectual relationship between Brown and his more
celebrated contemporary Herbert Marcuse. I use Marcuse’s work as a touchstone throughout,
but especially in the second and forth chapters. One of the aims of The Resurrection of the
4
Body is to redress the balance between Brown and Marcuse, which has seen a number of
books published on the latter (due as much as anything to his association with the Frankfurt
School) to the unjust neglect of the former.
A second difficulty with Brown’s work is its increasing formal complexity. He begins
with the fairly straightforward academic prose of Hermes the Thief, and though he becomes
more intellectually challenging with Life Against Death (1959), it is only with Love’s Body
(1966) that his fascinating signature style of collage, quotation and comment emerges. The
last two chapters give serious consideration to his technique.
No book length study of Norman O. Brown has been published before The Resurrection of the Body, and little of consequence has appeared in the last 30 years.1 Even so, the fact
that there has yet to be a full-scale monograph produced on Brown’s work is certainly not due
to a lack of interest in this seminal figure of American Intellectual and Cultural History (you
only have to look at where the October 2002 obituaries were placed). The absence of such a
work is rather, as I said, because of the difficulties involved in dealing with his range of references. These are difficulties that The Resurrection of the Body has overcome partly by taking
them on head on, but mainly by discovering that the diverse cultural phenomena that make up
Brown’s field of interest can be focused around the central issue of the resurrected body.
Of the short studies that exist on Brown the most sympathetic treatment is Richard
King’s chapter in his The Party of Eros (1972), which deals almost exclusively with the
Freudian aspects of Brown’s work. Indeed, if Brown has been categorized, then it is almost
inevitably as a part of what Paul Robinson in 1969 called “The Freudian Left.” In this line
there are a few well known works that treat Brown, albeit in a sketchy manner, alongside
Herbert Marcuse, e.g., Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1968) and the
aforementioned Robinson’s The Freudian Left (1969). Marcuse’s important review of Love’s
1
A possible exception, not yet released as this MS is drafted, is Jerome Neu ed. Norman O,
Brown: In Memoriam (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, still forthcoming, though down for
January 2005). If necessary I intend to work any useful information into my final draft.
5
Body (1967), a short critical contretemps between Fredrick Crews and Arthur Efron (1968,
reprised in 1973), and two articles by Richard W. Noland (1968, 1969) complete the early
work on Brown. Since then there have been a small number of articles discussing Brown, for
example those by Herbert Blau (1988), and E. F. Dyck (1989). The most recent essay on
Brown and Marcuse, again in a Freudian context, was Nancy Chodorow’s “Beyond Drive
Theory: Object Relations and the Limits of Radical Individualism” (1989).
Despite this lack of work when compared to the scholarship on Marcuse The Resurrection of the Body will be of importance to those academics in the Anglophone world who
lived through the ’60s as well as those researching the era. Also, those interested in: the
American left, especially the plight of Marxism and its overcoming in Brown’s work; psychoanalysis, in particular the new theory of “narcissism” offered by Brown; also post-war American intellectual historians will be fascinated by the transatlantic strands of Brown’s thought,
especially that way he interweaves European philosophy with an American openness. In addition, I would expect significant interest from those researching language, aesthetics, symbolism and poetry, all of which are seen as loosely structured responses to the body. Brown took
something from every aspect of the humanities; and to each of them he gives something more
in return.
This first chapter, “Between Chaos and Cosmos,” introduces Brown through an engagement with his two early works on the Classics, the “sociological” study Hermes the
Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (1947) and the long introduction to and translation of Hesiod’s
Theogony (1953). This chapter fulfils one central task: to explain the relevance of these works
for the development of Brown’s future thought, finding common themes, images and approaches. The lasting contribution from Hermes the Thief is the importance of the idea of
“myth,” particularly its interaction with the social and the historical. I show how Brown has
been influenced by contemporary European anthropology (as such he is arguably amongst the
first American writers to engage with this new conception of myth). Brown’s work on Hesiod’s Theogony introduces two more lasting themes: desire (Eros) and creativity (poiesis). The
Theogony is a creation myth built on the emergence of the ordered world (including a political
6
order), or cosmos, from the void, or chaos through the workings, principally, of desire. The
Theogony also continues Brown’s investigation, begun in Hermes the Thief, of the formative
power of myth as a mode of pre-historical, pre-philosophical understanding that can never be
fully displaced by its more “sophisticated” descendents. Myth, Eros and creativity, then, are
shown to be Brown’s “gods,” the legacy inherited by his more famous works.
Chapters two and three, investigate what I calls “The Dialectics of Eros,” and in particular the strikingly similar paths taken by Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic
Meaning of History (1959) and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud (1956). I show that in these two books the mythical, religious and philosophical aspects of Freud are worked through to their far-reaching conclusions. Myth and
Eros have already been announced in the first chapter. I further articulate how Brown utilises
Freud’s speculative metapsychology—in particular his instinct theory—philosophically,
alongside and occasionally in conflict with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This chapter engages not only with Freud’s instinct theory, but also with Hegel’s dialectical method, which is
essential to the conflict between Brown and Marcuse. The chapter unfolds in stages, beginning with an analysis of the utopian context of Freud’s thought in mid-twentieth century
America, i.e., Rieff, Goodman and Reich. Secondly, there is a concise interpretation of
Freud’s metapsychological dilemma, the dualism of life (Eros) and Death (Thanatos) as a
preparation for Brown’s engagement. Thirdly, there is an excursus on Brown’s and Marcuse’s
“philosophical inquiries into Freud” to ground their “instinctual dialectics.” In addition I examine and critique Brown’s use of Freud’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, specifically his claim regarding the absence of time in the unconscious. I treat this as a clue to Brown’s intentions in Life Against Death: the attempt to
recover the “noumenal” sources of human culture in religion, art, history, psychology. I argue
that Brown is advocating an escape from time—as well as history (diagnosed as neurosis)—as
a first step toward the “resurrection of the body,” which he sees as the promise of Christian
eschatology. The body—and the human failure to cope with it—becomes for Brown the unified (noumenal) source of all cultural forms (phenomena). In Life Against Death culture is
7
beginning to be grasped as the body’s struggle to re-find itself, to resurrect itself: a process
that only begins to be explicitly recognised by Brown is his last two books. Lastly, I analyse
Brown’s and Marcuse’s competing theories of history and eschatology, which I show lead to
a major reinterpretation of the theory of narcissism.
In chapter four, “The Mystic Imagination,” I pursue how Love’s Body answers the
challenge of the last chapter of Life Against Death to resurrect the body. Love’s Body is the
first example of Brown’s signature style, the use of fragments of quotation and commentary
ordered thematically, poetically and expressively, addressing any underlying interpretation of
the corporeal sources of culture. I argue that Love’s Body is written in the mode of “the fragment,” which Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, in their study of Jena romanticism The Literary Absolute (1988), describe as “the romantic genre par excellence.” In this
chapter I do three things: firstly, develop a formal grasp of Love’s Body, locating it within the
romantic mode of the fragment, thus as an occasion of necessary incompletion with respect to
both Brown’s sources and to the body the book is attempting to inscribe (i.e., that culture intends to recover through inscription). Secondly, I interpret this in term of Brown’s concepts of
“mystery” and “symbolism” with reference to Cornelius Castoriadis’ “radical imagination.”
Thirdly, I engage with Herbert Marcuse’s 1967 Commentary critique of Love’s Body, placing
it within Brown’s rethinking of the resurrected body, and comparing their respective ideas of
teleology and eschatology.
In the last chapter, “The Poetry of Origins and the Origins of Poetry,” I analyse how
Brown’s 1973 book Closing Time emerges from the confluence historical poetics suggested
by Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1744) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). The
chiasmus in this chapter’s title echoes the Viconian idea of corso and ricorso, which “by a
commodius vicus of recirculation” (Joyce) brings Brown back to consider the poetry of origins and the origins of poetry explicated in Vico’s philosophy and exemplified in Joyce’s last
work. This chapter first examines Vico’s “Poetic Logic,” which discloses the dominance of
(bodily) metaphor in early human cultures from which Vico argues that later language is derived. This last chapter brings to completion themes from previous chapters: the role of the
8
“imagination” (fantasia) and the body as measure and as the ground of metaphor (Hobbes,
Locke, Freud, Castoriadis), which comprises the resurrection of the body as language and culture. I also analyse the potentially “nihilistic” claims of Brown’s book, which takes Vico’s
thought beyond rationalism, beyond even its own extensive claims, but which does not, necessarily, step outside of the “logic” it establishes. Throughout I treat Brown’s own methodology, how he puts the lessons learned from Vico, Joyce and his own earlier books to work in
his short but complex and allusive volume. In addition, I look at the formal “collage” techniques of the Closing Time and the knowledge claims they produce, or, often more importantly, do not produce. This is another reprise, this time of Brown’s mythic poetics, which restates
and inverts his prior stance on the relationship between the vernacular or democratic language, and the priority of the “mystery.”
9
Abbreviations
In citing works by Norman O. Brown short titles have generally been used. Works frequently
cited have been identified by the following abbreviations:
Hermes
Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, Wisconsin, University of
Wisconsin Press, 1947; Rpt. Great Barrington MA: Lindisfarne
Press, 1990.
Theo
Hesiod (trans. and intro. Norman O. Brown), Theogony, Englewood
Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1953.
LAD
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959; Hanover NE: Wesleyan University Press, 1959; 2nd edn. with intro. by Christopher Lasch, 1985.
The pagination of both editions is identical.
LB
Love’s Body, New York: Random House, 1966; Rpt. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.
Meta
“From Politics to Metapolitics,” The Frederick William Atherton
Lecture, Harvard University, 20th March 1967. Published in Caterpillar (October 1967): 63-94.
FT
“Rieff’s ‘Fellow Teachers’,” an interview with Robert Boyers and
Robert Orill, April-May 1972. Published in Salmugundi, (Fall 1973):
34-45.
CT
Closing Time New York: Random House, 1973; Rpt. New York:
Vintage, 1974.
AM
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1991.
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——Chapter One——
Between Chaos and Cosmos
Norman O. Brown’s first two books are studies of Greek myth, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (1947) and Hesiod’s Theogony (1953). These works anticipate the trajectory of
Brown’s future development by scrupulously avoiding any definition of myth in terms that
will either damn it as fiction or frame it as truth. In this he turns against the prevailing, though
by no means universal, interpretation of myth as falsehood belonging to an ancient lineage
that may be traced to Plato in the fourth century BCE. In his Cratylus, we can find the following dialogue:
Socrates: You know that speech signifies all things (τὸ πᾶν) and keeps them circulating and always going about, and that it has two forms—true (ἀληθής) and
false (ψευδής)?
Hermogenes: Certainly.
Socrates: Well, the true part is smooth and divine and dwells among the gods
above, while the false part dwells below among the human masses, and is rough
and goatish (τραγικὸν); for it is here, in the tragic (τραγικὸν) life, that one finds
the vast majority of myths (μῦθοί) and falsehoods (ψεύδη).
Hermogenes: Certainly.
Socrates: Therefore, the one who expresses all things (πᾶν) and keeps them always in circulation (ἀεὶ πολῶν) is correctly called “Pan-the-goat-herd” (Πὰν
αἰπόλος). The double-natured son of Hermes, he is smooth in his upper parts, and
rough and goatish in the ones below. He is either speech (λόγος) itself or the
brother of speech, since he is the son of Hermes.1
1. Plato, Cratylus (trans. C. D. C. Reeve), in., Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M.
Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 126. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as PCW. The
11
Socrates, not wishing to waste a word, shows Hermogenes—whose own name, “son of Hermes,” is a springboard for the dialogue—how language contains its own falsehoods, its
“rough and goatish” parts, through a series of erroneous etymologies and revealing puns. The
argument of the Cratylus is that language itself is untrustworthy, for even an accepted etymology, like the “goatish” origin of “tragedy,” is undermined by an at best dubious connection between pan meaning “all” and Pan, the half man half goat, who in Greek myth is the
Son of Hermes, or Hermogenes.
According to Plato’s Socrates, to find the right meaning of words amidst their eternal
circulation between truth and falsehood it is in vain either to place language in the context of
its usage by a specific community, as Hermogenes argues, or to trace its origins back through
etymology to a direct invocation of the nature of the thing, as Cratylus contends (PCW 1023).2 Truth lies elsewhere: in the realm of the divine, of the smooth “forms.” These can only be
found, as Socrates implies in the Pheadrus, by avoiding myths altogether and attending exclusively to the Delphic imperative: “Know thyself” (PCW 510).3 Here we become trapped in the
Socratic irony of his position because the imperative of the Delphic Oracle is itself mythical.
Which does not mean it is not true because for Socrates self-knowledge is the only true
knowledge and the Oracle’s demand is the pathway to knowledge of the self. But as the Oracle’s words come not from the self, they must be treated with the skepticism which irony provides; a skepticism that dismantles the traditional “truths” of myth, even whilst acknowledging their ubiquity. It is apparent, then, from the earliest critiques of myth contained in these
dialogues that language itself remains unavoidably doubled. This is because myth, as Brown
Greek interpolations are from Plato (trans. H. N. Fowler), Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater
Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1992), 408c –d.
2. We might recognise here the diachronic and synchronic methods associated with
some forms of modern linguistics.
3. Cf. Cassirer
12
will show, is enshrined at the very beginning of thought and thought never escapes myth’s
pull; the smooth upper body modelled, perhaps, on the shape of the divine, is still attached to
the rough and goatish nether regions. This, then, is the tragedy of language. It is presumably
why the poetry that revels in language’s duplicity is exiled from the Republic and mathematics enthroned therein. The Republic, though, never happens and the “human masses” dwell
around the cloven hooves of Pan, the son of Hermes, and so, according to Plato, they dwell in
the place of “the vast majority of myths and falsehoods.”
Where Pan’s hide meets his skin Brown begins his work, the underlying task of
which is to unsettle received opinion, to find the point of hidden tension and rest there restlessly. Hermes the Thief and the Theogony inaugurate this tendency by refusing to take sides
on myth. Rather his master term, given in the sub-title of the earlier work, is “evolution” and
it is this that allows for the restlessness of different interpretations. Within the idea of evolution Brown’s interpretation of Greek myth is threefold: euhemerism, poetry and philosophy.
Each of these is demonstrated by philological evidence. Euhemerism, observes Fritz Graf,
“refers to the theory of Euhemerus of Messene, who…argued that the gods of Greek myth
were deified human beings, rulers from early Greek history.”4 So derived, euhemerism is the
name given to the attempt to find direct one to one historical sources for Greek myths. A
method that can, at best, be only partially successful, because on the one hand the historical
record is incomplete, and on the other it is by no means a given that myths always have historical sources. Nevertheless, for Brown myths necessarily derive from their context, and like
Hermogenes, he reckons that their meaning can, at least in part, be discovered in the historical
reconstruction of language at a particular time and place to reveal its customary “rules and
usage” (PCW 103). Brown’s historical reconstruction equally draws on Cratylus’s contrary
position “that there is a correctness of name for each thing, one that belongs to it by nature”
(PCW 103). Again he explicitly avoids Plato’s contention that the truth of things lies in the
4. Fritz Graf (trans. Thomas Marrier), Greek Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 16.
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forms and, in taking on the role of Pan-the-goat-herd, Brown’s concern remains with the
barred circulation of language “that signifies all things…true and false,” which the great philosopher parodies and ultimately mistrusts.
Brown’s position on the correctness of naming is connected to his understanding of
poetry, which, though closely related to his philological enterprise, is implicit here only to
emerge much more strongly in his later work. Nevertheless, even in these first two books the
myths that he centres on, the Theogony and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, are evidently poems. The original sense of poiesis, as making, interpreted as imaginative work or invention, is
never far away. In the following passage there is a sense of the complex mix of euhemerism
and poiesis in the path Brown picks between truth and falsehood in his interpretation of Hesiod’s myths:
The poet is a prophet of religious truth, and Hesiod is conscious that the truth revealed to him conflicts with much that passed as truth in his own day: the Muses
tell him that they “know how to tell many falsehoods that seem real [ψεύδεα
πολλὰ λέγειν ἐθέλωμεν ὁμοῖα],” as well as to “utter truth [ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι]”
when they wish to (lines 26-27). The Theogony is, therefore, not an encyclopedia
of orthodoxy—there is no orthodoxy in Greek religion anyway—but the result of
a creative reinterpretation which reorganizes old myths, alters them, and supplements with new inventions.5
The attempt to get behind “religious truth” in the Greek conception gives a sense of the problem at hand. To arrive at the truth requires historical understanding, following the euhemerist
5. Hesiod (trans. and intro. Norman O. Brown), Theogony (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.:
Prentice-Hall, 1953), 35. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Theo. The Greek interpolations are drawn from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White
(London: William Heinemann, 1967), 81. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Hymns.
14
method, that is to say, what passes as religious truth must derive from its context. However,
the word “religious” when attached to the word “truth” will inevitably colour it, leading to
Brown’s recourse to myth and poiesis. The distinction between myth, poetry and truth is,
though, hopelessly anachronistic. Hesiod believed that the Muses have revealed the truth to
him. For Hesiod religious truth (ἀληθέα) could be found in the old stories, or myths which
revealed the truth, as they understood it, to his ancestors. Brown raises this issue by isolating
the lines from the prooimion, or long prologue, to the Theogony where the Muses declined to
admit to the truth or falsity of their own words. This appears at first glance to prefigure Plato’s mistrust of myth. However, the Muses ambivalence is generally taken to mean, as Brown
interprets it, that the Muses had hitherto misled Homer and the other religious poets who preceded Hesiod. It was from these poets that the truths of Hesiod’s day were derived. But the
Muses in inspiring the Theogony they are not now misleading Hesiod. This is the task of the
prooimion. So part of the thrust of the Theogony is that what is held to be true is, in fact, false.
It is the work of the myth—as poiesis—to redress this. For Hesiod myth constructs truth.
Thus Brown’s euhemerism, or historical reconstruction, is linked directly to poetry, in that he
must understand the circumstances of Hesiod’s own day to know how the Greek poet diverges
from it, to know how he is using his creative power (poiesis) to reinterpret, supplement and
invent fresh forms of myths to explain his own religious truth. Poetry, then, is not found in
metre, but in creative reinterpretation. It is, as we shall see progressively throughout this
book, the ability to imagine the world other than it is and so to construct the truth. As Brown
puts it in terms that will come to be as relevant for his own work as for Hesiod’s: “The Theogony, like all mythical poetry, is a reinterpretation of traditional myths in order to create a set
of symbols which give meaning to life as experienced by the poet and his age” (Theo 35).
None of this says whether a myth is right or wrong. These judgments are held in abeyance.
A poetic understanding of myth, that it is neither true nor false but belongs to a creative encounter with the world, found a methodological expression over two thousand years
later in the Greek revival and in particular in Romanticism. In this account myth is “the human imagination’s compelling answer to ‘the power that produces the world’”, and also “the
15
earliest form of man’s artistic expression.”6 Myth, then, becomes a synthesis of religion and
art; it is also a form of the truth.7 This is a position that is sharply challenged by those who
follow Plato’s lead in discrediting myth in favour of the birth of reason under the sign of the
logos, where myth becomes associated with falsehood. The idea of a progression from mythos
to logos, and its corollary regression from mythos to pseudos, whilst inimical to romantic sensibilities, is unarguably the dominant understanding of early Greek thought. On these terms,
the first poets, Homer and Hesiod undoubtedly thought hard about the world, but because they
were unable to think abstractly, they never found the path to the truth, that is, to rationality.
This position is exemplified by the distinguished classical scholar C. M. Bowra:
A myth is a story which aims not at giving pleasure for its own sake but at alleviating perplexities which trouble pre-scientific man because his reason is not yet
ready to grasp them…. Faced by a world in which most things happen without a
known cause, they need myths to explain them, and the explanation, which must
suit their own special range of experience, is more emotional than rational and
works not by describing cause and effect, but by associating one kind of experience with another and suggesting a connexion or similarity between them.8
Myth, then, has a certain grandeur that enables it to emerge above the welter of merely pleasurable fictions, marketplace tales and fireside yarns. Moreover, myth definitely corresponds to
a manner of understanding the world. But this manner of understanding the world is based,
according to Bowra, on a manifest misunderstanding, namely, the priority of emotion over
reason, which leads to a failure to grasp cause and effect. Another version of the same idea of
6. Graf, Greek Mythology, 19, 31
7. An earlier eighteenth century version of myth grasped as poetic truth, associated
with Giambattista Vico, is the subject of the last chapter of this book.
8. C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (London: Pheonix, 1994) 103.
16
progression toward rationality was expressed earlier and in a more equivocal incarnation by
Wilhelm Nestle: “all myth in general, stands halfway between the compulsive ideas of early
magic mentality, and the problems and uncertainties of later empirical and historical
thought.”9 Myth in Nestle and Bowra’s conceptions is the failure to grasp the proper connections between things. In Nestle’s view emotion is replaced by the equally primitive concept of
magic. Myth, which he concedes is halfway to empirical thought, is contaminated with magic.
This view is derived from J. G. Frazer, for whom magic and myth were a consequence of
primitive man’s misunderstanding of logical association, but which were yet on the track of
later empirical rationality.
Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man
has a different, and probably still older, conception in which we may detect a
germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of
events in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The
germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic that plays a large
part in most systems of superstition.10
The development of the germ of rationality is hidden from the “savage” because the perspective of sympathetic magic arises from two misconceptions. Firstly, “like produces like, or an
effect resembles its cause” and secondly, “things which have once been in contact with each
other continue to act on each other at a distance after physical contact has been severed” (Frazer 26). Frazer calls these respectively “the Law of Similarity” and “the Law of Contact or
Contagion.” These two principles are, Frazer concludes in broadly Humean terms, “misappli-
9. Cited in Richard Buxton ed., From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of
Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1-2.
10. J. G. Frazer (ed. and abridge. Robert Fraser), The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 24.
17
cations of the association of ideas” (Frazer 27). The Law of Similarity mistakes like for like
and the Law of Contact mistakes parts for wholes.11 Frazer concludes that “Men mistook the
order of their ideas for the order of nature” (Frazer 75). In the Golden Bough magic is described as an early form of determinism and as such it is still a mental representation of the
world, even if it is misunderstood. Myth, at the last, is the corpus of stories told about the
world in defence of this misconstrued logic. This notion of myth is obviously seductive to
believers in the kind of progress described by the title of Nestle’s work Vom Mythos zum
Logos.12
However, is it not apparent that far from describing a process in intellectual history
for based on evidence, Frazer is exactly repeating the misapplication of logical thought attributed to “savages”? To see the pre-classical Greeks or any so-called savages or primitives
as pre-scientific is anachronistic—it defines a society by what came after it. Rationality seeks
the cause for which it is the effect and finds it in myth, magic and superstition. It thus mistakes like for like, and, moreover, confuses “the order of ideas for the order of nature.” Even
so, Frazer, by postulating a relationship between myth and the association of ideas brings me
to the last aspect of Brown’s interpretation of myth, and certainly the most tricky and the most
important for his future development: myth as philosophy. I will say a few words here, though
I will not go on to explore this fully until the last part of this chapter.
As Frazer has demonstrated, it is always difficult to conceive myth as philosophy
without a number of qualifications. Brown himself says, in his introduction to the Theogony,
that
11. Robert Fraser, ‘Introduction’ to Frazer, Golden Bough, xxii-xxiii, xxviii-xxix. In
his introduction Fraser notes the similarity to Roman Jakobson’s conception that metaphor
and metonymy are the basic roots of language.
12. See Buxton, Myth to Reason?, 1-11.
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Hesiod lived in an age innocent of philosophy. He presupposes an audience familiar with the idiom of mythical thinking and accustomed to speculate on the
great questions of life in that idiom. We must therefore translate his speculations
into our own idiom, which is primarily philosophical. (Theo 15)
Speculation is, perhaps, the key word here. Hesiod is not unthinkingly telling stories about the
world, nor is the Theogony, as Bowra puts it, a primarily “emotional” response to the world. It
appears that for the Greeks mythographers, as for the post-Freudians, there is no way in which
the emotional can be usefully contrasted with the rational (Freud, as is well know, and as we
shall see in the next chapter, derived much of this thought from, or at least illustrated it
through, myth). Hesiod is speculating on “the great questions of life,” namely, where do we
come from and how have we come to be as we are? Fritz Graf gives a similar definition: “A
myth makes a valid statement about the origins of the world, of society and its institutions,
about the gods and their relationship with mortals, in short, about everything on which human
existence depends.”13 The word “valid” here, taken from logic, does not imply truth or falsity,
merely the internal coherence of the argument, or, at least that the arguments the myth contains do not contradict the world order in which the myth reproduces itself. This is an implication of Frazer’s point, myths are a way of telling stories about the world such that our most
fundamental beliefs and institutions are not compromised or contradicted, a position which
will sanction many lasting errors, as seen from a later age. According to Brown, Hesiod’s
myth is a speculation upon origins that also establishes the status quo of his own time, namely
its institutions, what Brown frequently calls “the dispensation of Zeus.” And though speculation can be taken to mean thinking without full possession of the facts, this is by no means a
criticism of Hesiod. The facts are not there to be known then or now. All thinking is risking
error, mythical thinking no differently than so called rational thinking. Both are valid just as
both are speculative. Speculation, with its inherent structure of skeptical provisionality, is ar-
13. Graf, Greek Mythology, 3
19
guably the only honest way of approaching what is to be known. This is not to say that Hesiod
thought his own work provisional, but to affirm that there is no access to truth beyond what
people think and say, be that myth or science. Brown does not have Bowra’s or Frazer’s or
Nestle’s faith in empirical rationality as anything other than another myth, the myth that sustains our own age and is not in contradiction with it. At least, not until those contradictions
have been pointed out, which is a sub-theme of Brown’s work. So, the fact that we must translate myth into our own idiom of philosophy certainly will not advance it nor will it reveal its
limitations as thought. It is rather that, as shall be shown it the following chapters, myth and
philosophy are far more closely interwoven than even Brown realizes in his first two books.
I
In the preface to Hermes the Thief Brown makes the following grounding claim: “the interrelation of Greek mythology and Greek history is much closer than has generally been recognized”.14 This claim allies him to the euhemerist perspective, suggesting that the myth of
Hermes has its origins in the discoverable past of archaic Greece. However, Brown does not
limit himself to such a reading. The more important trajectory in his study is not to isolate the
origins of the myth by finding a historical “Hermes,” but rather to follow the course of its evolution. It is within this richer generative and organic sense of origins that Brown interprets
how the Hermes myth emerges from a changing social environment and develops into both a
shaping and a responding form of cultural self-understanding. The Hermes myth, then, is not
a static representation but a process of constant adaptation in response to wider social innovations. Brown writes, “What I have sought to do here is to correlate these changes [in the form
of the myth] with the revolution in economic techniques, social organization, and modes of
thought that took place in Athens between the Homeric age and the fifth century B. C.” (Her-
14. Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Great Barrington
MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1990), v. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Hermes.
20
mes v). Brown, then, argues that myth is fully integrated with culture in the broadest sense,
and what is more, will develop as the culture develops. Pursuing his grounding evolutionary
metaphor, he also needs to understand how the myth survives for a myth will only respond to
and shape the cultural environment that sustains it as long as it can maintain its relevance.
Brown does not come across this path of theorizing myth fully formed, like Athena.
He develops it in part from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century social-anthropology,
particularly the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, J. G. Frazer’s most famous student.
As Malinowski says, “myth comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or
moral rule demands justification, warrant of antiquity, reality, and sanctity.” He
also shows that precisely because myth has this “functional, cultural, and pragmatic aspect,” it is continually subject to change in response to changes in human
behaviour. (Hermes 46)
The first of these points its basically Frazer’s. He argued that myths grow up in order to defend established ritual. The second point belongs to sociological functionalism: i.e., that a
myth will only be sustained—will only survive—as long as it serves some function within the
culture that puts it to work and which it thus works upon. But Malinowski also marks the
trace of power. As well as mere ritual (the theatre of power) it is power itself, as moral or social rule, which demands warrant. It is the function of the myth qua the power relations it sustains and that constitute its survival and its evolution that Brown attempts to uncover or reconstruct in Hermes the Thief.
He begins, though, not with an explicit reference to social history, but more obliquely, with etymology and philology. It should be noted, even at this early stage, that for Brown
any changes in the meaning of a word are intimate with poetry, understood as above as creative reinterpretation, as well as with the forces of history, such as economics. As should be
becoming increasingly clear, the relationship between history and poetry is central to all that
follows. In the early studies represented in this chapter this is not explicit and, moreover, there
21
is little doubt that Brown favours a primarily sociological approach that bases historical
change in economics. For Brown the challenge to and ultimate reversal of this approach will,
in time, become perhaps the key trope of his work. However, in his first book Brown wants to
establish a basic connection between the socially specific and the etymological. To do this he
asks what the word “thief”—as in Hermes the thief—meant to the archaic (pre-classical)
Greeks. This is a fundamental question because, following Malinowski, he is trying to establish the origin and development of a particular form of moral rule, and the way the act of
thievery was understood will be a strong guide for Brown’s interpretation. He begins with the
division between two forms of “appropriation,” and Brown does not choose that morally neutral word lightly. These forms are “theft” and “robbery,” where “Theft is appropriation by
stealth; robbery is open and forcible appropriation” (Hermes 5). The Greek word for theft is
“κγοπή,” the word for robbery is, “ἁρμαγή.” Historically, according to Brown, robbery is associated with institutional plundering. A predominant form was cattle-raiding, which, “as depicted in Homer, was a public enterprise, led by the kings and participated in by the whole
people” (Hermes 5). The guiding term for robbery, ἁρμαγή, is βία (force). The guiding term
for theft, κγοπή, on the other hand, is δόλος, meaning “fraud” or “trickery.” Hermes is wholly
associated with words that share etymological roots with this latter pairing in both Hesiod and
Homer. Hermes is the God of stealth (ἐϖίκλοπος), trickery (δόλος) and theft (κγοπή), which is
in contrast to the aristocratic of social form of appropriation by force: ἁρμαγή. But, Brown
sets out to discover if these are necessarily immoral in pre-classical Greek life are. He begins
by noting that:
The distinction between theft and robbery appears not only as a distinction between terms, and between modes of action, but also as a distinction between
types of human beings: habitual stealing produces the cunning trickster, habitual robbery, the fighting hero. The typical cattle-raider of Greek mythology is
Heracles, that embodiment of the ideal of carrying a big stick and talking loudly. Hermes is just the opposite type; the whole emphasis in the mythology of
22
Hermes is on mental skill or cunning, as opposed to physical powers. (Hermes
6-7)
Here Brown clearly establishes his own feelings on the function of trickery in the Hermes
myth. It is not immoral, it is rather cunning, or even less morally problematic, “mental skill.”
It is, then, though linked in terms of appropriation, the opposite of the kind of behaviour embodied in the brawn of Heracles, or the cattle-raiding horde; theft, trickery and stealth are the
traits of the physically weak, but mentally strong. How the differences between these two
types of human being develop through time in Greek society will determine the evolution of
the Hermes myth.
As an example of Hermes” cunning Brown draws our attention to his confrontation
with Apollo. In brief, in the ancient poem known as The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which is
Brown’s principle source, Hermes, the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, on the very day of
his birth, steals Apollo’s cattle. Hermes is a born thief. The following lines in a standard
translation describe him at the moment of birth: “a son of many shifts, blandly cunning
[υἳμυλςμήυν], a robber [ληιτῆρ], a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a
thief at the gates365” (Hymns 365).15 Immediately, then, the source gives us a problem: Hermes, though cunning or wily (“υἳμυλςμήυν” may be understood as “winning wiles”), is yet a
cattle-thief and a robber. Even so, it is the manner of Hermes “robbery” that will mark it as
theft on Brown’s terms, and the fact that it is cattle he steals only makes the point more markedly. The hymn continues: “Born with the dawning, at mid-day he played on the lyre, and in
the evening he stole [κλέψεν] the cattle of Apollo.” (Hymns 365) The word for steal,
“κλέψεν,” is related to “κγοπή,” the word for theft in the furtive or secret sense, not in the
open manner of robbery as ἁρμαγή. Hermes, a babe not yet a day old, even if the scion of
gods, is apparently no physical threat and must rely still on his wits. And wits Hermes has as
15. The last two epithets are probably separated out from one ‘πυλδόκον’: meaning
‘watcher at the door.’
23
his birthright, for still on the first day of his life, whilst stealing the cattle, he invents first the
lyre, by hollowing out a tortoise shell, and then the art (τέχνη) of fire (πῦρ), by rubbing together dry sticks (Hymns 370-371). Thus Hermes is not only cunning, but usurps the role of
Apollo16 and Prometheus respectively (though there is no indication that Hermes makes a gift
of fire to the people). The lyre he invents to amuse himself; fire to cook the meat of Apollo’s
cows that he has selected for sacrifice and then to destroy the evidence of their bones. However, it is here that we learn of Hermes physical strength (δύναμις), for he throws Apollo’s
cattle on their backs in order to slit their throats (Hymns 372-373). This suggests that Hermes
does not use strength because he does not have it, but because he has other means at his disposal: cunning, stealth, and mental skill. Even so, the revelation of Hermes strength does
seem to contradict Brown’s conclusion that:
There is no more incisive delineation of the contrast between the cunning trickster and the fighting hero than in the Hymn, where Hermes, a helpless infant relying only on his phenomenal cunning, challenges Apollo, the embodiment of
physical power and the majesty of established authority. (Hermes 7)
Even though Brown fails to take account of Hermes’s physical strength, his larger point
stands because this strength is not used to affect the theft, nor is strength important in his later
conflict with Apollo with is a battle of words, wit, craft and music. Strength is only used by
Hermes in his sacrifice of the cows, an event which belongs to an aspect of the Hymn beyond
the scope of this study.
According to the Hymn Hermes’ cleverness—marked always by deceit—is further
illustrated by the manner in which he evades Apollo’s chase. Though the more powerful God
is not long in finding out what happened to his cattle, his task made more difficult because
16. Brown uses this as evidence that the myth was once implicated in a conflict between the cults of Hermes and Apollo (Hermes 126-127).
24
Hermes had “bethought him of a crafty ruse [δολίης δ’ οὐ λήθετο τέχνηϚ]” (Hymns 368-9),
where the word δολίης connects to Hermes trickiness and τέχνηϚ, to his craftiness. First the
infant God makes the cattle walk backwards to hide their tracks. Then he obscures his own
footprints by the use of sandals made from twigs. Hermes’ trickery is undiminished even
when Apollo traces him to Maia’s home and, catching him, brings him before Zeus for judgment. It is in this encounter that Hermes’ craft emerges as his greatest strength. Whilst telling
only the truth about his acts, Hermes is able to lie about his deeds. Hermes is here most certainly the father of Pan-the-goat-herd, expressing all things in the double nature of truth and
falsehood. Hermes did not, as he says, drive Apollo’s cattle to his own house: he slaughtered
them in a cave; nor did he cross his own threshold to effect the theft: he made the journey
through the keyhole as a wisp of smoke. Thus truth dissembles, but does not deceive Zeus,
who sees straight through Hermes’s “tricks and cunning words” (Hymns 387, 393). Hermes
eludes his punishment, however, by suddenly tuning his lyre—the result of his craft—and
beginning to play a Theogony: “the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth and how
they first came to be, and how each one received his portion [μοῖραν]” (Hymns 394-395).17
This is just such a tale as the cunning infant knows will appeal to the vanity of the Olympians.
On hearing the lyre Apollo “laughed for joy” and making a bargain with Hermes trades the
lyre for some of his own apportionment (μοῖρα): a golden wand, the task of keeping the herds
(so Hermes gets the cattle anyway) and powers of divination. In addition to this Zeus gives
Hermes the task of establishing barter among men and makes him his messenger, or herald, to
Hades. So, from an initial theft Hermes makes a profit, a skill associated with Hermes by Plato in the Cratylus, and as such can truly be seen to be the deity of mercantile exchange,
where, as Brown observes, wit rather than brawn reaps reward. As we shall see below it is
17. See F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper, 1957), 40-73. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as
FRP.
25
important for Brown to claim that mercantile exchange as a dominant practice is new to the
Greeks at the time of the Hymn composition.
For Brown Hermes’s victory places the Hymn within the tradition of trickster myths,
and “Hermes the Trickster is identical with Hermes the “giver of good things,” the culture
hero” (Hermes 23). Brown takes this back through the Greek noun kerdos, meaning economic
gain or profit, to the Sanskrit word kryta meaning “a doing”—the gain from the tricky deed is
as important a part as the trick itself, therefore gain and trick are one. Brown’s recognition
that Hermes is a Trickster takes him beyond the simple, grounding idea of cunning and theft
marked by stealth to three other aspects belonging to the trickster: trade, to which I have just
alluded, magic and seduction. Hermes role in trade, whilst identified in the Hymn as a gift of
Zeus, can also be traced etymologically to a different source. In archaic Greece, according to
Brown’s study, trade took place at the boundaries between distinct tribal regions. At specified
places on the boundary stone heaps were erected to mark trading points. As Brown observes,
“The name Hermes is probably derived from the Greek word for ‘stone-heap,’ ἓρμα, and signifies ‘he of the stone-heap’” (Hermes 32). It is a fascinating paradox that a point of difference, the boundary, is also of necessity the point of communication, of connection. This can
be associated, perhaps surprisingly, to Plato’s long-winded and obviously ludic etymology for
Hermes in the Cratylus, hermēmeus, namely, interpreter or guide. This itself may stem from
the word for boundary stone, though Plato takes a different view. For him Hermes is “an interpreter [ἐρμηνέα], a messenger [ἄγγελον], a thief [κλοπικόν], and a deceiver [ἀπατηλὸν] in
words, a wheeler dealer [ἀγοραςτικόν]” (PCW 126); all of which we have seen. But Plato’s
emphasis is, following the theme of the Cratylus, deception in speech. Hermēmeus, he argues, derives from Homer’s use of “εἴρειν” which means “to use words” and “ἐμήσατο”
which means “he contrived.” Hermes is the contriver of speech, or “Εἰρέμης.” This name is
aspirated and simplified for aesthetic effect to give the God’s name: Hermes. In the larger argument of the Cratylus all this serves to show that speech is deceptive and etymologies necessarily so. But inadvertently the idea that Hermes is a messenger and an interpreter places him
squarely between peoples, thus on the boundary. This bridging task fits Hermes the herald and
26
patron God of trade well, for Plato also notes that he’s a “wheeler dealer,” or ἀγοραςτικόν,
one who haggles in the market place, or an orator who speaks there in public. For Brown this
shows that Hermes was identified with trade and with messages long before the Hymn is
composed and it appears that the gifts of Zeus are merely the confirmation of a long established role. This, of course, is part of the role of myth, to authorize interpretations of the
world. As such, the fact that Hermes is sanctioned by Zeus to be the God of trade and a herald
is an important part of the myth’s evolution, for it shows the growth of Zeus” authority.
Brown further develops Hermes’ mythical functions. Trade in the ancient world was
no simple matter, and one did not approach, let alone cross boundaries lightly. Thus Hermes
was not only associated with trade, but with commerce with strangers in general. And though
this provides the conditions for the more familiar Homeric role as a herald (in the Hymn Zeus
describes Hermes as “hav[ing] the look of a herald [κήρυκος]” [Hymns 386-87]), and even as
messenger across the ultimate borderland and into Hades, the underworld of the dead, it also
associates Hermes with magic, which accords with Apollo’s “gift” (which we can also take to
be his sanction) of divination. Brown continues:
Intercourse with strangers was surrounded with magical safeguards: meetings
occasioned magico-religious ceremonies; points of habitual contact were regarded as hallowed ground; natural or artificial boundaries, where the world of
one’s own kindred ended and the inhospitable world of strangers began. The
magic practices surrounding intercourse with strangers were naturally associated with the God of boundary-stone. (Hermes 33)
Hermes, then, is a border-marker and a herald whose tricks safeguard exchanges between
tribes. There is an important link in the evolution of the Hermes myth between magic, trade
and handicraft. Hermes is not just the God of those who meet at the boundaries; he also becomes the God of those who cross the boundaries: the itinerant craftsman and the trader.
There is actually little distinction between craft and magic in the ancient world: “The word
27
δόλος, “trick,” which in Homeric Greek has the connotations of magical action, is also used
interchangeably with the usual word for “technical skill” (τέχνη) to denote Hephaestus” magical skill at craftsmanship as well as the products of that skill” (Hermes 21-22). Δόλος, as we
have seen is the guiding word for Hermes’s form of theft, and of his cunning, “δόλιος.” Preserving his attention to etymology, Brown continues: “The root κλέπτειν, ‘steal,” which in
Homeric Greek has connotations of magical trickery, is also used to denote technical proficiency: if ‘stealthy” is taken as the English equivalent of the word ἐϖίκλοπος (Hermes 22). So
magic (κλέπτειν), theft (κλοπή), stealth (ἐϖίκλοπος) and craft (τέχνη) are all connected. In
essence magic and technology are the same kind of thing: “the manipulation of the external
world” (Hermes 20), and the manipulation of the world is craft, or in the Greek, τέχνη. But, as
Brown concludes, there is a fundamental difference between the manner in which the ancient
and the modern mind describes the way we affect the world and the things in it; the difference, perhaps, between “craft” and “craftiness.”
This is precisely analogous to what Frazer tell us in the Golden Bough where both
magic and science are attempts to effect changes in the environment based on the laws of association produced by the human mind. Pinpointing the difference between science and magic
Frazer says: “The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely
essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied the yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science.”18 Thus, once again, Frazer implies a moral derived from his own age, because, as Brown continues, in the modern world
“technical proficiency excludes trickery, that is to say, we regard cheating as the antithesis of
good workmanship. Hence modern scholars have felt obliged to brand the cult of Hermes the
“tricky” as immoral” (Hermes 22). This perceived immorality is, in Brown’s interpretation, an
anachronism that emerges only in the myth’s evolution because one part of Hermes” character—his craftiness—is forced to adapt to new moral environmental conditions. The transformation in this concept’s fortune is closely linked to another of Hermes” tricksterish gifts, se-
18
Frazer, Golden Bough, 46.
28
duction. In part this can again be traced to the boundary-stone, where Hermes is associated
with exogamic exchange. As God of the boundary-stone, he oversees the sexual interrelationships between tribes, a process that often took the form of sanctioned bride seizure, or bride
theft, within the context of sexual license granted by a border festival. Brown concludes that
“‘stealing” a strange woman was a magical act consummated in the rituals of the boundary.
Thus Hermes came to be the master of the magic art of seduction and a patron God of marriage” (Hermes 42). However, though this may be an origin in ritual for the character of Hermes seductive power, it is in the two versions of the myth of Pandora given in the Theogony
and the Works and Days that it emerges most significantly.
II
The Pandora myth draws Brown’s first two books together. This is because Hesiod includes
recognisable versions of the myth in both major poems attributed to him, the Theogony and
the Works and Days. But in addition the myth draws on and transforms the concept of Hermes
the thief, using the very terms and moral associations that we have become familiar with.
Brown shows how Hesiod does this by continuing his close attention to language and in particular the evolution of individual words. It is Brown’s continued tracing of this evolution that
I want to follow in this chapter, an evolution that is defined by the massive shift of power in
archaic Greek society and that provided the driving force for Hesiod’s transformation of the
originally benign natures of Hermes and Pandora into quasi-satanic figures.
The myth of Pandora takes two forms in the Hesiodic corpus. The version in the
Works and Days is the more familiar account, though the one in the Theogony is still recognisable. Both consist of the following similar elements: the Titan Prometheus tricks Zeus;
Zeus takes fire from humankind as a punishment; Prometheus steals the fire from Zeus and
returns it to humankind; in vengeance Zeus has Hephaestus the smith create a beautiful woman as a curse upon mankind; Zeus emerges triumphant. The key differences between the two
versions are as follows. In the Theogony the woman is unnamed, and her curse is to make
29
“man” labor for two because she is unprofitable—a “drone,” in Hesiod’s words.19 In this account the curse of woman is inescapable because, as Hesiod makes clear, even those who do
not marry will suffer because they will beget no male heirs to care for them in later life. With
or without women mankind is punished, and woman is the curse’s vessel. It is in the variations in the Works and Days that we find the more familiar figure of Pandora and her “box.”
In this account, until Zeus” punishment mankind had never known want, labour, disease or
woman. The beautiful Pandora, so-called because she is given a gift by each of the gods
(though there is an ambiguity here that I explore below) is accepted by the Titan Epimetheus,
Prometheus” brother, explicitly against the latter’s warning. Hence Epimetheus” name means
“afterthought” and Prometheus means “forethought.” Pandora opens the lid of her “box,”
though a more accurate translation of the Greek, πίθος, is “jar,” and releases all the evils into
the world, trapping Hope inside. Now, according to Hesiod, “the earth is full of evils and the
sea is full” (Hymns 9), disease comes upon mortals, the earth no longer provides without labour, and mankind is punished. Though these differences are certainly significant, it is generally accepted that both versions of the myth explain the condition of life on earth: unremitting
toil, disease and evil. Also both versions are characteristically misogynistic, placing the blame
for mankind’s plight on the existence of women. Hesiod’s misogyny is something of a legend,
and a point that I will return to at the end of this section.
First, though, I need to elaborate on the way Brown connects Hermes and Pandora. It
is in the Works and Days that each of the gods gives a gift to Pandora. Hephaestus, the smith,
makes her from water and clay, and gives her the ‘strength of humankind” and “a sweetmaiden shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face,” Athena teaches her needlework and
weaving, she is bedecked by the Graces, and Aphrodite gives her further “grace upon her
head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limb”; Hermes gifts are “a shameless
[κύνεόν] mind and a deceitful nature [ἐπίκλοπον ἦθος],” and, a few lines later these gifts are
18. Brown observes in a footnote that the Greeks were aware that drones were male
(Theo 18n).
30
rehearsed and complemented by “lies [ψεύδεά] and crafty words [αἱμυλίους τε λόγους]”
(Hymns 6-9). It is the Herald of the gods, namely Hermes, who “puts speech in her” (Hymns
9). Hermes” gifts, then, though character traits, are also verbal categorizations bestowed
wholly or in part from amongst his own attributes and from terms closely related to those attributes. For example, the term used to identify Hermes” disposition, “ἐπίκλοπος” ‘stealthy,
thievish, wily or cunning,” is used also used by Hesiod to describe Pandora’s “deceitful” disposition. In addition, the word used for ‘shameless” here derives from the same root as the
Greek word for doglike, “κύνειος,” and Pandora is often described as having the mind of a
bitch or a cur. Ἐπίκλοπον is virtually synonymous with αἱμυλίους, here used for “crafty.”
These traits, when added to her lying words, which recall Plato’s later description of the Herald in the Cratylus which we saw in the last section, are derived from Hermes; her character
(ἦθος, an earlier version of the more familiar ἐθος) is his gift. And though Hermes is not the
only God to bestow an “evil” gift upon Pandora (Aphrodite makes her cruel and wearisome to
men), it does seem that he is the origin of the worst of the characteristics that because of their
determinate role in the myth of the origins of women will also come to define Hesiod’s famous misogyny. The association continues because, in addition, it is Hermes the messenger
who takes the “gift” of Pandora from the Olympians to Epimetheus, that is, to the earth below
where the curse is to do its work. Hermes, in Hesiod’s poetic reinvention, becomes the Herald
of mankind’s doom: labour. But this does not explain why Hermes and Pandora carry such a
burden in Hesiod’s poem. As we have seen, in the archaic Greek dispensation, according to
Brown, Hermes is a useful God, a kind of culture hero or trickster. He is the God of trade,
borders, sexual transactions, etc. The ability to “deceive” is not in itself morally problematic
but rather a craft which is determined by a pragmatic approach to everyday difficulties in a
society that in no way viewed nature or the stranger as necessarily benign. In order to interpret the reversal of Hermes’ fortunes, Brown turns to another more familiar myth.
