Life Against Death - Brown's View

Brown's View

"I did feel when writing Love's Body some kind of obligation to undo what I had done in Life Against Death. I wanted to release any followers I had acquired or at least to confuse them. Insofar as Life Against Death happened to end up by making me a leader, I did want to get lost...Thus I felt under some existential stress to write Love's Body in order to torpedo Life Against Death, to destroy it as a position."

Brown was later to comment that Life Against Death, "records the first revision of my historical identity, from Marx to Marx and Freud", noting that Marxism, his first "historical identity", "was wrecked in the frozen landscapes of the Cold War, the defeat of the simplistic hopes for a better world that inspired the Henry Wallace campaign for the Presidency in 1948." Brown, who saw Louis Zukofsky's poetry as anticipating the ideas of both Life Against Death and his subsequent book Love's Body, has called Life Against Death "my first exuberant surge of premature post-Marxist energy", writing that in it he had wagered his "intellectual life on the idea of finding in Freud what was missing in Marx." Brown "found in Freud's analysis of the pathological dimension of human desires the basis for a post-Marxist critique of capitalism." Commenting on his intellectual development, Brown noted that, "My Marxist background had given me a healthy prejudice against moneymaking. Imagine my excitement when I discovered Sandor Ferenczi's article 'The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money'; with its immortal conclusion, 'After what has been said money is seen to be nothing other than deodorized, dehydrated shit that has been made to shine.'"

That this "turn to Freud" lead to the writing of Love's Body, which concluded that "there is only poetry", showed, according to Brown, that "the change in direction taken from Freud, resolutely pursued, in the end dictated a massive breakdown of categories of traditional 'rationality' still accepted as authoritative by both Marx and Freud; that massive breakdown...which Nietzsche baptized with the name of Dionysus. Already the last chapter in Life Against Death, not really knowing what it was saying, proposes 'Dionysian consciousness' as a 'way out.'" Brown wrote that it was clear to him in Life Against Death, "that at that deep level which can only be expressed in myth or metaphor, Freud's "instinct theory" needed to be remythologized in terms of Dionysus, that is to say in terms of instinctual dialectics rather than instinctual dualism. Or, to use another metaphor, in terms of Heraclitus rather than Empedocles." Brown concluded that the world will always be 'ever-living fire', and that the last chapter of Life Against Death was disfigured by the misleading idea that the world could be 'a pastoral scene of peace and pleasure, luxe calme et volupté, Baudelaire's utopian image invoked by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization'."