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.
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
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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