He recognises a structural similarity between the Pandora myth, as Hesiod gives it in
Works and Days, and elements of the Book of Genesis, because in addition to magic and
theft, “Hermes is the patron of another special kind of trickery—the trickery involved in sex-
31
ual seduction—in Hesiod’s myth of Pandora [she is] the Greek Eve, “the source of all our
woe.” (Hermes 8). As a way of explaining the hardships of life Pandora as a mythic archetype
is exactly analogous to Eve; if Pandora is analogous to Eve, then because of his central role in
the manifestation of her “evil” Hermes parallels the serpent, he becomes Satan. Moreover, by
giving Pandora an evil disposition (ἦθος) he becomes the root of evil in the myth. Brown
sums this dramatic alteration in the Hermes myth as follows:
Hermes, though he is only one of several gods from whom Pandora received
her equipment, and although her creation was initiated by Zeus, has a special
responsibility for the catastrophe. Pandora opened the jar with malice aforethought: ‘she had in her mind bitter sorrows for men”; and her maliciousness—
“the mind of a cur and a stealthy disposition”—was bestowed on her by Hermes. The opening of the jar has the same fateful import as the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; Hermes plays a role analogous to that of the
serpent who tempted Eve. Like Hermes, the serpent was a trickster, “more subtil than any beast of the field”; in both myths the trickster appears as a satanic
character. (Hermes 52-53)
Though the blame for the evils afflicting mankind is clearly based on a false aetiology—in
both of Hesiod’s accounts of the myth it was Prometheus” tricking of Zeus and the latter’s
revenge that brought about catastrophe for humankind—there is no doubt that Hesiod places
the responsibility squarely upon Pandora and Hermes. Pandora is culpable because “her
thought [ἐμήσατο] caused sorrow and mischief to men” (Hymns 9; emphasis added). As Timothy Gantz points out, the verb “ἐμήσατο” used here by Hesiod, “usually connotes contrivance or at least intention, as if to say that Pandora understood in advance the consequences of
32
her action.”20 It is also the word that, as we saw in the last chapter, Plato associated with
Hermes when he derived his name from “the contriver of speech,” ultimately meaning “the
liar,” or someone who savours language’s duplicity. The trickster who initiates evil is Hermes/Satan, the person who consciously, and possessed of forethought, leads astray mankind is
Pandora/Eve. In the Hesiodic corpus and in Genesis it is women who are pre-ordained to be
weak, to be both tempted and temptress, to be unable to resist and to be irresistible. Likewise,
the relationship between the apple and the jar is unmistakable, even though the conditions in
which evil is released are quite different. However, one major distinction is that in Genesis,
human choice is accountable because, presumable, Eve (as Job did, for example) could have
denied Satan, otherwise the punishment is senseless. Whereas, in the Hesiodic myth Pandora
is created evil and unable to choose, because her nature or character (ἦθος—her “ethics”) had
been decided for her by Hermes. The process of Pandora’s fall, as we shall see, belongs to an
entirely different category. In Hesiod’s myth humanity is cursed not for its own actions but
because of a squabble between the elder Titans, Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the next
generation of gods led by Zeus. A squabble in which humans have at best a walk on part. It is
not, then, human morality as such that is at stake in the birth of evil, rather Brown argues that
it is the emergence and consolidation of Zeus” power.
The character of Pandora that emerges in Works and Days is indeed the consequence
of creative reinvention, of poiesis, but moreover she is the result of mythological “ethnic
cleansing,” where stories (mythoi) once told about established mythical characters are reforged into a pantheon of gods now ruled by Zeus. This is the tenor of Brown’s first two
books, the emergence of the dispensation of Zeus and its place in Hesiod’s Works and Day
and Theogony. This new dispensation will become an important factor in Brown’s interpretation of the evolution in Hermes” character, from culture-hero to satanic figure. Likewise, it
also explains the parallel change undergone by Pandora. He reminds us that neither Hermes
19. Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Vol.
1 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 157.
33
nor Pandora were invented by Hesiod, but they were only developed by him. The transformations of the two mythical figures are not merely analogous, rather they are causally related
because, Brown argues, Hesiod’s attitude to Hermes only emerges from a pre-existent misogyny. Hesiod’s misogyny can and has been explained simply by reference to Hesiod’s own
social conditions: a poor peasant farmer forced to support a wife.21 But, the euhemerist Brown
implies, if misogyny is to take hold across a culture it must have a deeper source. This deeper
source must be consistent with the emergence of the dispensation of Zeus in the Hesiodic age.
Pandora symbolizes the earthly dispensation that corresponds to the Olympian
dynasty of gods over which Zeus is king: Hesiod says she was called Pandora
“because all the Olympians gave her a gift for men,” or, as some translate it, “because all the Olympians gave her as a gift to men”; in any case the essence of
Pandora is that she embodies the gifts of the Olympian gods. The “gifts of the
gods” is a religious formula referring to the manner in which men obtain their
livelihood. Pandora symbolizes living conditions in the age of the iron generation, which Hesiod identifies with his own times. (Hermes 55)
There is some ambiguity with respect to Pandora’s name, to which I will return shortly, but
here we are again made cognizant of the idea that Pandora, and the ills she brings with her,
are somehow symbolic of, and as such explanatory of, the evil state of the world as Hesiod
sees it. Here the function of the myth in both its versions accords with Malinowski’s conception of myth as sanctioning a pragmatic response to a changing world and, moreover, giving it
warrant of antiquity. In the Hesiodic corpus present difficulties are understood not as contemporary failings, but as part of a long and inevitable process of cultural degeneration. In the
episode of the Work and Days that follows immediately upon the telling of the Pandora myth,
Hesiod writes of five ages of man, by which he means five ages of decline. He begins with a
20. Sources?
34
golden age, when men “lived like gods without sorrow or fear, remote and free from toil and
grief” (Hymns 11); a time when food was abundant and death was nothing more than a gentle
sleep. Then followed the silver age, an age of childishness and folly, of sinning and wrong.
Then followed the bronze age, an age of violence and strength that destroyed itself. The
fourth age was “nobler and more righteous, [peopled by] a God-like race of men who are
called hero-gods” (Hymns 13-15). It is to this heroic fourth age, the age of Troy and Thebes,
Helen and Oedipus, that the fifth age, or age of the iron generation, is to be compared. Of this
last age, the present age, Hesiod says famously:
would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had
died before or been born afterward. For now truly is a race of iron, and men
never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the
gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. (Hymns 15-17)
The fifth age is the age of strife (ἐρις), the division between generations and peoples, where
might is right, and reverence for gods and old age has passed away. The Works and Days begins by defining two types of strife, “one that fosters evil and war and battle, being cruel”, the
other type fostering competitiveness, where, Hesiod concludes, “neighbour vies with neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This second strife, is wholesome for men” (Hymns 3-5). This
is the strife of agrarian labour, which is good because a farmer is always his own man. Even
for the pessimistic Hesiod, then, things are never all bad, which marks a duplicity in his
thought which shall be explored below. However, by comparison with the fourth age, which
Hesiod only knows about because of the myths he has inherited, the age of Iron can still only
attain anything through graft and competition. It is a poor age were, as Hesiod puts it, “the
gods keep hidden from men the means of life” (Hymns: 5). But even so, Hesiod’s poem remains a celebration of an agrarian way of life that, as Brown will show, was passing even in
the poet’s own time. As he says, Hesiod “is the first nostalgic reactionary in Western civilization” (Hermes 60). And it is Hermes and Pandora who, in both the Works and Days and the
35
Theogony account for the trials of life in the iron age because it was Pandora who, according
to Hesiod, quite deliberately and in line with her character, released strife amongst other ills
into the world when she opens her jar.
The world described by the contents of the jar is, if Brown’s early date for the poem,
the ninth century B.C.E,22 can be accepted, “an age of crises, born of the conflict between two
social systems, the old order of familial collectivism and a new economy based on the profit
motive and the division of labor” (Hermes 59). The old economy of agriculture based on familial collectivism is the subject of the works (ἐργα) part of Works and Days. The poem is
made up of a collection of stories, maxims and warnings to work according to the well worn
paths of husbandry addressed by Hesiod to his “good for nothing” brother Perses. As such the
poem is a guide for good living in harsh times, when because “the gods keep hidden from
men the means of life”: in the age of iron it is only the spirit of competition that will allow a
living. It is this striving spirit that Hesiod is trying to infuse into his brother. According to
Hesiod what is missing from the fifth Age is the rule of Themis, of divine law. With the passing of the age of heroes the gods have departed to Olympus, leaving the earth to men. Thus,
Brown summarises,
“Robbery,” ‘shamelessness,” “Force,” “Strife,” are the harsh realities of life in
the iron generation; “Shame” and “Justice,” the daughters of Themis, the ideal
patterns of human behaviour, exist only in heaven. Hesiod recommends agriculture as the best way of life because it offers the maximum self-sufficiency,
the maximum of isolation from the new economy; his calendar of Works and
Days is designed to make the farmer as self-sufficient as possible, as independent as possible of the craftsman, even when such a policy is economically irrational. (Hermes 60-61)
21. Presumably Brown rethinks this date because he places Hesiod’s other poem, the
Theogony in the second half of the eighth century B. C. E. (Theo 47).
36
Because the gods and heroes have left the earth, Hesiod equally advocates a withdrawal from
the society left behind into a conservative tradition of agriculture. This is in denial of the new
economic order based on handicraft, commerce, and the agora that is rising in what Brown
refers to as “the nascent centers of urban civilization” (Hermes 58). Following Brown’s characterisation these are clearly the very aspects of Greek life that have long been under the aegis
of Hermes. It is, then, the mark that this God leaves on the new urban age that is anathema to
Hesiod. As we have seen, Plato, in the Cratylus, puns on Hermes’ name, alluding to the classical Greek idea that he is the God of profit. But he is also the God of trade, handicraft (craftiness) and the agora: the elements of modern Greek society that Hesiod despises, so it is for
this reason that Hermes is presented in the manner he is in the Works and Days. Likewise, the
vices of the new economic order are attributed to Pandora. Here the prevailing idea about the
source of Hesiod’s misogyny, namely, that as the reward in farming decreases, so the difficulties of maintaining a wife increase, finds its proper place. The cruel dispensation of the iron
age that disregards the ideals of Themis, justice reckoned by shame, is mythologized through
the evolution of the concept of “stealth” from Hermes the giver-of-good-things to Pandora’s
dissemination of the “evil” contents of her jar.
Brown traces Hesiod’s defamation of Pandora to two further interconnected areas: her
name and the contents of her jar. “Πανδώρα” contains the two Greek words “all” (παν) and
“gift” (δώρον). An ambiguity has already been noted in the possible translation, or rather interpretation, of Hesiod, where she either “gives gifts to men” from the Olympians or is “herself a gift” from the Olympians to men. In both cases the name is associated with the gift and
in both cases she fulfils Zeus’s curse: “I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in
which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction” (Hymns 7).
However, before the connotations forced upon her by the Hesiodic myth contained in Works
and Days, her name meant something like “the all-endowed” or the “giver of all.” As Brown
observes, acknowledging here the work of Jane Harrison, Pandora was originally “a figure of
the earth-goddess type” (Hermes 58). That is, she, like Hermes, was a giver-of-good-things.
37
As Harrison points out, in early vase representations there is an image of Pandora, recognisable because she is shown being carved by Hephaestus and bedecked by Athena, that is inscribed with “her other name (A)nesidora, “she who sends up gifts.’”23 On another vase Pandora emerges from the earth, freed by the mallets or earth-breaking equipment of the Satyrs,
who according to Brown represent “the manual laborers of Greek mythology” (Hermes 58).
Accordingly, far from representing the release of evil into the world these scenes represent the
seasonal release of the soil’s fertility figured by the emergence of the earth-goddess Pandora.
Her gifts, then, are the fruits of the earth. Harrison continues, “To the primitive matriarchal
Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the earth, and men did sacrifice
to her” (Harrison 283). In this Harrison asks us to recognise a contrary archaic meaning contained in Pandora that was to be transformed by the misogynist Hesiod, namely, matriarchy.
Harrison, though aghast at Hesiod’s effrontery, is hardly radical when she explains the shift
from matriarchy to patriarchy as inevitable: “the facing of a real fact, the fact of the greater
natural weakness of women,” and an outgrowing in men of their “belief in the magical potency of women.”24 But what we do learn from Harrison is to grasp the remarkable reversal inherent in the shift from thinking of Pandora as an independent God, who was once worshipped as such, to a mere creation. Her fall is from a goddess of bounty to a mere factor of
evil. In Harrison’s words, Hesiod uses “infinite skill to wrest her glory into shame.”25 This
infinite skill is Hesiod’s poetry, his making art, his creative reinterpretation of the symbols he
inherits. But also this is to be taken, along with Hermes, as a consequence of the dispensation
of Zeus in the age of iron.
22. J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 281.
24
Harrison, Prolegomena, 285.
25
Harrison, Prolegomena, 284.
38
Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in
his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning, so he remakes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made
all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments.26
The tricks and blandishments are, of course, the legacy of Hermes as much as of Zeus in Hesiod’s myth. They are amongst her gifts for mankind. Moreover, the gifts she is most famous
for, the contents of her jar, appear to have undergone a similar transformation to Pandora herself.
The paradox of the jar is well known. According to Hesiod Pandora’s jar contained
evils, yet Hope (ἘλπὶϚ) remains when she closes the lid. Though the refusing of hope can
clearly be interpreted as an evil, is hope an evil such that it should be in the jar at all? To interpret this Brown infers a connection between Hesiod’s claim that the gods have hidden
man’s “means of existence” (Hermes 57) and the following lines in Works and Days: “Only
Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not
fly out the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis holding Zeus”
(Hymns 9). Hope, then, parallels the fate of the easy life and is hidden from humanity as part
of Zeus” punishment. This certainly makes sense in terms of Hesiod’s cosmic pessimism.
With this in mind it also seems very unlikely, given the “unbreakable home” and the lid
stopped up by “the will of Aegis holding Zeus”, that the popular interpretation of the retention
of hope as a consolation is a possibility. Besides, neither consolation nor punishment explain
why hope was there in the first place. This could, of course, just be the whimsy of myth. But
Brown, who seeks to understand the evolution of myths, follows another path. There is a tradition of scholarship, he argues, going back to the seventh century B.C.E., that accounts for
the presence of hope on the grounds that the jar originally contained good things that also es-
26
Harrison, Prolegomena, 285.
39
caped. With a euhemerist touch, he adds that jars, πίθοι, actually contained goods, i.e., the
very “means of existence” that has been hidden from the Greeks of the fifth age. This is more
than suggestive because it takes Pandora’s earlier incarnation as an earth-goddess and giverof-good-things, when the opening of the jar marked the birth of a new season, and brings it
together with the very withdrawal of those goods by Zeus in the dispensation of the iron age.
The withdrawal of good is thus turned into evil in the evolution of the myth.
However, Brown contends that the paradox of the jar is best understood not with
black and white distinctions between good and evil, but rather in that “gifts” always represent
a fundamental ambiguity in that they are a “reward” and a ‘sorrow” at the same time. He takes
this position with reference to the Greek term pharmakon and the ritual “opening” of new
wine (one specific meaning of the Greek word πίθοϚ is “wine-jar”). Brown explains it as follows.
This ritual was a ceremonial opening of the jars of new wine; the new wine
was, according to Plutarch, a pharmakon: the word, which is untranslatable,
signifies a thing fraught with special magical powers which can produce either
favorable or unfavorable effects, according to the circumstances. He goes on to
say that “it appears that in olden times they poured a libation from it before
drinking it, and prayed that the use of pharmakon might be without hurt to
themselves, and a source of salvation.” Pandora’s “Opening of the Jar” inaugurates not a new cycle of seasons, but a new age, in which the sinister powers of
the gift of the gods were unfolded. (Hermes 57)
Gifts, then, are two-edged, and though Hesiod makes explicit the evils contained therein, the
presence of hope is the trace of an earlier and more ambivalent meaning. Pharmakon is a
word which is usually understood to mean a medicine that is both a cure and a poison and as
such Brown argues, it is inevitably linked to magic in this period of Greek history, and therefore to trickery and craftiness. The contents of the jar, if interpreted as a pharmakon, exactly
40
figure this doubleness. The transformation of Pandora, then, from a giver of gifts and an
earth-goddess to a harbinger of evil and a curse hang entirely on the balance of this divided
word. Hesiod the misogynist clearly has his finger in the balance. In Brown’s analysis, Pandora shares with Hermes the privilege of standing at a point in Greek history where the emphasis
on meaning is such that a different inflection can transform received understanding. Pandora
figures the duplicity inherent in the pharmakon not only by opening the jar and bringing evil
into the world and establishing the fifth age as an age of thankless toil but also by being the
prototype of that alone in which men can seek comfort: woman. In Zeus” words, women are
the “evil thing in which they [men] may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.” Women are, then, like the last element in Pandora’s jar, a hope withdrawn.
It is no coincidence, according to Brown, that the denigration of both Hermes and
Pandora occurs under the dispensation of Zeus as understood in the age of Hesiod. This is
because the evolution of the myth is determined by an alteration in its environment. The euhemerist Brown, complementing the philological one I have been analysing, is very clear
about this. He suggests that between 1500-500 B.C.E., toward the latter end of which the Hesiodic corpus was composed and set in writing, Greece was altering dynamically in economic,
political and cultural terms. We have already seen that Hesiod laments the waning of agriculture and the rise of the urban mercantile classes on the agora. A parallel development emphasized by Brown is the decline of what he calls “autonomous familial collectivities” and the
“rise of kingship” (Hermes 47). Kingship, a new concept, imposed its structures upon previously separate and autonomous peoples, the very tribes who would meet at the boundarystones for the pleasure of the contest (ἀγών) and to exchange goods and women. According to
Brown the Greek word for “contest” derives from the same root as the word for market place,
“ἀγορά” (Hermes 42). So the agora begins its move from the border to the urban centre as the
borders themselves are gathered within larger regions. These former border transactions, as
we know, were under the patronage of Hermes. He now took his place as patron of the urban
agora. We also know Hesiod’s feelings about this. But not everything moved smoothly. Under
the new dispensation the boundary transactions between autonomous familial collectivities,
41
under the aegis of Hermes, give way to ‘social differentiation” and “class divisions” in which
“the landed aristocracy secured a stranglehold on the instrumentalities of state organization”
(Hermes 47). Here Brown’s early allegiance to socialism is apparent for the first time. This,
then, is the age of Homer, that is the age of kings. But this age of kings also brought about a
difference in the perception of the gods:
The most obvious and the most significant reflection of this institution of kingship in Greek mythology is the Homeric concept of Zeus as monarch of the
gods. This new concept entailed a complete reorganization of the Greek Pantheon: the Olympian hierarchy as a whole was patterned after the recently experienced reality, the state, and the component gods were given ranks and positions analogous to the component orders in society. (Hermes 48)
Here myth is clearly used—as perhaps it ever is, if its historical roots are uppermost—as an a
posteriori authority for a given reality. It conforms to Malinowski’s functionalist definition of
myth given earlier. It should reinforce the reason why two formerly independent gods, Hermes and Pandora, have found themselves languishing, one as a mere herald—for all his
tricks—sharing the blame with the other as root of the ills of the world. Hermes is no longer
the God of borders, and his symbolic status is reduced to that of Herald, a go-between, bereft
of his unique place and forced into a Pantheon. This is shown in the Homeric Hymn where
Hermes position as patron of trade is given to him by Zeus and his other responsibilities by
Zeus’s favourite Apollo. Hermes is no longer an individual God ruling over his own realms of
commerce and social activity, but is rather located in a hierarchy and apportioned his powers
by his ‘superiors.” In Homer, as Brown points out, we can actually see the process of Hermes
demotion: “only in the Odyssey is Hermes the messenger of Zeus; in the Iliad that function is
performed by Iris, whereas Hermes enjoys the same independence as the other “free” gods,
such as Athena and Apollo” (Hermes 49). Whereas once Hermes represented all services between family collectivities, now there is only one family, Zeus” family, and Hermes the mes-
42
senger represents his business alone. All that remains of his uniqueness is his trickery, a trickery the meaning of which is transformed and contained by Zeus and given new life as Pandora. Another consequence of this, as Harrison observed, is that self-sufficient earth-goddesses
will not be tolerated by Zeus, who is now the mythical representative of a society based on
hierarchy and kingship. As her matriarchal world is transformed, Pandora’s wheel spins that
cruel half turn. Pandora is reduced to Hesiod’s demonstration to Perses, his idle brother of the
necessity to work. Myth cannot withstand such a change of environment without adaptation,
nor can the early Greek religion codified by it. Brown’s task in Hermes the Thief was to trace
how the Hermes myth was modified “in response to changes in the environment” (Hermes
48), and whilst doing this, Brown also uncovered the intimately connected “modifications” of
the Pandora myth. It is this gradual alteration of Greek cultural tissue that Brown understands
as “evolution.” But it is important to recognise that which Brown’s constant attention to language bears out: this evolution is only significant because it can be traced directly to the creative reinvention of myth found in ancient poetry. This is also one key to understanding
Brown’s own evolution from one who studies myths to one who writes them.
III
In addition to the reworking of old stories to fit their times, the Works and Days, and more
particularly the Theogony set out to solve—yet ultimately only bequeathed—two problems
faced by the archaic Greeks: the questions of origin and of order. The first of these is answered by Hesiod in cosmological terms, the second by an interpretation of the relationship
between the “one” and the “many.” Both hang on the dispensation of Zeus. Though Hesiod
answers these problems, it is important to stress that his answers are by no means final or lasting—his questions, however, do remain. His answers, perhaps, do little more that articulate
just how knotty the initial questions of origins and order were, for few have found them satisfactory. This is in part because mythical thinking that speculates on the great questions is always open to attack not just from other myth stories, but also from the “rationalism” that,
43
supposedly, follows hard upon it. However, what is rarely faced by so-called rational thinkers
is that the mythological origins of their own positions—namely their own questions—are not
so easily shaken off.
Mythical thinking and rational thinking have yet to be divided without engendering
further problems and it is, as Frazer, Nestle and Graf have shown, notoriously difficult to locate anything like a clean break. The progressive “from…to…” argument that has guided so
much of the history of philosophy often demands to be qualified, as for example by KirkRaven-Schofield, who, according to Richard Buxton, concludes that the difference between
Hesiod and the pre-Socratic philosophers is that between the “mainly mythical” and the
“mainly rational.”27 This can be further complicated with reference to Brown’s first subject,
philology. Graf, for example, begins his account of Greek mythology by observing that that
even the terms of the debate, “mythos” and “logos” originally mean much the same thing: “a
mythos was a “word” or ‘story,” synonymous with logos and epos; a mythologos was a story
teller.”28 Graf and Buxton go on to tell the same story about the progressive differentiation of
the two words. Logos supersedes mythos only “amid a methodological hubbub, [where] disputants in various fields staked out their own territories by defining them against their rivals.”29 The difference between logos and mythos was from the first a disciplinary one, and
has remained so. It is, perhaps, with Plato that the distinction between the rational dialectic of
the logos and the lies and falsehoods of mythos is first announced even if, as the Cratylus
shows, such a distinction is hardly able to be enforced.30
It is with Thales the Milesian in the sixth-century B.C.E., whose three gnomic cosmological fragments are remembered by Aristotle, that philosophy is supposedly inaugurated as
a new way of grasping the world that is categorically different from myth. In Burnet’s transla-
23. Buxton, Myth to Reason, 2.
24. Graf, Greek Mythology, 2-3.
25. Buxton, Myth to Reason, 6; cf. Graf, Greek Mythology, 2.
26. Graf, Greek Mythology,2.
44
tion Thales’ fragments are as follows: “The Earth floats on the water,” “Water is the material
cause of all things,” “All things are full of gods. The magnet is alive; for it has the power of
moving iron.”31 Whilst it is certain that the translation of ἀρχή as “material cause” in the second fragment is a refutation of any “divine” cause, Burnet also implies that it carries the implication of the later Aristotelian school, namely empiricism. It is, I would argue, only from a
retrospective interpretation of philosophy that seeks its origins from an determinate end point,
namely the disciplinary “triumph” of positivism, that can see in these fragments, as Guthrie
does, “a purely rational account of the origin and the nature of the universe.”32 Moreover, as
Burnet observes, what has often proven Thales claim to rationality over and above his “fragments” is Herodotus” story that Thales predicted a solar eclipse, probably by using geometry.
However, as Burnet remarks, it cannot be inferred from this that Thales understood what
caused eclipses,33 though I would take this further and ask if even a sound understanding of
the mechanical passage of sun and moon can yield insight into their cause.
First causes have a longer and deeper association with myth than with rationality,
which is rightly nervous about absolute origins. But the question of origins that myth first answers remain the questions of later science. Thus, as Buxton observes, even a “from…to…”
hardliner like Guthrie has to concede that “mythical thinking never dies out completely.”34 If
anything is to become clear from reading Brown’s corpus it is this continued challenge to positivism, yielded unwittingly by Guthrie, that mythical thinking never entirely disappears. For
Brown myth is a cultural bedrock that can at best be denied and which can and should, indeed
must, always be recovered. Brown follows here the work of F. M. Cornford, for whom, “The
modes of thought that attain to clear definition and explicit statement in philosophy were al-
27. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th Edn. (New York: Meridian, 1960), 4748.
32
Buxton, Myth to Reason, 2.
33
Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 41-43.
34
Buxton, Myth to Reason, 2.
45
ready implicit in the unreasoned intuitions of mythology” (FRP v). And here “unreasoned”
does not carry the negative connotation of the “from…to…” theorists, on the contrary, for
Cornford philosophy only exists because of its unreasoned intuitions. Following Cornford, as
Brown does, in taking myth to be the origin and unseen guideline of philosophical questioning, in this last section I want to do three things. Firstly, outline Hesiod’s answers to the questions of origins and order—the unreasoned intuitions that, arguably, become modern science.
Secondly, briefly show how Hesiod’s unreasoned answers ground central elements of Greek
thought. Lastly, suggest that what emerges in Brown’s early works about this very problem
grounds his own progression.
In Brown’s translation, the part of Hesiod’s Theogony that deals with the origins of
all that is begins as follows:
First of all, the Void [ΧάοϚ] came into being [γένετ’], next broad bosomed Earth
[Γαῖα], the solid and eternal home of all, and Eros [Desire], the most beautiful of
the immortals, who in every man and every God softens the sinews and overpowers the prudent purpose of the mind. (Theo 56)
It is important to note, as commentators such as Burnet, Gantz, as well as Brown have done,
that “chaos” does not mean disorder, nor does it have any such connotation. Thus its opposite
is not technically “cosmos,” or order. Brown’s translation of ΧάοϚ as “void” is far more apt
as the Greek word denotes a “yawning gap” or “abyss.” So, first of all, in Hesiod’s account, a
void or gap, an open place, came into being. The word used for this primary emergence derives from γένεσις, “genesis,” that is, origin or cause. This is not the place of creation itself
but the place where creation will take place when Earth and Sky come into being. (It is also
the place, or gap, that by the end of this book we will come to know as the imagination.)
Burnet says, significantly for a ‘from…to…’ perspective, that Hesiod’s three primal
forces, the Void itself, then Earth and lastly Eros, are not gods that were worshipped as such,
46
rather they are “mere personifications of natural phenomena, or even of human passions”.35 It
is clear that both Earth and Void can represent natural phenomena, and Eros is indeed described in human terms. The word for “immortal,” which is “ἀθανάτοϚ,” literally deathless,
and the word for “God,” “θεόϚ,” do not, according to Burnet refer to the divine, but rather
designate something immanent and worldly. These primordial cosmic powers, then, if they do
not represent objects of religious worship, are rather ways of understanding origins on immanent and earthly terms. Burnet makes the following points about the theogonist: “When we
come to Hesiod, we…hear stories of the gods which are not only irrational but repulsive, and
these are told quite seriously,” however, Hesiod is “not primitive” he rather presents “speculative ideas” but “blurred and confused”.36 Thus, Burnet concludes, whilst clearly being mythical, Hesiod’s poems are also proto-rational because they have lost their religious aspect and
belong to the beginnings of the Greek speculative tradition, namely the movement from mythos to logos. The relationship between myth and rationality is tightly drawn by Burnet.
Though the implication of the words “irrational” and “repulsive” certainly show which side of
the “from…to…” debate he is on and myth is regressing to pseudos.
Though not made explicit, a version of the distinction does appear in Brown’s commentary on the Theogony, but with a very important difference that is crucial for his trajectory. For Brown, like Burnet, the three initial powers, Void, Earth and Eros, are very much of
the world because they bring about everything in the world. However, Brown considers the
divine and the physical to be intimate rather than separate, for him “Hesiod’s plan covers not
only the divine cosmos but also the physical one, and…the two are in [Hesiod’s] view so interrelated that it is not possible to treat the one without treating the other” (Theo 9). So if for
Burnet Hesiod has already removed himself from religion and thus his mythology is the on
the path “from…to…”, then for Brown Hesiod is on the different path of “both…and…”
Brown never deviates from this path. As he says a little later, the primal elements of the phys-
35
Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 14.
36
Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 5-7.
47
ical cosmos are also divine powers (Theo 9). And it is from these powers, that represent a lack
of separation (though not necessarily of tension) between the Divine and the Natural, that
“every other power mentioned in the Theogony, whether physical or non-physical is descended” (Theo 9).
Hesiod’s means of showing this descent is the “genealogical catalogue” comprising a
list of the offspring of Earth and Void, generation by generation, until all the physical, human
and divine elements of the cosmos are accounted for. The key power that enables this creation
is Eros or Desire, as Brown explains.
First, by systematically extending the traditional mythical genealogy till everything significant in the physical, the divine and the human cosmos is included,
and by then deriving this totality from two primal powers, Void and Earth, Hesiod establishes a pattern of progressive differentiation. This progressive differentiation is represented in Hesiod’s mythical language as a process of proliferation
stimulated by an immanent creative energy which Hesiod calls Desire: that is
why Hesiod enthrones Desire as one of his primordial cosmic powers, side by
side with Void and Earth. (Theo 15)
The totality, then, can be traced back to a primal pair Earth and Void. But with this pair alone
progressive differentiation, the engine of genealogy, cannot come into being. For anything at
all to exist both differentiation and connection have to occur. With Earth and Void Hesiod
gives us only difference. Even the possibility of differentiation is certainly not established by
the emergence of the Void, because whilst as just outlined it is in itself a place for something
to happen, it has nothing to be differentiated from until the emergence of Earth, equally ex
nihilo. (All myths must emerge out of nothing, but the key is to understand the “nothing” and
that, as we shall see later on, in part of Brown’s task.) Both Void and Earth are barren until
beautiful Eros joins them, again, out of nothing. However, there is a curious twist in Hesiod’s
myth here because the joining effected by Eros does not appear at first glance to account for
48
the second generation, the first offspring of Earth and Void, Sky (Οὐρανός) and Night (Νύξ)
respectively, because they arise parthenogenetically. Indeed, Earth gives birth not only to Sky,
but also mountains and waters, all as Hesiod says, “without the passion of love [ἂτερ
φιλότυτος ἐφιμέρου]” (Hymn 89). Likewise, Void gives birth to Darkness and Night. It is only
the next generation when Night in “love” with Void gives birth to Light and Day that the first
phenomena are born from a union, including Cronos. This initial self-spawned emergence,
however, can be understood as the first sign of the power of Eros, where Eros is not love as
union, but desire, the primordial catalyst that creates difference from unity. This is why
Brown calls Eros “an immanent creative energy.” Eros allows for progression, division and
distinction between things. Eros is Hesiod’s solution to the problem of the one and the many.
The question of the relationship between the one (ἓν) and the many (τά πάντα) becomes one of the primary problems of Greek philosophy. F. M. Cornford finds in Hesiod one
of its earliest expressions. He argues that Greek cosmologies bequeath to the first philosophers two basic principles, “the recognition of four elements [and] the grouping of pairs in
contraries” (FRP 60). It is the second of these that is of interest here, because the question of
the one and the many is, Cornford suggests, answered by the division of the one into two, and
more specifically, into pairs whose terms oppose each other. For Cornford “the prototype of
all opposition or contrariety is sex” (FRP 65), this is because, according to his larger argument, Greek myth originates in social divisions, the first of which is the division between sexes. Cornford, like Malinowski, uses a functionalist methodology, developed from the work of
Emile Durkheim and the Annales School. Thus myth serves a function and that function first
arises socially. Though they share a methodology, Cornford reads the opening of the Theogony quite differently to Brown, but in a way that still illuminates Brown’s argument. For Cornford “what is” does not emerge out of nothing or at least not out of an empty nothing, but rather:
the world began as an undifferentiated mass, without internal boundaries or limits—an ἂπειρον. This mass separated into two parts, which were opposed or
49
“contrary”—male and female. Finally, the male and female were united by Eros,
the contraries were combined, and gave birth to individual existence—to gods,
or to things. (FRP 68)
So for Cornford it is important to find male and female principles. The female principle is
given in the myth, namely Earth, but the male principle has to be derived because it is not
Void as such. Void or Chaos is sexless, its work is not generation (though it does have offspring). Void is the principle of separation. Quite contrary to its later meaning Chaos is, actually, the first sign of order. It is the “yawning gap” which separates the Earth from the Heavens and thus brings about the world as we now see it, with limits above and below, namely
Earth and Sky. As Brown says, nothing positive emerges from Void, only “distinction”
(The:16), and its offspring are not “things” but rather differences such as night and day, light
and dark, and finally Void is the principle of destruction. The masculine, then, arrives in the
form of Sky [Οὐρανός], pathenogenetically from the female principle, Earth. It is interesting
to observe here that, as in the early Pandora myth, the female principle dominates at the first.
(Though, again, the Theogony will “explain” how this is overturned in the coming to power of
Zeus.) As we have already seen, it is Eros’ task to unite Earth and Sky and allow for the next
generation of gods and things. By this Cornford is referring to the fact that the offspring of
Earth and Sky are not just gods, namely Cronos and eventually Zeus, but also natural phenomena, the sea, rivers and mountains.
Though different in its conclusions Cornford’s concept of polarity helps elucidate
Brown’s interpretation of the Theogony which began with three cosmic powers, two of which
stand isolated after emerging from a unity, Void and Earth, and one that allows for their progression, Eros. For what Brown notes is that despite their progression Earth and Void, and the
offspring of Earth and Void, never intermix. There is an absolute polarity maintained
throughout the Theogony between these two archetypes. We can now understand this as the
difference between the positive offspring of the female principle, Earth, and the negative offspring of Void, which bring about only distinction and destruction. Where Cornford’s analysis
50
differs is in the presence of a male principle, Οὐρανός, which is missing in Brown’s reading.
For Brown Void gives birth to Night, and “the descendents of Night, who all represent destructive forces at work in the human cosmos, arranged in groups clustering around the key
figures of Death, Vengeance, Deceit, and Strife” (Theo 27). Earth, on the contrary, gives birth
to Sea, from whose son Nereus, so Hesiod tells us, come the Nereids, “a group of gracious
influences in the human cosmos, for their names include groups which signify beauty, generosity, leadership, and success” (Theo 27). Brown concludes from this that Hesiod uses the
catalogue form to “express his personal philosophy [of] polar tension as the foundation of the
human cosmos” (Theo 27). This “personal philosophy” whether derived individually, or as
Cornford argues from unmistakeable social divisions, gives to the Greeks one of their primary
philosophical threads: contrariety.
Polarity, however, though predicated on difference, only operates because of contact.
I have already referred to this connecting concept as Eros, and I want to finish this chapter by
further elucidating how this functions in Hesiod and in early Greek thought. Cornford argues
that “the coming into existence of individual things is variously attributed by the early cosmologist to love or harmony, and to feud , strife or war” (FRP 70). Thus there are two basic
tendencies, union and antagonism. Union—for example that of Earth and Sky—brings about
gods and natural phenomena in their difference; antagonism—for example that between the
generations of Zeus and Cronos—brings about order, namely the dispensation of Zeus and the
Olympian hierarchy, which is reflected in (or rather reflects) the social order of Greek society.
The paradox is all but perfect as union creates offspring as difference, antagonism generates
order as war. But they both beget each other. These, as we shall see in a moment, are the conclusions of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. In the cosmology of Hesiod there can only be antagonism because there is generation through union. Cornford says this should come
as no surprise because union and antagonism “are only two ways of conceiving the meeting of
contraries” (FRP 70). Thus:
51
The two contraries are antagonistic, at perpetual war with each other. It is a
war of mutual aggression—each seeking to invade the province of the other.
But this very invasion involves a mixing of the two elements—a reconciliation, or marriage, in which both combine to produce a compound, the individual thing. (FRP 70)
This basic principle emerges in the earliest philosophical systems, those of Anaximander,
Empedocles and Heraclitus. In brief, Anaximander argues that all things (elements) are initially separate and a price must be paid for any intermixing. Empedocles bases his philosophy on
Love (philia) and Hate (Neikos), these two principles order relationships between the elements through attraction and repulsion. It is Heraclitus who is the most subtle of these, recognising that antagonism and reconciliation are intimate and that difference and unity, notwithstanding the paradox, are one. This one he calls harmony, which is unity in contrariety. But
this is not a unity of peace, it is unity in war (Πόλεμος) and strife (Ἐρις).
Unity in war is the dispensation of Zeus, it is also one of the “truths” asserted by Hesiod in both the Works and Days where Pandora’s box has brought strife into the world, and in
the Theogony where the lightening bolt of Zeus both overcame the previous dispensation of
Cronos and remains as the threat that maintains order. But this order is necessarily dynamic,
only held together out of strife. What is anathema in Brown’s reading of Hesiod is inertia, this
is not what is meant by order. Order is a way of allowing creative space; it is a way of permitting difference and unity to belong to each other. This is his definition of Eros. Thus Brown
concludes: “Hesiod’s universe is not only dynamic, but inherently full of tensions and polarities, which, as we have seen, recur at every level, from the primary polarity between Earth
and Void to the final polarities in Zeus himself” (Theo 42).” What holds the polarity together
is tension. As Brown says, “Zeus” order is like Heraclitus’ subtle “hidden” harmony, which is
a “harmony in contrariety”“ (Theo 43). It is the same tension felt in Heraclitus’ bow and lyre:
“Men do not know what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement [ἁμονίη] of oppo-
52
site tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.”37 Attunement or harmony (ἁμονίη) is again
the key word to express tensions held in unity, like the string of the bow and the lyre, but also
their different tasks of war and pleasure. Eros, no doubt coincidently, is usually represented
with a bow, figuring the paradoxes of love. This is reinforced by another fragment fro Heraclitus, “The bow [βιός] is called life [βίος], but its works is death” (Burnet: 138). Thus, “What
opposes unites”,38 and that unity emerges from the attunement of strife, not from its eradication or its celebration for its own sake. In Hesiod’s mythology this attuning principle is named
Eros. It is Eros that figures the unity and difference, the “inherent dynamism” that “produces
by natural proliferation the entire physical cosmos” (Theo 42). The unity and difference of
Gaia and Sky is the origin of evolution, and as Cornford notes, “In the “gap” [Chaos] between
their sundered forms appears the winged figure of the cosmic Eros, whose function is to reunite them” (FRP: 70). It is this characterisation of Eros as harmony and attunement, as well as
the desire for unity that feeds on strife, which appears first in Brown’s earliest works that will
be the key to unlocking Brown’s next book, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning
of History.
37
Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 136.
34. Heraclitus (trans. T. M. Robinson), Fragments (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1987), 15.
53
——Chapter Two——
The Dialectics of Eros, Part One: Thanatos and Civilization
The paths taken in Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History (1959) and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (1956) are strikingly similar. Here the mythical, religious and philosophical aspects of
Freud are worked through to their radical conclusions and together these books constitute an
important attempt to show that even though the instinct theory developed Freud’s late work
may not cohere with the clinical positivism his metapsychology strove to pioneer, it does cohere with a metaphysical tradition inherited from classical German philosophy and its romantic interpretation. It is only with this difficult and often precarious reading of Freud as a philosopher and a reading of philosophy through Freud, that Brown and Marcuse can come to
many of their conclusions. They take psychoanalysis as a moment in a European intellectual
tradition that always moves both forwards and backwards. That this does a violence to Freud
the therapist is indubitable, but that revealing the metaphysical nature of his metapsychology
is exciting and important is also indubitable. Thus, despite risk and paradox, these two books
strive to unearth Freud’s philosophical and mythic substructures—Brown calls it “the unconscious connection between psychoanalysis and the romantic movement”1—and to bring
Freud back from the pessimistic brink.
The root of this pessimism is Freud’s late work Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920). Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this analytically negative essay is that it has
given rise to such a distinctive body of utopian speculation. It is remarkable because in situating the origin of neurosis in the very instinctual biology of humanity—the ambivalent struggle between life and death—Freud’s metapsychology displaced psychoanalysis from a meth-
1
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 2nd edn.,
(Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 86. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as LAD.
54
od of cure to one of mere damage limitation and adjustment. As Brown puts it, “The [instinct]
theory, as [Freud] left it, results in complete therapeutic pessimism, and is therefore worse
than useless for therapists” (LAD 81). This negative shift ultimately lead to a widespread rejection of, or bland lip service to, Freud’s revolutionary theories by the normative schools of
“ego-psychology” and “neo-Freudianism.” Even such original analysts as Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich rejected biology in favour of an aetiology of social conditions.
In his 1942 work, The Fear of Freedom, Fromm argues that human freedom is grounded in
the “freedom from [the] instinctual determination of his actions.”2 Thus, for Fromm, instincts
are necessarily pre-human. Similarly, since the 1920s, Reich’s Freudian reading of Marx and
Engels recognised the oedipal structure of family life as the beginning of both sexual repression and authoritarianism—for Reich the family was a potential fascist state in miniature.3
Thus, it was always the social, based on the pattern of the authoritarian family, which created
the destructive impulse in humanity. It was imposed as a secondary process through Oedipal
tensions and sexual repression—it was never primary or instinctual. This turn to the social
was key because the ideas brought to psychoanalysis by Freud’s ‘speculative” Eros and Thanatos left the analytic community “fighting” unbeatable instincts rather than apparently safer
material social causes. For Reich Freud’s instinctual metapsychology was simply a return to
metaphysics. It seemed to displace all of Marx’s achievements in countering the spiritual
(Geistlich) nature of dialectics and stand Hegel back on his “head”; as this chapter progresses
we will that in many ways Reich was correct. Reich went so far as to see Freud to ask whether the death instinct was vital to clinical theory: “It was “merely a hypothesis,” [Freud] said. It
could just as well be omitted.”4 Of course Reich’s casual elision between himself and Freud in
2
Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1984), 26.
3
See The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 104-114 and
passim.
4
Wilhelm Reich (trans. V. R. Carfagno), The Function of the Orgasm (London: Souvenir,
1983), 128.
55
those two sentences is misleading, but nevertheless Freud’s waiver gave Reich the selfconfidence—the approval of the Father—to proceed with his research outside of the metapsychological instinct paradigm. The otherwise revolutionary extremist was grateful that he had
received “permission” from Freud to discount his instinct theory. Destructiveness, he could
then conclude, is not a matter of instincts because “the destructiveness bound in the character
is nothing but the rage the person feels, owing to his frustration in life and his lack of sexual
gratification”5 (FO: 148).
Yet, as Brown holds, “A psychoanalysis which remains psychoanalysis must keep the
theory of instincts. In it is contained the commitment to restore to man his animal nature and
to eliminate the mystery of the soul” (LAD 82). And Brown and Marcuse were not quite alone
in travelling this, the more difficult, route. In addition a welcome to Freud’s instinct theory
was given by the utopian theorist and educationalist Paul Goodman. Goodman criticised Horney and Fromm for dismissing the instincts and accused Reich of being naïve and Rousseauvian. Even so, as Richard King observes:
Goodman…was not “asserting that the liberation of instincts will of itself produce a heaven on earth…. But…the repression of the instincts makes good institutions unattainable.” In other words, instinctual liberation was a necessary
though not sufficient condition for a new society.6
5
Reich, Function of the Orgasm, 148. Reich’s emphasis.
6
Richard H. King, The Party of Eros: Radical Thought and the Realm of Freedom (New
York: Delta, 1973), 85. King’s book provides a good critical account of the relationship between Marcuse and Brown and Freud which is a useful adjunct to the philosophical dimension I pursue in this chapter. See 116-172.
56
This was the dichotomy that Brown inherited: either an outright rejection of Freud’s speculation or a qualified acceptance of its role: for Brown the liberation of the instincts and all that it
entails is a necessary and a sufficient condition for a “new society.” However, Brown and
Marcuse largely ignore Reich and Goodman, and they dismiss neo-Freudianism out of hand7
as a timorous and conventional reading of psychoanalysis appropriate only to the trend of
conservatism and conformity in post-war American social thought.
Though this is the context from which Brown’s work Life Against Death emerges, I
am not going to pursue these therapeutic readings of Freud in this chapter. Rather, I am going
to articulate how Brown utilises Freud’s speculative metapsychology philosophically alongside and occasionally in conflict with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. The chapter will unfold in several stages, firstly the utopian context, which I identify as Brown’s inheritance of
romanticism; secondly a brief run through Freud’s metapsychological dilemma; thirdly, an
excursus on Marcuse’s “philosophical inquiry into Freud” to ground the movement into the
dialectic. This prepares the way for the next chapter’s engagement with Brown’s and Marcuse’s competing theories of history and eschatology which leads to a complete reinterpretation
of the theory of narcissism.
I
In many respects, then, Life Against Death shares parallel means and ends with the work of
Marcuse, in particular Eros and Civilization. Paramount amongst these is the positioning of
psychoanalysis as a keystone to modern thought. Brown recognises “psychoanalysis as the
missing link between a variety of movements in modern thought—in poetry, in politics, in
philosophy—all of them profoundly critical of the inhuman character of modern civilization,
all of them unwilling to abandon hope of better things” (LAD xx). In a more overtly political
7
Marcuse does provide a fairly extensive critique of neo-Freudianism in an epilogue to his
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1998), 238274. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as EC.
57
way Marcuse writes: “This essay employs psychological categories because they have become political categories,” and “Psychological problems therefore turn into political problems: private disorder reflects more directly than before the disorder of the whole, and the
cure of personal disorder depends more directly than before on the cure of the general disorder” (EC xi). The bringing together of the micro and the macro, the political and the psychological, the poetic and the philosophical, occurs to a greater or lesser extent in both their prefaces. Psychoanalysis can gather and support intellectual pursuits divided by the disciplinary
practices of the contemporary university; it can mediate between the social and the individual; and it has, for Brown at least, ultimately, located the missing source of “happiness” in civilization.
However, in their intellectual range Brown and Marcuse confirm their contemporary
peer Philip Rieff’s point that the proper analyst is not a doctor but an interpreter of culture:
Freud’s physician was to be a student of history, religion and the arts. Subjects
having no connection with medicine, and which never enter the physician’s practice, such as “history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and
literature,” were to be storehouses from which the psychoanalyst could borrow
select pieces of truth in defining symptoms. The first and permanent Freudian
task was not empirical research but interpretative rearrangement of the intricate
jumble of data accumulated by the cultural sciences.
(Emphasis added)8
As Rieff also observes, Freud did not want analysts necessarily to be physicians first, a point
on which he was vetoed by the Psychoanalytic Association. For Rieff, as for Brown and Marcuse, psychoanalysis is primarily a cultural hermeneutic. Also, for these three figures Freud
8
Philip Rieff, Freud, the Mind of a Moralist (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960), 301. Hereafter
referred to parenthetically as FMM.
58
is a negative or critical spirit, someone whose thought stands against the prevailing idea of
reality even whilst explaining it.9
It is interesting to note how this critical “negativity” works its way into Brown’s and
Marcuse’s books, beginning with a denial of mere correctness. In the preface to Life Against
Death, Brown quite clearly states:
Eccentricity is unlikely to be “right”; but neither is this book trying to be
“right.” It is trying merely to introduce some new possibilities and new prob-
9
Even so, as a parallel contribution to the understanding of Freud in America, Rieff’s Freud:
The Mind of the Moralist (1960) stands opposed to the radical interpretations of psychoanalysis by Brown and Marcuse on many points, particularly with respect to a romantic and mythic
inheritance. For example, Rieff does not believe in the continued significance of the romantic
dialectic of hope and despair that is at the very core of Brown’s utopianism. Though he is
well aware of the romantic heritage of psychoanalysis, his own reading aims rather at explaining the contemporary nihilism of “psychological man” who has symptoms rather than beliefs.
