Life Against Death - Influence

Influence

Life Against Death became famous partly because Podhoretz recommended it to Trilling, who produced "a favorable review of this central text of the nascent cultural radicalism toward which he was in general antagonistic and which - with Mailer, Brown, and me in mind - he would dryly characterize as 'the Norman invasion.'" Brown's work affected Foucault's reception in the United States: American reviewers of Foucault's Madness and Civilization noted that it shared a "kinship in mood if not in tone or method" to Life Against Death and its "strident paean to the primal id." J. G. Merquior sees Life Against Death and Madness and Civilization as similar calls "for the liberation of the Dionysian id."

Todd Dufresne, who compares Life Against Death to both Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Goodman's 1960 book Growing Up Absurd, notes that its influence can be measured in terms of sales figures: over fifty thousand copies had been sold by 1966. Dufresne, who finds Brown's work questionable, doubts that readers of Brown's work understood its critique of the repressive society well, suggesting that many student activists might have shared the view of Morris Dickstein, to whom Marcuse and Brown's work meant, "not some ontological breakthrough for human nature, but probably just plain fucking, lots of it". Hudson believes Life Against Death presaged a collapse of "our infatuation with hard science", but writes that it was neglected by radicals because its publication coincided with that of Eros and Civilization.

Camille Paglia identifies Life Against Death as an influence on her 1990 work of literary criticism Sexual Personae, writing that Brown's work, along with that of Allen Ginsberg, Leslie Fiedler, and Harold Bloom, provided an alternative to the New Criticism, which she sees as insupportable because of its exclusion of history and psychoanalysis. Paglia believes that in Life Against Death and Love's Body, "the deeply learned and classically trained Brown made an unsurpassed fusion of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and politics." Paglia credits Brown's books with making a major impact on American culture in the 1960s, writing that along with Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art they helped her to see Foucault as foolish. Paglia laments, however, that, "my generation was condemned to live out what was only imagined by the older Norman O. Brown", noting that the excesses of the 1960s lead many people to disaster. She has also called Life Against Death, "one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century" and "what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did." Discussing her intellectual development, Paglia observes that Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media was published in 1964, the year she entered college, while Brown's Life Against Death and Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel had been published five years earlier. Paglia sees Brown as a thinker similar to McLuhan and Fiedler, writing of all three men that, "They understood the creative imagination, and they extended their insights into speculation about history and society. Their influence was positive and fruitful: They did not impose their system on acolytes but liberated a whole generation of students to think freely and to discover their own voices." Paglia proposes their work as an alternative to that of Jacques Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, which she believes has little relevance to North American culture.

Edward W. Said called Life Against Death a vanguard book, noting that it contained a very appreciative study of Jonathan Swift. Kovel identifies Life Against Death, along with Eros and Civilization, as models for his 1991 work History and Spirit, noting that he encountered them at a time when his ambitions as a psychoanalyst and his hopes for an emancipated politics were in conflict. Kovel believes that Marcuse and Brown's place in history is uncertain, but nevertheless stresses their importance for the development of his thinking, writing that they gave him the hope that psychoanalysis could be turned away from a narrow clinical orthodoxy and toward emancipatory purposes. He sees the main difference between Marcuse and Brown as being that the former remained a historical materialist with a political emphasis, while Brown became an apolitical idealist.