donderdag 28 februari 2019

Norman O. Brown (1913 – 2002) had ook in zijn laatste boek veel over #Spinoza




Nadat ik een eerste blog had over Norman O. Brown en zijn Life Against Death, bracht ik in een tweede blog zijn teksten in dat boek over Spinoza (in vergelijking met Freud). Hier gaat het over zijn laatste werk, waarin eveneens veel Spinoza voorkomt:

Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. University of California Press, 1992 - 250 pages – books.google

De uitgever over dit werk: “Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war . . . that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death.

Met veel Spinoza:



• Chapter 7 “Philosophy and Prophecy. Spinoza’s Hermeneutics” [books.google]
Dat hoofdstuk was eerder verschenen
In: Political Theory 14, 2 (1986), 195-213 - PDF

• Chapter 8 “The Turn to Spinoza” [books.google]

Het eerste hoofdstuk, „Apocalyps. The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,“ eerder verschenen als „The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind [in: Harper's Magazine, May 1961 -  cf. Jstor] is in z'n geheel te lezen bij books.google

Reviewer Carl L. Bankston over de aandacht voor Spinoza in dat boek: “By the end of the Reagan era, the search for a new religious-philosophical-political foundation leads the author to Spinoza's Tractatis Theologico-Politicus [sic]. Philosophers will probably see Brown's view of Spinoza as an early Communist as somewhat anachronistic and tendentious. The summary of Spinoza's defense of democracy, though, shows how the concepts of theocracy and the social contract can be used to refute Hobbesian authoritarianism. Brown's imaginative synthesis of Spinoza's mystical body of the republic and his own post-Freudian faith in the undifferentiated unity of body, soul, and society represents an attempt to find new support for the principles of Love's Body.” [cf. academia.edu]

 

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