It is apparent that Rieff here follows the Nietzschean edict that philosophy should become
psychology. Thus, Rieff refuses to find in Freud the agonal consolations provided by religion
and philosophy—which are at the core of Brown’s reading and attendant upon Marcuse’s
revolutionary Hegelianism. He is determined, rather, to probe the conditions of nihility not to
seek its overcoming. In this he is the “objective” (though undoubtedly Nietzschean) sociologist. Nevertheless, there is in Rieff’s reading of Freud as an un-programmatic moralist, the
cold comfort—a kind of consolation—for the loss of faith in modernity, for the dissipation of
cohesive cultural forms, for the death of God and for the end of the family: the knowledge
that our “darkness” is inevitable. Also, because Rieff’s Freud is the cultural conservative not
the instinctual radical, he follows a Hobbesian trend in opposition to the substantively Rousseauvian path of Brown and Marcuse. As such Rieff’s thought does not turn dissatisfaction
into hope but merely into toleration (though not apathy).
59
lems into the public consciousness. Hence the style of the book: paradox is
not diluted with the rhetoric of sober qualification. I have not hesitated to
pursue new ideas to their ultimate “mad” consequences, knowing that Freud
too seemed mad.
(LAD xx)
Brown is, of course, disingenuous here. There is, to the modern eye at least, and despite his
preference for conclusion over argument, a substantial amount of sober qualification in Life
Against Death, which proceeds in always tolerable, occasionally brilliant, academic prose, its
theories expounded and its arguments supported where necessary. This is not to say that
Brown’s conclusions are not extreme and often paradoxical, as we shall see. Marcuse’s work
is equally determined not to conform—he insists that the very process of philosophy is nonconformity. In his 1940 book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution, “the struggle against common sense is the beginning of speculative thinking, and the loss of everyday security is the
origin of philosophy”, and “Knowledge begins when philosophy destroys the experience of
daily life.”10 This negativity marks and sustains the “hopes of humanity [that] stand against
the prevailing reality principle” (EC 105). Both Brown and Marcuse are writing from within
Pandora’s “jar” and striving to affirm the instincts, against the crippling momentum of
Freud’s metapsychology, in particular the division between life and death, that which sets
them against each other. Thus, “Dialectics rather than dualism is the metaphysic of hope rather than despair,” and Brown’s vital conclusion is that “dialectics is the metaphysic of Eros,
hoping all things according to St. Paul and seeking reunion according to Freud” (LAD 84).
Brown’s hopes are not attached to any gradual reform of extant society—or at least are not
determined by it. They are founded on the dream of an epochal or eschatological revolution
in sensibility, where psychoanalysis does not refute religion but rather completes it. This is
10
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Humanity
Press: Amherst, 1999), 48, 103. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as RR.
60
his dream, which is a conversion of the nightmare at the end of Civilisation and its Discontents, where Freud left culture with the consolation of a religion that it knew to believe to be a
lie. Of course, as a schooled Freudian, Brown knows that dreams are real.
It is the limited reach of the word hope, however, rather than the reality of the dream
that locates Brown—and arguably Marcuse—within a restricted sense of utopia. That is, a
no-place of thought rather than a eutopia, or good-place action. There was, certainly at the
time of the writing of Life Against Death in the 1950s, little but hope for such ideas. The political left had waned in the United States since Wallace’s campaign in 1948, a decline further
exacerbated by the subsequent paranoia of the Red Scares. In a later interview Brown cites
the failure of Wallace’s campaign as the source of his distrust of Enlightenment ideas, or, as
he puts it, the “view that man has a limitless capacity to perfect himself by manipulating the
environment” (VV: 31). From 1948 Brown became an observer of the “darkness that is an
abiding part of the human condition” (VV: 31). Though the intensity of the cold war might
have diminished by the time Life Against Death was published, it had nevertheless taken root
in a trying decade in which Enlightenment values seemed to have exhausted themselves. The
unexpected coincidence was that the book bore its fruit in the 1960s where it found an audience ready for its hopeful message. As Joel Whitebook has recently observed with reference
to the timing of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and by extension Life Against
Death, the writing of these books “is one of the instances of the not uncommon connection
between utopian speculation and political despair.”11 Indeed, it says something about the
speculative integrity of Brown’s—and Marcuse’s—work that the darker the issues investigated, right down to the primal urge to die, the more they see it as a negation of contemporary
existential conditions—and thus as an affirmation of what could be. “Nature—or history,”
writes Brown in terms I will explore in detail, “is not setting us a goal without endowing us
with the equipment to reach it” (LAD 36), and Marcuse concurs: “negativity…remains the
11
Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory,
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), 24-25.
61
source and the motive power of the [dialectical] movement. Every failure and set
back…possesses its proper good and its proper truth. Every conflict implies its own solution”
(RR 92-93). In this, they recall an important fragment from Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Patmos”
(c. 1800) (lines for which Heidegger expresses great fondness): “But where the danger threatens/That which saves from it also grows.”12 The influence of the romantic idea that utopia
emerges from dissatisfaction, that hope is intimate with despair, is preserved in the writings
of Brown and Marcuse.
There are two interrelated ways in which Freud is read by Marcuse and Brown. The
first way is to read him with Hegel, to bring the philosopher’s dialectic of history to bear on
Freud’s insights, while the second way is to draw out the mythico-poetical foundation of
Freud’s thought, opening it up to romanticism.13 Of course, reading Freud with Hegel was en
vogue in the mid twentieth-century. Roughly simultaneous with Brown’s work is that of
Jacques Lacan under the influence of Kojève, and in the 1960s, Paul Ricoeur published Freud
and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,14 explicitly engaging with Marcuse. These writers concur that Freud is an appropriate vehicle for philosophical speculation and, moreover,
that Freud is already “doing” philosophy. Marcuse writes: “In its most advanced positions,
Freud’s theory partakes of [a] philosophical dynamic” (EC 124), and Ricoeur argues that:
“Freud’s entire work—both the metapsychology and the theory of culture—takes on a very
definite philosophical tone” (FP 442). And Brown agrees, writing, “The metaphysical courage, even grandeur, of Beyond the Pleasure Principle should not blind us to the fact that it is
metaphysics” (LAD 82). What gives Freud his philosophical flavour is his curious position
12
Friedrich Hölderlin (trans. Michael Hamburger), Poems and Fragments (London: Anvil,
1994), 483, 499.
13
This latter way is dealt with at length in the next chapter.
14
Paul Ricoeur (trans. Denis Savage), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Hereafter referred to parenthetically as FP. Originally given as lectures in 1961 and published in English translation in 1970.
62
between rationalism and romanticism that, in Whitebook’s words, “sought to do justice to the
Other of reason”,15 which Brown called the abiding darkness of modern civilization. It is
Freud’s occupation of the middle ground between rationalism and romanticism in his more
speculative work that ally him, unwittingly, to utopian readings.
Freud is quite clear in the metapsychological essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle
that “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation”,16 and Ricoeur reminds us
that “there is an excess of hypothesis compared with [the essay’s] fragmentary and partial
verifications” (FP 282). Freud is following hunches and intuitions, flights of fancy into Greek
myths and ancient philosophies. We have already seen in the last chapter that one of the important consequences of Brown’s classical studies was the hidden harmony of myth, philosophy and religion. Thus, for Brown the discovery of the instincts is certainly not empirical science, it “is true religion…it is Freud’s attempt to see all things in God and sub specie aeternitatas” (LAD 82). So, despite Freud’s lengthy discourse on the repetition compulsion as seen
in migrating animals, and the empirical evidence used to back it up, the essay Beyond the
Pleasure Principle retains the evocative presence of myth. Perhaps it is the universal and
foundational claims made by his instinct or drive theory and the Greek names attached to
them, Eros and Thanatos. Perhaps it is also the return of fate and necessity, Anankē, to a discourse that has scientific pretensions. But then, maybe there ought to be no surprise in any of
this. For, as Alfred North Whitehead observed in his Science and the Modern World (1927):
The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists to-day are the great
tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of
fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is
15
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 8.
16
Sigmund Freud (trans. and eds. J. Strachey and A. Richards), Beyond the Pleasure Princi-
ple, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.)
243. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as BPP.
63
the vision possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought.17
So when any ‘science” attempts to pursue itself to its own ground, it might well raise the
spectre of these pilgrim fathers in whom the idea of determinism is immanent.18 This was
also F. M. Cornford’s conclusion, who dedicated his book on the origins of Western speculation to “a man of science, hoping that he may find in it some saving touch of the spirit associated with the name he worthily bears” (FRP x). This anticipates Freud’s correspondence with
Albert Einstein in 1932: “But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?”19 As further evidence Brown cites Freud’s point that “The instincts are mythical beings,
superb in their indefiniteness,” and that Freud goes on to remind us (contradicting Reich’s
claim) that “we cannot for a moment overlook them” (LAD 66-67). Ricoeur also indicates
“the quasi-mythological nature of this metabiology” (FP 312). The instincts then, are “mythical,” occupying the space between the known and the unknown, the psychic and the somatic;
and as a quest of origins, Freud’s drive theory belongs in this “romantic” no-place.
17
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938),
21. Cf. Cornford, FRP, passim.
18
In this I find it necessary to disagree with Rieff, for whom Freud’s scientific mythology of
fate is not tragic but ameliorative, i.e., therapeutic; and is not “transcendent,” i.e., prototypical, but is part of the “revolt against transcendence” (FMM 63, 204). I believe that Rieff’s
concern with the contemporaneous in psychoanalysis prevents him from seeing what Freud
and Whitehead really mean, that fate and tragedy remain the very prototype of deterministic
science.
19
Sigmund Freud (trans. and eds. James Strachey and Albert Dickson), “Why War?: Letter
From Freud” in Civilization, Society and Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 358.
64
How Freud came to his late theory of instincts, as it is set out in Beyond the Pleasureprinciple, The Ego and the Id (1923)20 and Civilization and its Discontents (1930),21 is well
known and I shall restrict myself to the barest definitions. In The Ego and the Id Freud defines Eros as an energy that “by bringing about more and more far-reaching combinations of
the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the
same time, of course, at preserving it” (EI 381-382). Freud saw this as a “preserving” instinct,
whereas previously Eros has been considered as a force for change. The death instinct, or
Thanatos (a term Freud rarely used), strives to bring about the immediate release of tension
through death, the return to the inorganic. “At this point,” he famously writes in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle,
we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a
universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which
has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It
seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an
earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon
under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic
elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in
organic life.
(BPP 308-309; Freud’s emphasis)
20
In Sigmund Freud (trans. and eds. J. Strachey and A. Richards), On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 339-408. Hereafter referred to
parenthetically as EI.
21
In Sigmund Freud (trans. and eds. James Strachey and Albert Dickson), Civilization, Socie-
ty and Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 243-340. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as CD.
65
The difficult manoeuvre for Freud is to locate a dualism in the entropic “hypothesis that all
instincts tend toward the restoration of an earlier state of things” (BPP 310). And it is Freud’s
inability to rigorously assert this dualism that allows Brown’s and Marcuse’s theories to appropriate him for their dialectics. The question Freud must answer is if it is conservative to
live, to preserve life, and it is conservative to die, to extinguish life, then what differentiates
Eros from Thanatos? This is where in order to maintain a dualism a third term enters. This is
Anankē, or necessity. By this Freud means the external forces of sun and earth that interferes
with any simple relaxation of organic matter to an inorganic state (we will see later how important the “third term” is for Freud). The first organic life, Freud hypothesises, would have
been so close to its death that its glimmer of life, the tension that arises between it and the
external world, would have been barely noticeable. External influences, however, over time
obliged these fleeting existences to diverge ever further from their familiar passage to death.
Thus Eros emerged as the preserver not of life per se, but of a particular route to death, via an
intimate and evolving interaction with nature. How this “erotic” intimacy is understood will
be at the centre of what follows.
The common nature of the instincts is, arguably, a hangover from, or an attempt to
rationalise further, Freud’s earlier second theory of instincts, the libidinal monism of narcissism. In fact many thinkers, Marcuse and Whitebook for example, choose this point, the 1914
essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,”22 as the philosophical turning point, or rather the
turning into philosophy, of Freud’s theory. “On Narcissism” is as close as Freud got to abandoning his preference for a dualism and admitting the dominance of a single force or energy
from which both the ego and its objects come into being: the libido. The libido is entirely
sexual—in Freud’s extended sense of the term—corresponding to the dynamic emergence of
the subject’s pleasure. In this second instinct question, the pleasure principle remains the
22
In Sigmund Freud (trans. and eds. J. Strachey and A. Richards), On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 59-98. Hereafter referred to as NI
in the text.
66
primordial regulator of the subject. The quandary for Freud was how autoerotic or subjective
pleasure became objective pleasure, or, rather, how the subject was able to turn outward into
the world and confirm itself as an ego among objects. Though familiar I want to discuss this
in some detail because what Freud suggests is crucial for an understanding of how Marcuse
and Brown utilise Hegel in their philosophical interpretation of primary narcissism.
At its origin, Freud points out, the subject cannot be said to possess an “ego” that is
in any way divided from the world, which is, rather, a monad of autoerotic satisfaction.
Something has to disrupt this simple kernel of, Freud assumes, mother or substitute and baby
in order to start the ego’s formation. This first stage of subjectivity (without a subject) Freud
terms primary narcissism. Again, what is important for Brown is that Freud was selfconsciously speculative in the answers he provides on the early development of the subject.
This is because it is this point of primary narcissism which forms a nodal point for Brown’s
reading of Freud. The evidence for primary narcissism obviously cannot come from direct
empirical observation, which for Freud means that it cannot be scientific in the strict sense.
Instead it comes from intuitive insight, comparative mythology, anthropological studies, scientific analogy and the treatment of neurotic patients—it is, in Rieff’s sense, a cultural symptom. The conclusions Freud draws run as follows. Firstly, it is suggested that the “omnipotence of thoughts” (NI 67) in primitive peoples and in children is a vestige of the primal
pleasure of the monad. Belief in magic, an over-estimation of the power of mental acts, and
animism are the symptoms here. Freud, like his contemporary Frazer, and despite his use of
mythological terms, shares the prejudice of the ‘from…to…’ school of thought discussed in
chapter one. For Freud the ontogenic maturation of the individual was a miniature in parallel
of the phylogenic maturation of the species:
the animistic phase would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in
its content; the religious phase would correspond to the stage of object-choice
of which the characteristic is child’s attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual
67
has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to
reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires. (Cited in
FMM 47).
Secondly, for Freud, with respect to the passage through primary narcissism, there is the necessity for the subject to recognise that the world does not run according to its desire because
certain “feelings” will always or regularly be present and certain “feelings” will not because
they are provided by another, the mother or a substitute. From this perceptible difference, the
child’s ego gradually emerges along with the knowledge of objects.23 That which is pleasurable is internalised, that which is unpleasurable is externalised. Libido is apportioned as egolibido and object-libido respectively. First there remains in the child an attachment to things
that are, in “reality,” other but which gave pleasure, this is ego-libido. Ego-libido forms anaclitic (from the Greek “to lean on”; Freud’s German term is Anlehnung) attachments, where
the sexual instincts “lean on” the ego or self-preservation instincts (which develop in Freud’s
thought into Eros), and objects subsequently are chosen on the model of those who nourished
those ego-instincts, ultimately the breast and mother, but also the father who protects. Objectlibido, on the other hand, should be the finding of objects “out-there” in reality, objects largely unmarked by the presence of the ego.
But there is another type of object choice, which Freud did not expect to find, and
this is narcissistic object-choice or narcissistic-libido, where instead of forming relations
through either attachment, or through the distinction of “reality,” object-choice is affixed to
the subject’s own self. Rather than loving the other as an object, narcissistic object-choice
loves the self because it is the object of the other’s love. It strives to “identify.” I think we can
say that anaclitic object-choice corresponds to a vestige of primary narcissism, of a prior unity, whereas narcissistic object-choice corresponds to secondary narcissism, an attempt to rep-
23
As we shall see, in a later chapter, Cornelius Castoriadis argues against such a “gradualist”
approach in ways that are important for understanding Brown’s Love’s Body.
68
licate a unity by denying difference.24 It was secondary narcissism, and its connection with
hypochondria, delusions of grandeur, perversion and homosexuality, that concerned Freud. It
is the relationship between libido, primary narcissism and Eros that is of concern here.
Perhaps the most important and justly famous factor arising from primary narcissism,
one cited by both Brown and Marcuse, is in Civilization and its Discontents and runs as follows:
originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world
from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a
much more inclusive—indeed, an all embracing—feeling which corresponds
to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.
(CD 225)
This intimate bond, which is certainly not rendered significant by Freud alone, but rather because of its long philosophical, literary, religious and mythological pedigree, remains with
the subject in a more or less significant manner as we have seen in the apportionment of the
libido. It is the famous “Oceanic feeling”: the memory of primary narcissism. Freud sees it as
the origin of mysticism and associated “religious” experiences.25 For Brown and Marcuse,
though in different ways, this oceanic feeling becomes the locus of utopian hope. In their extrapolations from Freud’s drive-theory, this single speculative idea, that there was at some
time, even if only briefly, a total immersion in the world prior to the demands of Anankē
24
We will see below that Brown takes a revised approach to this problem.
25
Rieff sees this quite rightly as Freud’s dismissal of any such religious feelings as “child-
like” or “regressive” (FMM 266-267). However, as we shall see, this only increases its significance for Brown and Marcuse. The difference is that for Rieff the oceanic feeling displays a
dependence on parental figures and is thus a sign of immaturity, whereas for Brown and Marcuse, the oceanic holds on to the promesse du bonheur.
69
where the instincts were balanced, is enough to fuel Life Against Death and Eros and Civilization. For this original unity suggests that something “real” exists before the dominance of
Freud’s dualisms, before the reality-principle, and that this state—which Freud recognises as
the ego’s dearest wish and deepest fear—can be returned to. So there are three crucial ideas
that are developed in Life Against Death and Eros and Civilization, namely, the vagueness of
the instincts, the ambiguities of object-choice and the persistence of primary narcissism. In
exploring these concepts Brown and Marcuse by no means limit themselves to psychoanalysis, between them employ almost the full weight of the Western philosophical tradition, from
Anaximander to Whitehead; but the most important idea in these two books is Hegel’s dialectical phenomenology. As Brown writes, psychoanalysis needs “instead of an instinctual dualism, an instinctual dialectic” (LAD 83).
II
Paul Ricoeur is quite clear that when reading Freud “a direct Hegelian translation” is something we “may do on our own, at our own risk, but not as interpreters of Freud” (FP 317). At
least one of the targets of this warning is Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, which as a “philosophical inquiry” into Freud makes extensive use of Hegelian techniques.26 For Ricoeur, Hegel and Freud are different “continents” and any reading of one in terms of the other, any colonial aspirations, would have to be viewed as violence, the outcome of which would be a
“facile but absurd eclecticism” (FP 461). His own practice is to compare Freud with Hegel,
to point to homologies, but not use one to change, improve upon or critique the other. Both
Brown and Marcuse, though, see it as an important utopian move to go beyond any herme-
26
In a significant note Ricoeur writes: “This entire chapter [“Dialectic: Archeology and Tele-
ology”] is an internal discussion or debate with Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, J. C.
Flugel, Man, Morals and Society; and Philip Rieff, Freud, the Mind of the Moralist.” (FP
462n).
70
neutic exercise, however adroit. They recognise in Freud, despite or perhaps because of its
absurdity, the realization—or at least the next stage—of a vital contribution to the possibility
of freedom initiated by Hegel’s dialectic of history which opposes everyday consciousness.
The Hegelian theory that Brown and Marcuse employ is complex and wide ranging. For his
references to Hegel in Life Against Death and elsewhere Brown himself draws on the Phenomenology of Spirit and the readings of the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic in
Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, as well as Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. I will also use key supporting essays by Marcuse to clarify his
pre-Freudian work on Hegel and Marx and his relationship to nature. This is necessary in order to separate out his trajectory from that of Brown. What is important is not to exhaust Hegel’s system but to explain how parts of it can help a reading of the instinct theory and thus of
the books in question. I shall trace how the dialectic emerges from the contradiction between
subjects and objects in order to explain the role of the dialectic in the life and death instincts
and how this is transformed in an original understanding of narcissism. During this analysis
of Hegel I shall open up what Marcuse means by “nature,” “reason,” and “essence,” contrasting Brown’s vision of an eschatology with Marcuse’s rational telos.
One of the most pertinent and persuasive foundations for Ricoeur’s trepidation is that
Freudian theory is “analytic” and results in an “economics,” whereas Hegel’s philosophy is
‘synthetic” and leads to a “dialectic.” Freud’s analytic of the libido, for example, takes it
apart and considers the dynamic between these energies as something like a hydraulic system
of pressures in which effects can be traced back to causes. This establishes an always-finite
exchange of energies, strictly analogous to the economic prejudices of the nineteenth-century
and Freud’s model of scarcity (Anankē). Ricoeur argues that this tends to solipsism, where
intersubjectivity is played down and a figurative map of the individual (systems Cs., Pcs.,
Ucs., or id, ego, superego) dominates (FP 476).
Synthetic philosophy, on the contrary, is inclined to bring things together, to expand
outwards to the infinite, aligning seeming contradictories—such as other people—into relations of mutual necessity. It is dialectical. It is, however, clear to Ricoeur that the predilection
71
of Freudian theory for binarisms is always on the verge of a collapse into synthesis. For example, Brown observes that
The only duality which the narcissistic libido suggested was the duality of the
ego-libido and object-libido; but since the facts which forced on psychoanalysis
the concept of the narcissistic libido showed the convertibility of the ego-libido
into object-libido and vice-versa, this duality was not firm enough.
(LAD 80)
Libido, as we saw in the last section, is a single energy source for two conflicting paths to the
world, anaclisis (object libido) and narcissism (ego-libido). But Freud wants a dualism and to
locate this he turns to the romantic distinction between “love” and “hunger.” But again, as
Brown observes, “No one has shown more clearly than Freud how love can turn into hate, the
fusion of both in the phenomenon of sadism. So, to obtain a firm enough duality, Freud turns
for inspiration to the biological antithesis of life and death” (LAD 80). From this we can see
what Ricoeur means when he argues that Freud often finds it hard to keep to the two terms he
wants, as above with both the conservative nature of the instincts and the different types of
object choice. It is Freud’s intellectual habit to introduces a third mediating term to keep his
dualisms from dissolving, one such term is Anankē. Further to this Ricoeur stresses that the
analytic situation itself is fundamentally synthetic and that transference relies upon intersubjectivity (FP 322). Freud, however, “expressly states that the discipline he founded is not a
synthesis but an analysis—i.e., a process of breaking down into elements and of tracing back
to origins—and that psychoanalysis is not to be completed by a psychosynthesis” (FP 460).
In spite of such warnings, Brown and Marcuse make of Freudian theory a dialectic. But it is
almost certainly because of them that they make their claims far away from the therapeutic
field, for Marcuse in philosophy (“a philosophical inquiry into Freud”), for Brown in history
(“the psychoanalytical meaning of history”). In order to grasp the uniqueness of Brown’s
contribution it is necessary to seriously consider the groundwork achieved by Marcuse’s Eros
72
and Civilization, and I shall use the rest of this section to discuss the most important aspects
of this his most daring work.
Some have argued that Marcuse in particular suffers from being tied to Freud’s outdated economic model,27 and on first glance it does seem odd to use an economic structure
for what are substantively synthetic ends. I would argue, however, that it is precisely in his
revision of this model that Marcuse’s Hegelianism comes through. Marcuse does not accept
the limitations placed upon the economic model—what Wilden would call its “closed system”—but rather historicizes it and reveals it to be an open process. A good example of this
is Marcuse’s use of the ambivalent word Trieb, instinct or drive. Freud considered this word
to be one of the triumphs of the German language, as it has a flexibility that the standard English translation “instinct” does not. The German word Instinkt, which Freud uses only rarely,
has the same connotations as the English instinct in the sense of “innate” and “inherited” biological structures. Trieb, however, is defined by Freud as “bodily needs inasmuch as they rep-
27
Douglas Kellner, for example, expresses surprise that Marcuse should exploit such an obvi-
ously limited bio-mechanical model. He argues that Marcuse is using “nature” (instincts) to
found the revolutionary subject. Whilst this is an appropriate reading, I seek here to stress
Marcuse’s overcoming of the economic model—and of nature—in the dialectic, and to position Marcuse with Hegel rather than Marx. See Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the
Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 162. Also, Anthony
Wilden argues that the “outdated” economic model, borrowed from Fechner, should be replaced with a systems theory model base on feedback mechanisms and communications theory. Of course, thirty years on, this quasi-structuralist model seems equally moribund. Nevertheless, Wilden’s article remains fascinating. Anthony Wilden, “Marcuse and the Freudian
Model: Energy, Information, and Phantasie,” Salmugundi, nos. 10-11 (Fall-Winter 19691970), 196-245.
73
resent an incentive to mental activity.”28 It is the crossover from mere bodily or reflexive
hungers to the mental, or the reflective—the creative—that is crucial in Freud’s use of the
term and in Marcuse’s appropriation of it. It is also important to remember that this ‘space”
between psyche and soma was for Freud the ground for his speculative and mythological instinct theory. The other common English word, “drive,” is often used interchangeably with
instinct. Whilst it has some of the dynamic connotations of Trieb, it still does not connect it to
mental and creative activity. It is because of these nuances that it is easier to historicise Trieb
than instinct or even drive. Thus Marcuse can conclude that ““Instinct,” in accordance with
Freud’s notion of Trieb, refers to the primary “drives” of the human organism which are subject to historical modification; they find mental as well as somatic representation” (EC 8;
Marcuse’s emphasis). So the word instinct is preserved despite the argument for other translations. But it is necessary to recall its full range of connotations which cross from the mental
to the bodily, because in this revision the instincts break down the distinction between nature
and culture, soma and psyche. Thus, for Marcuse, an instinct is not a fixed quantum of libidinal energy traversing the subject, but is the direct manifestation of the subject’s relationship
to nature that emerges from and as history as a dialectical process.
Like the need to recognise the word Trieb behind the word instinct, reader of Marcuse have to see the word Geschichte behind the word history. For Marcuse, because he writes
in English as a second language, “history” is always a translation of the German Geschichte
and never Historie. Geschichte, in Marcuse’s Hegelian vocabulary, is derived from Geschehen: event, happening, or process. History is something that occurs, it is the happening of eve-
28
Freud, cited in the editors” “Glossary” to Friedrich Schiller (trans. and eds. Elizabeth Wil-
kinson and L. A. Willoughby), On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters,
English and German Facing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 331. Schiller’s more expansive
use of Trieb is important to Marcuse in other areas, especially that of “play.” See EC 185-196
and my unpublished PhD thesis, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and the Romantic Tradition, 150-163.
74
ry-thing that is. What this means is that history is not something that happened in the past,
nor is it something that can be written about, i.e., historiography, but it is, as a cumulative
process, the present.29 The important conclusion is that instincts (Trieben) are as variable as
the historical (Geschichtlich) circumstances in which they are found. It is also worth noting
that Marcuse is referring to the life and death instincts. For Freud, at various stages of his career, instincts were multiple, and include destructive instincts, instincts to mastery, aggressive
instincts, which come and go with the phases of ontogenesis or, like the aggressive or selfpreservation instincts, are (earlier) versions of the life and death instincts. Marcuse’s—and
Brown’s—sole concern with Eros and Thanatos show, firstly, that they are recognized as the
most important because they the most fundamental, and secondly, that nothing less than the
29
This conception of Geschichte is clearly influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger and is
the subject of Marcuse’s 1932 work Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans.
Seyla Benhabib, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), and I refer the interested to it for further guidance on this. Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity.
Hereafter referred to parenthetically as HO. Though I have drawn extensively on this work in
writing this chapter, due to its technical density I have been reluctant to cite from it; in preference I shall merely point to parallels and supporting remarks in footnotes. Much of the work
is itself paralleled in Marcuse’s much more accessible 1941 book Reason and Revolution so I
have quoted from this source instead. For an intelligent reading of Marcuse’s relationship to
Heidegger and Hegel and of HO to RR see Robert B. Pippin, “Marcuse on Hegel and Historicity,” The Philosophical Forum, XVI, no. 3, (Spring 1985): 180-206. Hereafter referred to
as MHH in the text. Pippin argues that Marcuse’s reading of Hegel is heterodox, but not out
of keeping with trends in Hegel’s thought (MHH: 185). See also, Marcuse’s early 1928 article, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Marxism,” Telos 4 (Fall 1969): 3-34; also Paul
Piccone and Alexander Delfini, “Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” Telos 6 (Fall
1970): 36-46; and Paul Piccone, “Phenomenological Marxism,” Telos 9 (Spring 1971): 3-31.
75
historical (Geschichtlich) mutability of these instincts is what is at stake in a dialectical alteration of civilization.
An understanding of the dialectic, as Marcuse reads it, begins with Anankē, here interpreted as the human struggle with nature and the consequent experience of nature as susceptible to domination, mastery and control. Marcuse traces the origin of this thinking to Aristotle, or rather to “the canonization of Aristotelian logic” (EC 111) and the concept of
“Logos,” which exemplifies the task of ordering, classifying and mastering according to the
dictates of reason. Brown also traces the conception of rational control to Greece, but not to
its philosophy, rather, as should be expected, to its mythical theology:
To understand our present predicament we have to go back to its origins, to the
beginning of Western civilization and to the Greeks, who taught and still teach us
how to sublimate, and who worshiped the God of sublimation, Apollo. Apollo is
the God of form—of plastic form in art, of rational form in thought, of civilised
form in life. But the Apollonian form is form as the negation of instinct.
(LAD 174)
The mythical-philosophical origin of the rational—as sublimation and negation of instinct—
is also the point where the difference between the reality principle and the pleasure principle
becomes historically (Geschichtlichkeit) significant. Those faculties and attitudes which resist
ordering and classifying, and retain the demands of the pleasure-principle, become considered irrational, dysfunctional, somehow “lower.” Brown, closely following Nietzsche, sees
this as the repression of the Dionysian. “Dionysus is the image of the instinctual reality which
psychoanalysis will find on the other side of the veil” (LAD 175). Dionysus is always in excess of reason and the reality it purports to categorise. Thus, psychoanalysis, against its intentions, will always discover what was earlier called “the Other of reason” or this “excess.” But
as Marcuse explains reason, (logos, ratio) becomes increasingly effective at production and
less and less concerned with reception, pleasure or feeling. In Brown’s terms this is “life kept
76
at a distance and seen through a veil” (LAD 175). The veil, then, figures the way rationality
obscures what it reveals; a point returned to in chapter four. Eventually, Marcuse concludes,
“The Logos shows forth as the logic of domination. When logic then reduces the units of
thought to signs and symbols, the laws of thought have finally become techniques of calculation and manipulation” (EC 111-112). However, the domination of the reality principle, reified as reason, does not annihilate its other. Marcuse argues that the “inner history of Western
metaphysics” (EC 112) is epitomized by the dynamic of reason and its irrepressible (or only
repressible) other (the Other of reason). This otherness is the ‘synthetic” or “dialectical” urge:
“The restless labor of the transcending subject terminat[ing] in the ultimate unity of subject
and object: the idea of “being-in-and-for-itself,” existing in its own fulfillment” (EC 112).
For Marcuse’s Aristotle this only existed for God considered as nous theos. God as the pinnacle of the hierarchy of being could not be the object for a subject or the subject for an object.
The nous theos always returns to itself in otherness—it is the moment of pure thought “thinking” itself, the circle of being returning to its own origin in fulfillment. For Brown this unity
is the Dionysian principle because “Dionysus reunifies male and female Self and Other, life
and death” (LAD 175). Both the nous theos and the Dionysian should recall Eros’s role after
primary narcissism, which is the desire for a primal synthesis sustained in unity and growth.
Primary narcissism—along with myth, and as we shall see, religion, and dialectics, is a way
of figuring an excess that cannot be recuperated by rationality. Nevertheless, Marcuse argues
using lessons he would have learned at Freiburg from Heidegger, it is this initial Aristotelian
(Apollonian) conception that is retained by the subsequent philosophical attempts to think
through the problem of subject and object in terms of fulfillment. The most significant of
these attempts according to both Brown and Marcuse is Hegel’s.
Marcuse reads the Phenomenology as the beginning of Hegel’s systematic attempt to
reconcile the two positions just outlined, firstly, the otherness of “nature” as Anankē, secondly, the God-like notion of thought thinking itself. In Hegel, reason (Vernunft)—a modern interpretation of logos via the Latin “ratio”—becomes interpreted dialectically. Rather than
asserting the dominance of a subject over an object, reason is the way in which the philoso-
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pher can understand the interconnected and reciprocal relationship between the subject and
nature (as the world of objects) in a rational process which unfolds as (not in) history. The
subject comes to know itself by knowing the world it makes, like Aristotle’s God. Marcuse
writes: “This rationality is made possible through the subject’s entering into the very content
of nature and history. The objective reality is thus also the realization of the subject” (RR 8).
Unlike in the canonized interpretations of Aristotle, objects are not treated as substances that
can be analysed into elements and categorised (ultimately exploited), but they actually
emerge into their being along with the process of subjectivity.
Reason, Hegel argues, is not something abstract (that is, “removed”; abstract in the
sense of something “taken out”); it emerges as the telos of the movement of history on its
ineluctable route to the realization of human freedom. History operates to this end in spite of
itself (the so-called “cunning of reason”). Reason is the process of a subject towards its reality, by which Hegel means, its freedom. In the first instance it agrees with the role accorded to
it by the Aristotelians, to shape nature through knowledge of it, and thus to master it and to
release the subject from its bondage to Anankē, to impose order on chaos. The difference
here is that the subject, nature and history all emerge through the same process: as such, even
Anankē—primal need—is historical. As Marcuse explains it in his essay on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: “Man is not in nature; nature is not the external world into
which he first has to come out of his own inwardness. Man is nature. Nature is his ‘expression,’ ‘his work and his reality.’”30 The power to shape reality emerges along with that reality
30
“The Foundations of Historical Materialism” (1932), 1-48 in Herbert Marcuse, Studies in
Critical Philosophy, trans. Joris De Bres (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 17; Marcuse’s emphasis. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as SCP. The citations are from Marx’s reading of
Hegel. As will be shown, though, “work” drops out of Marcuse’s conception in EC.
In HO Marcuse expresses the same idea as follows: “Only human existence and all
the objects formed, created and animated by Dasein [Heidegger’s term from human being] in
its existence, are historical according to their being” (cited in MHH: 185); and: “‘The world,’
78
itself—otherwise it would not be open to change—“‘world history’ is “the emergence of nature for man’” (SCP 24). Thus:
Subject and object are not sundered by an impassable gulf, because the object
is in itself a kind of subject and because all types of being culminate in the
free “comprehensive” subject who is able to realize reason. Nature thus becomes a medium for the development of freedom.
(RR 9-10)
What is generally called objective reality, in Freudian terms that which sustains the realitytesting of the reality-principle—which is, of course, a tautology—is not, for Hegel, something
over against the subject, or that in the last analysis escapes it (as it does for Freud), but is
necessarily a part of the subjectivity that perceives it, adapts it and overcomes it or succumbs
to it. Subjectivity is this very process of overcoming and succumbing—negating or being negated.
This process of negation, however, becomes particularly acute when it is not an object that is being negated by a subject but another subject. It is impossible, Hegel argues, for a
subject to be content with the dominance, the understanding in their universality, of mere objects. An ego (Ich), he argues, can only be satisfied by another ego. In Eros and Civilization
Marcuse explains it as follows: “the ego is first desire: it can become conscious to itself only
through satisfying itself in and by an “other.” Such satisfaction involves the “negation” of the
other, for the ego has to prove itself by truly “being-for-itself” against all “otherness”“ (EC
the given manifold of beings is not an object (Gegenstand) of the human I; it is not something
which stands over against it (entgegen-stehendes) in some ontologically appropriate form.
The world ‘belongs’ quite fundamentally to the being of the I. For it is the negativity through
which the I can first be positivity; for it is the manifold through whose synthesis the I can first
come to be” (HO 36).
79
113; Marcuse’s emphasis). The assertion of the ego’s freedom is challenged by the assertion
of other egos as they attempt to negate each other in order to attain their freedom. Desire31 is
what Hegel calls this movement from subject to subject: the need to abolish the other recognisably equivalent self-consciousness in its otherness. “[S]elf-consciousness,” Hegel writes,
“is Desire in general.”32 (It is worth sign-posting here that Brown’s reading of the dialectic
based in desire is an interpretation of Hegel, via Freud [narcissism], rather than a decisive
break with him. The key to Brown’s reading will be the translation of Hegel’s embattled desire into “love”: Eros. See next section.) Thus, the ego has continually to win its freedom
from the other. The ego will only gain this satisfaction when the other ego, the other selfconscious subject, acknowledges its mastery, that is, makes itself an object. This is the familiar scenario of master and slave, the unequal battle of recognition, which for Hegel fuels human history. Moreover, what is key here is that for each stage to be realised, the subject has
to risk negation. That is, the master risks his or her life in order to subdue the slave; the slave
risks his or her life in order to overcome the master. Only through this process of risking life
can the position of universal recognition—equality—arise, as Hegel thought it had in the decisive revolutionary ‘spirit” of his own time. These two movements, the domination of objects and the struggle for mutual recognition, are what comprises dialectic. It is not the merely logical dissolution of pairs into a third term (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). Dialectic is the
overcoming (sublation, Aufhebung) of contradictions that imperil the stability of subjects as
substance, and, moreover, it is the historical spirit (Geist) of this self-movement (Bewegtheit).
31
In Hegel desire is Begierde. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Freud mainly uses Wun-
sch, but sometimes Begierde or Lust. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Quadridge PUF, 1997), 120.
32
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller; foreword & analysis J. N.
Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 105. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as
PS.
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III
Neither Marcuse nor Brown make explicit how Eros and Thanatos are dialectically engaged.
It becomes clear, however, that these two foundational instincts are meaningfully dialectical
as part of the ongoing conflict between essence and existence that is at the root of Hegel’s
thought, and continues through into Marxism. To put it simply, there exists a contradiction
between what humans are—their essence—and how they live—their existence. This contradiction is exemplified in the dialectic of master and slave. It maps onto the instincts in a very
simple way: instincts (of life and death) belong to our essence whereas the reality principle
and the pleasure principle belong to our existence. And it is how the Eros and Thanatos are
manifested in the pleasure principle and the reality-principle, how essence manifests as existence, in its contradictory forms of life and death, that is at stake.
It is important under prevailing intellectual conditions to understand just what is
meant by a word like “essence”, which has come to stand for a variety of reactionary postures. Essence is not the expression of something’s immutable “biological operation” or its
reified “status” or “race,” and it does not belong to “essentialism”—though unfortunately it
can be interpreted as such. The essence of something is not how it exists; the essence of
something is the contradiction of its existence. Again, to follow the German, Wesen or essence, derives from the past participle of the verb “to be,” gewesen or “it was”. For both Hegel and Marcuse this describes how essence is historical: that which is now has come to be or
“that which being (always already) was” (HO 69; MHH 191-192).33 The trouble with socalled common-sense, Hegel argues, is that it mistakes existence, the misunderstood phenomena (Schein), for essence, the actualizing of something’s—a being’s—potentiality. This difference or contradiction is the “genuine dialectical” movement of all being, as Marcuse puts
33
See also Marcuse’s 1936 essay, “The Concept of Essence,” Negations (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), 43-88, especially 67-69. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Neg in the
text.
81
it: “the necessary prelude to its reality” (RR 66). “When something turns into its opposite,
Hegel says, when it contradicts itself, it expresses its essence…. The contradiction is the actual motor of the process” (RR 148-149). This process (Geschehen) is history (Geschichte).
Now, as Marcuse observes in his essay on Marx, “Essence and existence separate in
[man]: his existence is a “means” to the realization of his essence, or—in estrangement—his
essence is a means to his mere physical existence” (SCP 29). There is, as with all beings, a
gap between essence and existence; the difference with humans is that this gap becomes ossified. In animals or plants, the distinction between essence and existence is ongoing, but they
never rest content, they do not adapt to their everyday condition if it means contradicting
their “essence.” This distinction is important for Brown who finds in it the antithesis of life
and death, the instincts.
life and death—this polarity exists in animals but does not exist in a condition of
ambivalence. Man is distinguished from animals by having separated, ultimately
into a state of mutual conflict, aspects of life (instincts) which in animals exist in
some condition of undifferentiated unity or harmony.
(LAD 83)
The harmony animals are said enjoy between life and death—the harmony to be found in
Yeats’ famous poem where “Nor dread nor hope attend/A dying animal”34—is wanting in
humans. Their essence (to live and die) is covered over by their existence (the reality/pleasure
principle). Humans, because of the dialectic of self-consciousness, can actually mistake their
existence for their essence. It is the task of philosophy—for Marx, it is the task of revolutionary praxis (remembering “Thesis Eleven”)—to educate people as to their essence: freedom.
As Marcuse puts it, again in the Marx essay, “It is precisely this unerring contemplation of
34
W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993), 234.
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the essence of man that becomes the inexorable impulse for the initiation of radical revolution” (SCP 29).35
The “performance-principle” is Marcuse’s term for the current historical form of the
reality-principle, which is in excess of repression demanded by scarcity (Ananke). Under the
existential conditions of the performance principle “human existence in this world is mere
stuff, matter, material, which does not have the principle of its movement in itself” (EC 104).
This condensed expression of Marcuse’s Hegelianism confirms that existence is out of kilter
with essence and this forms the state of alienation to which we have adjusted our existential
conditions. The relation to the world that would better express historical human being (Geist)
has become attenuated. However, in a remarkable post-Marxist gesture, Marcuse argues that
technology, the current and damning state of the performance/reality-principle, contains both
the principle of this ossification and the solution. He states that not only are the conditions of
35
The disjunction between existence and essence as found by Marcuse in Hegel and Marx,
then, is another way of registering romantic discontent. Possibly amongst the last ways
achieved, as the distinction has since been set aside by Heideggerian phenomenology, where
existence and essence are the same thing, and by Sartrean existentialism (see Marcuse’s “Sartre’s Existentialism,” SCP, 157-190), where existence precedes essence. The problem has
been changed to one of living an “authentic life.” One redoubtable critic of this change is
Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. See, for example Negative Dialectics, where he blames Nietzsche’s suppression of essence for the dominance of positivism—what we are left with is
mere existence which offers no “negative” point of critique. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 169-170; see also 122-124. Marcuse
deals with this briefly and polemically in his 1934 essay “The Struggle Against Liberalism in
the Totalitarian View of the State,” Neg 3-42, especially 31-42. See also Marcuse’s “The
Concept of Essence” (Neg 43-87)
It could be argued that Rieff’s work corresponds to just such a positivism; in particular the rejection of the dialectic of hope and despair, leaving a position without critique.
83
scarcity enforced by Anankē met,36 but that the very idea of labour is no longer a significant
part of human existence. Labour is no longer, as it was for Marx, a key to human essence.
The ideology of scarcity, or the productivity of toil, domination, and renunciation, is dislodged from its instinctual [i.e., Freud] as well as rational [i.e.,
Hegel and Marx] grounds. The theory of alienation demonstrated the fact that
man does not realise himself in his labor, that his life has become an instrument of labor, that his work and its products have assumed a form and a
power independent of him as an individual. But the liberation from this state
seems to require, not the arrest of alienation, but its consummation, not the
reactivation of the repressed and productive personality but its abolition.
The elimination of human potentialities from the world of (alienated) labour
creates the preconditions for the elimination of labor from the world of human potentialities.
(EC 105; interpolations and emphasis added)
Labour is no longer a “human” issue, no longer an issue for human essences. The “productive
personality”—Marx’s revolutionary subject—is abolished, negated by the affirmation of its
36
This is obviously a contentious claim. I am not going to oppose it here as my interest is on-
ly with how Marcuse’s utopian trajectory aids the understanding of Norman O. Brown. For
more see, for example, Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 25ff; and for a sideways sneer at
Marcuse see Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse (London: Glasgow, 1970), 46-47. For a broader
and more economically informed reading of the empirical details, with relevant graphs and
analyses, see John Fry, Marcuse—Dilemma and Liberation: A Critical Analysis (Sussex: The
Harvester Press, 1974), specifically chapters 4 and 5, “Further considerations of the Fundamental Economic Propositions and Implications,” “The Critique of the Fundamental Social
and Political Propositions and Implications,” 68-146 and passim.
84
own alienation. This alienation by labour was the negation of the subject’s existential conditions and therefore, according to dialectical logic, an expression of human essence. But when
Marcuse is writing in the 1950s, he argues that the division of labor has proceeded so far that
we are divided from labour. This is one of the most striking conclusions of Eros and Civilization and what can be understood from it is that the alienation of “man” from “his” labour is
the very condition of his potential freedom. Subjects are alienated from labour because toil is
no longer necessary. The expansion of technē is so far advanced that it has achieved a kind of
independent control of Anankē.37
What is at stake here is the significance of Marcuse’s assumption that scarcity only
exists because it is organised to protect the interests of “a particular group or individual in
order to sustain and advance itself in a privileged position” (EC 36). This state of organisation, the performance-principle, acts over and above the rethought problem of Anankē, and
exacts from particular social groups more than is required by the modified idea of the realityprinciple—that is, in Marcuse’s phrase, “surplus repression” (the debt to Marxism is apparent
here). In Eros and Civilization, with the reality-principle revised and thus with surplusrepression obviated, it becomes possible for the pleasure-principle to become the principle of
civilization. The differential, which comprises repression, is reduced to a point where it is
37
I should note that Marcuse takes a more Heideggerian position on technology in his later
writings. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), for example, he is concerned that our very response to nature is already conditioned by an a priori technological way of being which disenables the subject from recognising his or her own part in the creation of that technology,
and thus the possibility of mutual transformation. Rather than being a way of reconciling subject and object, technology has become predicated on production which circumscribes the
world, objectifying it as raw material. Nature disappears behind technology rather than being
disclosed by it. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, (London: Routledge, 1998), 153ff.
Cf. Robinson, Freudian Left 236. See also Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning
Technology,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1996), 307-342.
85
able to support “pleasure” or instinctual expression as a viable existential choice. Ultimately,
what replaces the dialectic of labour in Hegel and Marx is the new dialectic of the instincts,
of love and of death, which I have begun to describe here. History, the repressive and alienating outcome of the dialectic and impetus for its continuance, is fuelled by the contradiction
between Eros and Thanatos. Thus, Marcuse does not just revise Freud, but also Marx.38
With this dialectic of existence and essence in mind, let us recall where we left the
instincts in section two. Firstly, Freud defined them as fundamentally conservative, drawing
their energy from the tension of life that desires to relapse into the entropic simplicity of the
inorganic. Thanatos is the instinct to die directly; Eros is the instinct to die the death of the
species. In their combat, Freud called it “the battle of the Giants” (FP 452), Eros can only
stay an inevitable fate. In so doing Eros forces the subject to make use of nature and others to
protect the path to death laid down for it. Thus Eros expands out into the world, joins objects
and subjects, and demands of nature its due allotment—death. Yet, Thanatos must be repressed by the institutions Eros creates, but because of its unconscious presence these institutions are stained with its daemonic (Freud’s word) force. Freud’s late drive-theory emerged in
the twentieth-century just in time to be confirmed as the tragic destiny of civilization.
It has become apparent that the position offered by Marcuse refutes Freud’s pessimism and Hegel gives steel to his utopian vision. On these terms the dialectic is not between
the instincts—life and death—but between the instincts as a whole, as one term of the dialectic (as essence) and the reality principle as the other term of the dialectic (that is, existence).
The dualism between life and death is only a misreading of a fundamental unity which denies
the difference between life and death. Marcuse asserts this by associating the death instinct
not with dying per se, but with the regressive requirement to dissipate tension, that is, with
the Nirvana principle (EC 29). Because he makes this qualification, anything that releases
38
Whether this is a radical critique of Marx, or rather an acceptance of the consummation of
communism, would depend on the position taken with regard to an ontology based on labour.
Most Marxists would be less than sanguine about giving it up.
86
tension, say the overcoming of Anankē through technology, could help to modify this instinct, which, ultimately is historical (Geschichtlich) not eternal, and thus bring it in line with
life. It is, then, only the existential conditions of the performance-principle that keeps the instincts separate. As Freud says, it is Anankē which divides the dualism. If this division is removed, as Marcuse argues it can be in Eros and Civilization then the dualism should collapse. Marcuse believes that a dialectical synthesis of Freud’s basic structures will allow for
this conclusion. This is where classical German philosophy completes Freud’s project.
Though this reading of death as a negative force in the Hegelian sense rather than in
the mortal sense does tie in to Freudian theory, it is inevitably a major revision of it. Freud
does not admit that the “immortal adversar[ies]” (CD 340) of life and death are historically
variable in the way that Marcuse is proposing. Yet, if as he suggests, both death and life come
together in the pleasure-principle, it would be theoretically defensible to argue that anything
that makes existence more pleasurable, such as the reduction in instinctual renunciation necessitated by labour, would also mean that less instinctual energy is diverted toward destruction, consequently, bringing about a reduction in repression. Therefore, if the pleasureprinciple can become a viable existential choice because surplus-repression is extinguished
from the performance-principle then Eros and Thanatos will also become expressible by returning to what Marcuse sees as their unified source: the quiescence of tension. Marcuse
finds an important ally here in Ricoeur. He also argues that: “The death instinct turns out to
be the most striking illustration of the constancy principle, of which the pleasure principle is
always regarded as a mere psychological double” and concludes that “the death instinct, introduced precisely in order to account for the instinctual character of the compulsion to repeat, is not beyond the pleasure principle, but is somehow identical with it” (FP 319). Such a
revision of the pleasure principle, to ally it with death, reveals the problem at the heart of
Freud’s essay: pleasure is Thanatonic. What needs to be recognized, and I think the implications of this are crucial to Eros and Civilization, is that it is Eros, the synthetic principle, not
Thanatos, that is beyond the pleasure-principle. But, more importantly, it also shows that
Marcuse’s dialectic is actually Thanatonic. It does not go beyond the pleasure principle; ra-
87
ther death, the quiescence of tension, the giving over of life to technology, are the telos. This
telos is fundamentally not erotic. The erotic is the sustaining of tension that only emerges
from Eros. Marcuse’s book, then, is incorrectly named, because in order for essence and existence to come into line death must take precedence. It is Brown, in Life Against Death, who
more effectively asserts the dialectics of Eros.
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——Chapter Three——
The Dialectics of Eros, Part Two: Life Against Death
Brown also assumes, following clues in Freud’s theory of primary narcissism, that the instincts can be appeased and a state of nature can be reached. The idyll of childhood, where
conscious and unconscious are not yet separated, remains for Brown a powerful myth which
holds on to the human demand for happiness, for pleasure and for unity. This unity is, of
course, the Oceanic feeling: the oneness with the Other and with nature. But here it is important to see this through the dialectical reformulation of the words “other” and “nature.”
Thus, nature is not other to the “human”, it is how and what the human becomes; also nature
is not in the past, say a vulgar Romantic primitivism, but is the emergence of the present uncontaminated by the past, freed from the neurosis of history (as we will see much later, the
universality of myths frees Brown from many of the demands of history as historiography).
This, once again, registers Brown’s adherence to a (e)utopia where, in the terms of the last
chapter, essence and existence are undifferentiated. If for Freud there is an insuperable gap
between the natural force of human instinctual inheritance and the benefits of civilization
then for Brown, reading Freud as did Marcuse through Hegel, nature exists as the possible
expression of human essence as instinct (Trieb), but also as the possible negation of that essence as historical existence. Nature is the promise of happiness that childhood bequeaths to
the adult, but it is locked into a cycle of history as the history of repression.
I
Life Against Death, begins in line with Marcuse and Ricoeur with the unification of life and
death in the Nirvana principle. But what is interesting here is that Brown does not, as Marcuse did, see this unification as a part of historical becoming. For Brown history is part of the
problem.
89
The reunification of Life and Death—accepting for the moment Freud’s
equation of Death and Nirvana—can be envisioned only as the end of the historical process. Freud’s pessimism, his preference for dualism rather than dialectics, and his failure to develop a historical eschatology are all of a piece.
To see how man separated from nature, and separated out the instincts, is to
see history as neurosis; and also to see history, as neurosis, pressing restlessly
and unconsciously toward the abolition of history and the attainment of a
state of rest which is also a reunification with nature. It comes to the same
thing to say that the consequence of the disruption of the unity of Life and
Death in man is to make man the historical animal.
(LAD 91; emphasis added)
This is a dense passage that puts forward some of the fundamental ambitions of Life Against
Death’s dialectic: i) to theorise a unity of the instincts; ii) to consider an eschatological “end”
of history; iii) to ground a reunification with nature; iv) to suggest that this unconscious demand for history’s end is already present in neurosis.
It is possible immediately to pick up several themes from the last chapter here and
begin to see how they are developed. Firstly, the dialectical unity of the instincts, which for
Marcuse was brought about by an historical alteration of the instincts under conditions of
non-repressive technology and the realignment of the reality and pleasure principles with a
fatally compromising death instinct, is replaced here with the vision of an eschatological “end
of history,” the end of time, which on first glance may appear even more drastic. Secondly,
the separation between existence and essence is, in Life Against Death, clearly diagnosed as
neurosis, and moreover neurosis is interpreted as history as such. History is, then, symptomatic of the human failure to coincide with itself at the instinctual level, much as we saw for
Marcuse, but with one important difference. For Brown history has no ontological weight, it
is rather only a symptom; it is neurosis pure and simple. Thirdly, then, History, unlike in
Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel, does not play itself out as nature, but is located against
90
nature—nature has no history; it just is, it does not become. In these terms Brown concludes
early on that the human tragedy is never “to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and
debts, and [never] to enter that state of Being which was the goal of his Becoming” (LAD
19).1 By rehearsing these earlier themes we can see that Brown is presenting a very different
vision to Marcuse for whom it is the technological “understanding” of nature that will allow
for human release from instinctual renunciation, and allow life and death to regress to the
steady pulse of the pleasure-principle. As Brown said in an interview published in 1970, by
the time he came to write Life Against Death, he had become disillusioned with the “enlightenment view that man has a limitless capacity to perfect himself by manipulating his environment.”2 Thus he refutes Marcuse’s idea of controlling or dominating nature such that nature’s demands are excluded altogether. Indeed, Brown’s hopes are opposed to the Enlightenment values presupposed in the idea of nature as man’s “help-mate,” his “resource.” His
position is a “return” to nature that was only left under conditions of repression; to let it overtake humanity and to regain the animal balance—the balance between life and death—with
the forces that construct us at the most elemental level, the instincts. This would, in Brown’s
terms, be the “end of time”: an eschatological revolution. And he makes no apology for arguing that “psychoanalysis, carried to its logical conclusion, and transformed into a theory of
history, gathers to itself ageless religious aspirations” (LAD 93). So by the transformation of
psychoanalysis into a theory of history—which is the sub-title of his book—he means a theory of the end of history, as we find in the Bible, as well as in Hegel and Marx. Brown’s history “ends” not with revelation or absolute knowledge or the dictatorship of the proletariat—
1
In this Brown is alluding to the difference between cyclical and progressive or linear time as
put forward by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History
(Princeton NJ: Bollingen, 1974).
2
“Norman O. Brown’s Body: A Conversation with Norman O. Brown,” in Sam Keen ed.
Voices and Visions, (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 31.
91
though in part it is all of those things. His history ends by plunging humanity into the immanence of “nature.”
It is with respect to history that the differences between Brown and Marcuse can most
clearly be perceived. Though both see the instincts as fundamentally related to what history,
what they understand by history is not the same. For Marcuse the process of history (Geschichte) itself remains dominant whereas, it is how the life of all that is exists. For Brown
history becomes merely symptomatic. In Eros and Civilization the dialectic is driven by history as the progress of humanity to its freedom. The instincts, as mutable, are the product of a
priori history and, though they are its negation instincts can at best sublate the present historical stage defined by technological advancement. Instincts are historical (Geschichtlich) and
their negative power is “subterranean” (EC 16). The telos of Eros and Civilization is the quiescence of the instincts as a new historical shape. In Brown’s work, however, technology has
no decisive influence, indeed there is no epochal principle at work at all. In stark contrast to
Marcuse, in Life Against Death history only exists because of the hitherto irreconcilability of
the instincts—it is the product of those instincts and not vice-versa. The difference between
Marcuse and Brown, then, depends on whether ontological precedence is given to history, as
Marcuse holds, or to the instinct, as Brown holds. Because Brown thinks of history as a
symptom—rather than possessed of its own self-movement—then the decisive change, which
makes a reconciliation possible, is not technological advancement, but psychoanalysis itself.
History can be “cured.” Life Against Death does not presuppose a teleology, say the completion of the Enlightenment project, but an eschatology. The reconciliation of instincts is not
the product of a particular path but of the sudden enlightenment put forward by Freud. In the
broadest possible sense it is a religious enlightenment not a rationalistic one. This difference
in the meaning of history is decisive in explaining the increasing differences between Marcuse and Brown that begin in their otherwise strikingly similar works Eros and Civilization and
Life Against Death and which reaches its peak in the controversy over Love’s Body that form
the basis of the next chapter.
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Religion is important for Brown not because he is putting forward any particular
faith, but because he sees religion as “a half-way house” to curing history. Religion, especially in its mystical strands, keeps alive and makes overt the human aspiration to change the
conditions of existence (the truth of essence). In these terms religion is negation: it has no
answers but its denial of the extant vivifies the demand—the desire—for something other.
Thus, “Psychoanalysis must view religion both as neurosis and as that attempt to become
conscious and to cure, inside the neurosis itself, on which Freud came at the end of his life to
pin his hopes for therapy” (LAD 13). Religion is part of the romantic dialectic of hope and
despair, the recognition that things are not as they should be, are out of kilter. This could be
seen in Hesiod’s religious poetry, itself a negation of the existential conditions of the “Age of
Iron.” In the terms of Life Against Death Hesiod’s poem asserts a religious and prophetic aspiration that accords with essential demands. To put it crudely, the poem is a symptom of instinctual repression, as such it is historical. It is in the very problem of history, its working
out as symptom, that the first clues to a cure will be manifest and these are perhaps more evident in the aspirations of religion than anywhere else. Freud is, of course, damning about religion. In Civilization and its Discontents he writes that “by drawing them into a massdelusion, religion succeed is sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything
more” (CD 273). By offering the illusion of happiness, then, religion is better than nothing,
but only just, because “Even religion cannot keep its promise” (CD 273) and its consolations
are ultimately empty. But for Brown the promise itself is enough, it begins the dialectic of
dissatisfaction by making us aware that extant conditions are insufficient to our most human
needs. Religion is therefore a negative force that discloses an instinctual resistance. An example of this in Life Against Death is the concept of Christian “love.” As Brown observes,
for both St Augustine and Luther, love or the Christian Agape, has a ‘self-sacrificial structure” (LAD 49) where the self cannot be completed by the other but must disappear in God.
Thus Luther’s “To love is the same as to hate oneself” and St Augustine’s “Love slays what
we have been that we may be what we were not” (LAD 49) are both formulations that express
an obvious dissatisfaction with the self. They are saying that to love God is to hate or to kill
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the self. Both Luther and St Augustine deny the human body—they are “the despisers of the
body” in Nietzsche’s phrase. What is important for Brown is that this religious contempt for
the mortal form reveals, at bottom, a conflict between love and death, Eros and Thanatos. In
both Luther and St Augustine he can read the aspirations of Eros to overcome Thanatos or for
the immortal spirit to overcome the mortal body. The key here is that what is really aspired
to, dreamt of and wished for is not death but love: Eros is the key to grasping Christian
Agape. The desire to disappear in God is the desire to unify life and death in love everlasting.
Indeed, for Brown, Eros is the key to unlocking—and ending—history.
II
If Brown is to conclude that Eros is the drive behind the overcoming of history then he first
has to come to terms with its adversary, Thanatos; something that I have argued Marcuse
failed to do. According to Brown it is Thanatos’ Avatar the repetition-compulsion—which, as
we have learned, can also be construed as the pleasure principle—that keeps civilization tied
to time, humanity to its history, which is against nature—a trend we have seen develop from
the interpretations of Aristotle and Apollo. For Brown this yields the neurotic movement of
time as the return of the repressed. Here he anticipates Ricoeur’s claim that “the repressed…has no history (‘the unconscious is timeless’); what does is the repressing agency; it
is history: the individual’s history from infancy to adulthood, and mankind’s history from
prehistory to history” (FP 179). So history is found in “repressive agencies” and these are
cultural phenomena registered in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. To overcome the
Thanatonic impulse that Brown finds in these phenomena he needs to recover the nature beneath the sedimented layers of repressive history or “time.”
In Life Against Death Brown puts forward four closely related theses on time. One is
simply that life on its own, as Eros, has no need for historical time. His assertion is that time
does not exist at the organic level—i.e., mere “life”— but only emerges with separation of
existence and essence in humanity in terms of life and death. The conclusion of this first the-
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sis is that history is what humanity does with death and time is strictly analogous to history.
His second thesis explores the Protestant idea that “time is money.” This thesis is expressed
in the part of Life Against Death called “Studies in Anality” in the subsection “Filthy Lucre.”
Here time is linked to economic theories and in particular the theory of interest, where “the
dynamics of capitalism is a postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future”
(LAD 273). This Protestant deferment takes time out of the cyclical and into the linear. It is a
model based on the earliest ontogenic economy, namely the anal phase, where time is portioned out as was excrement. And thus Brown alludes to the “standard psychoanalytical dogma the paradox that not only money but also time is excrement, and they have case histories
to proves it.” (LAD 276-277). In this section, however, I want to investigate Brown’s third
and fourth theses in some detail. The third thesis takes its cue from Freud’s underdeveloped
conclusion that there is no time in the id, where nothing is forgotten and nothing is negated.
The fourth thesis develops Freud’s point with respect to the forms of thought, or intuitions of
time and space, put forward by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason.
Freud states his idea that there is no time in the unconscious is several places. In the
1915 essay “The Unconscious” he writes: “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e.
they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference
to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs3.”
(Meta 191). Though it is in this essay that the timelessness of the unconscious becomes part
of the metapsychology, the basic idea has been part of Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis
since 1897, where in an early theoretical draft he wrote that “disregard of the characteristic of
time is no doubt an essential distinction between activity in the preconscious and the unconscious” (Meta 191n). The point was made again, in slightly different terms, as early as The
Interpretation of Dreams: “In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is
past or forgotten” (Dreams 733), the effect of time upon mental processes is exclusively
3
Freud’s editors note that this reads “system Pcs” in the 1915 edition (Meta 191n).
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brought about by the preconscious (Dreams 734). This is repeated in a 1907 footnote added
to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
It is highly probable that there is no question at all of there being any direct
function of time in forgetting. —In the case of repressed memory-traces it can
be demonstrated that they undergo no alteration even in the course of the longest
period of time. The unconscious is quite timeless. The most important as well as
the strangest characteristic of psychical fixation is that all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in
all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments. (Psychopathology 274n-275n)
In a further footnote to “On Narcissism” Freud observes that “the time-factor…has no application to unconscious processes” (Meta 91). This then corresponds to Brown’s third thesis. It
is in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud develops this in an expressly philosophical
manner by stating his opposition to “the Kantian theorem that time and space are “necessary
forms of thought”.” Freud concludes that “unconscious mental processes are in themselves
“timeless”. This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does
not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (Meta: 299).
Freud’s last word on Kant and the timelessness of the unconscious occurs in his late New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
The logical laws of thought do not apply in the id, and this is true above all of
the law of contradiction…. There is nothing in the id that could be compared
with negation; and we perceive with surprise an exception to the philosophical
theorem that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. There is
nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time; there is no recognition of
the passage of time, and—a thing most remarkable and awaits consideration of
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philosophic thought—no alteration in its mental processes is produced by the
passage of time….
Again and again I have had the impression that we have made too little
theoretical use of this fact, established beyond any doubt, of the unalterability
by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most profound
discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself made any progress here. (New
106-107)
Freud, then, raises the same basic idea for forty years. Despite the shifts and changes in vocabulary, from preconscious to conscious, from unconscious to id, the fundamental point is
consistent: time is the province of the conscious and the unconscious has nothing to do with
it. Ricoeur restates this as follows: “The unconscious is timeless. It should be noted that time
is intimately connected with quality, which plays a role in reality-testing. Time, consciousness, and reality are…correlative notions” (FP 76n; Ricoeur’s emphasis). But what is frustrating for Freud and for subsequent analysts and theorists is that Freud himself does little or
nothing with his insight. The idea haunts his thought rather than becoming its subject. Yet,
even though the timelessness of the unconscious has not been developed as fully as he would
have liked, Freud still suggests that it can challenge, and may even topple, Kant’s foundational discovery that time is a basic “form of thought.” Indeed, he expressly states that this is a
problem for philosophy. It is this that intrigues Brown and lets him put this idea of Freud’s to
work. Firstly I shall address Brown’s interpretation Freud’s theory in more detail, then I will
turn to how he attempts to utilise Freud’s attack on Kant, turning it into a full scale assault on
rationality.
According to Life Against Death history is neurosis, it is a disease suffered by the
body as the repetition compulsion is suffered. There is something of death about it: history
clings. But the conclusion that Brown draws from Freud’s undeveloped insight is that time is
“not of the essence of things” (LAD 93), indeed it is only a construction of consciousness,
albeit an important and apparently inescapable one. However, this inescapability of time is in
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Brown’s terms “psychological” not “ontological.” This is because time has its origin not in
things but in the way things are grasped by consciousness, and consciousness is not all (not
even most) of what it is to be human. Therefore what it is to be is not necessarily to be in
time. According to Brown’s interpretation of Freud time is a psychological phenomenon, the
working of the system conscious-preconscious. And because the unconscious is untouched by
time, the ubiquity of time is refuted. This certainly seems to be Freud’s conclusion too, because the implication of Freud’s language is that time is change and as there is nothing that
changes in the unconscious there can be no time in it nor can it be affected by time.4 He says
this time and again. What is unchanging is outside of time, and what is repressed is therefore
never lost, never forgotten. This is, of course, one of the cornerstones of Freud’s entire theory
of the aetiology of the neuroses: the return of the repressed. The unconscious, then, is not of
the order of time and is unaffected by time, and its processes, the primary processes, are always there. To construct an analogy, the unconscious is like the rings of a tree, the steady and
ever present heartwood of being; the conscious is like the leaves of a tree, a transient victim
of time. From this Brown concludes with characteristic bravura that time is a repressive illusion.
Brown is particularly keen to appropriate Freud’s implied attack on Kant that occurs
in both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and New Introductory Lectures, namely that time is
not a “necessary form of thought/mental act.”
The psychoanalytical theory of time, as Freud saw, must take as its point of departure Kant’s doctrine that time does not pertain to things in themselves out
there but is a form of perception of the human mind. This Copernican revolu-
4
One concern that this raises and which would bear further investigation is that the uncon-
scious must “grow” if it is this reservoir of the unforgotten. Would this or would this not constitute change? This is certainly something that Freud does not deal with and which appears
not to have occurred to Brown.
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tion makes time a psychological, not an ontological, problem, and therefore a
problem for psychoanalysis.
(LAD 64)
Brown is referring here to Kant’s self-styled Copernican revolution and to the status of the
Freudian unconscious in therapeutic theory. For both Kant and Freud the self, as “I” (Ich, ego)
is that which corresponds to the inside, however tentative and unverifiable it may eventually
come to be in their writings, and however much it anticipates the reliance of the Other that is
the essence of the Hegelian subject. Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) attempts, with lasting success, to present a plausible and rigorous a priori (that is, prior to experience) model of the constitution of inside and outside, self and other—or, in more familiar
Kantian terms, subject and object. The opening two sections of the Critique, “The Transcendental Aesthetic” and the “Transcendental Logic”, are concerned with establishing the conditions for the possibility of a priori knowledge (which Kant calls ‘synthetic a priori judgements”). It is important to test Brown’s—and Freud’s—argument by sketching out Kant’s
transcendental aesthetic and the conditions for transcendental apperception, or the “I.”
For Kant the conditions for experience are a priori transcendental, by which he means
the faculties of the subject determine what is cognised. A significant part of this as it relates to
my reading of Brown is Kant’s novel determination of space and time in the “Transcendental
Aesthetic.”5 To be brief, both space and time are for Kant pure subjective a priori intuitions.
Space is not something given “out there” just as time is not something running its course apart
from the human experience of it (that is, absolute Newtonian time-space). Space is that intuition because of which “it is possible for things to be outer objects for us”,6 and this outer
5
Aesthetic here has as yet no connection to the way the word is used in the third Critique.
6
Immanuel Kant (trans. and eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood), Critique of Pure Reason
(Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781/1787]), 161/A29. Hereafter referred to parentheti-
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sense is purely an operation of the mind within which the relation of objects to one another
can be determined. Kant writes:
Space is a necessary representation, a priori, which is the ground of all outer
intuitions. One can never represent that there is no space, although one can
very well think that there are no objects to be encountered in it. It is therefore
to be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependent on them, and is an a priori representation that necessarily grounds outer appearances.
(CPR 158/A24/B38-39)
Space is not intuited alongside objects or as a part of their appearance (by appearance Kant
means an as yet underdetermined intuition of the manifold) but is necessarily in the mind as
an a priori intuition before such appearances can be apprehended. It is the condition of the
possibility of the relationships between objects (e.g., geometry), not conditioned by those relationships (as the rationalists thought), and it is the condition for the experience of outer objects, not derived from the experience of outer objects (as the empiricists thought). Time is
mutatis mutandis “merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition” (CPR
181/A35/B51). It is “the form of our inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner
state” (CPR 180/A33/B49). Time does not inhere in objects as they change their state. Time
derives from the way in which subsequent intuitions are organised by the mind in that the subject can register a change in the state of a determined object—time is the pure form of “inner
sense” by which the alteration of “outer sense” (space) is cognized. Space and time, then, are
the pure (transcendental) forms of intuition. In a much-compressed form, these are the con-
cally as CPR. I will maintain the convention of referencing the first and second editions as A
and B respectively.
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clusions of Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” which is the target to Freud’s and Brown’s
criticisms.
Kant’s second faculty, the transcendental unity of apperception, or the “I,” is solely
concerned with that intuition of inner sense: time. In the last instance, Kant argues, any synthesis of intuitions is referred to the mind’s temporal faculty.
Wherever our representations may arise, whether through the influence of
external things or as the effect of inner causes, whether they have originated
a priori or empirically as appearances—as modifications of the mind [Gemüts] they nevertheless belong to inner sense, and as such all of our cognitions are in the end subjected to the formal condition of inner sense, namely
time, as that in which they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into
relations [Verhältnis]. This is a general remark on which one must ground
everything that follows.
(CPR 228/A98-99)
Representations, or the general determination of an object by a subject, must be brought under the ordering faculty of inner sense, but in itself, Kant argues, this cannot be the transcendental ground for the unity of all syntheses of the manifold in which cognizable objects are
determined. Raw inner sense is only one necessary condition for self-consciousness. Another
is the “I” or “transcendental apperception.” Basically, the awareness of the continuity of the
self that allows for experience. The relationship between consciousness, apperception (literally, self-consciousness) and the I (or Descartes” “I think”) is a subtle one. Inner sense is composed of empirical data and is forever variable, and this includes the perception of self, that
is, mere consciousness, and because of this variability Kant argues that inner sense alone “can
provide no standing or abiding self in this stream of inner appearance” (CPR 232/A107). The
fragmentary and vulnerable identity conveyed through inner sense is called “empirical apperception.” In order to provide a stable “I think” Kant deduces that there must be a further con-
101
dition that precedes the empirical data and makes the experience of it possible. This is the
transcendental ground of the unity of consciousness that asserts the continuity of the I (think)
and the unity of all subjective perceptions, including that of the self. Kant calls this “pure,
original, unchanging consciousness…transcendental apperception” (CPR 232/A107; Kant’s
emphasis). Transcendental apperception is an absolute objective unity, which grounds all
concepts, a priori and further unifies all intuitions under itself. That which gives stability to
this model, then, is the “I think” (cogito), in that the object is referred to it. This is not to say
that every object is reduced to the I think, but to say that the I think is in every object.7 This
“synthetic unity of apperception” is also the unified point of subjectivity, the new central star
of the Copernican revolution. Kant’s Copernican Revolution, then, describes an understanding of subjectivity in which knowledge corresponds not to the object’s influence on the subject, but to the a priori facility to actively determine an object through our built in faculties
all centred on a transcendental subject, namely the “I.” The outcome of this for Romantics
like Brown is that “the perceptual mind [projects] life and passion into the world it apprehends”,8 and is not a passive receiver of objective impressions as the previously dominant
empiricist theories had argued.
Ostensibly, Kant’s critical philosophy sought to disabuse (to critique) dogmatic theories about God, knowledge, aesthetics and morality by showing, in a series of transcendental
deductions, that what we had taken thus far to be “reality” was in fact a consequence of our
subjectivity. It is important to stress that Kantian subjectivity does not point to “individuality” or to the “merely subjective,” but rather to a set of shared human faculties which delineate
universal human limitations—i.e., none of us can see infra-red or hear dog whistles, but, we
all share the same five-senses to a significant degree, and we all share, Kant argues, the same
7
This is also the idealist turn within which Freud can be very much located. Consider projec-
tion, for example.
8
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New
York: Norton, 1958), 68.
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a priori faculties. Kant calls these faculties “categories.” However, and this will be crucial in
what follows, this does not mean that we have to understand the products of these faculties in
the same way, though Kant does try to provide a normative platform for such an understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and elsewhere. One consequence of this was that
Kant severely circumscribed the ability of humankind to know either the universe or its place
in it. Because Kantian idealism locates knowledge of the world subjectively the world of the
“object”—as the famous thing-in-itself—becomes unknowable. Thus, Kant refuted a mode of
access to the world. But Kant did give strict parameters to the “new sciences,” setting their
horizon off from another, unknowable but he argued, rationally believable, “space”: God’s
world of the thing-in-itself, of freedom and of moral imperatives. This division has come
down to us as that between the phenomenal and the noumenal or the sensible and the intelligible. The sensible corresponds to the transcendental aesthetic, namely intuitions of time and
space, the noumenal to the unrepresentable “thing in itself.”
What Brown does with this ideas is to squeeze them into psychoanalytic categories.
Thus the idea that time and space are phenomenal and tied to the “I” becomes the idea that
time and space are the “same kind of thing” as consciousness. So the conscious self, or ego,
becomes Kant’s transcendental subject, or seat of rationality secured by intuition and the categories. Likewise, the fact that the noumenal, according to Kant, is unrepresentable, makes it
the “same kind of thing” as the unconscious, i.e., timeless, spaceless and, by virtue of analogy, irrational. From this Brown argues that psychoanalysis,
suggests that if the human mind were to break through the veil of phenomena
and reach “noumenal” reality, it would find no time. It is true that Kant himself
firmly shut the door on such a possibility, not only by denying the possibility of
reaching “noumenal” reality, but also by asserting the immutability of the forms
(including time) through which the human mind perceives reality, and by equating these immutable forms with rationality.
(LAD 94)
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The claim about rationality certainly appears to accord with the implications of Freud’s last
view in the New Introductory Lectures9 where he states that there is no logic, according to the
law of non-contradiction, in the unconscious. The reason why Brown is concerned to rethink
the transcendental aesthetic and transcendental apperception is that he links Kant’s theory of
“time-schema” and the self directly to a broader theory of rationality and rationality to repression: “what Kant took to be the schemata of rationality are really the schemata of repression”
(LAD 95). It is probably fair to say here that this is not Freud’s point. Maybe because Freud,
unlike Brown, restrained himself at the end of his career from making the daring assumption
that because there is no logic in the unconscious the conscious is necessarily logical or rational. The question remains, then, is time, as Brown contests, the equivalent of some kind of repressive rationality? It is certain that Brown goes beyond any claims Freud would make here,
and indeed he says as much himself.
I think we can…equate Freud’s Unconscious with the “noumenal” reality of ourselves, we find Freud positively asserting the discovery that at least in that “noumenal” reality there is no time…. If, therefore, we go beyond Freud, and speculate seriously on the possibility of a consciousness not based on repression but
conscious of what is now unconscious, then it follows a priori that such a consciousness would not be in time but in eternity.
(LAD 94)
We need, therefore, to go beyond Freud in order to examine Brown’s claims.
As I have shown before, Brown makes use of Freud’s vagueness in order to strike for
his conclusion. For though Freud says, in opposition to Kant that “forms of thought/mental
9
As Ricoeur observes, these late lectures “underline [the] philosophical character” of Freud’s
work (FP 444-445).
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acts” are not necessarily tied to time, he does not make the equation between the noumenal
and the unconscious or between time and repression. The unconscious is certainly irrational,
and according to Ricoeur it is “anti-phenomenal,” by which he means without meaning (FP
148). Time is also, the “correlative” of “consciousness…and reality” (FP 76n). But it does
not necessarily follow from these premises that the unconscious is the noumenal, in Kantian
terms, or that time is necessarily repressive.10 This is Brown’s addition to psychoanalytic theory, and it is a precarious one because time, in the Kantian theory, is not in itself “rational”—
though Kant was certainly attempting to ground the conclusions of Newton—it is rather a
sensible condition for the possibility of experience and experiences can be rational or irrational. Time grounds both possibilities. Time is, then, not a certain idea of time, say the working day of industrial capitalism, based on the anal economy, as Brown is implying, but rather
the necessary component of continuous experience. What inner sense—one of Kant’s terms
for time—tells us is only that the I that “felt” the world a moment ago is the same I that is
“feeling” it now: time is an intuition. The theory of time tells us nothing about the quality, be
it rational or irrational, of that experience, nor does it tell us anything about the type of judgments that I may make about the experience or about the language that I may use to describe
the experience. The transcendental unity of apperception, namely the unity of such “feelings,”
is a condition for self-presence only. Now, in a later chapter I will discuss what happens if a
subject fails to enter this condition, but the important thing to recognize here is that for Kant
time might hold the keys to rationality, i.e., correct judgements within time, but, as a form of
thought, or better an “intuition” time is only a necessary but not a sufficient cause of rationality. Because of this Brown’s “equations” are unable to prove what they set to, though I
think he is as much mislead by Freud as he is by his own project.
However, though the resurrection of the noumenal body may be beyond Brown here,
his basic argument about what he calls the “relativity” of time is acceptable on Kantian terms,
10
Following suggestions by Ricoeur it could be argued that Brown literalizes certain meta-
phorical descriptions of the unrepresentable unconscious. Cf. Ricoeur, FP 108, 134.
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quite contrary to Brown’s understanding of Kant. What Brown really wants, like Marcuse, is
to free the body from the chains of Enlightenment time-management and its “repressive”
structures, and “What the cultural relativity of time concepts really signifies—and what is a
hopeful sign is that the structure of basic repression is not immutable” (LAD 275). What
Brown is alluding to here is Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis popular in the mid-twentieth century, but more particularly to a 1955 essay by Leopold Von Bertalanffy entitled “An Essay of
the Relativity of Categories.” In this essay Von Bertalanffy uses the Whorfian hypothesis,
which derived from the latter’s interpretation of the distinctions made in understanding time,
particularly tenses, in Native American languages. These were then contrasted with IndoEuropean languages. Von Bertalanffy’s aim is to show that there is no “universal” time experience, but rather that language itself shapes that experience. So, for example:
Instead of our categories of space and time, Hopi rather distinguishes the
“manifest”, all that which is accessible to the senses, with no distinction between present and past, and the “unmanifest” comprising the future as well as
what we call mental. Navaho…has little development of tenses; the emphasis
is upon types, iterative, optative, semilfactive, momentaneous, progressive,
transitional, conative, etc. aspects of action. The difference can be defined that
the first concern of English (and Indo-European language in general) is time,
of Hopi—validity, and of Navaho—type of activity.11
He concludes from this that neither a physics nor a metaphysics can be shared culturally between these different language groups, and thus concepts like “time” and ‘space” are not universal but relative. He also adds to this the challenges to Euclidian and Newtonian space and
time put forward by modern physics. Thus, Bertalanffy concludes, “Little is left of Kant’s
11
Leopold Von Bertalanffy, “An Essay on the Relativity of the Categories,” Philosophy of
Science 21, no. 4, (1955): 244.
106
supposedly apriori [sic.] and absolute categories”.12 However, again this is to make a mistake
about Kant’s claims. Time and space are not categories but rather intuitions. Thus they are
not proscriptive in describing the experience of space and time but rather figure the underlying conditions for the possibility of its experience. It is these conditions that are universal—
and thus analogous to the categorical—and not the way that they are reconstructed either in
the light of Native American languages or the language of Relativity Theory. Kant’s universality is, paradoxically, a universality of possible difference. It allows, for example, for the
sun to be understood as a dragon that passes under the earth at night or as a ball of burning
gas that bends light, for it is unity of the self that makes these judgments that is at stake for
Kant’s epistemology not the judgements themselves. Time, in particular, can be interpreted in
an infinite variety of ways, but it must first ground experience otherwise it cannot be registered in any language whatever a culture then does with it. Thus if Brown wants to escape
from the “repressive” structures that account for contemporary industrial and post-industrial
time-keeping he must do it within possible experience. It is when he takes this up as a hermeneutic problem, rather than an epistemological one, that he will make significant progress, as
we shall see in the next section.
In conclusion, Brown’s excursion into time and the unconscious, though instructive
and important for his development, is unsustainable with respect to his identification of rationality and consciousness. They are not, on the terms Brown uses at least, equivalent.
Brown cannot reach the unconscious in Life Against Death and neither does he find there a
formula for its absence. However, as the excursus into the Relativity of the categories
showed, his claim that the timelessness of the unconscious can lessen the burden of repression—tough not recover the noumenal—can still be acknowledged as a possibility. Moreover,
on Brown’s terms, the desire to achieve the noumenal body is another expression of the myth
of plenitude that underlies Freud’s metapsychology of the instincts. It is important to return,
then, to Brown’s interpretation of Freud’s instinct theory and the dialectic of life and death.
12
Leopold Von Bertalanffy, “An Essay on the Relativity of the Categories,” 247, cf. 250.
107
For the promise of the timeless unconscious lives on in the recollection of primary narcissism
and in the demands of Eros. Demands that can only be disguised by the inertia of the pleasure
principle and that are revealed in art, religion, myth, philosophy and neurosis. Nature remains
Brown’s exemplar here because, as we saw earlier in the case of animals, it is not made ill by
it. In nature life and death co-exist at the most basic organic level, they are not in conflict:
“That is to say there is some sort of dialectical unity” (LAD 100). It is here that Brown’s quest
for the noumenal leads.
III
The conflict at the instinctual level that fails to unify life and death is “The Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History,” which is the subtitle Brown gives to his book. What must be stressed
now in this title, however, is the word meaning, indicating that this is a hermeneutic and not
an epistemological or an historiographical problem.13 The first of these we saw in the last
13
Thus I disagree totally with Robinson’s assertion that “[Brown] was unable to account for
the historical rise of repressive civilization (the subtitle of Life Against Death, “The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History,” was both pompous and misleading), and equally incapable of
envisioning any historical escape from the dilemma of modern unhappiness.” Robinson,
Freudian Left, 233. Brown was not trying to make a historiographic point but rather a hermeneutic one.
There is also an argument about Brown’s response to history carried in Dissent in the
late 1960s. The opening salvo is Lionel Abel’s “Important Nonsense” (March-April, 1968):
147-157 which accuses Brown of having an inadequate idea of the anthropological bases of
history. The return of fire is by Arthur Efron “In Defense of Norman O. Brown” (SeptemberOctober, 1968): 451-455, who accuses Abel of misreading Freud and misrepresenting Brown.
Abel responds in the same issue (455-458), and does not recant. Overall, their contretemps
adds very little to any reading of Brown, dealing mainly with their own paradigms. The whole
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chapter, and as should already be evident, Brown is not writing history from a psychoanalytic
point of view, a study in the Oedipal motivations of “great individuals” for example, but he is
interpreting the very drives of history using the implications of Freud’s late metapsychology.
Meaning becomes all important. Meaning is a counter-entropic (and thus anti-Thanatonic)
force that emerges from desire, that is, from Eros. The assertion of the authority of Eros
means a conceptual revolution from class-struggle, or master and slave, to a dialectic between
instinct and the reality principle (synonymous here with both repression and history). “From
the psychoanalytical point of view”, Brown argues, “unsatisfied and repressed but immortal
desires sustain the historical process. History is shaped beyond our conscious will, not by the
cunning of reason but by the cunning of desire” (LAD 16). That this is a Freudian interpretation of Hegel and Marx is confirmed by the following statements: “The riddle of history is
not in Reason but in desire; not in labour but in love” and “From this point of view, repressed
Eros is the energy of history and labour must be seen as sublimated Eros” (LAD 16, 17). Like
Marcuse, Brown does not see labour as a necessary aspect of human being, but technology is
not the answer. Rather, as religion tells us, human being is “love.” Religion, of course, also
tells us “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Gen. 3:19), a telling paradox because
labour-time and history emerge from love’s errancy, its departure from the path under conditions of repression. So we can conclude that Eros denied is the key to history, sublimated as
labour and neurosis. But still the essence of humanity, as Hegel observed, is Eros, Desire,
Love. The movement of Eros in “man” is desire, and Brown counters the beginning of modern philosophy by arguing that “the essence of man consists, not as Descartes maintained, in
thinking, but in desiring” (LAD 7). To begin with the assertion “I desire therefore I am” is a
complete overturning of the dominance of disembodied “mind” in interpretations of the essence of “humanity.” Moreover, as the full implications of Hegel’s thought implies, there is
no “I am” only a “we are.” The self, as ego, as soul—as an undivided individual is an illusion
argument is warmed over and served up in more detail by Efron in: “Philosophy, Criticism,
and the Body,” Paunch (1973): 72-163.
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of existence, of the reality principle and of ego-psychology. In essence “we are love” and the
“soul” that individuates is only symptomatic of diverted desire: love’s errancy that turns back
on the self in secondary narcissism. One of the professed claims of Life Against Death is here
exemplified: to return the soul to the body as embodied Geist. It should also become apparent
from these statements why Brown believes a psychoanalytical theory of history is necessary.
It is necessary because the force that moves history is not consciousness, not thinking, not
even the cunning of reason, but the unconscious, which must be understood through its representations which are expressions of repressed instinctual desire.
What we are encountering, then, to recapitulate, is the struggle captured in the title of
Brown’s book, where life against death is the psychoanalytical meaning of history. Brown’s
counter-Enlightenment project, leaning on Freud’s instinct theory, has to theorise a dialectic
in which Eros triumphs, and in which death does not disappear, but is sublated. It must not be
death itself that is the problem, because it is never going to go away—Brown is not offering
immortality, only holding onto its promise. The problem is the way that Western civilisations
cope with, or fail to cope with, death; what it means for them and how it structures the lives
possible within them. Indeed, for Brown, the champion of Eros, it is in death, to paraphrase
Hölderlin, that the saving power grows. Brown, searching for a widely applicable solution,
tends to generalise here. But the conclusion he comes up with, is that life and death are considered as separate—that death, the absoluteness of finitude, is not an issue for life, and certainly not for the life of the body. This is intimately involved with the problem of the soul; the
soul that individuates. To take the point made above about Luther and St Augustine one stage
further, according to Brown the soul is what the human makes of the body in denial of death
and, moreover, in denial of life. This is another example of religion belonging to and yet
holding open the negation of (the cure to) history. Nevertheless, Brown warns us that “psychoanalysis can go beyond religion only if it sees itself as completing what religion tries to
do, namely, make the unconscious conscious; then psychoanalysis would be the science of
original sin” (LAD 13-14). Religion tries to find an answer to death and in Christianity this is
the promise of immortality, i.e., the soul; death itself is “the wages of sin”—life and death are
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divided. Brown knows that the Christian promise is itself part of our essence—love, the oceanic—but that it is disembodied in our existence. So, psychoanalysis must be able to hold
onto the promise of Christianity, and yet dissolve the distinction which defines its religious
practices. This is the goal of his eschatology, an eschatology that must, along with the soul,
negate history.
So, humans repress their death and in so doing create history as the history of this repression: civilization as neurosis. It is the human failure to recognise, at the most basic level,
that life and death are the “same,” one half of a dialectic, which both fuels history and is its
meaning. Freud is, perhaps, suggestive of this conclusion when he argues that the goal of all
life is death, but he shies away from the truth as Brown sees it, and retains a dualism. Freud,
he points out, aligned his metaphysical principle with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles’ cosmological division between love (philia) and strife (neikos), which we saw in Chapter 1.14 Brown, however, aligns himself with two earlier Greek thinkers, Anaximander and
Heraclitus. Anaximander, as we also saw earlier, asserted a primal undifferentiated state.
Heraclitus suggested the “ultimate unity of opposites, including life and death” (LAD 83).
There is an important distinction between the two positions held by Freud and Brown: one
ends in the reinforcement of therapeutic pessimism, despair and division, the other points to
reconciliation, which for Brown means hope. If there is a cosmological unity between life and
death, then there is no inherent reason why humans should not enjoy it. He uses Hegel to further his point, but with very different results than we found with Marcuse.
In a fragmented loosely autobiographical work published some ten years after Life
Against Death Brown engages with Hegel as follows:
Dialectics is a dialectic of life against death
death is a part of life
Like Freud, Hegel says the goal of all life is death:
14
Cf. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”
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“The nature of the finite lies in this, that it dissolves itself”
it must go under
this is self-contradiction in practice, in action…
Hegel, Phenomenology: “Not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
undefiled by devastation (Verwüstung), but the life that suffers death and
preserves itself in death is the life of the Spirit. Spirit gains its truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment (Zerrissenheit).”15
In the last part of this quote Hegel is, as Walter Kaufman observes, in all likelihood alluding
to the resurrection—indeed, there is a appropriate way of understanding the Phenomenology
of Spirit as Christ’s passion; but he is also referring to Dionysus Zagreus, (Zagreus means
“torn in pieces”) who was dismembered and reborn.16 This, of course, is a typical range of
references for Brown, a range which calls for and underlines the harmony of philosophy,
myth and religion, especially in the context of the unity of life and death in the resurrection
and its archetypes. Such connections are the substantive means and ends of Life Against
Death. Hegel, unsurprisingly, is making a more complex philosophical point about the subject needing to destroy (devastate/dismember) the familiar in order to know it as it is. Only in
knowing the familiar can the self find itself: thus it finds itself in absolute dismemberment.
This dismemberment is the power of the negative with which life, if it is to be the life of the
spirit, must abide or tarry. Such abiding is the “labour of the negative” which, at the end of
Life Against Death Brown acknowledges as the unity of life and death (LAD 308). To fully
disclose the meaning of this for Brown we need to look at it in more detail.
15
Norman O. Brown, “From Politics to Metapolitics,” in Caterpillar 1 (October, 1967): 62-
94, 85. The ellipses are Brown’s. The longer quotation, in a slightly different translation, can
be found in Miller’s standard translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, 19.
16
Walter Kaufman, Hegel: Texts And Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 50-51.
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For Hegel the understanding (Verstand) meant two things. The first is the process by
which the subject is able to determine the world in an elementary form. Marcuse establishes it
as follows: “Understanding…conceives a world of finite entities, governed by the principle of
identity and opposition. Everything is identical with itself and with nothing else; it is, by virtue of its self-identity, opposed to all other things” (RR 44). This is basically the same as what
Hegel calls “natural consciousness” and Marcuse calls “common-sense”—we know it as the
logic of non-contradiction or the reality-principle. It is the general security that each thing
exists untouched in its individuality and maintains itself as such. This definition of understanding obviously corresponds to pre-dialectical thinking. The later meaning of the word,
coming after dialectical consciousness, states that:
The unity of the thing is not only determined but constituted by its relation to
other things, and its thinghood consists in this very relation…. The thing becomes itself through its opposition to other things; it is, as Hegel says, the
unity of itself with its opposite, or, of being-for-itself with being-for-another.
In other words, the very ‘substance” of the thing must be gleaned from its
self-established relation to other things. This, however, is not within the
power of perception to accomplish; it is the work of (conceptual) understanding.
(RR 109)
What the Understanding17 does, in this case, is to take the perception of a particular thing, say
a simple salt, and to follow the path by which we come to terms with what it “is,” its substance. Firstly, as it is perceived, it is negated by that perception, broken into sense data
(white, cubic, hard, etc.); the role of the Understanding is to negate this difference so that the
17
Following the convention, I shall capitalise Understanding when it is meant in this second
sense.
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thing is reconstituted in its universality. By universal here Hegel means nothing more than
how the particular once Understood can be utilised in the self-movement of the subject toward freedom where that object is for a subject. The double negation takes what was “initself,” wrapped up in its individuality, and recognises that it is “for-another”—as such it is
universal: through the dialectic, the salt comes to be for us. The pattern of the Understanding
is repeated in all acts of cognition right up to self-consciousness and the dialectic of desire in
the master/slave conflict and beyond, to end, for Hegel, in the modern constitutional state.
The Understanding is the faculty by which objects come to emerge from the subjectivity of
the perceiver; their universality is recognised as their dialectical engagement with the subject.
The Understanding, then, “tarries with the negative,” and according to Hegel we only
“find ourselves” in “absolute dismemberment,” that is, not in the individual, the ego, the soul,
but in negation, in otherness and in difference. But where we are not is perceived as death,
limit, end. Death, as Hegel puts it, “is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what
is dead requires the greatest strength” (PS 19).18 The attempt to overcome this (to deny it or to
disavow it) is, according to Brown, history. History is not the process of human becoming,
then, but rather that which lingers because of the human inability to face the transient or to
tarry with the negative. In his reading of the early parts of the Phenomenology in Life Against
Death, Brown argues that the human, faced with his or her own death—his own negation—
transforms “the consciousness of death into a struggle to appropriate the life of another human being at the risk of one’s own life: history as the class struggle (the dialectic of master
and slave, in Hegel’s terminology) is based on an extroversion of death” (LAD 102). This is
the process of to denying difference and thus negating otherness in its freedom. This dialectic
is nothing more nor less than history. But what Brown does, even more clearly than the Hegelian Marcuse (again, perhaps because he is not in his own field), is link this to Freud. Freud
has concluded that the will to mastery over nature (the Apollonian or Aristotelian logos) and
18
See also Hegel, PS 51-52. Here death is consciousness transcending itself in the concept
which marks the lack of self-sufficiency of consciousness as ego.
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other people (the Hegelian) is also an extroversion of the death instinct—sado-masochism.
Freud first thought that people were innately aggressive. Only later did he turn this around
and, like Hegel, see aggression as a way of protecting the self, that is, Thanatos rebounding
off Eros as violence. What Brown adds to this is the notion of the unconscious, and thus he
changes death as an absolute into death as an interpretation of the death instinct under conditions of its repression.
Hegel needs reformulation in the light of psychoanalytical doctrine of repression and the unconscious. It is not the consciousness of death that is transformed into aggression, but the unconscious death instinct; the unconscious
death instinct is that negativity or nothingness which is extroverted into the
action of negating nature and other men. Freud himself…derived affirmation
from Eros and negation from its instinctual opposite.
(LAD 102-103)
Brown’s point is that the negation of the other—be it nature as an object or another subject—
in the process of the extroversion of death is mistaken by consciousness. Eros, or desire,
which in a vulgar reading of Hegel appears to demand the extinction of otherness, can in fact
open itself as the affirmation of otherness, in exactly the same way that the subject was affirmative in the phase of primary narcissism. It is in this way, I would repeat, that for Brown
Desire becomes Love. “I desire therefore I am” becomes something like “I love therefore we
are”. It figures an original and expansive co-belonging. As in the above quote from “Metapolitics”: “our finitude dissolves itself.” It is only repression that keeps Eros and Thanatos from
coming into agreement. And repression is the conditio sine qua non of history from which
Brown wants to escape in order to return—though not by going backward, but in a messianic
sense—to what he calls the “Sabbath of Eternity”—the bliss of childhood.
For Brown, as we saw with Marcuse, when Freud uses the word death, he does not
mean death, but its psychological counterparts: the equivocal tripartite matrix of the Nirvana-
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principle, the repetition compulsion, and sado-masochism. Only the last of these in any way
applies to destruction, and all three are tied to the pleasure principle, and thus Brown faces
the same kind of problems that Marcuse failed to overcome in Eros and Civilization. In the
next section we need to see if Brown can overcome the problem that faced Marcuse. For if
the pleasure-principle is actually allied with the death instinct (its existential expression is the
repetition compulsion), then just what is beyond the pleasure-principle, and, moreover, how
can Eros be thought in order to grow into that space? It is surely something beyond the pleasure principle—and that is not death—that is going to bring about the kind of utopian visions
that Brown advocates. The pleasure principle itself, as Freud formulates it and I have explained it, is intimate only with a kind of death. For the pleasure-principle is the advocate of
separation and the annihilation of the stimulation brought about by difference and otherness—it is the principle of negation without advance, it is a curtailed dialectic or a dualism.
Pleasure is, in this sense, negative, but it is also death. But as we have seen Brown’s aspirations challenge this and he thinks that he has found the theoretical material in religion, myth,
Freud and Hegel to overcome the negative as death. For Brown “Only an unrepressed humanity, strong enough to live-and-die, could let Eros seek union and let death keep separateness”
(LAD 106). As has already been established, in order to make the dialectical reversal Brown
makes use of Freud’s speculative “oceanic feeling,” that moment of undifferentiation when
there was pleasure in otherness because it was affirmed in unity. This first stage of childhood
equates with Hegel’s last stage of knowledge. It is the circle of being, as we saw with Aristotle’s nous theos, a going out, an ex-stasis, which returns in an extinction that is an affirmation
of otherness. It is the Dionysus of the Bacchanalian whirl. It is Eros and it is narcissism.
IV
Narcissism in this revised sense is the self-movement of the ego as its strives to gather itself
in otherness. It is the counter-entropic movement of Eros through which meaning arises; the
dialectic that reveals the world, unifies self and other. The question remains, though, whether
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this movement that Hegel calls desire by bringing about a unity annihilates either the other or
the self. In Brown’s reading it is the self—as ego—that gives way to otherness: Hegel’s desire is replaced by—or, rather, interpreted as—love. In a more conventional reading of Hegel
or of Freud, quite the opposite has been assumed.19 Such a reading of Freud is provided by
Rieff.
Freud’s ideas of sexuality as a general energy of the self may be given another
interpretation: that satisfaction from an object is but a devious means of selflove…. Loving, the body is loved, and thus any object is absorbed into the subject; even adult loves retain their autistic and self-regarding character. That love
must serve the self or the self will shrink from us, that the self may chase love
around an object and back to itself again—this is Freud’s brilliant and true insight, reminiscent of La Rochfoucauld’s keen detection of the ego behind the
curtain.
(FMM 157-158)
From the position of Eros and Civilization and Life Against Death, by focusing on the pitfalls
of secondary narcissism Rieff is lacking the idea of the widened self of primary narcissism.
This is the key to both Brown’s and Marcuse’s thought: the myth of the oceanic registered in
philosophy from Heraclitus to Hegel and in poetry from Hesiod to Rilke. For Rieff, the primary monad is only an unproblematic “self,” an ego in waiting. The “body” of narcissism, as
such, gains no pleasure from the other, has no relation to the other. It is thus a primary autism
not a primary narcissism. Rieff’s child, it seems, begins in alienation, “the bodily self we first
19
“Some critics have suggested that Hegelian absolute knowing is itself nothing more than
self-consciousness writ large and for this reason fails to make genuine space for what is other
than consciousness and its own determinations.” Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel:
Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 72.
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explore and like, before we know what it is to like other bodies” (FMM 156). For Rieff—as
for Freud—the world is alien and hostile. The oceanic feeling is regressive, “a flagging of the
ego”, which denies the “permanent conflict between self and non-self” (FMM 267). Reunion
at the expense of the ego is simply an irrational surrender. Indeed, it is very hard to perceive
any value, utopian or otherwise, in the extinguishing of the ego as one object among many.
This may provide another explanation as to why Marcuse and Brown move apart in later
years, with Marcuse implying a refutation of some of the ideas of Eros and Civilization, moving closer to Rieff, and Brown intensifying his quest for unity. It also leads to a critique of
this position by Joel Whitebook.
Whitebook recognises only hubris in Marcuse’s claims for narcissism (and by extension, though he is not considered in Whitebook’s study, Brown’s claims). He marshals a large
amount of work subsequent to Marcuse’s book which suggests the authority and omnipotence
of narcissism is, in fact, “a defensive sham”,20 a position always present in Freud’s work. For
Whitebook—and I concur though draw different conclusion—the “treatment of narcissism
lies at the speculative and problematic core of Marcuse’s already unabashedly speculative
work”.21 In his critique he argues that primary narcissism relies on a reality based on the primary monad of mother-baby-world and can lead only to “de-differentiation.” He uses an expression borrowed from Hegel’s analogous critique of the young Schelling in his “Preface,”
that this egoic monism leads to the “night…in which all cows are black” (; PS 9).22 It is of
course interesting that Whitebook, presumably knowingly, would aim a critical phrase used
by Hegel in the direction of a Hegelian. For Whitebook, the phrase means that primary narcissism is an omnivorous expression of the libido dissolving Eros and Thanatos into a fatal
identity that utterly submerges the ego. We have already seen, however, how Marcuse and
Brown turn to Hegel rather than Freud in defence of primary narcissism. Thus, Hegel’s
20
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 14.
21
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 33.
22
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 13-14.
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phrase is an apposite riposte, for what he means to criticise by it is Schelling’s notion of absolute identity that collapses into the impossibility of difference. For Schelling, Walter Kaufman argues, it was only the perspective of an inadequate ego that brought differentiation into
the world.23 Hegel, on the contrary, means that absolute knowledge “understands” everything
but preserves it in its difference.
The problem with this understanding, though, is that because of the nature of subjectivity, when it goes out from the subject, it finds nothing but itself (as in Rieff’s reference to
La Rochfoucauld). It is a finite version of nous theos, or, what I will call “the narcissism of
the understanding.” The truth it seeks behind the veil of appearance given by everyday understanding is revealed, in the Hegelian sense of Understanding, as the truth of the subject, that
is its teleological path to freedom in reason. Nevertheless, the question holds: does reason in
negating the particularity of the object annihilate its otherness or preserve it? How this is taken determines how we are to read Brown and Marcuse and how we are to take the narcissism
of the understanding that this represents. Marcuse also observes that “Understanding finds
nothing but itself when it seeks the essence behind the appearance of things” (RR 111), and he
cites Hegel from the Phenomenology: “It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which
is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind there, as
much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which
can be seen” (RR 111). This suggests more than a simple analogy or correlation between
noumenal reality and the phenomenal understanding of that reality.
For Marcuse this direct, or Absolute, relationship cuts right to the heart of Hegel’s
importance for Utopian thinking, and psychoanalysis in particular. It seems to suggest that a
subjective change will bring about an objective change—that a dialectical Understanding of
23
See Kaufman’s commentary in Hegel: Texts And Commentary, 26-27; Hegel’s words are
on 26, and Schelling is cited in Kaufman’s commentary on 27. For an interpretation of Schelling that counters this assertion see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 127-177.
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reality brings about a total revision of reality. To this end Marcuse can see in this a fundamental contribution to an idealist politics, of which both Freud and Marx are heirs.
Hegel’s insistence that the subject be recognised behind the appearance of
things is an expression of the basic desire of idealism that man transform the
estranged world into a world of his own. The Phenomenology of Mind accordingly follows through by merging the sphere of epistemology with the
world of history, passing from the discovery of the subject to the task of mastering reality through self-conscious practice.
(RR 110)
Existence and essence only come together when reality is mastered, which means that a fundamental identity is observed between subject and object and an epochal change in history
takes place.
Holding on to the question of what happens to otherness as the most vital question
here, precisely how essence is described again becomes important. The problem continues to
be how to escape the narcissistic abyss of thought thinking itself, of having no object but itself (RR 163), which was the objective end of Hegel’s philosophy—freedom only existing in
pure thought. In this narcissism of the understanding all is merged into the kind of logical
rationality that spells its domination. Hegel is as we can see suggestive of this end,24 and his
thought is often considered a colonial strategy that obliterates all difference into the Same, the
“identity thinking” of the narcissism of the understanding (for which he attacks Schelling).
24
See, for example, Marcuse’s comment: “our interpretation also refutes Dilthey’s view that
the concept of “otherness” is a source of embarrassment for Hegel” (HO 49). Cf. the rest of
this Chapter “The Absolute Difference within Being: Equality-with-Self-in-Otherness. Being
as Motility [Bewegtheit]” (HO 39-49) for a more detailed reading of otherness in Hegel’s philosophy. Cf. MHH 185f.
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This is a negative approach that posits nature in terms of categories and measurable quantities. It contains an a priori conception of nature as open to domination. In Freud this corresponds to the reality principle in that it withstands reality testing (again, a tautology) which
comprises precisely these a priori conceptions of measurability, repeatability, etc. For Whitebook, this is another danger of Eros and Civilization, that the synthetic ego, leaving the subject for the object, is liable to fall into a systematic (Aristotelian) vision of the world. Whitebook cites Samuel Weber who suggests that “the attempt to grasp the world in systematic
thought, which is to say in terms of unity and totality results from the narcissistic ego’s impulses…to impose its own artificial and rigid unity on the world”.25 It is also worth recalling
here Freud’s remark in “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” that systematic philosophy arises
from paranoia, which is a form of narcissism (NI 91). But, on the contrary, for Marcuse the
dialectic operates such that there is a movement from primary narcissism, which is negated by
otherness, but is not destroyed by it. Thus the synthetic capacity of the ego, in enacting the
desires of the id, can be united with the other, yet the other can be retained in its otherness.
The ego, to follow Marcuse, “splits up into a diversity of states and relations to other things
which are initially foreign to it, but which become part of its proper self when they are
brought under the working influence of its essence” (RR 146). In the terms that I will come to
in a moment, the ego loves back again whatever leaves it. Essence, then, is the instinctual
desire for unity and differentiation. This is how identity can be taken to mean unity in otherness, which is the “structure of reality,” “negative totality” and “essence.” Thus, identity does
not mean uniformity and stability but rather, expansion, restlessness26 and creativity. Though
25
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 109.
26
As Ricoeur confirms: “Unruhigkeit, the “restlessness” of life, is not at first defined as drive
and impulse, but as noncoincidence with one’s self; this restlessness already contains within
itself the negativity that makes it other and which, in making it to be other, makes it be self”
(FP 465) and “The opposition in which each consciousness seeks itself in the other and “does
what it does only so far as the other does the same” is an infinite movement, in the sense that
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this is clearly not the conclusion to be drawn from Eros and Civilization, another view of
Eros suggests that it is beyond the pleasure principle, but is not unpleasureable; it is an affirmation of the once and future pleasure of primary narcissism. The negation of the negation is
affirmation. Thus, even Hegel’s absolute, seen as Eros, is not a stable end, but, “as it were,
dialectical thought, unfolded in its totality [which] thus contains its negation; it is not a harmonious and stable form but a process of unification of opposites. It is not complete except in
its otherness” (RR 165; emphasis added). Hegel’s own project, in Marcuse’s interpretation,
ends not in the Same, but in the Other.
This is the ambivalent principle of Narcissus rendered by Rilke’s 1913 poem of that
title.
Narcissus perished. From his beauty rose
incessantly the nearness of his being,
like scent of heliotrope that clings and cloys.
But his one avocation was self-seeing.27
Whatever left him he loved back again,
he whom the open wind could not contain;
rapt, closed the round of reciprocity,
annulled himself, and could no longer be.28
each term goes beyond its own limits and becomes the other. We recognize here the notion of
Unruhigkeit, the restlessness of life, but raised to the reflective degree through opposition and
struggle; it is only in this struggle for recognition that the self reveals itself as never being
simply what it is—and therefore as being infinite” (FP 467).
27
Not self “knowing” but ‘seeing”
28
Maria Rainer Rilke, An Unofficial Rilke, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil, 1992),
43.
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I do not mean to provide a reading for this poem outside of the context presented here. The
Narcissus myth could, of course, be read in terms of the dangers of secondary narcissism,29
the illusion of reflected love. Teiresias” prophecy says that Narcissus will “live long…unless
he learns to know himself”,30 referring presumably to the Delphic imperative, the dangers of
which have already been fully explored in Sophocles Oedipus the King. However, Ovid’s
Narcissus does not recognize himself, he misrecognizes his reflection: “Not recognizing himself/He wanted only himself”,31 and thus fails to make contact with either the other or himself. He sees though his self deception too late. This is secondary narcissism. But Rilke’s poem is more relevant, I believe, to the transience of primary narcissism and its opposed dialectical possibilities of life and death represented by Brown and Marcuse respectively. The poem
begins with Narcissus” death, but the negation is not of the other, but of the self as ego. Primary narcissism is egoless, or, to put it another way that means the same thing: everything is
the ego (though of course the ego proper, as difference, has not arisen). Vulgar Hegelianism
has implied that the I emerges as the desire to extinguish the other. In Brown’s view the path
of Eros is, rather, the extinction of the self, but it is a perishing in which the ego grows—it
sees itself everywhere, almost by accident (the I becomes We).
29
Such a reading is provided in the modern Ted Hughes translation of Ovid where Narcissus
mistakes “the picture of himself on the meniscus/For the stranger who could make him happy” and Hughes admonishes the “Poor misguided boy! What you hope/To lay hold of has no
existence./Look away and what you love is nowhere”, from “Echo and Narcissus,” Ted
Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 79-80.
30
Hughes, Tales from Ovid, 74.
31
Hughes, Tales from Ovid, 79.
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The word “avocation,”32 which Hamburger chooses, does not contain the compulsive
feel of secondary narcissism. And the gravity of Narcissus’ modest avocation returns the
world to him in an erotic, ever widening, circle which the “open wind could not contain”.
Narcissus’ being, then, is not “annulled” by the death instinct, as the conclusions of Eros and
Civilization imply, but by the life instinct. Eros is able to return to an undifferentiated state
not by killing the ego, but by its infinite expansion into the world. It finds itself in dismemberment. This is the transient state that the rethinking of Eros by Brown hopes to sustain. It is
a movement outward that inverts any crude drive to “absolute knowledge,” or the narcissism
of the understanding. It is not in the negation and domination of others that Eros thrives and
stills Thanatos, but in the affirmation of otherness. A narcissism of pure self-reflection allies
itself only to death, a narcissism that obliterates the self allies itself to life. Life, Eros, is beyond the pleasure principle because, in welcoming difference it tolerates—even thrives on—
tension, a tension that is untainted by threat. This tension, Heraclitus’ “harmony,” is described by Anthony Wilden as “negative entropy,” or “emergent evolution,” the negation of
the entropy of the death instinct as the Nirvana principle. It is the force provided by an open
system (an unrestricted economy) “the constant tendency to higher and higher levels of organization—which implies a very high order of morphogenesis: the ability to elaborate and
change structure.”33 It preserves what he calls a “gradient” that refuses the homeostasis of
entropic forms. It is the higher organisational principle of, particularly social, life.34
32
Though I put emphasis on this word, Hamburger’s choice is something of a mystery. Avo-
cation suggests something trivial, a hobby or a pastime, whereas the German word gesetzt
(ihm aber war gesetzt…) implies that it was mandatory, from the past participle of Setzen, to
put something in place. The over all feel of Rilke’s line is rather that it is Narcissus’s destiny
to see himself—perhaps this refers back to the clinging, cloying scent.
33
Wilden, “Marcuse and the Freudian Model,” 211
34
On this point Wilden actually positions himself against Brown: “Eros is an affirmative, gra-
dient producing, differentiating principle. But as that which seeks the identification of self
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The ego, Freud argues, is synthetic, and has a tendency to “‘harmonize,’ ‘reconcile,’
‘organize’ the conflicts and divisions in mental life” (LAD 84). This synthetic capacity is attributable, ultimately, to Eros, the bringer of unity, and the seeker of ever-wider unification.
The instinctual task of Eros is the dual legacy of the primary monad and of the need to sustain
the route to death immanent in the organism, that is to return to an undifferentiated state.
Narcissism, in both its positive and its negative forms, is a way of maintaining this instinctual
injunction. Thus, Brown points out, “just as Freud said object-finding was refinding, we may
add that the fusion sought by the ego is re-fusion” (LAD 84). The ego in its synthetic role is
actually dancing to the tune of the id, or to the repressed desire of Eros. In “finding” reality,
the ego is rather striving to repeat the unity that is sustained in unconscious wishes. Objects
and the reality they make up are responses to an instinctual demand for unity, and reality is
not other to the instincts (nor existence other to essence), in a privative sense, but is made
manifest by their actions. There are two ways this can work out. The first is through the logic
of domination, and I have called this “the narcissism of the understanding.” The second instance is through an originary co-belonging, I call this and “erotic” or “ecstatic narcissism.” It
is the later that I associate with Brown. This is to follow the Hegelian path to reality which,
through the dialectic of negation, strives to bring existence in line with essence. For Marcuse
and Brown, the essence of what it is to be human is instinctual, but, moreover, whereas for
Marcuse it was shown to be Thanatos, for Brown it is Eros. Eros must be acknowledged as
the negative in a field dominated by the reality principle and the pleasure principle, for it is
with other, under the commands of the Other, [(]as that which Norman O. Brown sees as the
great unifying principle, being-one-with-the-world uniting the notions of narcissism and object choice), Eros is the principle of negation of difference, the reduction of gradient; it is entropic in itself” (Wilden, “Marcuse and the Freudian Model,” 237). In this I believe he has
misread the dialectical nature of Brown’s thought. Like Marcuse, Wilden has mistaken Eros
for Thanatos. In a later chapter I shall show how this principle of expansion is fundamental to
the imagination and to creativity in Love’s Body.
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there that the dynamic tension between essence and existence is played out. But neither of
Freud’s two principles applies to “reality” in the rethought essential sense I am maintaining
here, but are rather, as I said, the field of conflict. Both reality and pleasure are the way the
essences exist, but not how they ex-sist, not how they are in the “expanded field” of Eros. As
we saw above, objects as they arise in the field of nature, are in fact the “objectification” of
the conflict between essence and existence that emerges as nature and history. Nature
(Brown) and history (Marcuse), on this reading, are attempts to (re)attain unity, to re-find essential desires in existent things. It is because of this that we can conclude, reality is not other
to the instincts, in a privative sense, something that stands against their immaturity, because
reality is only made manifest by their actions. Of course, how this expansion is approached
will determine whether domination or co-belonging is the telos of the dialectic.
This can be explored through a criticism voiced by Nancy Chodorow. She argues that
only through an objectification of the mother—seeing her not as a subject—can Marcuse and
Brown “envision narcissistic union and the complete satisfaction of pre-genital demands and
desires as progressive social impulses.”35 The mother must be annihilated in order for the desires of the subject to be fulfilled. The mother’s role as provider and separate agent fulfilling
her own goals is thus obviated and the self extended in its place. The memory of gratification
negates the activity of nourishment given by another, and a childhood idea of the “true,” as a
uniform extension of the self, becomes the telos of their liberatory theory. Though this might
appear attractive, taking Brown and Marcuse out of an Hegelian or idealist theory of synthetic
history and placing them into a psychoanalytic/object relations context which is predicated on
separation and distinction of roles, it is not surprising that they appear to fall into contradiction and inherent sexism as Chodorow claims. It is, though, Chodorow who has misread the
nature of the instincts and of narcissism.
35
Nancy Chodorow, “Beyond Drive Theory: Object Relation and the Limits of Radical Indi-
vidualism,” 114-153, in Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1989), 141ff.
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She argues that “Brown’s and Marcuse’s idealization of a narcissistic mode of relating and of drive gratification based on the pleasure principle precludes those very intersubjective relationships that should form the core of any social and political vision.”36 By this, she
means to point to the flaw at the centre of their hopes for future communities showing that
they would reduce everything to an expression of infantile desires. In opposition, she concludes that:
the reality principle does not simply signify an abstract, repressive civilization based on the performance principle and domination, or on a morbid and
neurotic history and culture. Rather, the reality principle is in the first instance the subjectivity of others—the recognition that others have their own
intentions, goals, and experiences of pleasure and pain. For the child, learning the meaning of the self-other distinction and of one’s relatedness to a differentiated other is the same thing as the reality principle and is intrinsic to
the construction of the self.37
The reality principle is needed, then, to distinguish the self and the other. The intervention of
the father and the needs of the mother enable the child to find themselves as different and
thus construct their ego. The reality principle is a benign force, hard but fair, and it allows for
both self and other to emerge in their differentiation. Instincts on their own will—like the
“Schellingian” night when all cows are black—lead to nothing but a collapse of difference
and a regression to the childish. However, in response to this, it is important to counter pose
Ricoeur:
36
Chodorow, “Beyond Drive Theory,” 135.
37
Chodorow, “Beyond Drive Theory,” 136.
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the desire of the other is directly implied in the emergence of Eros; it is always with another that the living substance fights against death, against its
own death, whereas when it acts separately it pursues death through the circuitous paths of adaptation to the natural and cultural environment. Freud
does not look for the drive for life in some will to live inscribed in each living substance: in the living substance by itself he finds only death.
(FP 291)
For Ricoeur the instincts are not the strivings of a wilful child to be civilised by the realityprinciple (as Brown says, “Infantilism, however glorified, is no solution” [LAD 39]). The instincts are a direct implication of intersubjectivity; the very process of overcoming Anankē
described by Freud in his initial definition of Eros as a complicating and expansive “force.”
Ricoeur writes: “Freud never described instincts outside of an intersubjective context” (FP
387). Instinct only exists because of otherness and can only be sustained by otherness. On
these terms the reality-principle is just the existential expression of the instincts, which is
what Marcuse and Brown have been asserting all along. The self cannot survive on its own—
on its own the self can only die. Life, Eros, only emerges through a widening that takes in and
responds to otherness, at first Anankē and later other subjects. The relationship to the other is
only possible because there are instincts. In addition, as Hegel says, the “I” is always “We.”
A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact selfconsciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it…. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the dif-
128
ferent independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”.38
(PS: 110; Hegel’s emphasis)
It is necessary to see the whole of the Hegelian dialectic at play when either Brown or Marcuse, talk about primary narcissism, and not just the often speculative philosophical intuitions of
Freud. The Hegelian dialectic of desire can only exist in the maintenance of otherness, because only in otherness can the self be confirmed. It also, as Hegel makes clear, relies on the
“freedom” and “independence” of the other self-consciousnesses, including the mother. Only
by recognising the differences sustained in the other can self-consciousness by maintained as
an ongoing and infinite process.
Eros, as narcissistic, seeks identification through a passive yet restless union, its plenitude is immanent in its transcendence. This is a philosophical and mythological answer the
problems of narcissism. It is to not a strict Freudian answer, but proves consistent with the
thinking through of psychoanalysis that Brown achieves in Life Against Death. A thinking
that, in responding to the unforgotten and timeless claim of the oceanic feeling, confirms that
the overcoming of lack is not dependent on technology, but on a way of finding objects that
does not dominate or possess them. This is a path to the world enabled by the erotic fulfilment of narcissism, where the subject determines reality in line with freedom, that is in line
with an instinctual gratification that can only be maintained because of the tension of otherness, the dialectic of Eros, that is beyond the pleasure principle. This, for Brown, is the resur-
38
It is worth mentioning in this context Kenley Royce Dove’s suggestion that the “We” here
discussed by Hegel are in fact the philosophers. Which is to be contrasted with the “We” of
the proletariat of Marx’s thesis eleven. Dove “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method,” in Warren
E. Steinkraus ed., New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 46, 49.
129
rection of the body and the fulfilment of the hopes of religion, contained in the aspirations of
St. Augustine:
The resurrection of the body, and the ascension unto bliss is believed now by
all the earth; learned and unlearned embrace it, only some few reject it: if it be
credible, what fools are they not to believe it: if it be not, how incredible a
thing is it, that it should be so generally believed!39
What is held onto by St. Augustine and the Christian Church is not just the soul but also the
body. It is this hope for an immortal body that, Brown argues at the end of Life Against
Death, is the truth of a religion disfigured by sublimation. What is curious and telling about
Christian eschatology, Brown concludes, is that the resurrection of the body is actually the
negation of that platonic trend in Christian thought which denies the body and advocates the
immortality of the soul alone. It is the denial of the body that has lead to the errors of history,
to the failure to cope with death. The lesson from philosophy, religion, mythology and poetry
as they work through the labour of the negative is that it is only in the acceptance of the death
of the body that it can actually live. This is the conclusion of the dialectic of Eros.
39
St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), Bk. XVIII,
Ch. v.
130
——Chapter Four——
The Mystic Imagination
In his critique of Norman O. Brown’s 1966 book Love’s Body, “Love Mystified,” Herbert
Marcuse, drawing a veil over his own intellectual radicalism, writes: “Norman Brown has
carried the burden of radical thought to the farthest point: the point where sanity must appear
as madness, where concepts must turn into phantasies, and the truth must become ridiculous.”1 Marcuse’s earlier works, Eros and Civilization for example, would suggest that his
words be taken in support of Brown’s project, even as complimentary. Yet by the late 1960s
Marcuse’s aesthetics were less theoretically experimental than a decade earlier and his new
found counter-cultural political focus had led him to be more cautious in his reception of such
an “advanced” work as Love’s Body.2 It was this “cautious” (the word must still be used lightly with Marcuse) approach that guides his Commentary critique where, along with other
“fragmentary” works, Love’s Body is seen ultimately as “mimesis without transformation”3—
a mere repetition of the world’s apparent disorder. Marcuse’s criticisms are not blanket ones,
however, and formally at least he approves of Brown’s style, in which the argument is contained in “fragments, short paragraphs, aphorisms” that evolve in a “musical rather than a
conceptual order: variations on a theme, progress through repetition, dissonance as element of
structural harmony and development” (Neg 229). This method, according to Marcuse, reasserts “The right of the imagination as cognitive power”, where “thought becomes play, jeu
1. Herbert Marcuse, “Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown” in Neg 228.
Originally published in Commentary (February, 1967): 71-75.
2. See my Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and the Romantic Tradition, especially Chapter 3, “The Aesthetic State,” for an account of the development of Marcuse’s aesthetics.
3. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 51.
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131
interdit, the scandal; the esprit de sérieux gives way to the gaya sciencia, drunkenness and
laughter” (Neg 229).
It is on these terms, at least partially endorsed by Marcuse, that Brown answers the
open challenge of the last chapter of Life Against Death: to resurrect the body. Love’s Body is
an example of labour laced with pleasure and a love of the lyric. It is a work that leaps off
from the dialectics of Eros and the reinterpretation of narcissism described in the last chapter.
It exemplifies the movement from labour to love, but simplified and compressed, now expressed “not in a system, as in Hegel, but in an instant, as in poetry.”4 Indeed, Love’s Body is
composed in the mode of “the fragment,” which Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, in their study of Jena romanticism The Literary Absolute, describe as “the romantic
genre par excellence.”5 Building on Marcuse’s critique and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s
theory of romanticism this chapter will do three things: firstly, develop a formal grasp of
Love’s Body by locating within the romantic mode of the fragment; secondly, interpret
Brown’s concepts of “mystery” and ‘symbolism” with reference to the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’ “radical imagination”; thirdly, account for Marcuse’s critique of
Love’s Body by placing them within Brown’s rethinking of the resurrected body, that is, by
comparing their respective ideas of teleology and eschatology.
I
4. Norman O. Brown, “A Reply to Herbert Marcuse”, Neg 244. Originally published
in Commentary (March, 1967): 83-84.
5. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1988), 40. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as LA.
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Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate the fragment in contradistinction to the systematic working through of philosophical problems most easily identified in German Idealism.6 The fragment comes from a tradition of writing, for example, Chamfort, La Rochfoucauld and Pascal,
which traces its origin back to Montaigne’s Essays. This is a tradition that reaches its first
reflexive maturity with the Schlegel brothers and Novalis in the 1790s. The Jena romantics,
then, are said to receive
the heritage of a genre…that can be characterized by three traits: the relative
incompletion (the “essay”) or absence of discursive development (the
“thought”) of each of its pieces; the variety and mixture of objects that a single ensemble of pieces can treat; the unity of the ensemble, by contrast, constituted in a certain way outside the work by the subject that is seen in it.
(LA 40)
It is immediately evident that this in part rehearses the description of Love’s Body provided by
Marcuse. The fragment expresses an absence of systematic and consistent development and is
made up of an often heterogeneous mixture of subjects. It is incomplete and does not desire to
be complete in itself, for, as the last part of the quotation states, the fragment’s formal unity is
“constituted in a certain way outside the work by the subject that is seen in it”, a point I shall
develop later in this chapter. In one way, as Maurice Blanchot acidly observes, “the fragment
often seems a means for complacently abandoning oneself to the self rather than an attempt to
elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing,” and thus ‘simply to welcome one’s own disor-
6. In addition see Karl Ameriks ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In particular Ameriks, “Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism” (1-17) and Paul Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon” (95-116).
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der.”7 In part Marcuse echoes this in his response to Brown; for Brown himself, it is the distinction between system and poetry. But two other criteria of the fragment are also important
here. The first is the response to Friedrich Schlegel’s injunction that “poetry and philosophy
should be made one.”8 The second is the romantic fragment’s responsiveness to and responsibility for the voices of others, which is called writing together or “symphilosophy” (LA 45).
Brown, in Love’s Body, goes to considerable trouble to achieve something corresponding to
the romantic fragment. Thus in this work we find each of the elements of the fragment established by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: an absence of obvious system, a heterogeneous mixture of subjects, an attempted union of poetry and philosophy, and a symphilosophical confluence of voices. The absence of structure is apparent in Love’s Body’s loose ordering of isolated and unnumbered paragraphs; heterogeneity is announced in the extraordinary range of references. As with Life Against Death, Brown draws on the full range of the humanities: Classics, mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, theology and anthropology. The
fragment itself is the union of poetry and philosophy. Lastly, Brown symphilosophizes by
bringing together diverse quotations, not just academically, but also formally and typographically. As we shall see, he actually establishes an original page layout for his book that allows
all his sources—his co-authors or symphilosophers—to be immediately present.
Love’s Body is divided into sixteen chapters, and I shall begin by analysing chapter
eleven, “Fraction,” which comes between “Fire” and “Resurrection.” Other titles include
“Liberty,” “Trinity,” “Unity,” “Person” and “Representative,” as well as “Food,” “Head,”
“Judgement” and “Nothing.” Each chapter heading is deliberately provocative, threatening a
thematic development that, because of the work’s fragmentary nature, does not truly emerge
(though the threat itself is significant). “Fraction” is a relatively measured way into a formal
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1993), 359.
8
Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1991), 14. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as PF.
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analysis of Love’s Body, because it appears to be Brown’s self-reflexive encounter with his
own form and also with the genre of the fragment that the title implies. The inferable pattern
of this chapter is the fragmentation of the body and of meaning (two increasingly closely related subjects in Brown’s work). Moreover, it suggests how these fractions are utterly implicated in the whole. It begins:
To eat and to be eaten. The grain must be ground, the wine pressed; the bread
must be broken. The true body is a broken body.
Nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.”
Cf. Dylan Thomas, “This bread I break.” Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 290.9
The movement from system to fragment—to poetry—is inaugurated here by the echo of Hegel’s subject finding itself in dismemberment (Zerrissenheit). This establishes a dialectic between part and whole, the mythological, the religious, the philosophical and the poetic. To
take up Brown’s references, in Thomas’ poem, the human body is made up of the fragments
of the world: its food. But it also recalls the hidden or material meaning of transubstantiation,
the part taking on the whole through the ceremony, through the symbol, which in turn becomes the human accepting the world through ingestion.10 This connects with Northrop
Frye’s reading of the images of the winepress and the mill in Blake as references to the “great
9
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (London and Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 184; hereafter referred to parenthetically as LB.
10
Cf. Eliade, Eternal Return: “Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews
communion”, 4.
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communion feast in which human life is reintegrated into its real form.”11 With respect to the
cited Yeats” poem, where “Fair and foul are near of kin/And fair needs foul,”12 it is first necessary to hear a reprise of the scatological and the Protestant from Brown’s earlier work Life
Against Death. There, in his brilliant discussion of Luther, Brown argued that “Protestantism
was born in the temple of the Devil, and it found God again in extremist alienation from
God.” (LAD 209) He is referring to the vision of reformed religion given to Luther on the
“jakes” (a second divine kenosis, or “emptying out”). According to Brown this is the exemplary archetype of sublimation. In this extreme Protestantism, the world, the body and in particular money, are given to the Devil—are shards from the Devil’s arse. The material world is
quite literally for Luther the shit in which God’s flowers grow (the body is manure for the
soul). This Brings us back to Yeats, for the preceding lines of “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop” run: “But Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement” (in itself another reference to Blake). Thus, a general interpretation of the poem might include the body versus the
soul, sensual matter against virtuous spirit the, contesting of the ground between Crazy Jane
and the Bishop. When reintegrated with Thomas” and Blake’s poems of bread and the body,
blood and wine, it should be evident that the conflicts between part and whole, secular and
spiritual vision, literalism and symbolism, between madness and authority are at the heart of
Love’s Body.
Meaning, Brown is arguing in “Fraction,” is in parts: a collage, or rather a montage
(for meaning, as shall become clear, is temporal), edited out of an historical body, smashed
out of the dead weight of words. “There is a seal or sepulcher to be broken, a rock to be broke
open, to disclose the living water; an eruption. Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent;
opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light” (LB 185). Though the religious imagery
is strong here—perhaps too strong—it is really only secondary: it is to be found in the words
11
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton Universi-
ty Press, 1969), 290.
12
Yeats, Poems, 259-260.
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as a kind of fossilised trail. “Language,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously writes “is fossil
poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have
long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”13 The religious meaning of these words—
which Emerson calls their ‘secondary use”—Brown is arguing, is this fossilised or “literal”
meaning—which is not what the words really mean, that is not what they can mean, but only
what they are taken to mean by tradition. They have lost their poetry. Thus: “Literal meanings
are icons become stone idols; the stone sepulcher, the stone tables of the law” (LB 185). Taken in this way speaking and writing have become kinds of idolatry. The important thing for
Love’s Body is to escape this reified written history—historiography—and to welcome an
iconoclasm: “Iconoclasm, the word like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces” (LB 185).
Here there is a deliberately ironic inversion of Jeremiah: “Is not my word like as a fire? Saith
the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29) Brown usurps the
authority of the “original” fragmentation, where God smashes the words of the false prophets,
for the present, removing it from history.14 Like Emerson before him, Brown is denying that
13
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982),
215. Brown cites from this passage in his later work, Closing Time (1974).
14
Ironically, Harold Bloom in his Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: The Seabury
Press, 1975, xii), calls both Marcuse and Brown “false-prophets.” He has in mind the following verses from the Book of Jeremiah: “Thus saith the lord of hosts, Hearken not unto the
words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision out of
their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. They say still unto them that despise
me, The Lord hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after
the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.” Jer. 23:16-17. Brown and
Marcuse both lay claim to the rights of the imagination and are rightly named “False Prophets.” False, here, can only be a critical stance against orthodoxy, i.e., in Brown’s terms,
against the literal: ultimately a counter-claim upon the logos.
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religious mystery lies in the past, that it is only something to be inherited rather than experienced. In Love’s Body Brown reopens the aphoristic or fragmentary force of Biblical history
by placing religious words and phrases in a deliberately non-conforming context. Brown is
playing with their lofty sound, recognising their absurdity, and moreover, as shall become
clear, returning them to the body (the dismembered body of Hegel, the flat breasts of Crazy
Jane, the blood of Dylan Thomas).
In addition, Brown is acknowledging that this kind of writing is precisely what his
own practice echoes. “Fraction” continues:
Aphorism is exaggeration, or grotesque; in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations; and in poetry, “cet extrémisme est le phénomène même
de l’élan poétique.” Aphorism is exaggeration, extravagant language; the road
of excess which leads to the palace of wisdom.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, 78. Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 7.
Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace, 198.
(LB 187)
Here we have a passage in which two quotes are unmarked and slightly paraphrased, and
where the references are not in the same order as they are given in the fragment. Also, Brown
has knowingly lifted Adorno’s quote about psychoanalysis out of its ironic context and used it
as an authority.15 Indeed, the irony is inflated, as with the Jena romantics for whom irony is
“an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two
conflicting thoughts” (PF: 33). The aphorism, as a sub-genre of the fragment capture this rest-
15
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1999), 49. The section of the book this aphorism comes from bears the tellingly ironic title “Dwarf Fruit.”
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lessness like no other form. For Brown “Aphorism is recklessness; it goes too far…. Aphorism, the form of the mad truth, the Dionysian form” (LB 187). The aphoristic expression of
knowledge is important because it is unfinished (to this end he cites Bacon: “Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further” [LB 188]); it plays with the
self-imposed epistemic limits of systematic form. The aphorism, as a form of the fragment,
recognises the particularity of knowledge, the finite nature of the inquirer, the infinite nature
of the subject. “Systematic form,” Brown continues, “attempts to evade the necessity of death
in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings on it, and so it remains dead”;
thus, in an unfortunate pun, “rigor is rigor mortis” (LB 188). Broken forms or fractions or
fragments, however, are living, they are “the form of eternity” (LB 188). Aphorism, Brown
asserts, is
Beyond atomism. Fragmentation unto dust, and the word becomes seminal
again. The sower soweth the word. Dionysus broken and scattered is seed scattered. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit. The body is made whole by being broken.
John XII, 24.
(LB 189)
Words sown in their own history (as a written series, historiography) may perhaps fall on fallow ground (“the dead wood of systems” [LB 190]). Ground up and sown in the present, on
the blank page, they may germinate anew, like dragon’s teeth. For Love’s Body, this rejuvenation belongs to the fragment as a site of incompletion, but also to the authority of symbolism
as linguistic coitus, to which I shall return shortly. From this it is quite clear why Brown’s
work can be associated with the romantic fragment. In addition to its incompletion, its form is
broken, it refutes the supposed inertia of the system (even Hegel’s dynamic and dismembered
system), its subject matter is eclectic, and it speaks with and alongside the voices of others.
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Brown’s fragment, then, is not passive, it is provocative—an open challenge to test
the responsibility of the reader. At the beginning of this chapter, I referred to LacoueLabarthe and Nancy’s contention that the unity of the fragment was “constituted in a certain
way outside the work by the subject that is seen in it”. I now want to explain what is meant by
this absent romantic subject described in The Literary Absolute.
For the romantics, the work never ceases to imply the fundamental motif of
completion. Indeed, they raise this motif to a peak of intensity [as] fragmented “poetry and philosophy,” whose very completion remains incomplete. The
work in this sense is absent from works—and fragmentation is also the sign
of this absence. But this sign is at least ambivalent, according to the constant
logic of this type of thought, whose model is negative theology. The empty
place that a garland of fragments surrounds is a precise drawing of the contours of the Work.
(LA 46-47)
This passage condenses what I want to put forward here. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue
that the centre of the work, here Love’s Body, its point of negativity or absence—its incompletion, or what makes it a fragment—is also the circumference of the work, its limit—the
ideality of its completion. The fragment, by the logic of its own definition, posits a whole.
The work itself emerges from the tension between completion and incompletion. The image
utilised by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy is deliberately abyssal, paradoxical: a central hole that
also provides the shape and extent of the work. By this I think they mean that the hole is in
the work—something missing—whereas its completion, its “whole,” is outside the work. In
the context of Love’s Body, the site of Brown’s meaning is always elsewhere, in a place of
necessary incompletion, thus the hole in the work is the work’s inability to contain its own
sources. Conversely, the “whole” of the work, its completion (itself impossible) is a realized
reading of his symphilosophers. So, one such place we might locate Brown’s meaning, what
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Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the “exergue” (there is another I shall discuss below) is in
the history of writing, the essential deferral of the hermeneutic circle, the deferral of authority, which is always asserted by the failure of the fragment. This deferred hermeneutic of the
book, always pointing elsewhere—fore and aft—is a restless, disorienting and abyssal prospect.
It is again to the American Romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson that I can turn for a significant illustrative analogue. In his writings this same abyss of authority is considered as the
problem of “Quotation and Originality”—the title of one of his late minor essays (1876). He
writes:
Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest
or private addition so rare and insignificant,—and this commonly on the ground
of other reading or hearing,—that, in a large sense, one could say there is no
pure originality. All minds quote.16
The debt of language to language (of book to book) is such and so much that “None escapes
it. The originals are not original” (CW 781-782). And, provocatively, it is not merely mouths
or pens that quote, but minds. People behold nature, he goes on, “as exiles” and ‘so they quote
the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs” (CW 784). For Emerson thought is quotation, and quotation is part of a larger removal from nature, from an original experience—
that is, the experience of creation. This in turn betrays the very possibility of truth, which for
Emerson belongs to an original (an aboriginal, or “from the beginning”) relation to the universe.17 But through quotation “they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote
thoughts, and thus disown them” (CW 784). This would suggest that the sources of Brown’s
16
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Writings (New York, Wm. Wise and Co., 1929), 781.
Hereafter referred to parenthetically as CW.
17
See Nature (CW 1), and “Self-Reliance” (CW 144).
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symphilosophy actually write Love’s Body, and Brown’s anonymity is confirmed as he becomes merely a palimpsest. But it would sound a false note if Emerson were so dogmatic.
And indeed, he is far from being straightforward on his determination of either quotation or
originality. There are at least three ways in which these terms overlap and dissolve into one
another.
In the first instance, quotation is often out of context, and may not even mean (even
desire to mean) what the “original” author meant; thus, “next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it” and “Genius borrows nobly” (CW 785). Emerson’s own source
is Goethe. In this case, all thought and all literature become a kind of refitted hand-me-down.
Often, Emerson argues, this does a greater service to the person quoted, as in “his own [writings] he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s he is a lawgiver” (CW 786).
Thus, the author becomes, ironically, an authority (consider Brown’s earlier ironic use of
Adorno as an authority).
In the second instance, and this is more idiosyncratic, quotation is actually invented:
“It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and not less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary person, in order to give it weight” (CW 787). It is
not to pass off someone else’s work as your own, but to pass of your work as somebody
else’s—a forgery. Emerson does this most famously through the cipher of his Orphic poet in
the 1836 Nature. It is a curious position where the “original” is passed off as “quotation” to
give it more credence. And it is almost impossible to find out whether Emerson—or anybody
else—is actually quoting, merely ventriloquising or even inventing another.
The third instance is closest to Emerson’s own heart and figures his place in the romantic tradition of which Brown is an inheritor: it is the idea of genius.
To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the single word Genius
is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. The divine never quotes, but
is, and creates. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, which
makes the Past forgotten. Genius believes its faintest presentiment against the
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testimony of all history; for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state
of mind is the ancestor of everything. And what is Originality? It is being, being
one’s self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.
(CW 788-789)
That is, we are original not when we make things up but when we quote nature, rather than
just what others have said about it. And, moreover, we express our original relation when we
quote our own nature. The writer can only do this by breaking the “fossil language” that is his
or her inheritance. This is where “what we see and are” become the same thing—the self is
our perception. It is fairly clear here that Emerson’s Genius is the poet, the “liberating God”
(CW 247), the creator, or the spontaneous thinker, whose debt to what Emerson calls the flux
of the past, is wiped away through a total immersion in the present—”the moment has the supreme claim” (CW 789).
Many of these ideas are visibly circulating in Love’s Body. Brown quotes out of context and thus undermines the very authorities he chooses, he leaves the reader unsure whether
an author is being quoted (though he does not, I think, invent quotations), and he writes the
book to strive for an iconoclasm that creates the new, creates an opening: the spring beneath
the rock. In sum, quotation and originality become the condition for our responsibility to the
voices of others, but, moreover, to the creation of our self (our-body, love’s body). Both
Brown and Emerson are attached to the kind of unabashed romanticism, where our human
perceptive limits—here registered as the limits of reading, overstepped by the unrestrained
imagination—are turned into creative faculties, here “writing.”
What follows is amongst the most extreme, challenging and fertile examples provided
by Love’s Body.
All walking, or wandering, is from mother, to mother, in mother; it gets us nowhere. Movement is in space; and space (χώρα), as Plato says in the Timaeus,
is a receptacle, a vessel (ὑποδοχή—“undertaker”); a matrix (ἐκμαγεῖον); as it
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were the mother (μήτηρ) or nurse (τιθήνη), of all becoming. Space is a sphere
of spheres containing us; ambient and embracing; the world-mothering air as
atmosphere. Also a chaos or chasm (χώρα), a yawning pit, a devouring mother.
Without form; void; and dark. And then there is light walking in darkness: the
son-sun-hero in the mother-dragon night.
Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 49A-52B, Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas, ch. xi, §19. Róheim, “The Dragon and the Hero: Part Two,” 90. Ferenczi, “Gulliver Fantasies,” 46-47. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambience,” Essays.
(LB 50)
A psychoanalytic interpretation of this fragment might suggest that it is a rehearsal of the devouring Mother or Other, what Hans Leowald, after Karen Horney, calls the “dread of the
womb,”18 here more broadly anticipated as the terror of an as yet meaningless space. Two images, mother and space, are combined to form a mythographical symbol of the void (χώρα),
where the “son-sun-hero” (the philosopher-king?) creates his meanings, illuminates them, out
of the darkness, as Eros shaped the generations of Earth and Sky within Chaos for Hesiod,
who also disavowed the feminine priority of Gaia in accordance with the dispensation of
Zeus. And indeed, the section of Love’s Body from which this fragment comes, “Nature,” establishes itself on the mythographical understanding of a feminine space and a masculine definer by bringing together a mass of sources unified by the theme of birth and re-birth; in particular the use of re-birth as a mythological way of displacing female creative power. The
work of Luce Irigaray sounds a useful counterpoint here. The masculine symbolic in Love’s
Body appears to be “like a play to achieve mastery through an organised set of signifiers that
surround, besiege, cleave, out circle, and outflank the dangerous, the embracing, the aggres-
18
Hans Leowald, “Ego and Reality,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1980), 16-17.
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sive mother/body.”19 Thus the phallus defines meaning at a point of origin from which the
feminine is excluded by being the very void that needs to be mapped or “illuminated.” The
depth of Brown’s sources, however, and the manner in which he approaches them, suggests
that, like Irigaray, he is trying to get behind this duality by reflecting on the bodily sources of
the mythical and the mystical, the anthropological and the philosophical. He is not defending
the patriarchal affiliation of his sources, but rather he is opening up their metaphorical status.
The implication is that gender is also a victim of the lapidary inertia of “fossil poetry.” Brown
is, albeit in a limited way, foreshadowing Irigaray’s more rigorous assertion that the disavowal of the feminine is the “impetus [for] fictive, mythical, or ideal productions that are only
afterwards defined as laws assuring the permanence and circularity of [the] system” (Spec
52). We will see this most clearly when Brown’s hostility to “permanence,” “circularity” and
“system” is illustrated in the last part of this chapter.
It is also important to re-affirm that if Brown’s sources are pursued, Love’s Body is
not immediately sympathetic to its symphilosophers and is not taking them at their word. Despite the humility of anonymity that goes hand in hand with the presentation of sources in the
book there is a considerable amount of Emersonian ventriloquism and even violence done to
the cited thinkers. As we have seen, even though Brown always provides sources, there is
rarely an easy way of knowing which source is being quoted, which merely referred to, or
even in which order they appear in the fragment. Now one could, taking Blanchot at his word,
say this is bad scholarship. But I think that it would rather be bad reading not to check references, not to examine the Timaeus or the Adventure of Ideas, etc. That is, in symphilosophy,
the reader should never take the writer’s word for it, because the text is not closed and the
hermeneutic on which a final interpretation rests is always deferred. Nevertheless, an ideal
reader might know that Plato’s Timaeus contains one of the earliest and most influential
Greek cosmologies. It is not too much trouble to find out that Chapter XI, section 19 of The
19
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithica NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 37. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Spec in the text.
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Adventure of Ideas contains a short discussion of Plato’s receptacle (ὑποδοχή) or locus
(χώρα), described in the Timaeus in which he asserts the unity of events within their constant
becoming.20 Plato’s chora is often described as just such a locus between being and becoming,
which partakes of neither, rather allowing them to emerge into their difference, as did Hesiod’s Eros. The ἐκμαγεῖον or “matrix” means both that on or in which an impression is made
and the impression that is made. The chora is also another problematically gendered term, coopting the maternal as the surrounding words “mother,” “nurse” “matrix” and “receptacle”
suggest. Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out that the chora is the disavowal of a gendered origin:
“This peculiar receptacle that is chora functions to receive, to take in, to possess without in
turn leaving any correlative impression. She takes in without holding onto: she is unable to
possess for she has no self-possession, no self-identity.”21
Brown’s other sources make cognate points. Leo Spitzer’s essay deals with the idea
of a surrounding space, the perfect sphere of the Platonic universe embracing all possible
forms. Spitzer, however, is tracing the semantic history of “milieu and ambience” to the
Greek περιέχον, a kind of sheltering space or receptacle that partakes of the physical and the
spiritual (aether)—an all embracing locality—which has come to be understood as “environ-
20
Alfred North Whitehead, The Adventure of Ideas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), 218-
219.
21
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on The Politics of Bodies (London:
Routledge, 1995), 116. There are several other significant discussion of “chora” in this context. Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida both try to displace or defer gendering the chora; Julia
Kristeva borrows it as a positive metaphor for the way the woman’s body loosely orders the
semiotic rhythms that precede language. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993) 35-46; Jacques Derrida, On The Name
trans. David Wood, et al., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 88-127; Julia Kristeva
, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), 25-30.
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ment.”22 Ferenczi suggests an analogous position with regard to his constant leitmotif of the
birth trauma. Here, the neurotic still perceives the world in terms of the womb, and the dream
symbols he analyses refer to the point of birth, challenging the neurotic’s sense of scale and
relative sexual potency, that is, the “Gulliver Fantasy” (“the little man in the enormous room”
[LB 52]).23 This is analogous with Róheim’s reading of the womb motif in mythology, where
the hero re-enters the womb in order to retrieve some sacred symbolic object.24 Such a list
quickly becomes tedious, a tedium that emphasizes the inertia of these gendered and polarised
metaphors of a “feminine” space and its “masculine” determination. But beneath these metaphors Brown is finding a meaning that is founded on the body, which is not determined by
gender relationships, but rather by the imagination, symbolism and by metaphor itself. Love’s
Body becomes a trial of readership, challenging any easy reflection on its content, and where
the imagery is closely linked to a reading of the histories, or deferred hermeneutics, of philosophy (Plato, Whitehead), philology (Spitzer), psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), anthropology (Róheim) and poetics (Brown).
Now all of this appears to Marcuse as “unabashed romanticism.” Contrary to the interpretation just offered, he argues that Brown’s self-consciously stylistic opening on the imagination cannot bear the weight of the inherited thought it seeks to appropriate in its intoxicated swirl.
But then comes the hangover; the imagination falters, and the new language
looks for support in the old. Support in the quotations and references, which
are to demonstrate or at least to illustrate the points made; support in returning to the primordial, elemental, subrational; to the infantile stages in the de-
22
Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1948), 179-225.
23
Sandor Ferenczi, Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Michael Balint, trans. Eric Mosbacher, et al., (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 46-47.
24
Géza Róheim, “The Dragon and the Hero,” American Imago 3 (1939-1940): 40-94.
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velopment of the individual and of the species. Psychoanalysis changes its
direction and function: the latent content, the unconscious and prehistory
serve not as powers to be recognized, comprehended, conquered, but also
(and increasingly so in the unfolding of the argument) as normative values
and ends. This grand leap into the realm of freedom and light is thus arrested
and becomes a leap backward, into darkness.
(Neg 229)
There are two main criticisms to deal with here. Firstly, Marcuse locates in Brown the conflict
of originality and quotation between the new and the old: the inability to escape their supportive structure or to support their conclusions. We have already seen that the play (Spielraum)
between these two positions is the place adopted and transformed by Brown. Secondly, there
is an implied regressive re-reading (revision) of psychoanalysis which contradicts the (assumed) project of psychoanalysis and closes off Brown’s initial imaginative leap into an Enlightened future. Marcuse—arguably in opposition to the substantive conclusions of Eros and
Civilization outlined in Chapter 2—is proposing that the imperialistic characteristics of psychoanalysis (to conquer the “unconscious prehistory” and move toward the light) are more
significant for freedom than its discovery of the “elemental” and the ‘subrational.”25 Not only
do the hierarchical and topographical implications of this latter term, go entirely against psychoanalytic thought—compare Freud’s rejection of subconscious in favour of unconscious—
Marcuse also seems to be recalling the Kantian idea of Enlightenment “as the human being’s
emergence from his self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit].” His caution here begs the question of whether Marcuse is continuing to follow Kant’s Horatian injunction in the same essay:
25
The hierarchical/topographical emphasis of this latter term, goes entirely against psychoan-
alytic thought—compare Freud’s rejection of subconscious in favour of unconscious: the unconscious surrounds from within.
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‘sapare aude [dare to be wise]”.26 It is important to refute Marcuse’s contention that Brown
drags freedom backward into the dark. This, I would argue, is not at all the place where
Brown locates freedom. For Brown freedom is in tension, Eros, the harmony in contrariety of
Heraclitus, and this necessarily challenges any idea of a singular light source. Love’s Body, as
Brown rejoins, strives “to surpass the Enlightenment notion that in the life of the species or
the individual there is a definitive change-over from darkness to light. Light is always in
darkness; that is what the unconscious is all about” (Neg 244). The individual is not constructed in light, nor is he or she bound toward the light—there is an inevitable cyclicity in
even the most progressive theories of the subject that necessarily negates the luminary
tendencies within psychoanalysis. As Brown puts it:
Psychoanalysis begins on the side of imperialism, or enlightenment, invading
the heart of darkness, carrying bright shafts of daylight (lucida tela diei), carrying the Bible and flag of the reality principle. Psychoanalysis ends in the
recognition of the reality principle as Lucifer, the prince of Darkness, the
prince of this world, the governing principle, the ruler of the darkness of this
world.27
(LB 150)
26
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17.
27
In this passage there is an echo of Nietzsche’s irony in: “Reason = virtue = happiness means
merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing permanent daylight—the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to
the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards…” Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 33; Nietzsche’s ellipsis.
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Light and dark are reversed and negated by Brown’s movement away from progressive Enlightenment and regressive Lutheran metaphors, and toward a “new” body, love’s body. The
reality principle (Marcuse’s “performance-principle”) cannot be redeemed thus lightly. On the
contrary, the subject can first be seen as both “light” and “dark” (“the son-sun-hero in the
mother-dragon-night”). As such Love’s Body continues to dissolve and defer these anachronistic gendered metaphors, which Marcuse rest on, by asserting the subject as continuous creation; not in the “twilight,” but as the place from which light and dark emerge. “The reality of
the body”, Brown writes:
is not to be given, but to be made real, to be realized; the body is to be built not
with hands but by the spirit. It is the poetic body; the made body; Man makes
Himself, his own body, in the symbolic freedom of the imagination. “The Eternal Body of Man is the imagination, that is God himself, the Divine Body.”
(LB 226)
Love’s body, built by the spirit, overcomes any implied dualism because it rejects the materialist “hand” and the incorporeality of the ‘soul.” As we saw in Chapter 3, Brown is interested
only in an embodied Geist. He cites William Blake’s remarkable and chaotic etching “Laocoön” (1826), which consists of aphoristic fragments encircling a depiction of God with his sons
Satan and Adam.28 This should be considered an archetype for Love’s Body, words surrounding and yielding an ambivalent meaning to the body; and Blake is a figure of recurrent importance, a model visionary.
II
28
William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000),
403.
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For Brown, as the title of the watershed essay that comes between Life Against Death and
Love’s Body in 1960, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” implies
“the point is first of all again to find the mysteries”.29 In the interpretation that follows “mystery” is the incoming novelty or enigma that forms the crux of the contretemps between Marcuse and Brown. Whether history is mystery or reason, whether it demands clarity or confusion (Brown prefers “fusion”), system or fragment, idealism or romanticism—and, ultimately, whether we have the choice between them. From within the crisis of these positions the
genre of the fragment corresponds to the observable difference between idealism and romanticism, the circularity of their pursuit of philosophy. As Andrew Bowie puts it, after Manfred
Frank, “The difference of the Romantic view from the Idealist view…lies in the Romantics”
eventual conviction that a self-grounding system of philosophy is impossible: the aim of
German Idealism is such a system.”30 Why this is circular is simple enough. If the romantics
can recognise that a closed system is impossible, then they must have been searching for it,
must have tried to assert it, in order to fail to do so. If the idealists feel the need to search for
such a system they must have found it lacking, or continue to be unable to assert it, to fail to
provide the system. The one position is the crisis of the other. In Life Against Death Brown
wanted a system: a dialectics of Eros. But as we saw, even there the closed circle suggested
by Narcissus could not be contained. Love’s Body develops out of the expansive nature of
Eros, its open economy of meaning. To do this Brown utilizes the fragment, which, in all its
paradox, is content to take on both perspectives—but at the cost of never “completing” itself.
Its very limitation always points elsewhere, to a vexed inheritance, or deferred hermeneutic of
the book, to the possibility and the impossibility of the system, to the possibility and impossi-
29
Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (University of California Press:
Berkeley, 1992), 2. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as AM.
30
Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary
Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 312n.
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bility of its own conditions for existence as a fragment—a phrase that deliberately evokes
Kant and a pertinent dissatisfaction with his legacy.31
What I am referring to is something touched on in the last chapter, the difference presented in Kant’s critical philosophy between those who believe in an absolute relation to the
world—he calls these empirical idealists—and those who believe in a critical relation to the
work—the transcendental idealists. To recapitulate, in his first Critique Kant argued that it is
those who believe the represented object to be a “thing in itself” (Ding an sich), existing independently from sensibility (the transcendental realists or empirical idealists) who cannot be
certain about “reality” because their senses must always be inadequate to prove the existence
of the thing in itself from its objective representation in consciousness. The transcendental
idealist, however, relying only on sense data and the testimony of a consciousness of representations can consider his or her world to be real, to be made of matter, and his or her immediate perception is sufficient proof of this reality. Thus, the transcendental idealist is an empirical realist in that he or she is true to experience without pressing a claim beyond that experience. “[E]xternal things—namely matter, in all forms and alterations—are nothing but
mere representations, i.e., representations in us, of whose reality we are immediately conscious” (CPR 426-427/A368-372). The thing in itself is not sensible, only intelligible. Only
through the constancy of representations and the thoroughgoing unity of syntheses into concepts (the task of the understanding), can supersensible objects be presumed through analogy,
perhaps even felt, but never known (cognised). This two-world split (as Stanley Cavell has
called it) has at least since the romantics been seen as both Kant’s triumph and his failure.
Our inheritance is the profound disappointment with this dualist legacy. For Kant and for the
Brown of Love’s Body, I am arguing the concept does not obtain to the thing in itself; for Hegel, the “systematic” Brown of Life Against Death, and Marcuse, through the process of ne-
31
In this context the word “dissatisfaction” must be associated with Stanley Cavell. See, for
example, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1988), 31-32.
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gation, the concept can take on this ontological weight. This is the difference that emerges
between Brown and Marcuse. It might also be phrased as the difference between the mystical
and the speculative, between an absolute difference to the other and an absolute knowledge
that includes it. We saw the beginnings of this difference, and its circlings and ambiguities, in
Chapter 3.
The contemporary Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, who I now want to introduce in order to further challenge Marcuse’s—and by extension the earlier Brown’s—
Hegelianism and to illustrate the consequences of Love’s Body, shares Kant’s radical doubt
about the ability of the subject to know the world as it is, in itself, before or aside from any
representation of it. The consequences of his philosophy of the imagination arise directly from
Kant’s problematic and can give further insights into the workings of Love’s Body, for Castoriadis keeps himself open to the romantic dialectic between system and fragment,
knowledge and poetry. However, the implication of his philosophy is not any kind of crude
absolute idealism because the influence of the world is everywhere to be felt. Castoriadis argues that there are always two interdependent and irreducible ways to represent the world. On
the one hand there is what he calls “ensemblist-identitary logic” (the “ensidic”) and, on the
other, the “imaginary.”32 Ensidic approaches to the “object” are essentially deterministic, arising from comparison, collation, iteration and extrapolation. Societies, and in particular languages, are generally understood within ensidic relations and, separating himself from mere
32
Castoriadis is keen to separate his imaginary from the specular imaginary of Jacques Lacan
which, he argues, reflects another “reality” rather than being an event of mutual creation. For
Castoriadis, the Lacanian imaginary is just a contemporary version of Platonic ontological
hierarchies, i.e., where things in themselves are “reflected” as appearances in the empirical
realm. See, Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998), 3. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as IIS. For Castoriadis, as shall become clear, there is no distinction between the imaginary world and the
world that “is,” but the world that is is not all that there is.
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idealism, Castoriadis argues that the world itself lends itself to such an organisation. He calls
this “the first natural stratum,” wherein “what exists always lends itself interminably to an
analysis that constitutes in it distinct and definite elements, elements that can always be
grouped into specifiable sets, always possessing sufficient properties to be definable as classes” (IIS 228-229). Nevertheless, Castoriadis does not drift too far toward positivism, and is
quick to signal his manifest intent: “a natural fact can provide support or stimulus for a particular institution of signification, but an abyss separates this support or stimulus from a necessary or sufficient condition” (IIS 230). Thinking the abyss is the key to his contribution to understanding Love’s Body. Though intersubjective significations may “lean on” (étayage, after
Freud’s Anlehnung) the first natural stratum, the simple anthropological evidence that cultures
always invest the same “natural facts” (for example, the “rising” of the sun, generation, menstruation) with different significations is proof enough that there is always a creative moment
that “leans” across the abyss and gives shape to the phenomenal details provided by “nature”
as it shows itself. This will prove crucial for understanding the metaphoricity of the body, a
metaphoricity which is love’s body.
Castoriadis, in an argument that parallels that of Kant on space and time presented in
the last chapter, argues that the knowledge the scientist, for example, asserts about the first
natural stratum, and which he or she considers to be in the object itself, is actually established
by an “imaginary” relation to it. This imaginary relation, he argues (going further than Kant),
is by its very nature unstable, and always prone to the new, to emergent and incoherent representations of the manifold, which in giving itself to the inquiring subject, enacts a continuous
challenge to their inherited thought. Even though the first natural stratum “is ensemblizable—
because individual events can be separated out from the flux of becoming and focused on,
because of the natural periodicity of certain phenomena” (IIS 231), and thus can be measured
and collated, this very categorizing “proves sooner or later to be partial, lacunary, fragmentary, insufficient—and even, more importantly, intrinsically deficient, problematic and finally
incoherent” (IIS 273). The imaginary, which ultimately provides support for the institution of
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side” the subject (an abuse of language, as Castoriadis is fond of saying) affects the continuity
of the world—which is to say, the history of society and of “personality.”
In ensemblist-identitary logic, the subject is a subject of (double genitive) history,
there is an inevitable causal relation between history and subjectivity—Marxism, Castoriadis
argues, is the most coherent example of this ensidic phenomenon. For him Marxism became
moribund because it could not escape the dilemma of the subject of history who, as subject to
history, was both determined and yet free. Marx’s route out of this paradox was teleology—to
present the causal history of the subject as inevitably drawn toward the emancipation of the
proletariat—the disastrous outcome of which was, Castoriadis contends, Stalinism. If a
movement is established on the presumption of absolute knowledge, of a determinate evolution “toward the light” then, “[t]he multicolour phenomenal cloak must be torn off, if we are
to perceive the essence of reality which is identity—but, obviously, ideal identity, the identity
of naked laws” (IIS 69). And Marxism, he implies, for all its deferral of social laws and attempts at reflexivity still rests in the ideality of determinable relations between determinate
entities—which is on identity working toward the ends of emancipatory dialectic.
Castoriadis’ considered rejection of Marxism asserts that “[a] revolutionary surpassing of the Hegelian dialectic demands not that it be set on its feet but that to begin with, its
head be cut off” (ISS: 55). And this fundamental decapitation counts for the same whether the
head in question is the Geist of Hegel or the materialism of Marx.
[Dialectic] must set aside the rationalist illusion [of closure and completion],
seriously accepting the idea that there is both the infinite and the indefinite,
and admit, without for all that giving up its labour, that all rational determination leaves outside of it an undetermined and non-rational remainder, that
the remainder is just as essential as what has been analysed, that necessity
and contingency are constantly bound up with one another, that “nature” outside of us and within us is always something other and something more than
what consciousness constructs, and that all of this is valid not only for the
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“object” but also for the subject, and not only for the “empirical” subject but
also for the “transcendental” subject since all transcendental legislation of
consciousness presupposes the brute fact that a consciousness exists in a
world (order and disorder, apprehendable and inexhaustible), and this is a
fact which consciousness cannot produce itself, either really or symbolically.
(IIS 56; my interpolations)
With this refutation of ensidic Marxism, Castoriadis is alluding to Kant’s disavowed idea that
consciousness—as apperception—is produced by something that is not “consciousness” itself,
which exceeds it—transcends it, that is, the “imagination.” The imagination’s reluctance to fit
neatly into the faculties arises in part from the fact that it has a dual function. It is both productive, establishing a priori the coherency of the synthetic unity of the manifold, and reproductive, constituting the ground of empirical cognition in general. In the first instance, which
Kant calls the transcendental synthesis of the imagination (Einbildungskraft), it is an active
faculty that brings the manifold into focus; it quite literally creates an image (Bild; which is
why Kant calls it a “blind” faculty of the soul—because ‘seeing” is dependent upon it [CPR
211/A78/B103]). However, this function, the apprehension of an instant of the manifold,
could create nothing determinate if there was not also the power to associate this image with
previous impressions. This is the faculty of the reproductive imagination, which is necessarily
empirical. Nevertheless, the actual formation of time or inner sense—the schema—remains
transcendental.33 The reproductive imagination, then, as a temporal faculty seems to provide
33
This rather awkward duality of the imagination perhaps explains the apparent confusion in
the first Critique where Kant first calls the reproductive imagination transcendental: “the reproductive synthesis of the imagination belongs among the transcendental actions of the
mind” (CPR 230/A102) and then suggests that it is empirical: “the reproductive synthesis [of
the imagination] rests on conditions of experience” (CPR 238/A118).
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the ground for the synthetic unity of apperception, whereas the productive imagination, existing a priori seems to enable the pure intuition of a spatial manifold. Indeed, Kant writes:
the transcendental unity of apperception is related to the pure synthesis of the
imagination, as an a priori condition of the possibility of all composition of
the manifold in a cognition. But only the productive synthesis of the imagination can take place a priori; for the reproductive synthesis rests on conditions of experience. The principle of the necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the imagination prior to apperception is thus the ground of
the possibility of all cognition, especially that of experience.
(CPR 238/A118; Kant’s emphases)
If, then, the productive imagination, as the ground of cognition must be prior to apperception,
for upon it rests any unity achieved in apperception and because the imagination provides the
composition of the manifold, then apperception, rather than being a unique and further indeterminable faculty of the soul, must derive itself from the imagination. Secondly, as the successive strata of pure productive syntheses, unified by the empirical reproductive synthesis
contributes the essential nature of the transcendental unity of apperception (the “I think” that
accompanies all my representations), the originality of the temporal must in some way depend
upon this faculty of imagination. Thirdly, the very possibility of a representation, the “composition of the manifold,” also rests on the productive imagination, so the a priori intuition of
space itself, as a representation out of undifferentiated appearance, falls under its sway. The
signal thing that can be concluded from this is the pure intuitions of space and time, and consequently apperception, are subsumed by, or rather dependent upon, the imaginative faculty.
Considering the possibility of this deduction, it is perhaps no surprise that Kant chose to limit
the power of the imagination in the second edition of the first Critique. This is the point where
Kant—as Castoriadis, Martin Heidegger, and more recently Slavoj Žižek, have observed—
oversteps his own ensidic programme and “discovers” something that is ultimately nonThe Resurrection of the Body
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causal: the relationship between the incoming manifold and the productive imagination.34 And
by non-causal Castoriadis does not mean unpredictable or random, but creative, and by creative he means imaginative creation ex nihilo.35
34
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, (trans. Richard Taft, Blooming-
ton and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 112-113. Cornelius Castoriadis, The
World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 215-216. Here
Castoriadis after agreeing with Heidegger, then accuses Heidegger of covering over the discovery of the imagination himself. However, Heidegger’s recently published work from the
1930s, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), would suggest that the imagination was always central to his work. See, in particular, 219, where “imagination” is the occurrence of the
“clearing” (Lichtung) itself, which Heidegger’s philosophy has pursued throughout. Castoriadis, however, could not have had access to this seminal work, which was not published in
German until eleven years after his essay was written in 1978. See also, Slavoj Žižek, The
Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), 22-28. For
a contrary position see Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and
Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 160-164, esp. 163.
35
We might ask “how can we recognise the difference between the wholly new and the mere-
ly random?” A useful analogy can be drawn from the physicist Roger Penrose. He argues that
the random is that which is determinate but un-computable. For example, to calculate all the
variables affecting the collision of three snooker balls, including the gravitational force of the
cue, the table, the moon and even the nearest stars, would be impossible, that is uncomputable, but yet the event is determinate. Castoriadis, on the other hand, is arguing that
the new is absolutely other to determinism. The point, then, is not to show that the original is
indeterminate, but to realise that the very terms of determinism, the ensidic or the merely calculable, are inadequate to the question at hand. See Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Lon-
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The reason for this excursus into Castoriadis and Kant is that I want to use the
framework of creative anti-determinism that arises from the imagination to structure the dispute between Brown and Marcuse, for at the heart of his critique of Brown is a relationship
between the causal—ensidic—paradigm I have sketched above and the priority of the imagination in its schematisation. For Marcuse what is required to further the revolutionary cause is
an ever purer form of rationalism (in the Hegelian sense)—which may have to pass through
aesthetic extremes, or the unconscious and the dynamic energy of the libido, but does not end
there. Even in Eros and Civilization ideas of sensibility/sensuality were seen as epiphenomenal negations of reason as history gone awry rather than as genuinely constitutive and were
dialectically synthesised accordingly. For, as I concluded in Chapter 2, Marcuse’s relationship
to Freud is predicated on history (Geschichte) working itself out, whereas for Brown causal
history is merely a symptomatic or neurotic imposition upon an inexhaustible nature—that is,
“imaginary.” So, Brown recognises in these extremes a truth which cannot be worked back in
to Enlightenment progress, but is always on the other side of the illusory boundary erected by
reason (even reason as “freedom”) and policed by the paternalistic reality principle. This conflict can be pursued through their respective attitudes to the reality of the unconscious and the
ideas of latent and manifest content. That is, to symbolism. Symbolism, in this sense, to risk a
possibly precipitous, but certainly helpful conclusion, will come to mean the imagination
working to unify itself with otherness, whilst crucially allowing that otherness to escape it, to
remain beyond it. It “leans on,” as Castoriadis says, but does not exhaust the possibilities of
otherness. Thus symbolism, unlike, say allegory, is an open economy of meaning. What is
important is how this relates to—or leans on—the body.
Love’s Body, following Freud’s first topography, and paraphrasing the Sophist, Protagoras, says the human body is the measure of all things (Neg 245); because of this every-
don: Vintage, 1990), 217-225, 558-559. Penrose himself appears uneasy with the idea of a
strong determinism that reduces all possibility to the outcome of a “cosmic” (my word) algorithm.
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thing can be read, symbolically, back into the body; the family body of mummy-daddy-baby.
Even human history is symbolically reducible to this corporeal transformation (transubstantiation). The father/king is the penis; revolution is castration. This is made plain in the very first
fragment of Love’s Body. “Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the
primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra- historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; and old, old story” (LB 3). For Brown this all too obviously recalls Zeus’ castration of Cronos in the first rebellion described in Hesiod’s Theogony.
But in Love’s Body he goes on to connect Freud’s archetypal origin myth with the “mythographers” of the English “body politic,” Hobbes and Locke. For Hobbes, in the Leviathan, this
is the assertion of sovereign power through contract. For Locke, in the Two Treatises of Civil
Government, it is the struggle to wrest authority from Filmer’s patriarchal King, the direct
descendent of Adam, and assert a civil constitution. In each case, Brown argues, brotherhood
usurps fatherhood and defends itself against its own guilt by re-establishing the authority it
overthrew. Thus Love’s Body begins with the glorious revolution of 1688, which by reinstating the monarchy averted the guilt of the English Civil War, the archetypal rebellion of the
primal horde, the “sons” killing the “father,” digesting his (fragmented) body (power) and
redistributing his women (wealth). This visceral reality pervades Love’s Body, reasserting the
mystery that the body holds for the social world.
The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the
real centers of energy and their interrelation; the mystical body which is not
to be arrived at by anatomical dissection and mechanical analysis; the symbolical life of the body, with which psychoanalysis can put us in touch.
(LB 136)
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Brown’s embracing of symbolism is the first step toward a more than nominal assertion of the
resurrected mystical body—which “is not, because mystical, therefore non-bodily” (LB 83).36
Symbolism, then, is not here different from what is, it constitutes the way what is is represented, and as such is all that is. It is the way the imagination “crosses” the abyss. What remains is reification (petrification)—dead symbols or dead metaphors.
This is not only a transcendental idealism in that it accepts an unknowable stratum
(unlike Marcuse’s rationalist phenomenology), because in Love’s Body Brown is rethinking
the authority of myth. Mythical symbolism, as he argued in his “Introduction” to the Theogony, does not stand in for something else, it is not an attempt to map a knowable space by substitution or sublimation. It is, rather, creative reinterpretation or poiesis, an attempt to grasp
the world through symbolic representation. For Brown, at this stage of his development, symbolism, in travelling simultaneously along the presumably latent phylogenetic and ontogenetic
pathways, returns a unity to the unconscious body of mankind. The kind of (fleshly) unity
embodied in the church, or at least in certain radical forms of religious prophecy and still retained in the language of its ceremonies (for example, the “union” of the marriage ceremony
or Augustine’s unity in Adam). For Brown, in Love’s Body, symbolism is no longer a turn
from the body (a sublimation), but is a turning of the body outwards as measure into the
world. It becomes a kind of transcendental metaphor that grounds our knowledge. Metaphor,
taking an etymological route, “carries over” the body into the world.
Returning to Brown’s verbal iconoclasm, symbolism replaces lapidary literalism.
That is, the mysteries of the church replace its rational hermeneutic: “The return to symbolism
36
There is something of Zen experience in this. Compare, for example, the relationship be-
tween the mystical and the everyday in the great 13th Century Zen philosopher Dōgen, where
the mystical powers of the Buddhist monk are “fetching water and carrying firewood” i.e.,
their ordinary everyday activities See, for example, Dōgen (), Shobogenzo, Book 2, trans. and
eds. Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross (London: Windbell, 1996), “Jinzu [Mystical Power],”
71-82.
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would be the end of the Protestant era, the end of Protestant literalism. Symbolism in its preProtestant form consisted of typological, figural, allegorical interpretations, of both scripture
and liturgy” (LB 191). The typology of the Puritans being, of course, the mot flagrant kind of
literalism. Literalism is the exorcism of the spirit from the house of the letter. It is merely sublimation. Literalism negates the trace of the body that can be recovered from, because it first
emerges as, a symbolism in which spirit and body are the same. Like Eros in Life Against
Death, in Love’s Body correspondence replaces separation and as a consequence it acknowledges the unconscious’s power to create through symbols connections across rational abysses.
Thus, the realm of the dream is more vital than the analyst’s ability to turn the dream “back”
into its latent content. The psychoanalytic hermeneutic is arrested at a pre-therapeutic stage.
Psychoanalysis, like religion, must be stalled to reveal its origins and its aim: the symbolic
unity of body and world.
There is another kind of Protestantism possible; a Dionysian Christianity; in
which the scripture is a dead letter to be made alive by spiritual (symbolical) interpretations; in which the meaning is not fixed, but ever new and ever changing in a continuous revelation; by fresh outpouring of the holy spirit. Meaning
is made in a meeting between the holy spirit buried in the Christian and the holy spirit buried under the letter of scripture; a breakthrough, from the Abgrund,
from the unconscious of the reader past the conscious intention of the author to
the unconscious meaning; breaking the barrier of the ego and the barrier of the
book. Spiritus per spiritum intelligitur.
(LB 196)
Symbolism becomes “enthusiasm,” a kind of mutual ingestion of and by extant meanings and
the abyssal possibilities gathered in the deferred hermeneutic of “the book”—which is the
dream-work of every book. The unconscious of the book is the meaning we can only read,
literally, in secondary revision, but which is preserved in its symbolic redolence.
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As with most “rational” (ensidic) readings of Love’s Body, Marcuse considers that
Brown takes symbolism too far, retreating into a phantasy realm from which the rigors of the
concept as well as the realities of class struggle and its social problems cannot be reached.
This is another aspect of Marcuse’s withdrawal from his earlier position and the authority he
gave to phantasy as part of the negative path to the concept. In his critique of Love’s Body
Marcuse writes:
The “lower depths,” the “underworld” of the Unconscious moves the history
of mankind without dissolving its reality, its rationality. The roots of repression are and remain real roots; consequently, their elaboration remains a real
and rational job. What is to be abolished is not the reality principle; not everything, but such particular things as business, politics, exploitation, poverty.
Short of this recapture of reality and reason, Brown’s purpose is defeated,
and the critical destruction of history, the discovery of its latent and real content, turns into the mystification of the latent and real content.
(Neg 235-236)
However much sympathy Marcuse’s references to politics and poverty must elicit—and they
must elicit some sympathy—in the terms of this chapter it still begs the question: “just what is
this “reality,” this “rationality” that Marcuse appears so sure of?” On what is it based if not on
the paradigm of reason’s ensidic reliance on “external” reality as the measure of all things (a
dualism that extends from Cartesianism to materialism), rather than the apparently far fetched
mystical body or radical imagination? Knowledge must here conform to extant (inherited)
ways of looking at the object, even if this is the Hegelian dialectic’s radically unstable—
dismembered—version of reality. It still assumes an essence to be obtained—the telos of
freedom. This problem corresponds to the fact that history for Marcuse has no real “future”—
time is but the sum (telos) of the past as process. It is then, as we shall see, a problem of temporality.
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In “Love Mystified” Marcuse argues that Brown overestimates the part played by latent content in manifest consciousness. He states that the aeroplane may be a penis symbol,
but it also “gets you in a couple of hours from Berlin to Vienna” (Neg 235). Marcuse is recalling Freud’s axiom—for which we are all grateful—’sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Brown retorts that the body is the measure of all things, and Marcuse has given the businessman the last word. “[T]he real meaning of technology,” Brown says, “is its hidden relation to
the human body; a symbolical or mystical relation” (Neg 245). This restates their opposed
visions of technology set out in earlier chapters: Marcuse seeing it in essence (if not in existence) as progressive, Brown seeing it as largely irrelevant before the immediate concerns of
the body (its resurrection). Thus, Brown interprets the relationship between the body and the
world in a completely different way, and, as with Kant and Castoriadis, “representation” becomes a key term. Brown writes:
When the problem in psychoanalysis becomes not repression, but symbolism; when we discover that even if there were no dream-censor we should
still have symbolism; then personality (soul, ego) becomes not substance, but
fiction, representation; and the primal form of politics becomes not domination (repression), but representation.
(LB 109)
Symbolism is not in dreams but representation, the subject is not substance but representation
and politics is not repression but representation. This is a withdrawal metaphysically from
Hegel to Kant. And repression ceases to play a significant part for Brown, not because it is
diffused, sublimated or no longer relevant, but because it is understood in a different way.
Latent unconscious representations are real because they do not as Marcuse says “dissolve
reality,” because they not only partake of it critically, they are, as symbolic representations,
the condition for its very possibility. The dissolution of rationality is not a consequence of
Brown going too far into the reaches of radical thought. It is inevitable because, to utilise CasThe Resurrection of the Body
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toriadis’s terms, a pre-rational (we might even say “metaphorical”) surplus exists in every
ensidic organisation, which makes “rationality” open to its own incoherence, but also allows
the rational to be imaginatively, that is, symbolically, posited.
Symbolism, Kant argues in the third Critique, is the ability to take a concept belonging to one thing and to use it for another for which a concept cannot be found; it “allows the
addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive
faculties and combines the spirit with the mere letter of language.”37 This is the outcome of
“reflecting judgment” and the ground of the “aesthetic idea” as a projective possibility in line
with reason. But in the third Critique, the ground of the conceptual understanding is, in fact,
the imagination, which itself is, arguably, as pure transcendence, ungrounded.38 Brown follows this to its limit such that the ecstatic body—love’s body—is the only conceivable
ground,39 and thus pure sensation, the ecstatic horizon of the imagination, is the condition for
the possibility of symbolism. Taking a penis for a king and/or an aeroplane and/or the father
becomes the most pressing symptom of this. And Brown often repeats the Freudian extreme:
a penis in every convex object, a vagina in every concave object; the body is the measure of
all things; and, for Brown, the body, love’s body, the mystical body, is everything (a cigar can
only be a cigar because it is first the penis, or because it first has a relationship to the human
body: lips, tongue, palate, phallus). The beginning of the mystery is to “perceive in all human
37
Immanuel Kant (trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews), Critique of the Power of Judgment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 194.
38
It is important to note that in the third Critique Kant begins to air his own concerns about
the metaphorical language (he uses the word “hypotyposes”) that grounds philosophy; indeed,
ground or Grund is one of the words he takes issue with. Critique of the Power of Judgment:
225-227.
39
The outcome of this is further explained by Brown’s recourse to Giambattista Vico in Clos-
ing Time. See Chapter 5.
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culture the hidden reality of the human body” (Neg 246). “To the enlightened man, the universe becomes his body” (LB 253-254).
Symbolism, after reading Brown through Kant and Castoriadis, will come not merely
to reflect the correspondence, however vague, between “objects,” it will reflect their cobelonging in the mystical body that is love’s body. The origin of so-called free association lies
in the more fundamental associations that make up the psyche, whose own birth is out of a
“unity” (Castoriadis might use the term monad). Freud’s famous dream confusion between his
clean shaven friend R and his likewise un-whiskered uncle in the image of the man with the
yellow beard emerges because “all ‘separate’ representations that waking logic necessarily
distinguishes are certainly formed starting from and in relation to a minute number of archaic
representations which were the world for the psyche…and which refer back to the enigma of
an original representing-representation” (IIS 276). Brown put is as follows: “Dismembered,
Remembered. The symbolical consciousness is to remember the unity.” (LB 210). Every representation, Castoriadis argues, bears the trace of this origin. What Brown refers to as “unity”
he calls it the “radical imagination.” But, moreover:
The psyche is a forming, which exists in and through what it forms and how it
forms; it is Bildung and Einbildung—formation and imagination—it is the radical imagination that makes a “first” representation arise out of a nothingness of
representation, that is to say, out of nothing.
(IIS 283)
From the moment Anankē starts the nascent subject from oceanic slumber, every affect and
every intention—that is every representation—is laced with the radical imagination which
“pre-exists and presides over every organisation of the drives” (IIS 287). Indeed, even the Urphantasien, castration, seduction, the primal scene, and primary narcissism, Castoriadis argues, are secondary to the radical imagination. For these originary subjective experiences are
representations, not original phantasies. The first phantasy, the primary representation (anothThe Resurrection of the Body
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er abuse of language—”all language is abuse of language” [IIS 348]) is necessarily ex nihilo.
This is not to say there is nothing there—that would be to fall back into idealism—because
the first natural stratum is always there; it is merely that that is nothing. It has no ontological
weight. Until the emergence of the psyche, the world is the void. Psyche for Castoriadis has
the same task as Hesiod’s Eros.
The proto-world/proto-psyche—which Castoriadis calls primary autism—constitutes
the immediate identity of the “I” and the “world” which enacts the scene of primary phantasy.
Now the ‘subject” is not a ‘scene” in diurnal reality nor even in secondary
unconscious formations. The subject is the scene of the phantasy (at once its
elements, organization, “director”, and stage and scene in the strict sense)
because the subject has been this undifferentiated monadic “state”. The
phantasy ineluctably refers back, as to its origin, to a “state” in which the
subject is every where, in which everything, including the mode of coexistence, is only the subject.
(IIS 295; Castoriadis’ emphases)
Of course, this reference to an undifferentiated or “oceanic” self that was the central theme of
Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and Brown in Life
Against Death, who each used it to explain central aspects of their work, namely a period of
plenitude prior to Anankē. But the expression of oceanic unity as a semi- or necessary myth
which continues in the repressed primary processes and occasionally emerges from dreams
and phantasies into the light of consciousness does not go far enough for either Love’s Body
or Castoriadis. In those earlier works, critically for Brown and negatively for Marcuse,
f/phantasy comprises a mistaken relation to the real. It is a misrecognition of that which is,
which, even though it may retain a fundamental critical power, remains a poor reflection of
reality (a remnant of Platonic ontology). The later Brown argues that Freud’s use of the term
phantasy to describe the contents of the unconscious is, in ‘salvag[ing] its allegiance to the
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(false) reality principle” (LB 152), a veiling of his discovery of the crucial role of phantasy is
the positing of the self. Castoriadis says almost exactly the same thing, arguing that Freud’s
concept of phantasy (Phantasie) covers over his discovery of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) (IIS 282).40 Rather, the psychical monad, the phantasy of which remains in the radical imagination, is the original scene of representation, and it leaves its mark across the
whole range of intentions and affects that the subject represents. Castoriadis goes on:
It is important, however, to stress…the sovereign character of the radical imagination during all of [the following] stages. The subject can begin to sketch
out the elements of the real, the object and the human other, only starting
with and under the exclusive control of its own imaginary schemata. Scarcely has he grasped a bit of “reality” when he must metamorphosize it to make
it agree with the irreality which alone has meaning for him.
(IIS 305)
The radical imagination could be said to be the unconscious of the Kantian imagination. It
partakes of exactly the same role, but instead of creating unities of the manifold and of apperception, it creates disunities. These are only united in the phantasy itself, which is the phantasy of the continuity of the “I”: the emergence of identity from otherness. As Joel Whitebook
has further observed in connection with this, the radical imagination as the remnant of the
psychical monad is also analogous to Kant’s “I think,” or transcendental unity of apperception, and accompanies all representations, but which in turn as the ground of all representations, cannot be represented.41 The radical imagination, however, instead of uniting representations across time into the Same—that is, through the “I think” or the transcendental unity of
40
This is analogous to Kant’s covering over of the discoveries of the first Critique which was
referred to earlier.
41
See Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 172
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apperception—disperses them; it connects them retroactively with things they “are” not, but
that they once were. That is, it is the origin of Brown’s symbolism. The radical imagination is
itself a version of love’s body.
To recapitulate, the radical imagination, like the Kantian imagination, is not restricted
to conceptions of just the self, but also of the world—it is the original source of “world” as
representation.
As radical imagination, we are that which “makes itself immanent” by positing
a figure and that which “transcends itself” by destroying this figure and by
bringing into existence another figure. Representation is not tracing out the
spectacle of the world, it is that in and through which at a given moment a
world arises.
(IIS 332)
That is, it is reproductive as well as productive. Though, considering the role of the archaic
monadic trace in all representations, it might be better to say that the radical imagination corresponds to the temporal faculty of the Kantian “Schematism” in which incoming representations are “matched” to concepts in time (CPR 271-277). The radical imagination continuously
spans the temporal gap between the origin and the emergent, between monad as everything
(that was) and the advent of the world as other (that may be). As Castoriadis writes: “it will
forever be impossible absolutely to separate what comes from that which is put into images
and what puts into images, the radical imagination, the representative flux” (IIS 329; Castoriadis’ emphases). So the role of the radical imagination is temporal, but not continuous.
Time is the permanent possibility (which is really a necessity) of the production of
new forms that do not copy previous models or arise from abstract sets of principles, whether
cosmological, natural or human—even if all these, as in Kant, are subordinate to the understanding. In this way, Castoriadis argues, “The wheel revolving around an axis is an absolute
ontological creation” and carries more weight as such than the arising out of nothing of a new
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galaxy: “For there are already millions of galaxies—but the person who invented the wheel,
or a written sign, was imitating and repeating nothing.” (IIS 197). And Brown concurs: “Imagination is a better artist than imitation; for where one carves only what she has seen, the
other carves what she has not seen; that never was on sea or land.” (LB 262).42 This is what
Emerson means by originality. Castoriadis’s own exemplary explanation of this again refers
to Plato’s Timaeus, where the demiurge manufactures the world after a model, that is, the
forms (eidei)—he is, therefore, creating nothing, merely imitating. Thus Plato’s cosmology
has no ontological depth but is merely a reflection. (This is, of course, ironic considering the
famous treatment of art in Book 10 of The Republic.) Time, as otherness/alteration is the necessary faculty for autonomy. Castoriadis calls this praxis, which he sums up in the elegant
phrase: “praxis is a perpetually transformed relation to the object” (IIS 89). This is the most
pregnant possibility of revolution as absolute creation: praxis as poiesis.
In this sense representation is far from the bringing of appearances under the thoroughgoing unity of concepts. Unity is only a possibility—considering its modality—not a necessity. And as a possibility, it has little chance of achieving the permanence, that is, the continuity, which the Kantian categories promise. So time is not here merely the registering of
self-presence in inner sense that we saw in the last chapter. It is, rather, the registering of selfdifference. This becomes Castoriadis’ conception of time as radical otherness.
Representation is radical imagination. The representative flux is, makes itself, as self alteration, the incessant emergence of the other in and through
the positing (Vor-stellung) of images or figures, an imaging which unfolds,
brings into being and constantly actualizes what appears retrospectively, to
42
Alluding, perhaps, to the visionary gleam of Wordsworth’s seascape in his “Elegiac Stan-
zas” of 1807: “The light that never was on sea or land,/The consecration and the poet’s
dream” ll. 15-16. Duncan Wu ed., Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
474
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reflective analysis, as the pre-existing conditions of its possibility: temporalization, spatialization, differentiation, alteration.
(IIS 329)
This indivisible but irreducible relationship between representation and radical imagination
which is the psyche, the subject, is the origin of Castoriadis’s conception of time and of creation—which provides further impetus for an understanding of “mystery” in Love’s Body.
It is important to see in this another exemplary occasion of the romantic fragment. I
have already shown that the fragment as the central trope of Love’s Body is figured against the
impossibility of inheriting “the book,” that is in a deferred hermeneutic of the history of texts.
However, as I said, there was another way to read the incompletion of the fragment into
Love’s Body, and this is to take the point of incompletion as the “body” itself. For it becomes
apparent, after the introduction of Castoriadis, that the one thing that cannot be “represented,”
though it is the continued key for all subsequent representations, is the “body.” What Love’s
Body and the radical imagination show is that there is an unknowable mystery at the centre of
our being. A kind of permanently corrupted, because necessarily incomplete, archaeology that
determines all of our conscious encounters with the everyday and that places them at one remove from us. That which would complete us, would realize us as totalized (mediated) subjects is always and irremediably other to us. It remains outside and corresponds to the edges
of subjective finitude. The body, love’s body, is only representable, never presentable. It is
love’s body because it only comes to us in relation to the otherness of language—as corporeal
metaphor, that is as poetry, and love is this co-belonging (from desire to love, from anaclisis
to co-belonging). The body and the book, as necessarily incomplete, are both beyond the
hermeneutic they inaugurate, and thus they are fragments that do not cohere with any totalising, self-generative system.
Registering this fundamental absence the last section of Love’s Body is called “Nothing.” “Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is words with nothing to them; words
that point beyond themselves rather than to themselves; transparencies, empty words. Empty
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words, corresponding to the void in things” (LB 259). The vision appears bleak, an emptiness
at the very heart of Being. On one level this must be attributed to the important Zen Buddhist
and negative theological influences on Brown in this book. Nevertheless, this does not exhaust the meaning of his words. It must be allowed that at least one trajectory of Western
thought itself comes to this point—whether you follow it forwards or backwards.43 Thus,
“The obstacle to incarnation is our horror of the void. Instead of vanity, emptiness. Being
found in the shape of a human being, he emptied himself” (LB 262). Indeed, the reference to
Christ’s emptying out (Philippians, 2:7), is an important symbol of this trend, which we have
already seen demonstrated in very different ways by Luther and Blake—that which is divine
in us, Brown argues, we are too keen to give away, to sublimate. That which is divine in us is
the transcendent imagination that discloses our immanence, our co-belonging: the nothing
beneath the veil of metaphor, which is the condition for the possibility of metaphor. There is a
divinity, a creative power, named “love’s body,” which is grounded in the void, human
finitude. In this case, the fragment is the most suggestive form to represent the nothingness of
the body—the exergue of which is the ideality of communication, of language, of the imagination, that is, of symbolism.
III
While Marcuse always finds himself caught, willingly, in the dialectical chains of inherited
ontology, though implicit arguments may lead him elsewhere, Brown hangs, somewhat more
precariously between the acceptance of otherness and a picture of the world as cyclical. Firstly, for Brown the body is creation; but it is also resurrection. Secondly, language must both be
new, turning to nonsense or to the limited expression of the fragment, to negate its inheritance, yet, as Marcuse observed, his authorities are all “old.” Thirdly, boundaries must be
43
See Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with Setsuko
Aihara (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), for a persuasive reading of this trend.
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overcome and unity prevail qua introjection of the other; but the unity often seems an archaicmythological plenitude more reminiscent of Eden or Ferenczi’s Thalassa than the complex
otherness of the monadic trace of the radical imagination. Lastly, Brown’s aim is to engage
the mystery of the world without reifying it, but the mystery always precedes (is re-found by)
the imaginative resurrection of the self affected by it and is thus a cyclical movement which
repeats the Same. His thought is given coherence through such cyclical metaphors, but the
return of the Same is always questioned by his adherence to the mystery, to the new, to symbolism and to the world as becoming through the creative possibilities of the body as imagination, that is, as unknowable. Brown’s important conclusion is that we can create the ecstatic
body, love’s body, that we never knew we had. In the last section of this chapter I shall sift
through some of these apparent paradoxes as they emerge in the critical dialogue in Commentary between Marcuse and Brown. It will comes down to the continuing difference between a
teleology that, at the last, reduces otherness to the process of history and an eschatology that
may yet be radically other—in fact depends upon it.
A productive starting point is the difference between a “whole” of mediated differences and a “unity” or original co-belonging. In his critique Marcuse defines his relationship
to totality in the following way:
in dialectical logic the whole is the truth, but a whole in which all parts and
divisions have their place and stage. The relations between them, their specific function, the different levels and modes of reality, its inner development
must be demonstrated and defined—only then, in the unending and subverting stream of mediations, appears the true as the bacchanalian whirl:44 sober
drunkenness of the whole: Reason and Freedom. Critical, not absolute vision; a new rationality, not the simple negation of rationality.
44
This Hegelian idea of truth as a Bacchanalian whirl (PS 27), stimulates, at some level, the
arguments of Marcuse, Brown and Castoriadis.
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(Neg 241)
The kind of clear-eyed critical inebriation desired by Marcuse is enthused by the rarefied atmosphere of Hegelian dialectics. It is the movement traced above from unity through diremption to unity with consciousness increasing aware of its own mediation at every point, ultimately sublating all excesses into the what Marcuse here calls a critical vision of rationality.
He makes it clear in the last line of the citation that he shies away from the use of the word
“Absolute,” replacing it with “critical.” Even so, Marcuse holds on to the idea that in the light
of reason the phenomenal world will fall into serried ranks and be amenable to negation and
mediation and will be universalised through rational critical practice. Deliberately, I believe,
his logic positions itself between the “unending” and the “whole”, one of which, it would
seem, must subvert the other. Of course, that is his point: critical practice, like Castoriadis’
praxis, is ongoing and necessarily indefinite. The whole, then, is broken, as the poets, Yeats
and Thomas, told us. Marcuse, however, wants to have his broken bread and eat it; to maintain the rationality of the whole and allow for its excess. This antinomy between the whole
and the unending arises because Marcuse’s “new rationality” is based upon his “new sensibility,” where sensual affects—from perversion to surrealism—are seen as the “subverting
stream of mediations” which can inspire critical evaluation. This new rationality is definitely
not the sober “science” of positivism, for it admits to occasional drunkenness and erring desires; indeed, it is arguably not even reducible to the Enlightenment program as it stood from
Kant to Freud. Nevertheless, it claims to order and to know.
The imagination, like the unconscious, remains a critical resource for Marcuse, in that
it reflects the deviations from the path of a long established emancipatory program. Even so,
the imagination is always returned to the Same. The role of imagination is mediation not mystification. According to Marcuse the fact that the imagination may be mystified is a privative
condition. This, however, can be its strength, for example, the labour of the negative—but
also its weakness, called by Hegel natural or unmediated consciousness. In the progression of
this new rationality such differences as are discovered by the imagination in its overstepping
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of the known can be measured, and even enforced, for they are the method by which history
itself is measured, and from which meaning is ultimately derived.
[W]thin the historical universe (the only one that, in any meaningful sense,
can ever be the universe of freedom and fulfillment), there are divisions and
boundaries that are real and will continue to exist even in the advent of freedom and fulfillment, because all pleasure and all happiness and all humanity
originate and live in and with these divisions and boundaries. Such are the
division into sexes, the difference between the male and female, the penis
and the vagina, between you and me, even between mine and thine, and they
are, or can be, most enjoyable and most gratifying divisions; their abolition
would be not only illusion but nightmare—the acme of repression.
(Neg 236; emphases added)
History (Geschichte), then, is a history of division, begun in division and fulfilled in division:
sexes, genitals, self and other and, perhaps curiously, property, are the sufficient and abiding
causes of history. Whole and part are retained by the logic of Marcuse’s position. This is a
radical overturning of Marcuse’s earliest position, where were he held onto the promise of a
reconciliation between reason and sensibility, or the intellectual faculty and the somatic faculty. The search for a “unified source” at the origin of history (Being) is one of the main themes
of Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Marcuse begins this book, his first, following Hegel’s contention that philosophy begins with the fall into division (Entzweiung), from
which all the dualities, subject/object, understanding/sensibility, mind/body, spirit/ matter,
etc., arise. Marcuse attempts to trace all these back to the division caused by the thinking subject which divides itself (from Being) in the act of positing an object and which only returns
to unity in Hegel’s “Reason,” which is itself the motor of history. The point here is that in this
earlier work, and up until Eros and Civilization the tendency is toward unity, even if it turns
out to be unity in death. In his critique of Brown the whole is rational, but unity is the “acme
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of repression.” This, though learning from one of the mistakes of Eros and Civilization, is not
necessarily an argument against what Brown is doing in Love’s Body.
That divisions and boundaries are discovered by the imagination is beyond doubt, but
that this primary stratum determines the whole of history and freedom is very much in doubt.
This is because, as the earlier Marcuse contended, nothing is originally divided. Rather, according to the dialectic of Eros, division rests on a minimal repressive structure that, in responding to the tensions of Anankē, give shape and definition to the “world.” “Suffering—
after all”, as Dostoyevsky wrote, anticipating Freud, “is the sole cause of consciousness.”45
But, as is implicit in both Kant and Castoriadis, there must be something prior to suffering
and need in order to be able to register them at all: there must be conditions for the possibility
of suffering. Lack cannot be the first determinate of subjectivity and objectivity, though it
may be the first “meaningful event,” because something must exist which can both “lack and
be lacked.” This a priori “structure” that is impossible to determine from a gradualist approach, and which Kant recognises in his transcendental psychology, is the “scene” mentioned in the last section that Castoriadis also called the psychical monad. This is the scene
within which the drama of primary lack is played out, the fort/da game of connection and disconnection of the monad, which is everything, and in which everything is “subject.” That is:
love’s body. The first sense of objectivity is the hallucination, and Castoriadis argues that this
primary hallucination, in which subjectivity is always returned to (a mythical) oceanic plenitude is the radical imagination, which accompanies all representations. It is both unique and
total, a oneness that is everything. In this sense, it is division that is artificial, always secondary, and the unconscious truth is not mediation but im-mediation. If, for Marcuse, the reduction of boundaries is the “acme of repression”, Castoriadis argues that a more potent archaic
(pre-representative) power is in operation that requires qua phantasy and the radical imagination that boundaries be overcome (the insistent demand of the fragment as praxis and poiesis).
45
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground/The Double, trans. J. Coulson (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 41.
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So particular boundaries are not, here, repressive structures per se as Brown argues, but they
are the framework around which repressive structures are accreted as the ‘subject” is brought
into contact with the “world.” Boundaries correspond to the always secondary institution of
subjectivity by the social (Oedipus, etc.); they lean upon the first natural stratum but are, as
always, irreducible to its rational mediation. The “loss” of the breast, for example, may be a
biological-corporeal event, but its meaning in the oral drive is not. Just as the anal drive does
not arise from the anus, but from the position of the faeces in the first economy between
“mother” and “child” (IIS 317). This representative organization of the drives is imaginatively
imposed upon, not inherent in, the somatic disturbances of the body as it is traced by lack.
And the boundaries that emerge from this social-somatic regulation resonate with their origin
in the phantasies of unity that trace the proto-structure of representations. There are, then, no
boundaries in the radical imagination, which is why, ultimately (recalling Freud’s friend, R),
symbolism is possible.
Thus, Castoriadis attests, the origins of affect and intention are one, and the initial
hallucinatory satisfactions developed by the psyche to cover its lacks are proto-words. That is,
that which ‘stands” for something it is not (Kant’s “hypotyposes” at the origin of subjectivity). Unconscious representations, though not strictly symbols, because they are not actually at
a remove from what they represent (because they are affect) are however, the ground for conscious symbolism (IIS 142), because they recall the co-belonging of the affects which lead to
the social economy of words. The origin of symbolism, then, is the hallucinatory undivided
imagination-affect-intention of monadic phantasy. Therefore, when Brown speaks of the need
to understand the body as unity, or co-belonging, and appeals to symbolism and mystery rather than the “whole,” he is not slipping into the “darkness” of repression but showing a keen
understanding of where radical psychoanalysis can lead, and, more to the point, where it is
coming from, which is from mystery, from the anti-sublime which disrupts the Enlightenment
myth of gendered conquest and illumination.
Love’s Body contains the following illustrative passage: “The great whore is to be
stripped. Her name is Mystery; to see her naked is to destroy the mystery. The mystery of sex
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is the mystery of kingship. The mystery is the deception, the non-existent penis” (LB 76). This
is an exemplary moment of the anti-sublime, rejecting reason’s self-assertion over the loss of
meaning. Compare the Enlightenment Kant with the Romantic Schlegel. First Kant: “Perhaps
nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sublimely expressed, than in
the inscription over the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is, that was, and that will
be, and my veil no mortal has removed.’”46 Now Schlegel: “It’s time to tear away the veil of
Isis and reveal the mystery. Whoever can’t endure the sight of the goddess, let him flee or
perish” (PF. 94). The sublime is a way of protecting oneself from the absolute mystery of nature and the attendant finitude of the understanding and the hubris of reason. Love’s Body exposes the clichés of the Enlightenment and retrieves the mystery from the gendered metaphors
of conquest. The removal of the veil and the revelation of the mystery is not the resolution of
the mystery, is not its end. On the contrary it is the revelation of the mystery that stands as a
mystery, a nothingness that can only be negated by a meaning which leaves it untouched. The
mystery is the sight that must be endured. For Brown the signifier of difference, the absent
penis, the absence that Kant wants to keep veiled, is a deception. It is that minimal difference
upon which the imaginary leans and which hides the more radical alterity of the manifold/void/chora: the surplus that includes all possible ensidic determinations that Castoriadis
calls the “magma,” which includes gender, and with which this chapter opened. Likewise the
veil of Isis, which as we gather from Freud, is really the woven plait of pubic hair that disavows the lack of a penis, is also the wages of her sin, the covering of the body. Freud’s idea
that weaving is women’s only creative work is, according to Brown “a lie, a veil, a fetish;
weaving the absent penis” (LB 73). As Irigaray again observes, this is another negation of the
feminine because “woman weaves to sustain the disavowal of her sex” (Spec 115). The imaginary or symbolic relation does indeed allow for such a disavowal, but it does not sanction it.
In conclusion, for Brown it is not only a negation of the feminine, it is a negation of the nothing. In the section “Trinity” he argues that the fetish is the third thing that that disavows the
46
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 194. Kant’s emphasis.
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difference between the two—the presence and absence of the penis—and that further allows
for the one to stand alone. The one protects us from the nothing; it is the veil that hides love’s
body: the penis and the plait bear the same ontological burden. Boundaries, division, difference are all ways of hiding the nothing: “The world is the veil we spin to hide the void” (LB
261). For Brown, the world and the boundaries in which it inheres are not an origin to which
we can return with mediated knowledge, with the dialectic overcome, for they are purely the
work of the imagination, and imagination that can only return to the nothing from which it
arose: ex nihilo nihilo fit.
So, the pleasure that Marcuse locates in boundaries within his whole, that is, the
pleasure of sex (genital or polymorphous), does not originate in boundaries but in the overcoming of the minimal repression consequent upon their dissolution: the return to nothing
(which the young Marcuse called Being). In the section of Love’s Body called “Boundary,”
Brown takes the understanding of the body politic as genital organ(-)ization and removes the
power of creating the “body” away from the social as causal. He reflects instead upon a
Blakean vision of the body as mutable, as contingent upon the imagination as that which
overcomes boundaries. His “symbol” is the schizophrenic.
Schizophrenic thought is “adualistic”; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The
schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; and “indescribable extension of inner sense”; “uncanny feelings of reference”; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a
distance.
(LB 159)
Schizophrenia is here a symbol of divine madness that belongs to poetry (Crazy Jane). The
importance lies not in valorising a disease, but in promoting the truth found in its symptoms—
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tics, as in former times” [LB, 160]. The lunatic in question is as likely to be Hegel, Freud, Roheim, Storch or Laing as to be Crazy Jane.) The schizophrenic is symbolic of the failure to
cross from imagination to representation; to emerge, that is, from the radical imagination as
archetype, and thus is the symbol of symbolism. Schizophrenia figures the co-belonging at the
heart of being—but only as emptiness and insanity. It is a extension or ecstasis of “innersense,” Kant’s temporal faculty and stable point of the “I.” Schizophrenia, in these terms, is
the failure to enter ensidic time which points to what ontological time, or time as alterity, “is”,
i.e., the withdrawal from a time based on rationality and an openness to a time based on symbolism. Consequently, symbolism is not only adualistic, it is acausal: “Events are related to
other events not by causality, but by analogy and correspondence. In the archetype is exemplary causality, causa exemplaris” (LB 209). This is not, I think, to say that it is atemporal,
because whilst Brown consistently attacks any idea of time as persistence or duration—his
attack on rational and anal time in Life Against Death is exemplary here—he remains open to
time as creativity and as activity. The overcoming of time is, however, no longer a way to
penetrate to the noumenal. In Love’s Body time becomes a series of analogies, a mythical
schema of representations and symbols. The trace of the radical imagination engaging with an
incoming manifold and creating the present. “Reality,” he writes, “does not consist of substances, solidly and stolidly each in its own place; but in events, activity; activity which
crosses the boundary; action at a distance” (LB 155).
We are led beyond any idea of what Brown calls, following Whitehead, “Simple Location,” the premise of the reality principle and of ensidic logic, and into the idea of the body
as manifold, ecstatic and unknowable. As he writes in the section “Head”:
The revolutionary idea in psychoanalysis is the idea of the body as a (political) organization, a body politic; as a historical variable; as plastic. Man
makes himself, his own Body; his image of the body; the Eternal body of
Man is the imagination.
(LB 127)
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In Love’s Body, the value of psychoanalysis is not in therapy but in that it presents the body as
mystery and symbol. It eludes the scalpels wielded by the reality principle and that constitute
the myth of inside and outside, where, to paraphrase Brown’s citation of Gaston Bachelard,
alienation begins (LB 144). The two principles of mental functioning, reality and phantasy,
are reduced to their common origin in the one: phantasy, which is prior to the divisionist myth
which disavows its mythical status. This false body, “the separate self,” dreamt up by “Two
Horn’d Reasoning, Cloven Fiction” (Blake) must be cast off “in order to begin the Odyssey of
consciousness in quest of its own true body” (LB 154).
Castoriadis understands this very well. Reason, as the principle of ensidic comprehension of the world, emerges out of the unity of initial autism. The desire of reason is to unify, quantify and rationalise the world into the minimum amount of categories, to understand it
in a single expression—be it the grand unifying theory that brings together relativity and
quantum mechanics (or the Talmud), the Absolute, or the word of God—is born of “the monster of unifying madness” (IIS 298). The initial autism of the monad which is for Castoriadis
the origin of the need “to find across difference and otherness, manifestations of the same”
(IIS 299); a madness of unification that is the beginning of rationality. In Chapter 3 I called it
“the narcissism of the understanding,” here it is the search for a final unity based on the ultimate authority of a primary One. The paradox of reason in part unveiled here is that in seeking to separate out the world in order to categorise and progress, the desire is still to regress.
In the end it is only the irreducible otherness, alien to totality in either its primary (monadic)
or mature (ensidic) forms, that keeps the desire going, forbids reason from obtaining closure,
and thus, in some sense, satisfies it: “Man is not a rational animal, as the old commonplace
affirms. Nor is he a sick animal. Man is a mad animal (who begins by being mad) and who,
for this reason as well, becomes or can become rational” (IIS 299).
Thus, the boundaries erected to define mine and thine, self and other within the inherited logic are neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause. Marcuse’s claim that Eros, the life
instinct, “lives in the division and boundary between subject and object, man and nature”
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(Neg 238) here steps right into the breach created by the paradox of reason as the unifying
madness. For Freud’s Eros wants to dissolve boundaries, to bring ever greater unities, but as
was shown in the discussion of Life Against Death, Eros actually thrives on difference, on the
gradient between self and other, but only as an expansion of the self, the recovery of the oceanic birth right. So as we saw Marcuse writes against himself, and substitutes Thanatos for
Eros. Brown responds: “the abolition of genital organization, foretold by Marcuse in Eros and
Civilization, turns out to mean what Marcuse calls [in his critique of Love’s Body] the impossible unity and union of everything” (Neg 237). The boundaries are the space of expansion,
the co-belonging that abolishes all property in the self. Brown argues that Marcuse’s defence
of property in the self: “a factor and ingredient of true freedom (Marx knew it well): that
which is properly mine because I am different from you and can be with and for you only in
this difference—boundaries to be enjoyed by you and me” (Neg 237), is merely a placation of
the establishment, and he turns Marcuse’s criticism around.
What needs to be reiterated is not reassurance to the bourgeois that he will be
able to carry his little old Self, Person, and Property into that world [of
Communism/Communion], but that the kingdom of heaven on earth is possible; and that other world, the negation of this jungle, cannot possibly be anything except Communitas. A higher form of chaos; instead of confusion, fusion.
(Neg 245)
Love’s Body preserves Brown’s eschatology begun in Life Against Death, and thus sees the
“next world” in the present, sees it in communism, radical (Dionysian) Christianity (Blake,
Boehme), philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis. It lies in the co-belonging of symbolism not in
the mistaken solidity of substance ontology: “Reality is not in things (dead matter, or heavy
stuff), in simple location. Reality is energy, or instinct; Eros and Thanatos…[T]he human
body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation” (LB 155). The body is the
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mystery of the world unveiling itself through symbols, but moreover, the mystery withdrawing and refusing symbolization, a refusal or withdrawal of meaning that is the excess of meaning as its condition of possibility.47 Such is Brown’s “Odyssey of consciousness.” It is not to
be read off in measurements or understood by the scientist, but in the marriage of idealism,
mysticism and psychoanalysis: “combining to make us conscious of our unconscious participation in the creation of the phenomenal world.” For, “To become conscious of our participation in the creation of the phenomenal world is to pass from passive experience—perception
as impression on a passive mind—to conscious creation, and creative freedom” (LB 255).
Brown does not dismiss the possibility of appearance becoming reality. Rather, he enjoins it
to do so—this is what “critical” idealism means for him. In doing this he asserts a kind of
secular divinity.
For Brown the negation of theism, of the human subject as the nous theos, is not atheism or the faith of science (Wissenschaft), but divinity in human form: to deify the mortal
contribution to the creation of the (phenomenal) world. “God is not Freud’s God Logos, abstract or disembodied Reason, but the human form divine” (Neg 246). This apotheosis relies
on an acceptance of the void as the other of the world: “The obstacle to incarnation is our horror of the void” (LB 262; “The world is a veil we spin to hide the void”). The nothing, the
“utopia,” that lies on the other side of the veil is the negation of the institution of the world.
The world is the sum total of stable meaning, of inherited phenomena. This is a necessarily
transient institution because “[f]reedom is instability” (LB 260), an instability that announces
itself in the breach of the veil, allowing new meanings to erupt. The void (in Castoriadis’s
terms the temporal alterity of the magma) is for Brown (and he could almost have read Castoriadis here): “A pregnant emptiness. Object-loss, world-loss, is the preconditions for all creation. Creation is out of the void; ex nihilo” (LB 262). Symbolism, metaphor, can only exist
because the world is originally without meaning, is empty. It is a Void that, as in Hesiod’s
Theogony, requires Eros, the principal of co-belonging, to emerge as meaning. This is neces-
47
This will be returned to in the next chapter.
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sarily the reversal of Marcuse’s Hegelian position where the world strives towards its meaning through human history. Brown’s “unity” is an emptiness: Marcuse’s “whole” is a fullness.
Brown exceeds even Castoriadis is in his ideas of resurrection, revelation and revolution, which he equates with a characteristic awareness that none of these words can be used
together and maintain their current meanings. “Revolution”, he writes in his response to Marcuse, “is not a slate wiped clean, but a revolving cycle. Even newness is renewal. As it was in
the beginning. The idea of progress is in question” (Neg 243). Indeed it should be argued that
his use of these words together is as much to do with alliteration (a somatic co-belonging,
tripping off the tongue: R…R…R) as it is with either a psychoanalytic or philosophical truth.
In the last analysis Brown does not distinguish between the two.
From politics to poetry…. Poetry, art, is not an epiphenomenal reflection of
some other (political, economic) realm which is the “real thing”; nor still a
contemplation of something else which is the “real action”; nor a sublimation
of something else which is the “real,” carnal “act.” Poetry, art, imagination,
the creator spirit is life itself; the real revolutionary power to change the
world; and to change the human body.
(Neg 246)
To see the world aesthetically is not, for Brown, a narrowly critical artistic sensibility, at best
a determinate negation, as it is for Marcuse, but to recognise how people partake of the creation of their world from out of the “mystery.” Thus through his praxis—which is poiesis—he
oversteps Marcuse’s aesthetics, blending the world of politics with the world of poetry. This
is clearly a very different kind of politics in which there are no liberal undertones or calls for
social democracy. The “truth,” as Brown makes very clear in his Phi Beta Kappa address of
1960, is not democratic. Science, he argues, is the attempt to democratise knowledge, to ‘substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard operating procedure”
(AM: 4). Real insight, however, is necessarily esoteric, it is neither publishable nor republiThe Resurrection of the Body
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can—a thing of the people; a perspective that receives a startling new interpretation in Closing Time. But in Love’s Body he writes, “Thank God the world cannot be made safe, for democracy or anything else” (LB 248). The kind of knowledge Brown seeks emerges from the
‘sovereign power of the [romantic] imagination…which makes poets the unacknowledged
legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new” (AM 4). This is the mystery of
love’s body, beyond the sense of wonder (a derivative state of the sublime), the acknowledged
source of the dual ensidic academic disciplines of philosophy and science. It is the mystery of
the new, the radically other, which cannot be mediated by but only mystify the imagination
that brings about its emergence. If the world were how we saw it the imagination would not
exist and the ensidic empirical idealists—deterministic science—would have the victory. This
is the mystery that Brown discloses when he accepts that “Everything is metaphor; there is
only poetry,” (LB 66) the meaning of which I shall discuss in the last chapter.
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——Chapter Four——
The Poetry of Origins and the Origins of Poetry
Brown closes Love’s Body with the phrase “there is only poetry” (LB 266), and the last chapter has gone some way to disclosing and defending this position through an interpretation of
the ontological authority Brown gives to symbolism and the imagination. In this chapter I
shall take one last turn through Brown’s labyrinth, revealing another significant level of his
poetic understanding and drive for an “erotic sense of reality” (LB 81). This latest twist comes
from the confluence of the historical poetics presented in Giambattista Vico’s New Science
(1744) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), in Brown’s last full scale work, Closing
Time (1973). I shall use the deliberate chiasmus in this chapter’s title to explore the Viconian
idea of ricorso, which, “by a commodius vicus of recirculation”,1 brings Brown back to consider the poetry of origins and the origins of poetry explicated in Vico’s philosophy. This chiasmatic movement, I argue, follows Brown’s bold step that collapses the categorial distance
between epistemology and ontology, knowing and being, understanding and making—and
returns them to the corporeal, to love’s body. The pursuit of this chiasmus demonstrates how
people are too eager to give away the work of their imagination to mathematics, to science, to
religion, to fancy, etc. The authority of the imagination needs to be retrieved as the site of
freedom and the origin of truth. Closing Time is another example of Brown’s insight that poetry and humanity occur simultaneously in the imaginative disclosure of the world.
1
Norman O. Brown, Closing Time (New York: Vintage. 1974 [1973]) 26. Hereafter referred
to parenthetically as CT; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 3.
Hereafter referred to parenthetically as FW. Brown’s collage like work uses a large amount of
citation, as such I shall reference all relevant sources.
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I
There is, then, to begin with at least—though what Brown might mean here by “beginning” is
yet to be established—only poetry. In the first part of this chapter I shall address just how
Brown draws this gnomic conclusion and in what way the implied relationship between language and the body is confirmed, or rather anticipated, in Vico’s New Science. The focal point
of this relationship is the precedence of metaphor, not just as a way of describing the world,
and certainly not as a secondary affectation or ornament, but as the primary and directly sensual response to the given, through which the given can first appear for us. The fragment from
which the above phrase comes is the last composed by Brown in Love’s Body and runs as follows: “The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome.
Everything is metaphor; there is only poetry” (LB 266).2 To begin to establish the difference
between Love’s Body and Closing Time, the phrase can be compared to the context of its reiteration in the latter work:
Man is his own maker
maker or creator
creator or poet
“Poets,” which is Greek for “creators.”
The making is poetry, poiesis
Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde
2
NS, 376
Hölderlin,
Heidegger
These words are followed by a quotation from Lama Anagarika Govinda’s Foundations of
Tibetan Mysticism (London: Rider, 1960), 226. The actual last words, appropriately enough
for Brown’s book, are “Silent One.” the giving up of Authority at the last is a by now typical
Brownian gesture.
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Love’s Body, 266
there is only poetry
the key to The New Science is poetry
(CT 79)
In Love’s Body, metaphor was virtually synonymous with poetry, and it formed, or tried to
form, a perfect (hermeneutic) circle which overcame the familiar separation of word from
world upon which modern thought is predicated. But, whereas Love’s Body strove to find a
kind of lyricism that centred around metaphors of the body to exemplify the closing of this
gap, in Closing Time there is an evolution in both the typographical form of the page, which
now reads rather like a list, and in an increasingly paratactic use of the fragment. This is reflected in the form of the book, which is, arguably, almost a “found” poetry of juxtaposition,
and less an organised attempt to understand the bodily metaphoricity of Western culture—
which is not to say that the book is disorganised.
The temporal implication of the title, Closing Time, also delivers on another theme
from Love’s Body: the apocalyptic. As Brown confirms in his own comments on the later
work just prior to its release, he is concerned with the question “what time is it?”3 The short
and somewhat gloomy answer is obvious, but the content of the book is by no means as simple or as despairing. The claim for an ending, whilst chiming with the “end of philosophy”
motto of the early 1970s, actually gets its authority from the cycle of history that Vico lays
out in his New Science, where an ending always discloses a new beginning: an origin. Vico’s
corso turns from a poetic time of gods, that is a “theocracy,” through to an age of heroes
where individuals take on the characteristics of the gods, that is, an “aristocracy,” and to the
age of men, or “democracy.” This last age, Vico argues, records the loss of the gods. From
this loss men relapse into the earliest period of barbarism—they become poetic again (ricorso). Brown’s point, asserted in the above quote, is that this barbarism is upon us, or is at
3
Norman O. Brown, “Rieff’s ‘Fellow Teachers’” Salmugundi, no. 24 (Fall 1973): 35. Hereaf-
ter referred to parenthetically as FT in the text.
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least emerging from amongst us, announced by Hölderlin and Nietzsche, and reflected in
thinkers like Heidegger and Joyce. For, he argues, “only barbarians are simple-minded
enough to recognize the gods” (FT: 39); where ‘simple” does not mean stupid, but rather
whole or discrete: partaking completely of their world, enjoying the simplicity of the “near”
in a creative linguistic encounter. As such, the barbarians can become aware of the metaphorical construction of their own gods (Homo Faber)—which, in the secular vision peculiar to
Closing Time, is a Blakean “deification” of humanity. But first it is necessary to explore
Brown’s interpretation of the concept of fantasy, one of Vico’s key terms, and then to outline
Vico’s approach to metaphor and to the “poetic,” and so to delve into the origins of Brown’s
claims and, simultaneously, the Viconian origins of language.
Brown is explicitly restating the main contention of Vico’s New Science when he
writes, “The origin of language in fantasy, not in reality” (CT 72). To maintain this he has to
rescue the term “phantasy” from Freud and from his own earlier distrust of fantasy registered
in Life Against Death. For Freud, phantasy is fundamentally regressive and potentially debilitating—indeed, he argues that phantasy always retains the mark of repression.
In the realm of phantasy, repression remains all-powerful; it brings about the
inhibition of ideas in statu nascendi before they can be noticed by consciousness, if their cathexis is likely to occasion a release of unpleasure. This is the
weak spot in our psychical organization; and it can be employed to bring
back under the dominance of the pleasure principle thought-processes which
have already become rational.
(Two Principles: 40)
In this sense phantasy is a reflex defensive structure that flees reality, if it is likely to be unpleasurable. That this sustains the promise of the pleasure principle is clear enough. However,
for Freud this is a false promise and the flight from “reality” is irrational; it undoes all the
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work of maturity and in particular the education brought about by contemporary scientific
standards. There is, Freud seems to suggest, no need to study the difficulties of the world if
the refuge of phantasy—by which he means mythology, superstition, religion and neurotic
withdrawal—remains easily available to the psyche. Ironically, science itself is seen as problematic, in that it follows the path of a temporary renunciation of pleasure for long term reward, thus it only displaces the pleasure principle but does not over-turn it. Phantasy, for
Freud, is a kind of nostalgia; it can be preserved in the mature psyche, but it is always the
remnant of something more fundamentally lost. In a telling footnote, he argues that the retention of the pleasure principle in phantasy is analogous to the way “a nation whose wealth rests
on the exploitation of the produce of its soil will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in
their original state and for protection from the changes brought about by civilization. (E.g.
Yellowstone Park.)” (Two-Principles: 39). This analogy is telling: the reality principle exploits and dominates for the improvement of production whereas the pleasure principle belongs to a primitive “original state” which has been overcome by “civilization.”
It is perhaps surprising that, in Life Against Death, Brown goes even further than
Freud does in his criticisms of fantasy.4 For Brown fantasy is the backward glance of narcissistic libido which, though appealing to union (identification) rather than to domination (his
interpretation of anaclisis) is also necessarily regressive in the way outlined by Freud. The
reason for this is that it operates as a sublimation of sexual aims. Thus the actual living present “is denied by reactivating fantasies of past union, and thus, the ego interposes the shadow
of the past between itself and the full reality of life and death in the present” (LAD 162). Fantasy is a way of avoiding the harshness of the life and death struggle that, for Brown is actualized as history. Instead of facing the causes of history directly—which would “end” history—
fantasy allows aberrant imagos of the past to dominate the present, such as the “conscience”
4
The “f” rather than the “ph” is telling for two reasons, firstly because it means the word los-
es its Germanic philosophical pedigree; and a second related point, Marcuse, for example,
only uses the “f” spelling when he talks, deprecatingly, of “childish fantasy” (EC 159).
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and the ‘superego.” But, more importantly for Brown, the attachment to the past as fantasy is
what gives rise to the soul, “the shadowy substitute for a bodily relation to other bodies”
(LAD 162). It does so at the expense of the living body traced with life, death and otherness.
He goes on,
The more specific and concrete mechanism whereby the body-ego becomes a
soul is fantasy. Fantasy may be defined as a hallucination which cathects the
memory of gratification; it is of the same structure as the dream, and has the
same relation to the id and to instinctual reality as the dream. Fantasy and
dreaming do not present, much less satisfy, the instinctual demands of the id,
which is of the body and seeks bodily erotic union with the world; they are
essentially, like neurosis, ‘substitute-gratifications.”
(LAD 163-164; emphases added)
Fantasy, then, like other cures that are part of the problem—neurosis, religion and psychoanalysis itself—does not correspond to the actual movement of the instincts or the realization
of Eros as the expansion of the body that Brown describes in Life Against Death. In fact, it
does quite the opposite, it leads to a negation of the body which is also a negation of that erotic reality, namely the id’s expansion into the world through the mutual expansion of the ego,
which as we saw earlier, constructs a positive narcissistic reality. Brown sees fantasy as a hallucinatory idea which deludes the ego by negating the present and replacing it with the past. It
is a process of backward representation in which the ego uses its own recollected images to
replace the “reality” of the erotic body; that is the body as Eros. In this sense, Brown seems to
assert that fantasy aligns itself with the misrecognised idealism of the “narcissism of the understanding,” in which the ego perpetuates its narrow place in the world, surrounded by its
own reflections, which are but memories of past gratifications. From this it must be gathered
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that for Brown primary narcissism is not an historical stage that can be re-membered, but belongs to his eschatological turning into the “now.”
An additional problem, one encountered by Freud much to his cost, is that the primal
fantasies appear to have no existence apart from their re-enactment in the analytic or neurotic
setting. Or, as Brown writes, “to put it another way, they do not exist in memory or in the
past, but only as hallucinations in the present, which have no meaning except as negations of
the present” (LAD 166). Fantasies present themselves retroactively (Nachträglichkeit), as a
response to the “infantile flight from life-and-death” (LAD 166). This is the curse of the (negative) idealism of humanity, which posits something other than the body, other than ecstaticinstinct, as the process of being. This un-real goal emerges, Brown argues, from the very real
flight from the body that begins with the repression of infantile sexuality and reaches its acme
with the mind-body dualism; a dualism which, as an exemplary abstraction, is the main target
of Brown’s polemic. He argues—and there is a Hegelian twist to this—that the most profound
knowledge we can gain about ourselves only emerges from the most abstract positions, which
involves the negation of our bodies, of our materiality. This materiality is inverted—the displacement from below upward—being eventually dominated by vision (theoria), which is
most able to maintain the distance between bodies. So, “As life restricted to the seen, and by
hallucinatory projection seen at a distance, and veiled by negation and distorted by symbolism, sublimation perpetuates and elaborates the infantile solution, the dream” (LAD 172). But
sublimation is no real answer for Brown. There is, as he demonstrates with élan in Life
Against Death, a general reversal in the accepted version of the aspirations of mankind. At the
most basic level the foundation of monetary exchange on the primitive economy of shit—the
child’s first “product”—with the mother, and on a more elevated level, the proposition that
higher metaphors are often based on physical attributes, the well known example being “spirit.” In his reading of Swift, Brown concludes that “Not only the genital function but also the
anal function is displaced upward” (LAD 197). He takes this to its limit in the remark about
Luther cited above: “Protestantism was born in the temple of the Devil, and it found God
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again in extremist alienation from God” (LAD 209). A position reflected in Emerson’s knowing reversal: “What is there divine in a load of bricks? What is there of the divine in a privy?
Much. All.”5 The irony is, of course, that the attributes admired by Protestantism, parsimony,
orderliness, and obstinacy, are identified by psychoanalysis as “anal traits” (LAD 203). Much
of culture, Brown argues, retains just such a “taint” of the pleasure principle held over from
the anal phase. This is one reason why Marcuse argues that Freud ultimately rejects artistic or
liberal culture in favour of constraint as the impetus of civilization. The unconscious, though,
refuses to forget “the equation with freedom and happiness tabooed by the consciousness”
(EC 18). Its continued presence is the force behind utopian speculation and romantic discontent.
Sublimation, then, as “fantasy” is for Brown the loss of “life” as Eros, which returns
as the perpetual quest for that life; it is “the mode of an organism that must discover life rather
than live, must know rather than be” (LAD 171). It is the attempt to return to a world that has
been carved off from us, idealised into subject-object positions.
If the mechanism of sublimation is the dream, the instinctual economy which
sustains it is a primacy of death over life in the ego. The path which leads
from infantile dreaming to sublimation originates in the ego’s incapacity to
accept the death of separation, and its inauguration of those morbid forms of
dying—negation, repression, and narcissistic involution. The result is to substitute for the reality of living-and-dying the desexualized or deadened life.
(LAD 174)
In its most pervasive form desexualised sublimated fantasy presents itself to us as language,
as symbolisation, which, Brown argues, operates as a hallucination of what is not there, “ne5
Joel Porte ed., Emerson in his Journals (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1982),
126
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gating what is there, conferr[ing] on reality a hidden level of meaning, and lend[ing] a symbolical quality to all experience” (LAD 167). Though this will come to be celebrated in Love’s
Body, in Life Against Death the animal in language is the animal that has lost its world “and
which preserves in its symbol systems a map of the lost reality, guiding the search to recover
it” (LAD 167). Culture is this Atlantian map writ large.
The problem of sublimation is one that Brown takes back to the Greeks; it is “Apollo…the God of form—of plastic form in art, of rational form in thought, of civilized form in
life” (LAD 174). Apollo, as “form,” is the negation of the instincts, he is the God who taught
the Greeks how to sublimate, an inheritance felt throughout the Western world. Brown follows Nietzsche in defining the Apollonian world as made up of the dream:
Apollo rules over the fair world of appearance as a projection of the inner
world of fantasy; and the limit which he must observe, “that delicate boundary which the dream-picture must not overstep,” [Freud] is the boundary of
repression separating the dream from instinctual reality.
(LAD 174)
The deeper argument seems to suggest that the real shift, the revolution in thinking, occurs
when myth becomes philosophy, when mythos is interpreted as logos (for Brown the best philosophy is that which obtains to the status of myth).6 We can return here to Brown’s introduction to his translation of Hesiod’s Theogony, where he observed that the early Greek mythical
idiom, the way in which they “were accustomed to speculate on the great questions of life”
(Theo 15) must be translated into philosophy in order for us moderns to understand it. To say
that myth is the language of the pleasure principle would be to go too far; rather, Brown sug6
For an acute, but separate, reading of the relation of mythos to logos see Martin Heidegger,
What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Collins, 1968), 10 and
passim.
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gests myth emerges from the era prior to the repressive division between reality and pleasure.
This is no lost utopia. What it describes is not paradise or innocence, but the chance of a dialectical “resurrection of the body.” The mythical poetry of the Theogony, “is a reinterpretation
of traditional myths in order to create a set of symbols which give meaning to life as experienced by the poet and his age” (Theo 35). There is nothing radical here until you realise that
this is what Brown comes to do in his own work. His unselfconscious interdisciplinary mining
of the history of philosophy, psychology, poetry and myth is just such an invocation of symbols appropriate to the writer’s age. Life Against Death is a somewhat circumspect version of
this vision. The force of Brown’s mythography is only fully revealed in Love’s Body and
Closing Time.
Hesiod’s poem does not yet engage in the symbolic replacement of reality, is not yet a
flight from life-and-death but rather reveals their dialectic in its structure and narrative. The
position of Eros, as the third term between Earth and Void, being and nothing (Theo 16), that
allows the progressive generation of the myth from gods to men—from a cosmic order to an
anthropocentric order, preserves the truth of this dialectic. The understanding provided by the
Theogony is not sublimated. It is not the imposition of order on chaos, but is amongst the earliest statements of the truths Freud finds preserved in the unconscious and which Brown, the
modern mythographer, uses his later writings to disclose. It is here that we can see the difference between fantasy in the Freudian sense of a repressive withdrawal from “reality” and fantasy as actually constitutive of reality. Once Brown’s thought has passed through the crucible
of Love’s Body fantasy is no longer a “sublimation” but is now, what Vico will call “Sublime.” This is the change in meaning and tone that shapes Brown’s response to Vico where
fantasy becomes necessarily analogous to the critical idealist imagination. Fantasy is, indeed,
a translation of the Italian “fantasia,” which Vico uses to mean “imagination.” The unique
distinction of the imagination for Vico, and more importantly for Brown because it chimes
with his own thesis in the Theogony and in Love’s Body, is that it is the faculty through which
the early or “primitive” peoples conceived the world and gave it “linguistic,” or rather ‘sym-
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bolic,” shape and meaning. For Vico this leads to two imaginative modes: that of an originary
creating or imaginative being and that of a “reconstructive” historical knowing. These two
imaginative modes are necessarily deeply integrated.
Vico’s sense of history is proscribed by the Biblical account of Genesis that gave him
only six and a half thousand years of history and it is encumbered in particular by the flood,
which he makes a central motif of his reconstruction. However, his philosophical insights are
as remote from the Catholic orthodoxy of eighteenth century Italy as they are from the new
rationalism (often called the “new science”) that had emerged with Bacon, Galileo and Descartes a century earlier, and certainly merit isolating from his more fantastic ideas. In Vico’s
time the general trend, even within the nascent Enlightenment, was to believe in the “matchless wisdom of the ancients” from which humanity has regressed, and which modern humans
were only just beginning to rediscover during and after the Renaissance.7 But for Vico, on the
contrary, early peoples were crude and “vulgar” (that is, common), all sensuality and with
little reason—and this included the archaic Greeks, such as Hesiod and Homer,8 and the
founding Romans. By his remarkably elaborate reckoning (the word often used is baroque),
after the world was destroyed by the great flood, it was populated for the next two-hundred
years with ignorant giants, growing vast and strong on the nitrous salts of their own excrement in which they unthinkingly wallowed whilst shamelessly fornicating with kin and
stranger alike. The only nation unaffected by this monstrousness was, according to the New
Science, the Jews, whose scriptural adherence to cleanliness kept them of human proportions
7
For a more general context of the conflict between the ancients and moderns see Peter Gay,
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. II: The Science of Freedom (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1970), 96, 124-125.
8
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H.
Fisch (Ithica, London: Cornell University Press, 1984), §97, §856. I shall follow the conventions of Vico scholarship and cite quotations and comments by paragraph number.
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and relatively culturally advanced. However, the Jews are not the subject of the New Science,9
which is concerned with the offspring of the Gentile giants, the sons of “Ham and Japheth
[who] were destined to be scattered through the great forests of this earth in a savage migration of two hundred years” (NS §62)—the original Diaspora.
What is of interest to Brown is not the details of Vico’s reconstruction of history but
the method by which he achieves it. This is based on the assertion that the first peoples were
‘sublime poets” and that this sublimity was attendant upon their savagery, not upon their wisdom. Poetry emerges as the first and most vital of three linguistically defined human relationship to the world; as a necessary first comprehension and contemplation of it and the things in
it. He writes, “Men at first feel without perceiving…. This axiom is the principle of the poetic
sentences, which are formed by feelings of passions and emotion” (NS §§218-219). Poetry
corresponds to this first stage of development, which is sensuous and unreflective, felt without perceptiveness. Later, more sophisticated linguistic forms and their corresponding abstract
rather than sensuous thought patterns are derived from it. This first stage is, in essence, the
mode of metaphor: the direct unmediated (but by no means “essential”) connection between
“things” which gives rise to a primal vocabulary, more gestural than vocal, more symbolic
than articulate. Vico calls these Ur-metaphors “imaginative universals” (NS §460).
The insight that Brown will take from this is that metaphor is not an artificial and unnecessary addition to language, but emerges from what Vico considers an indissociable link
between the emotions and senses of the subject as they respond to the movements of his or
her environment, which are confusing, and potentially alienating. For Vico, this affective imaginative association constitutes the origin of the “primitive” thought processes which he calls
“Poetic Wisdom” and to which he gives over more than half of his New Science. Vico sums
up this bodily motivation for metaphor in the following axioms: “Because of the indefinite
9
The Jewish people and their Christian descendants are authorised culturally not by the imag-
ination but by revelation—as such they stand outside of the main methodological insights of
interest to Brown in the New Science.
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nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of
all things” (NS §120); and: “It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can
form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand”
(NS §122). These two underpinning laws of corporeal metaphor, ignorance and proximity
(that is, everything unknown is judged by what is closest at hand), form the understanding of
the poetic character of early peoples. They are the bases for Vico’s point that it is from the
poverty of reason and the robustness of the “primitive” imagination that poetry emerges as a
“natural” and necessary form of knowledge.10 Thus, the cause of this direct and emotive discourse is that from the first, as Brown argued in his dispute with Marcuse, “the human body is
the measure of all things” (Neg 245). It is the absolute origin of the metaphorical interpretation of the world.
Vico makes great claims for this “discovery,” and considers “the principle [that the]
origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the early gentile peoples, by a
demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters” to be the “master key of [his] Science” (NS §34). It stands as the background to Vico’s way of understanding ancient peoples, which is again stated as an axiom: “the universal principle of etymology
in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and the properties of bodies to express
the things of the mind and the spirit” (NS §237). This seems to compare favourably to
Brown’s readings of Luther and Swift. But these ‘sublime” moments are not sublimations in
the Freudian sense, nor yet the Romantic sublime, but rather the creation of symbolism ex
nihilo. Vico’s sublimation is the transcendence of the body. In the terms we have learned
from Brown and his symphilosophers, sublimation is the body discovering itself in the alien
stuff into which it transcends, a transcendence that marks its finitude, the attempt to overcome
which is, ultimately, culture.
10
See Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New
York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 48.
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The second type of imagination, the reconstructive, is the corollary of this. What Vico’s key tells him (and all subsequent historicism) is that ancient peoples and lost cultures can
also be reconstructed, imaginatively, from their extant languages and artefacts. These will
contain, he argues, the “precise” relationship, necessarily imaginary, between those peoples
and their world. Vico’s poetics is, in this sense, an historical method. Isaiah Berlin sums this
up as follows.
Fantasia is for Vico a way of conceiving the process of social change and
growth by correlating it with, indeed viewing it as conveyed by, the parallel
change or development of the symbolism by which men seek to express it;
since the symbolic structures are themselves part and parcel of the reality which
they symbolise, and alter with it. This method of discovery, which begins with
understanding the means of expression, and seeks to reach the vision of reality
which they presuppose and articulate, is a kind of transcendental deduction (in
the Kantian sense)11 of historical truth. It is a method of arriving not, as hitherto, at an unchanging reality via its changing appearances, but at a changing reality—men’s history—through its systematically changing modes of expression.12
The imagination is the motive force in the forward dynamic between peoples and nature and
as such is reflected directly in the linguistic documents they inadvertently leave to historians.
11
I.e., rather than being deduced from empirical “facts” or “evidence,” Vico makes what he
believes to be necessary presuppositions (Kant calls these “transcendental deductions”, i.e.,
they do not arise from experience, but are necessary for experience) in order for the understanding of history to be possible at all.
12
Isaiah Berlin, Three Critiques of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry
Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), 11-12.
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It consists in a kind of “dialectical” progression (though Vico would not have used that term)
between word, or symbol, and “reality,” and which asserts the ideal relation between the two.
The historian is able to access this dynamic relationship through a difficult and arduous imaginative reconstruction of it in documentary research. For Vico history is recoverable precisely
because it is essentially imaginative, that is poetic.
Historians and philosophers prior to, and many subsequent to, Vico have tended to
dismiss the imagination, seeing it as an irremediable legacy of the irrational, as did Freud and
the Brown of Life Against Death. Descartes, for example, argues that “they who wish to use
their imagination to understand [God and the soul] are doing just the same as if, to hear
sounds or smell odours, they attempted to use their eyes.”13 Moreover, Descartes” crushing
critique of history in general (that, for example, it would give no more information on the last
days of Rome than would have been available to Cicero’s housemaid)14 was, arguably, still
the dominant view in the eighteenth century. For Vico, though, the discovery of the poetic
origin of language and of human history was more than equal to its rationalist critiques. It
provided a positive method that led directly to our primitive origins. It also enabled him to
understand not only their language, but also their metaphysics, these being in essence the
same thing.
From these men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts, all the philosophers and
philologians should have begun their investigation of the wisdom of the ancient
gentiles; that is, from the giants in the proper sense in which we have taken
them…. And they should have begun with metaphysics which seeks proofs not
in the external world but within the modifications of the mind who meditates it.
13
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 57.
14
Berlin, Three Critics, 30.
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For since this world of nations has been made by men, it is within these modifications that its principles should have been sought.
(NS §374; emphasis added)
This passage contains one of the most important methodological principle of the New Science.
The historian should not seek knowledge in the “external” world, in facts and data about objects, but in the “inner” world or in the modifications of the mind of the primitive person as he
or she develops. That is, history will be found in the altering symbolic structures that codify
and give meaning to actions in time. The sum of these actions is, for Vico, history. Thus, to a
certain extent, the first history is an “intellectual history”—moreover, it is an idealism, because human history begins not in abstract or objective facts, but in necessarily subjective—if
shared—meanings. These are the “imaginative universals,” to which I shall now turn.
Understanding imaginative universals may be helped by an example that brings the
foregoing together: the human creation of the first gentile God, Jove, which in turn becomes
the model for Brown’s return of the gods. In Vico’s imaginative reconstruction of early religion, Jove is an anthropomorphic construction, arising as a response to “primitive” ignorance.
So-called “primitive” peoples are described as being: ‘simple and crude, and [who, acting]
under the powerful spell of the most vigorous imaginations encumbered with frightful superstition, actually believed that they saw the gods on earth” (NS §3). So, as just outlined, for that
of which people are ignorant they substitute what they do know and that invariably is the
body. Vico tells the following story of the post-diluvian giants, the wandering children of
Ham and Japheth. This monstrous brood had never before heard thunder because, Vico argues, for two-hundred years after the flood the air was too wet to produce any “dry exhalations”, thus they were affected by a great fear when the thunder finally came.
And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its
own nature to the effect, and because in that state their nature was that of men all
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robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and
grumbling, they picture the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which is
that aspect they call Jove, the first God of the so-called greater gentes, who meant
to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder…. And so
they make all nature a vast animate body which feels passions and affections.
(NS §377)
Jove becomes an archetype, an “imaginative universal,” for all things which are animate or
make noises and which can be directly related, in an exaggerated manner, to the sensible
movements of the human body. Indeed, it is this very exaggeration which makes the “cause”
of the sky, and of thunder in particular, an immortal being.15 For, if the vast giants make so
much noise when they are angry, then the primitive poets could only imagine how vast must
be the “being” who makes the sound of thunder. In this way, without diverging from their
metaphorical metaphysics, early men came to see all of nature as symbolic of the greater God,
Jove—in the Latin still favoured by the vernacular of the New Science, ius omni: “God in everything.” They were animists.
Vico’s anachronistic stories aside, his methodology stripped down to its basic principles, which Brown appropriates, remains powerful because it makes the world and its history
from the human response to it. The gradual coming to self-consciousness of that response and
15
Part of Vico’s argument in anticipated, in a cursory manner, by Hobbes in Leviathan. For
example: “perpetuall feare, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it
were in the Dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore when there is nothing
to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good, or evill fortune, but some Power, or
Agent Invisible. In which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old Poets said, that the gods
were at first created by humane Feare”, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Everyman,
1950), 88. For Hobbes, however, this the origin of superstition, not history, and is ripe for a
materialist critique.
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the reflexivity which comes with it are a necessary part of Vico’s science—almost one hundred years before Hegel suggested a very similar thing. But the emphasis on the linguistic and
the internal modifications of the mind take Vico away from Hegel. For Vico, as for Kant an
important part of the world remains unknowable. Thus, his “idealism” is (in a sense) transcendental rather than absolute. Nevertheless, what has made Vico so attractive to diverse
thinkers, most notably, James Joyce and Norman O. Brown, is his ability to think the historical in purely human terms, indeed, as a necessary human poetic creation.
However, despite the claims subsequently made for his philosophy and his own divergence from the dominant ideas of his day, Vico’s Catholic orthodoxy and Scholastic education led him to present humanity’s creative possibilities in a manner quite distinct from the
Judeo-Christian God’s.
[T]he first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind, created
things according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different
from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by
knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue
of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they
did it with marvellous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which
they were called “poets,” which is Greek for “creators”.
(NS §376; emphasis added)
Brown, as we saw earlier, cites that last line in Closing Time (79), and on the following page
he writes: “Man makes himself by making his own gods, and this is poetry” (CT 80). With
this in mind, a clear distinction has to be drawn between the Catholic Vico and the
herme(neu)tic Brown. The latter wants to claim the former for his mystical tradition, and in
some respects this may be plausible. The New Science does suggest a manner of reading the
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world in terms of its own “closed” symbolic intensity, in the sense of co-belonging asserted
by Love’s Body. However, Vico clearly distinguishes between the type of knowledge such a
reading might afford and that provided by God. People, he argues, create themselves and their
worlds out of ignorance, out of a profound poverty of “real” knowledge. This lack of
knowledge perturbs, disturbs and engenders great terror, which has lead Hayden White to argue that though the historian may be able to look back upon time as a plenum, where the human imagination, seeing the reflection of its own sensuality in nature, made of nature its gods,
this was a position driven by ignorance and fear. Thus, the failure of the early gentiles to recognise the subjectivity of their objectification of nature leaves them in a position of alienation.16 But this poverty for Brown at least, is the strength of the early peoples. For in this type
of knowledge nothing is given forever, and the relationship between people and nature can be
more tightly drawn because of the dynamic potentiality of uncertainty rather than in spite of
it. Brown cites the following passage from Vico twice in Closing Time: “as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (HOMO INTELLIGENDO
FIT OMNIA),
this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not under-
standing them (HOMO NON INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA)” (CT 9, 47; Brown’s emphasis; NS
§405). I hear in this Brown’s call for the release from both rationalist and Absolute idealist
chains, chains which always reduce the potential of the “known” by diminishing the creativity
of the “knower.” Although for Vico this is a religious point (the sole knower is God), and for
Brown a mystical one (the knower is “man”), the spirits of both are, dialectically, commensurate. Vico goes on: “when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but
when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.” (NS §405) This process of becoming, of nascimento, stems from
ignorance and from the metaphors of poverty.
16
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Baltimore and London:
John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 203. Cf. Berlin, Three Critics, 82-83.
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II
Turning to Brown’s book, I want to suggest that is an exemplary exercise in the mythography
of poetic logic. Displaying a complete aversion to methodological arguments, syllogistic, soritic (accretive), or otherwise, and to theses in general, Closing Time is constructed around
verbal plays, suggestive juxtapositions and collages, supported by a kind of Dionysiac erudition. It is a book that does not need verification to feel vindicated. Closing Time begins as follows (and this quotation gives as fair a statement of Brown’s “methodology” as will be found
between its covers):
Time, gentlemen please?
The question is addressed to Giambattista Vico and
James Joyce.
Vico, New Science; with Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
“Two books get on top of each other and become
sexual”
John Cage told me that this is geometrically impossible.
But let us try it.
The book of Doublends Jined.
FW, 20
At least we can try to stuff Finnegans Wake into
Vico’s New Science.
One world burrowing on another.FW, 275
To make a farce.
(CT ix)
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“Two books get on top of each other and become sexual” is first of all an attempt to gain
progeny from the deferral of meaning to be found in any one book. Meaning is not found in
any single place, but only in juxtaposition. Here he is elaborating an idea first raised in Love’s
Body, where:
Intercourse is what goes on in the sentence. In every sentence the little word
“is” is the copula, the penis or bridge; in every sentence magically, with a
word, making the two one flesh. The little word “is” is the hallmark of Eros,
even as, Freud said, the little word “no” is the hallmark of Death. Every sentence is dialectics, an act of love.
(LB 252)
By bringing two books together Brown wants the reader to enter the orgy of words, multiplied
dramatically from the mere promiscuity of the single sentence, to create a “cosmos upsung
from chaos” (CT 82); “the Dionysian origin of civilization” (CT 47). It is necessary to see in
the copula, the “is,” the ontological burden belonging to Vico’s first people, the animists who
attribute to the natural world the signification affects of people. The “is,” then, is the link
from the body to the environment it names. The “is” is the sphere of human transcendence,
where the negation of the body emerges as language: the space in which the body is resurrected in its words, a resurrection that is the world.
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake takes this poetic logic one step further in that it discounts the
“is” altogether and brings together “word” and “thing” in such a way that one cannot really be
said to “represent” the other, as in standard or, as we shall see, reflexive discourse, but where
the word actually substitutes itself for the entire relation—takes the place of the created event.
Language, then, in Finnegans Wake is not representative, it is creative:
“Really it is not I who am writing the crazy
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book. It is you, and you, and that man over
there, and that girl at the next table.”
His producers are they not his consumers?
FW, 497
(CT 109)
This is part of what makes Joyce’s book so difficult for the modern prose reader, who is used
to a recognisable distance between word and thing (even if misrecognised), and cannot easily
or willingly fall back into the type of logos that strives to create its world as it goes along, to
bring the reader, through their resistances, into the “book,” and from the book, to the body.
Brown’s reading of Joyce in Closing Time is also a recollection of an hermetic tradition that reads the world as an open book, where “things” are words: “It is all one book/The
book of God’s works and the Book of God’s Word. Every phenomenon is scripture not alphabetic but hieroglyphic…./Every thing is legend: to be read (lego, legere, to read)/to be deciphered” (CT 99). And in this Brown follows Vico’s “animistic” principle that “Man makes
himself by making his own gods, and this is poetry” (CT 80). When God is in everything (ius
omni) it is because “man” is in everything, and the scripture to be read is that of the human
imagination in all its ideality as it “becomes” animate nature. Thus, “It is as scripture that man
become part of nature again; he becomes mythy again, that is to say, mute” (CT 105). And
this becoming (nascimento) is Finnegans Wake. In the hermeneutics of Homo Faber—the
species that “makes” before it is “wise”—the “word” of God becomes an absence as it transubstantiates itself into the circulating “presence” of the logos of the human imagination.17
Poet, as we know, arises from the Greek for maker, and it is this poiesis, that frees us to be
Homo Faber. And this, for Brown as for others, is Vico’s great insight. “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was Man” (CT 88).
17
For a strong reading of “presence” and “idea” in Vico see A. Robert Caponigri, Time and
Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1953).
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It is important to Vico’s logic and to the philologist Brown’s appropriation of him, to
grasp just what logos means in this context. Indeed, it will bring much of what has been said
and will be said into a sharper focus. In the following quote Vico is describing the use of logos from which he derives “logic” in Poetic Logic.
“Logic” comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning was fabula, carried
over into Italian as favella, speech. In Greek the fable was also called mythos,
whence comes the Latin mutus, mute. For speech was born in mute times as
mental [or sign] language, which Strabo in a golden passage says existed before
vocal or articulate [language]; whence logos means both word and idea…. Similarly, mythos came to be defined for us as vera narratio, or true speech, the
natural speech which Plato and then Iamblichus said had been spoken in the
world at one time…. For that first language, spoken by the theological poets,
was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with (as must
have been the sacred language invented by Adam, to whom God granted divine
onomothesia, the giving of names to things according to the nature of each), but
was fantastic speech making use of physical substances endowed with life and
most of them imagined to be divine.
(NS §401; translators interpolations)
Whole hosts of ideas are vying for attention in this dense passage, many of which we have
come across before. I merely want to highlight the constellation that surrounds the etymology
of logos. Customarily, logos is given a meaning which either corresponds to speech, or to
word, or abstractly, but significantly for the study of what has come to be known as logic, to
reasoning; these meanings sometimes come together in “discourse” or “account.” Thus comes
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“Listening not to me but to the logos…”18 of Heraclitus, and “In the beginning was the logos,” of the Gospel of St. John. What is fascinating about Vico’s derivation is that he traces it
through fabula, which corresponds on the one hand to the idea of speech (favella), but on the
other to both myth and to silence (mythos, mutus), in direct opposition to logos as speech and
reasoning. The logos is for Vico the original (metaphorical) meditation upon the world which
preceded speech in terms of the development of human consciousness—it was both, as Brown
put it in Love’s Body, deed and thing. Moreover, it relates to Brown’s reading of Hesiod’s
Theogony and to the place of myth in his thought more generally. Myths, for Vico and for
Brown, are not fantastic tales in the usual sense, that is either tall stories or manipulative narratives. The myths and fables, like the words in which they are cast, are originally “true.” That
is, they belong to the truth of the relationship of the first peoples to their environments. Fantasies they might be, but like the tale of the origin of Jove in thunder, they exhaust the possibilities of meaning to those peoples of those times—and there can be few more adequate definitions of what “truth” means for such an idealism.
These fables are ideal truths suited to the merit of those of whom the vulgar tell
them; and such falseness to fact as they contain consists simply in failure to
give their subjects their due. So that, if we consider the matter well, poetic truth
is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity with it
should be considered false.
(NS §205; emphasis added)
Myths are able to bring together the imaginative universals or poetic genera of ancient times
and signify the unintelligible actions of the world. As the limits of meaning and of the world it
can disclose, these myths are, necessarily, the limit of the true. After Vico, the logos, like the
18
See the recent translation by T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus, Fragments (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1996), 36-37. He translates λόγος as “account.”
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true, is an historical variable. When the logos slips back into Poetic Logic, philology or, as we
shall see in a moment, etymology, it is necessary to bear in mind the relationship between it
and the poetic modes of knowing and bringing to presence the natural world.
Logos, then, is mythos is fabula—is mute, and through the silent interpretation of the
world, and later as speech, the Viconian logos sublates the scholastic and rationalist dualisms
that begin with the syllogism, with representational thinking, with what Vico will call the
“ironic” separation of truth and error, spirit and body, literal and metaphorical, and their final
deflation into the nihility of the barbarism of reflection. Myth is truth at the limit of its meaning, neither the errors nor the conceits of the ancients, but vera narratio.
Dethroning philosophy in favour of mythology:
It follows that the first science to be learned
should be mythology or the interpretation of fables.
NS, 51
Truth and life is in myth:
Poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical
truth which is not in conformity with it should be
considered false.
NS, 205
(CT 81)
The rebirth of myth—or the recognition that it has never gone away—allows for the revivification of language as poiesis. The barbarism of reflection turned over (“its just, its just about
to, its just about to rolywholyover” [CT 36; FW; 597]) into a releasement toward the evocation of language and a mystical revolution.
Brown’s method is mythood—to make an unpardonable Joycean pun. He wants to
remember that language was always already mythical, as in the Theogony, and thus rather
than a turn to the past, he affirms a mystical sublation into the future—a return of an animism
(a return of the gods) that has never been left behind (“Array! Surrection!” [CT 36; FW:
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210
215]). This is the sublime task that Vico found in poetry: the task of giving life (which may be
as simple as giving meaning) to inanimate objects, which exist as myth, as silence, as logos.
Language is the extension of the body, resurrected first as gesture, then finally the ventriloquism of the spoken and written word. And the task of the poetic for Brown is to give back to
language the creative role that it has lost but never given up entirely, to manipulate the workings of language from within the Viconian paradigm of the barbarism of reflection, working
through irony to poetry: ricorso.
The first stage of this revivification of language, as had been demonstrated, is to rediscover etymology: the fables told by words. “The etymology of the word etymology: etym
means true” (CT 83). So etymology is a composite of the words, etym: true (ἔτῠμος—true,
actual, most basic), and the word logos: myth or mute, speech, account, discourse, etc. The
complexity of origins: is “etymology”—true account, true myth, basic silence, actual deed,
etc.? (“The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence overcome.
Everything is metaphor; there is only poetry” [LB 266].) On the one hand, this indefinite nature of the etymology of etymology is just the type of paradox that the barbarism of reflection
throws up and which, from Vico’s conservative perspective could seem disastrous. In the New
Science, the movement of etymology is from more meaning to less meaning, to recover an
original, if necessarily ideal, plenitude in the birth of a word. On the other hand, Brown follows Joyce in moving in the opposite direction, to find such a surfeit of meaning that only
creative choices can be made. He takes fragmentation from its romantic origin in Jena
through the tortured aphorisms of Love’s Body, down to the very word. His task, then, is to
split the etym and reveal its excess.
Etymology is ricorso: as it was in the beginning.
As in Finnegans Wake:
the abnihilisation of the etym.
That’s what Finnegans Wake is about:
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FW, 353
211
smashing the atom.
Etyms are atoms
Annihilisation of language:
he would wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, of the face of the erse.
FW, 178
Annihilisation of language so that it can be abnihilated again; created out of nothing.
Out of the thunder
(CT 88)
In the beginning was the logos and it was silent—mute. The silence of ab-nihilisation (fromthe-nothingness). The silence from which language will, in passing through nihilism, come
again. The ricorso returns to, or rather brings around again, the ‘silence” of origins in Finnegans Wake:
Mute speech
science of sonorous silence
FW, 230
all’s set for restart after the silence
FW, 382
the shocking silence
The silence speaks the scene
FW, 393
FW, 13
(CT 96)
The same silence in John Cage? The silence that hears the call of the origin that is immanent
in every imaginative moment? The same silence that Heidegger listens for in die Sage, the
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saying, which gives to poetry its weight as making?19 Emerson’s “wise silence,” which fills
the gaps in his prose? The silence disclosed by the splash of Bashō’s jumping frog?20
Annihilisation and abnihilisation, corso and ricorso. To take language into the “nothing” and to bring it back, out of the thunder, like the first people finding God in their own
fear. Is this more Eliot than Joyce? “What the Thunder Said”: Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.21
But Joyce’s hundred letter rumbles in Finnegans Wake can also be heard, naming the gods in
Old Norse: “Ullhodturdenweirmudgaargrinnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokbaugumanodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar! Thor’s for you!/—the hundredlettered name again, last word of
perfect language” (CT 95; FW: 424). To “abnihilate,” to pass through nihilism, however, is a
difficult task—but it is made easier if you are relieved of the scepticism of modernism by an
un-ironic—un-Eliotlike—use of myth. For, in Eliot myth is used to overcome the collapse of
modernity into anomie. In Brown, myth is the affirmation of the collapse as the condition for
the possibility of myth itself—circles not lines. The corso and ricorso, the dialectic of meaning, which emerged from the necessary evolution of humanity to comprehend nature through
logos and mythos, has been the dynamic, the narrative since the very beginning of thinking—
the silent logos was the first thought and the world came to presence within it. Reflexivity is,
in Vico’s New Science the end, where the corso begins to slip over into ricorso. This may
take more or less time—it will certainly take a long time—but his ineluctable “ideal eternal
history of nations” demands the ebb and flow of the civilisations it purports to define. In the
Closing Time the last stage of the cycle, “the barbarism of reflection,” as Vico calls it, can
clearly be understood as “nihilism,” or, better, as nihilism coming to understand itself. The
19
See for example Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in Krell ed. Basic Writings,
408-412.
20
See Robert Aiken, A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen (New York: Weatherhill, 1996), 25
and Takeuchi Yoshinori, “The Philosophy of Nishida” in Frederick Franck ed. The Buddha
Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 187-188.
21
T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 78-79.
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213
first barbarism is pre-linguistic (etymologically problematic, perhaps). The second barbarism
arises from the scepticism brought about by too much meaning (which Vico would probably
define as “democracy”), the calling into question of accepted norms, scepticism, and most of
all, the decline in piety. Vico’s understanding of this period is reactionary—very much part of
the Counter-Reformation; Brown’s response is revolutionary, eschatological. For Brown, to
risk an early conclusion, the barbarism of reflection and the barbarism of the first poets are
the same thing. We will see how this develops of the course of the last two sections.
III
For Vico and for Brown humans are not, essentially, Homo Sapiens—wisdom comes too
late—but Homo Faber, “man as maker” (CT 18). The New Science is the history of gentile
civilisations making themselves; Closing Time, borrowing from Finnegans Wake, is trying to
put together the pieces that these civilisations have made after the return to barbarism: the
barbarism of reflexivity. Brown’s book is a revolutionary version of Eliot’s shored-up fragments (“Time, gentlemen please?” [CT ix]), equally paratactic, but refusing to settle upon old
myths. On the contrary, like Love’s Body, it is establishing new ones. There is a paradox here
that we have seen before: all the fragments are old. But, maybe, that is to repeat the tired lie of
reflexivity that in its essential linearity can only look backwards with distaste, or with nostalgia—which is merely distaste for the present. It would be more in the spirit of Brown’s encounter with Vico and Joyce to see the fragments of the past as variables, not artefacts to be
consigned to museums, classified and lost, but as “facts of art” to be endlessly reinvented. In
fact, for both Vico and Brown, this process is inevitable—though with markedly different
consequences—and it is what distinguishes humanity from God, the finite from the infinite.
God, everywhere at all times (ius omni), knows his world absolutely because he has made it
absolutely; humans can never know anything but what they have made—and they never make
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anything entirely (except, ironically enough, God).22 This, extrapolating from Brown, is the
origin of human freedom and it emerges most clearly from the conversion of the made and the
true (“‘verum’ et ‘factum’…convertuntur”).23
As Vico asserts, in much quoted passage:
For the first indubitable principle posited above is that this world of nations has
certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the
modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain
than when he who creates the things also narrates them. Now, as geometry,
when it constructs the world of quantity out of its elements, or contemplates
that world, it is creating it for itself, just so does our Science [create for itself
the world of nations], but with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces,
and figures are. And this very fact is an argument, O reader, that these proofs
are of a kind divine and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God
knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.
(NS §349; translators’ interpolation)
Brown cites the italicised sentence in Closing Time (CT 20), juxtaposing it with a paraphrase
from his earlier version in Love’s Body: “Man Makes himself, even his own body./The human
body is a historical variable” (CT 21; LB 127). These claims correspond to the romantic axiom suggested by the first section of this chapter that: “to know is to know how to make it/(to
have made it” (CT 18, sic.). This is opposed to the then prevalent Cartesian doctrine of “clear
and distinct ideas,” which begins from first principles observed, passively, from nature (pri22
This, of course, depends on whether there is a distinction between the pagan Jove and the
Judeo-Christian God. For Vico there is, for Brown there is not.
23
Berlin, Three Critics, 35.
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215
mum verum), and is usually reducible to the mathematical postulates that from Pythagorean
times have been assumed to reside in nature. For Vico, as I have already pointed out, this type
of knowledge belongs to God, for he alone has made the world. The condition of mathematical knowledge, analogously, is not to have found it, but to have made it. Brown quotes from
Vico’s Autobiography: “In geometry we demonstrate because we create./The rule and criterion of truth is to have made it” (CT 18). And Berlin echoes this: “formal sciences, like mathematics and logic, are not forms of discovery at all but of invention.”24 The truth claims that
they can make do not correspond to “nature” except as it is ordered by active human engagement, that is, by the human imagination.25 Rigor, the claim with which mathematics substantiates itself, arises not because it reflects an “outer” reality, but because it belongs, in its entirety, to an “inner” arbitrariness. Mathematics oversteps the limit of its legitimacy the moment it
makes or tries to demonstrate a statement about nature, in physics for example, because the
nature it claims is always absolutely other to it, whereas the nature it is is the nature it is trying to escape. Vico writes, “Demonstration is operation; truth is what has been made, and for
this very reason we cannot demonstrate physics a caussis [sic] because the elements which
compose nature are outside us” (TCE: 36). Mathematics moves entirely within the human
hermeneutic, and as such it is perfectly “true”—but creative, that is “ideal” (in the Kantian
sense) not “real” (in the materialist sense).
As a consequence of this distinction between finding and making, the “facts” that the
historian uncovers in ancient documents are “almost diametrically opposed to that carried by
24
Berlin, Three Critics, 41.
25
This is another foreshadowing of a later philosophy, as here Vico’s distinction between
mathematics as discovered or invented is parallel to Kant’s position in the first Critique, i.e.,
the distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori judgements. Mathematics, Kant argues,
is the latter, it comes from our manner of intuiting ‘space” not from space “in itself” (an sich).
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216
the term ‘fact’ in empirical contexts”.26 As A. Robert Caponigri observes, this is the type of
fact that is made, that is an “artefact.”
Before the historical document conceived thus as its own “factum”, the human
spirit cannot assume a posture of alienation. Rather the document so conceived
elicits an act of recognition, of self-recognition, however rudimentary, on the
part of spirit. Between spirit and the terms of products of its own historical creative activity there can be, not alienation, but only recognition and identity.27
The idea of factum here outlined, enables historical truth, that is truth as identity in terms of
human activity, to be established. This occurs because human activity is a making activity, a
production of the imagination—it is poiesis—as was put forward in the last chapter. It is also
significant that due to the identity or self-recognition of spirit, this truth, contrary to Hayden
White, is non-alienating. “For the total presence of spirit which will be actual and genuine,
and not illusory, will be the life actually traversed through the expressive moments represented in those documents.”28 This type of knowledge is called coscienza (conscience, consciousness), that is the coming together (coitus) in consciousness of the known and the “knower,”
because they are both made.
In the complex collage of Closing Time, Brown announces the movement thus:
Man as maker
(homo faber
science is of making
scire est per causas scire
26
Caponigri, Time and Idea, 148.
27
Caponigri, Time and Idea, 149.
28
Caponigri, Time and Idea, 153
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217
knowledge is knowledge of causes
to know is to know how to make it
(to have made it
v. Descartes clear and distinct ideas:
In geometry we demonstrate because we create.
The rule and criterion of truth is to have created it.
Au-
tob. 38
The true (verum) and the made (factum) are
convertible
Berlin, 165
verification is fabrication
fact is fabrication
homo faber
man is the forger; at his forge
forging the uncreated conscience of his race.
(CT 18)
If mathematics is reduced to a circular epistemology by its attempt to ground itself in the
“world,” then how are we to understand Brown’s phrase “knowledge is knowledge of causes”—for it certainly cannot reflect the pattern of cause and effect, that is, the statement of
knowledge from first principles? Maybe the answer is already clear. It has emerged from the
constant refrain of Vico’s work: that to know the truth of something is to have created it—that
is, to have been its cause. This is purely an historically meaningful causality, one that is based
in the free choices of humans, which is in turn based upon their creative essence as posse finitum. It is a motivated rather than a “blind” or “billiard ball” understanding of determinate
causality. The causes might not always produce the effects intended, but that is not the point.
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The point is that finite human agency was involved in the process of change from one state of
affairs to another and that the trace of the engagement is inherited as “causality.”
Perhaps, in the end, the most forceful case for the separation of mathematical and poetic knowledge is a reprise of that given by Castoriadis in the last chapter: mathematics yields
no ontological weight. This is the conclusion drawn by Caponigri.
[The] poetic character…is an ontological structure…but the synthetic transaction of [mathematical] sciences generates an alien world because it effects no
ontological result. The world which is generated in history is real because it is
the being of the human spirit itself that informs that world.29
This is anticipated by Benedetto Croce, who writes: “The physical sciences of to-day is in fact
like a house, sumptuously furnished by former owners, to which their heirs have added nothing, but have occupied themselves merely in moving and rearranging the furniture.”30 Croce
also makes clear one of the great ironies of mathematics: the fact that it was designed to understand the workings of God by mimicking his creative process—from first principles—but
that in doing so it ineluctably alienates itself from that very world. Moreover, only in this way
can it retain its power; indeed, internal descriptive and predicative rigour it is its greatest
strength.
For Vico, reading a peculiar Platonic ideality into his theology, God is the plenitudinous birth of “being” out of itself, or, as he put it in his biography, quoted by Brown: “the
metaphysics of Plato leads to a metaphysical principle, which is the eternal idea, drawing out
and creating matter from itself, like a seminal spirit that forms its own egg” (Autob. 121, CT
27; Vico’s emphasis). It is interesting here to compare what Castoriadis said about God, the
Demiurge, in the last chapter. For Castoriadis, Plato’s God, who is also Vico’s, was the fabri29
Caponigri, Time and Idea, 176-177.
30
Croce, Vico, 13.
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219
cator par excellence, but not because he “gave birth to his own idea” but because he merely
copied the world of appearance from the model of the universal forms. He was the “fabricator” of the cosmos but not its first cause, in much the same way as mathematical models can
describe nature, but must remain outside of it. The irony here is that following this logic, as
we saw above, mathematics is necessarily reduced to the status that Plato gave to art—a mere
copy at two removes from the reality of being. A second irony is that the bestowal of the distinction of being “first cause” upon God goes in fact to Aristotle. This is ironic because Vico
writes: “the metaphysics of Aristotle leads to a physical principle, which is matter, from which
the particular forms are drawn; and indeed makes God a potter who works at things outside
of himself” (Autob. 121, CT 27; Vico’s emphasis). It seems that Vico wants it both ways. To
retain the ideality of the forms “delivered” to the cosmos via the chora (the nursemaid of all
becoming), but also to find God in all the stages of the process (ius omni)—as mother, father,
nursemaid and offspring. For Plato, as Castoriadis’s point implies, the world of appearance
(becoming) is necessarily discrete from the world of the forms (being). But in Vico’s metaphysics this distinction is somehow sublated: for him the being of objects, institutions, etc., is
their coming to presence in the process of the Providential becoming of human history—that
is where the cosmos is most real. This, I would argue, amounts to a creative misreading of
Plato by Vico—a strategic anthropomorphism of the Demiurge that is, perhaps, in keeping
with the Catholic orthodoxy that exists in his work. He projects onto his God an exaggerated
version of the very “least” power that resides in humanity: the ideal creation of their institutions and through them the creation of their environment. God’s environment, however, is
everything, and pantheism—if not animism—is the most likely corollary (ius omni). But for
Brown, recalling Love’s Body, the Timaeus is reread to assert the creative authority of the
‘son-sun-hero in the mother-dragon night” (LB 50), and to parody the gendered platonic metaphor of illumination. In Brown’s words: “It is all a misunderstanding, a creative misunderstanding/the fortunate fall” (CT 47). The misunderstood, the felix culpa, is the necessary consequence of an imaginary or poetic relation to the world, a hermeneutic circle into which Ho-
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mo Faber have fallen. So, when humans “bring” what is “out there” to presence via the faculty of active imagination they necessarily miss “it” entirely (as Emily Dickinson puts it: “Perception of an object costs/Precise the object’s loss—”31)—and, in the case of God, such logic
leads to an inevitable abyss. This is the “misunderstanding” attendant upon all idealism, upon
all finite beings. Hegel’s movement of spirit is infinite, Brown’s resurrected body is finite.
The assertion of the essential status of humans as Homo Faber, as makers of themselves, is undoubtedly one of the crucial moments in philosophical humanism, but it leads
away from humanist values, or at least toward the incredibility of those values, and finally
into a “reflexive” nihilism. This is the position the thinker arrives at when he or she has learnt
the lessons from Nietzsche. Firstly, to have concluded that value forms are themselves constructed, not constitutive, and thus that these value forms were in themselves “nihilistic” because they assumed values where there were none. Secondly, and moreover, in doing so these
“values” denied the will or authorship of the human being (“the world is a veil we spin to hide
the void” [LB 261]). Thirdly, the assertion of that will in overcoming values: “The destruction
of what never existed” (LB 261). The movement laid out by the trajectory of Brown’s work
from Life Against Death through Love’s Body and into Closing Time, which strives to reveals
that “Man makes himself, even his own body”, and that, “The human body is a historical variable” (CT 21; cf. LB 127). Thus, the gigantic distension of the imagination—which for Castoriadis is the evolutionary origin of humanity32—is disclosed during the “barbarism of reflection.” It tips over, initially, into romantic idealism, the first philosophy to make a coherent
claim for imaginative ontogenetic power; and from which point, Kant’s teetering on the brink
31
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Fa-
ber), 486 (poem number1072).
32
See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Logic, Imagination, Reflection,” in World in Fragments, 262.
See also Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 202.
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221
of the abyss,33 romantic nihilism is one of the next possible steps: Schopenhauer to Nietzsche.
And to return to the argument of an earlier chapter, I would now contend that Marcuse and
Brown are suspended between these two poles. Marcuse remains an (Hegelian) idealist (even
within his materialist position), Brown shifts much further towards nihilism, though as Nietzsche recognised, a movement all the way there is, probably, impossible. Vico’s philosophy,
which anticipated so much of romanticism and idealism, is usually recognised as being the
first to establish that the provenance and authority of human history belonged to humans
themselves, to Homo Faber. Thus, within it the origins of modern nihilism may be found, that
is, the crisis of the ungrounded ‘self.”
IV
For Vico then, as for Brown, “human being” is an historical product and “history” is a product
of human being. Vico’s claim, as Berlin makes clear, “was a stroke of genius”34 that ran counter to the vast majority of established Scholastic, theological and nascent rationalistic thought.
33
“The unconditioned necessity, which we need so indispensably as the ultimate sustainer of
all things, is for human reason the true abyss [Abgrund]. Even eternity—however awful the
sublimity with which a Haller might portray it—does not make such a dizzying impression on
the mind; for eternity only measures the duration of things, but it does not sustain that duration. One cannot resist the thought of it, but one also cannot bear it that a being that we represent to ourselves as the highest among all possible beings might, as it were, say to itself: ‘I am
from eternity to eternity, outside of me is nothing except what is something merely through
my will; but whence then am I?’ Here everything gives way beneath us, and the greatest perfection as well as the smallest, hovers without support before speculative reason, for which it
would cost nothing to let the one as much as the other disappear without the least obstacle.”
(CPR 74/A613/B641)
34
Berlin, Three Critic, 57.
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Indeed, the entire “central Western tradition [for which] the existence of an unaltering human
nature whose properties are knowable a priori”35 was a given. In the New Science, on the contrary, it is the facta of human history, its linguistic artefacts, which provide the necessary support for an analysis of this shifting “flux” of historical becoming. Language, the logos, in the
sense outlined above, is the trace structure of the evolution of the relationship between people
and environment, subject and object. It is the body transcending itself in order to be itself,
dying in order to become, as we saw with Hegel in Chapter 3. Language is the resurrection of
the body. The question Vico asks, then, is philological and etymological: “What kinds of
words have human beings used to express their relation to the world, to each other, and to
their own past selves.”36 The answer to this question will correspond to the hermeneutic of
spirit which circulates as the logos. Vico has identified this spirit’s movement in three now
familiar stages: poetry, prose and irony; gods, heroes and men; corresponding to the theocratic, the aristocratic and the democratic respectively; this latter, democratic irony, being the
ground for the fall into the barbarism of reflection, and the beginning of the cycle: corso and
ricorso.
It should have become clear that it is this last phase, teetering on the brink, that
Brown is describing in Closing Time. To await “the return of the gods,” but only to witness
the “return of barbarism,” is the human condition in the “ironic” period. This nihilism belongs
to the barbarism of reflection. Perhaps implausibly, Vico considers this stage to be the beginning of “untruth” or “irony,” which would have begun to be disclosed by the syllogistic method:
35
Berlin, Three Critics, 59. It is also an anticipation of the break from “order” that Berlin di-
agnoses as the real romantic revolution. See Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed.
Henry Hardy (Pimlico: 2000).
36
Berlin, Three Critics, 63.
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223
Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is
fashioned by falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth.
Here emerges a great principle of human institutions, confirming the origin of
poetry disclosed in this work: that since the first men of the gentile world had the
simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign
anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above,
true narrations.
(NS §408)
The conceit that children “are truthful by nature” has long since passed away—if it was ever
widely held. Nevertheless, what this reaffirms is the assertion that because primitive peoples
were operating at their limits of signification, due to the “poverty” of language, they had little
option but to tell the “truth” qua their imaginative disclosure of their environment. The ability
to reflect upon language itself “wearing the mask of truth” was not an option for them, as language was totally involved with their poetic world creating hermeneutic. The subsequent “reflective” hermeneutic, however, is misleading by “nature.” What has occurred to bring about
this decline—and this betrays Vico’s political stance—is the possession of language, and
more importantly writing, by the vulgar majority. “This language [of the plebeians] must be
understood as having sprung up by their free consent, by this eternal property, that vulgar
speech and writing are a right of the people” (NS §430; interpolation added). The invention of
the alphabet is key here, but, moreover, the alphabet’s popularization by Protestantism with
its epochal influence of European reading practices. Thus within the larger historical point it
could be argued that Vico’s terms reflect the counter-reformation where the loss of Latin to
the vernacular is a shift toward barbarism. Ambiguously, Vico himself was one of the first to
write academic works in everyday Italian. To return to the corso of providence, before the
invention of the alphabet symbols had been mute, gestural or had evolved into hieroglyphics.
As such their meanings could be protected. They were, Vico argues, concrete and particular
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with a limited ability to express the abstract. The alphabet, however, immediately made a reflexive fragmentation of poetic universals not only possible, but also historically inevitable.
Thus, the alphabet and the possibility of democracy arise simultaneously. Peoples can now
make reflective choices about meanings, they can observe changes within their own languages—that is, they are able to argue about truth and untruth, which is, perhaps, the conditio
sine qua non of the democratic paradigm—even if democracy is absent. And even if this is
held in abeyance, no hierarchy, be it theocratic or aristocratic, can withstand the superfluity of
meaning that supervenes with the barbarism of reflection. It is difficult here to disengage Vico’s counter-reformative intentions from his grand vision of history.
Reflection, Vico concludes, provokes the flight of the gods. This flight was also asserted by Hölderlin and made epochal by Nietszche. But announced by Nietzsche in the death
of God (from a fate diagnosed by Vico as irony) was the hope of the return of “God” in the
shape of “humanity’s” future—Übermenschen. But instead, to according the catholic Vico,
history turns to barbarism. How, then, to recognise the gods, to greet them—what language
will they speak? The answer is that they will speak the language that is already being spoken
by the “new barbarians” and forging their world. The task Brown sets himself is to “find”
God in extant human creativity, where it has been, hitherto, imagined otherwise. Thus the
recognition of God in Homo Faber, which can be seen as the first stage of nihilism—the loss
of control, the crisis of grounds—needs to catch a glimpse of itself in the reflection of the imagination and thus return to itself its own poetic power: a power already recognized by Brown
in the dialectic of Eros that lead to a reinterpretation of primary narcissism. But even so, irony, in Vico’s sense, also leads to nihilism. A difficulty is presented by the two ways of looking at irony. On the one hand there is that approach taken by scientists and by Marxists,
amongst others, where a distance from exaggerated figurative language enables a method to
be developed which exposes lies and errors, and thus approaches or makes claims about the
truth—and this doubtless has brought with it many great benefits. On the other hand there is
the nihilistic approach to this ironic knowledge (acknowledged in the modern period firstly by
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Jacobi, the critic of Kant, through Schlegel and the Jena romantics, taken up in a different
form by Max Stirner and reaching its peak with Nietzsche) that there is no truth, only metaphor (there is only poetry), and that science is nothing but the forgetting, deliberate or otherwise, of this essential nothingness (“the world is a veil we spin to hide the void”). Vico himself takes refuge in Providence and the cyclical. For him it is inevitable that decadent scepticism either will fall back into barbarism, or will be subsumed within a more vigorous poetic
or heroic culture at an earlier stage of development—this is his corso and ricorso. The real
question for my reading of Brown, though, is how he puts the possibilities of this nihilism to
work, how he uses it as a source of creativity that takes us out of the “refuge of the void, the
Nothing.” That is in his recognition that the ideality of presence, the emergence of the world
and the self from an imagination in which everything can be otherwise, and which figures the
origin of freedom, is the purest potential of this period of history.
A page in Closing Time reads as follows:
Waiting for the return of the gods
witnessing the return of barbarism
The new barbarians
returning to primitive simplicity of the first
world of peoples
NS, 1106
to recognize the gods
to greet them
Dei dialectus soloecismus—the dialect of God is
solecism
God does not speak good English
Not atticism but solecism
Barbarism
The Resurrection of the Body
Love’s Body,
239
226
Barbarism, or speaking with tongues
as in Finnegans Wake
polyglot turning into glossolalia
Pentecost
wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cel[t]elleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript.
FW, 219
In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is
the sounddance.
FW, 378
Instead of the sentence the sounddance.
(CT 63)
This passage recapitulates all the challenges and creative possibilities of working through
Brown’s little book. There is a complex and often overdetermined mixture of collage, quotation, ventriloquism, embroidery, suggestion, lyricism, which is part philosophy, part philology, religion, nihilism, linguistics, and hermetic mysticism. Closing Time, speaking with
tongues—other people’s tongues: Brown, Joyce and Vico. Brown’s God, like Joyce, does not
speak good English. The dialect of God, of the imagination, is ‘solecism”—erroneous speaking, the necessary fragmentation of grammar that attends a dynamic language. Not Greek atticism but solecism; which as Brown the classicist would well know derives from Soloi, an
Athenian colony where they spoke bad Greek, and thus were “barbarians”—etymology:
βάρβαροι: non-Greek speakers.37 Solecism is Barbarism. Barbarism, or speaking with tongues
and in tongues, mystical babble—Gk. glossolalia, “tongue babble,” or Babel, the antediluvian
language of Finnegans Wake. It builds a tower to heaven by merely digging its foundations,
its etymologies—it is where we already are—and this is Brown’s eschatology. His Pentecost
37
The initial Latin citation in Closing Time from Love’s Body, “Dei dialectus soloecismus,”
(239) is in turn a quote from J. G. Hamann.
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227
is the descending of the Holy Spirit to the imaginative Geist, the overturning of that hierarchy
to remind people once again that it is they who make the gods from their own minds.
The Babylonian confusion of tongues redeemed in the Pentecostal fusion. Many
meanings swelling together in unity; because it is the unspoken meaning that they
mean. Real unification is the unseen unity, unity at the unconscious level, at the
level of symbolism.
(LB 253)
And from this co-belonging at the core of symbolism, Heraclitus” ἀρμονία, the word is loosed
world wide, to emerge again in the Celts, Hellenes, Teutons, Slavs, Zends, and in latinsoundscript (Sanskrit: an Ur-alphabet or ‘soundscript”). Each language is the work of a spirit, the
essence of which is the ideality of imaginative presence, carving out of the woid (“in the beginning was the…”; “We take refuge in the void, the Nothing” [CT 57]);38 and the logos is
generated out of the nothing, and genesis emerges from the “nixnixundnix” (CT 56; FW: 415)
(nichtsnichtsundnichts; νύξ, Night the daughter of Chaos, Brown’s Void, born through Eros.).
This “funferal” is recognised at the expense of the sentence, with the rise of the solecistic
sounddance.
Is there a thesis here? Is there an analysis that works a problem through to its end or
to its beginning? Does Brown answer the questions he sets himself? The answer must be both
yes and no. He has no interest in “closure” only in suspense, in—and he cites Ezra Pound—
”Confusion, the source of all renewal” (CT ix). As Isaiah Berlin points out, Brown and Joyce
are “irrationalists”, they push the New Science “to its logical conclusion, [which] would destroy, at least in principle, all distinction between history as a rational discipline and mythical
thinking.”39 This is anathema to Berlin, who seeks above all to trace patterns in history. It is
38
I leave aside the Buddhist connotations of this phrase, though they would bear scrutiny.
39
Berlin, Three Critics, 136.
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228
also anathema to the majority of Viconians who yearn to establish Vico’s place in the philosophic canon between Descartes and Kant (though I think Brown does that too). Berlin refuses to take Vico to his limits—perhaps wisely so. But there is a different, and every bit as exacting, rigor in the work of Brown and Joyce: the exhilaration of taking Vico into speculative
regions where he would probably rather not have gone.
In many places Brown flattens Vico out and actually uses him against himself. For
even though an analysis of Closing Time almost reads like the New Science in its mixture of
linguistic archaeology and imaginative fancy, as alluded to above, it is directly opposed to
what Vico wants to find in etymology, in philology and in origins. In the New Science, Vico
writes:
that languages are more beautiful in proportion as they are richer in these condensed heroic [i.e., poetic] expressions; that they are more beautiful because
they are more expressive; and that because they are more expressive they are
truer and more faithful. And that on the contrary, in proportion as they are more
crowded with words of unknown origin, they are less delightful, because obscure and confused, and therefore more likely to deceive and lead astray. The
latter must be the case with languages formed by the mixture of many barbarous tongues, the history of whose original and metaphorical meanings had not
come down to us.
(NS §445; my interpolation)
There is a purity of origins here that is not to be found in Joyce or in Brown. For Vico language becomes corrupted the more “tongues” it takes on board, and the more adulterated it is
by unknown words the further it is removed from its original or natural “connection” to the
thing (as event). If this is the case Finnegans Wake is the least delightful, the most corrupt and
deceitful book that ever was written. For in Finnegans Wake, every origin is lost and written
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229
over—indeed, the history of European languages is the palimpsest upon which the book is
inscribed, and one of its arguments might be that there are no “origins” only circulations.
But is the necessary corollary of this that Finnegans Wake and by extension, Closing
Time, are corrupt books? It would, yet again, be more in the spirit of Brown’s encounter with
Vico and Joyce to see the fragments of the past as variables (including Vico himself); not artefacts to be consigned to museums, classified and lost to history, but as facts of art to be endlessly reinvented. Brown’s archaeology is not driven by the desire for plenitude, but by the
will to make the origin exist in every moment; to take the arche from the past and to replace it
in the present and as the very cause of presence. Moreover, this presence does not fall from
Heaven or come from the past, but emerges from pure sensuality and the consequent poverty
of the transcendental imagination. The robust poverty of the original poets, the makers, is as
Vico implies and Brown confirms, their sublime strength.
It must be added, however, that this is not a moment for an “elite few”—for poets in
the traditional sense, but, on the contrary: “The language belongs to the people/and the poetry
is in the language” (CT 107). Vico’s poetry belongs to the “vulgar”—his own prejudice—but
this can work against him, and Brown thinks that he finds in the poetic logic of the New Science “a way to transcend Vico’s occultist elitism” (CT 107). However, what Brown in fact
finds in Vico is a way of overcoming his own occult elitism and returning the “mysteries” to
the people. In Closing Time, Brown seeks ultimately to “democratise” language—that is, to
return it to the common ownership of the people whence it came. It is necessary here to recall
how different Brown’s tone was in his Phi Beta Kappa address of 1960:
The alphabet is indeed a democratic triumph; and the enigmatic ideogram, as
Ezra Pound has taught us, is a piece of mystery, a piece of poetry, not yet profaned. And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of mysteries, by the undemocratic
but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which
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230
makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which
makes all things new.
(AM 4)
He needs to overcome the clash implied by the differences he finds between “undemocratic
poetry” and the poetic logic capable of sustaining the mystery. Brown has to recall something
from Vico that Vico ostensibly forgets: “Poetic sublimity is inseparable from popularity” (CT
107; NS §875). And this sublimity, property of the early peoples who emerged from the first
barbarism after the flood, also applies to the emergence of humanity from the barbarism of
reflection. Poetic language was denied to the “elite” by Vico because hitherto it is only possible to poeticise without reflection, in a “natural” relationship to the world. There is, Vico argues, no esoteric “wisdom” in Homer, because he was nothing but the Greek people themselves, the unreflexive comprehension of their late-animistic/early theological world. The elite
proper, the aristocracy, do not arise, Vico argues, until the poetic has begun to be debased.
But even outside of Vico’s fanciful histories, to return language to poetry is to return
it to the people, to the masses and to the gods. And this is the possibility of a return of the
mystery in the “vulgar”, or perhaps rather, in the popular. This is also the implied definition
of Emerson’s poet in the essay of that name, when he writes, “The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!” (CW: 243). Poetry is not something we can choose
to do, it is only something we can choose to ignore. “The poets”, Emerson asserts, “are thus
liberating gods” (CW 248). They divine the flux of nature and provide the flexible symbols
that disclose its being (“for divinari, to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from
men—the future—or what is hidden in them—their consciousness” [NS §342]). This ties into
one last reflection on the ΦBK passage: that in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the alphabet is
brought back to the spirit of the ideogram or the hieroglyph, the meaning of his words are,
once again, a mystery. But, in some way, a democratic mystery, albeit a problematic one; not
democratic in the sense that Brown fears in this ΦBK address, cited in the last chapter, “the
The Resurrection of the Body
231
attempt to democratize knowledge—the attempt to substitute method for insight, mediocrity
for genius,” but in the sense of Viconian democracy: in Finnegans Wake there is too much
meaning—it is an abyss—and because of this choices have to be made in its interpretation.
This may not be an obvious or even a politically significant idea of democracy; it certainly
does not include any of its pretensions to pragmatic persuasiveness or to clarity. But if uncertainty and an aversion to dogma is the ground of debate, Finnegans Wake points to the primordial confusion that is the basis for the democratic possibility of clarity. It gathers philosophical weight from the “vulgar” metaphysics outlined in the New Science, even if it goes a
long way to turning Vico on his head. Brown relishes the surfeit of meaning in Joyce just as
he finds it in the New Science—these books, then, are an initiation into the oxymoronic hermeneutic of the “democratic mysteries.”
Vico’s poetic logic is the “vulgar” knowledge that, in his poetic metaphysics, brings
to presence a world which belongs to the demos, the trace structure of the circulation of the
common spirit: “The map of souls’ groupography” (CT 109; FW: 476). Poetic metaphysics is
“vulgar metaphysics,” it vulgarises the gods, it vulgarises the truth, it vulgarises knowledge
and it vulgarises being itself, bringing them all under the rubric of “poetry” and, ultimately, of
the corporeal body. It enacts the reversal proposed by Novalis at the beginning of the romantic project: to make the finite infinite and the infinite everyday.40 It is also the consummation
of the problematic outlined by nihilism, where the so called higher things, spirit, logos, God,
etc., are brought within the circle of Homo Faber and found not to be from another world, a
better world, but to be made from the working out of human limitations—transcendent lack—
immanent in the transcendental metaphor of the human body. Cultural phenomena, represented by Hesiod, Protagoras, Vico, Hegel, Freud and Joyce, are a circuitous route to the absent
noumenal body, an absence that can only be recognised through these detours that contour the
resurrection of the body. In this lack, this essential finitude drifting through the flux, lies all
40
Novalis, cited in Bowie, Romanticism to Critical Theory, 80.
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232
the potential gathered from human history—the story made by Homo Faber. This story, the
chiasmus that moves between the poetry of origins and the origins of poetry has, ultimately,
radically different meanings for Brown and for Vico. Viconian origins are historical, they are
situated in the past and emerge from the Godless through the truth of the one Providential
God, and then descend into anomie. But for Brown the origin exists in every moment as poiesis, as a transformed relation to the moment, that is, as praxis, and his dialectic of his history
is the inverse of Vico’s, it moves from the one God, Jove, ius omni, to a secular apotheosis of
the resurrected human body.
The Resurrection of the Body
233
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