Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death. The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Wesleyan University Press, 1959; 2nd edition 1985 [with introduction by Christopher Lasch)- 387 pages. Hier het PDF van de 2nd edition!
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Second Edition, by Christopher Lasch vii
Acknowledgments xv
Preface xvii
Part One: The Problem
I The Disease Called Man 3
II Neurosis and History 11
Part Two: Eros
III Sexuality and Childhood 23
IV The Self and the Other: Narcissus 40
V Art and Eros 55
VI Language and Eros 68
Part Three: Death
VII Instinctual Dualism and Instinctual Dialectics 77
VIII Death, Time, and Eternity 87
IX Death and Childhood 110
Part Four: Sublimation
X The Ambiguities of Sublimation 137
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XI Couch and Culture 145
XII Apollo and Dionysus 157
Part Five: Studies in Anality
XIII The Excremental Vision 179
XIV The Protestant Era 202
XV Filthy Lucre 234
Rationality and Irrationality
Sacred and Secular
Utility and Uselessness
Owe and Ought
Time is Money
Giving and Taking
The City Sublime
Immortality
The Human Body
Excrement
Part Six: The Way Out
XVI The Resurrection of the Body 307
Reference Notes 323
Bibliography 351
Index 361
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Uit hoofdstuk IV The Self and the
Other: Narcissus
The ultimate aim of the Freudian Eros to
affirm union with the world in pleasure is substantially the same as Spinoza's
formula for the ultimate aim of human desire the intellectual love of God. God,
in Spinoza's system, is the totality of Nature (Deus sire Natura). He
defines love as pleasure (laetitia) together with the idea of an
external cause (the source of the pleasure), adding that it is a property of
love to will a union with the beloved object, in the sense that satisfaction
lies in the presence of the beloved object. Hence for Spinoza the ultimate aim
of human desire is to unite with the world in pleasure; and, as in Freud, this
is the ultimate aim of an energy (desire) which is in essence narcissistic. For
Spinoza the energy of the individual is essentially directed at
self-maintenance, self-activity, self-perfection (conatus in suo esse
perseverandi), which is also self-enjoyment (laetitia). Thus for
Spinoza, as for Freud, the self-perfection (narcissism) of the human individual
is fulfilled in union with the world in pleasure.23 There are
important differences between Freud and Spinoza [-] differences not recognized,
for example, in Smart Hampshire's acute comparison of the two.24
Above all, Freud has two instincts at war with each other, in place of
Spinoza’s single conatus, and thus can grasp human bondage (Spinoza's
term) as internal conflict and not simply as ignorance. And, as we shall see
later, Freud's final notion of Death as the antagonist of Eros is incompatible
with Spinoza's notion of eternity. Nevertheless, on essential points they are
allied, and both are at odds with the Western tradition. Like Freud, Spinoza is
at war with the illusion of free will; and, as in Freud, the commitment to the
principle of psychological determinism results in the "hideous
hypothesis" that the basis of our ordinary morality is irrational and
superstitious. Spinoza is thus also driven to a gloomy picture of our present
state of human bondage as a sick state in which we are determined by
unconscious determinations: "It is plain that we are disturbed by external
causes in a number of ways, and that, like the waves of the sea agitated by
contrary winds, we fluctuate and are unconscious of the issue and our
fate."25 Hence Spinoza, like Freud, replaces moralism by clinical
understanding, and prescribes a radical psychoanalysis to make us conscious of
the causes which have determined our nature and, by making us conscious of our determinism,
to make us free.
On the problem of human happiness,
what distinguishes Spinoza from the Western philosophic tradition and aligns
him with Freud is his allegiance to the pleasureprinciple and his rejection of
mind-body dualism. His allegiance to the pleasureprinciple brings him to
recognize the narcissistic, self-enjoying character of human desire, and hence
to recognize that human perfection consists in an expansion of the self until
it enjoys the world as it enjoys itself. And with his rejection of mind body
dualism, Spinoza never forgets that man's desire is for the active life of his
own body. From his notion of mind and body as two attributes of one substance,
it follows that the power and perfection of the human intellect is at the same
time the power and perfection of the human body. "If anything increases,
diminishes, helps, or limits our body's power of action, the idea of that thing
increases, diminishes, helps, or limits our mind's power of thought." 26
Hence the expansion of the self, in
which human perfection consists, is at the same time the expansion of the
active life of the human body, unifying our body with other bodies in the world
in active interaction: "That which so disposes the human body that it can
be affected in many ways, is profitable to man, and is more profitable in
proportion as by its means the body becomes better fitted to be affected in
many ways and to affect other bodies."27 Spinoza sees the
inadequacy of the human body as currently structured to sustain the project of
human Eros: "In this life, therefore, it is our chief endeavour to change
the body of infancy, so far as its nature permits and is conducive thereto,
into another body which is fitted for many things."28
What Spinoza cannot see, without
becoming Freud, is that the endeavor to acquire "a body which is fitted
for many things" is the endeavor to recover the body of infancy. Spinoza's
"body fitted for many things" is structurally identical with the
polymorphously perverse body of infantile sexuality in Freud, the body
delighting in the activity of all of its organs. But Spinoza recognizes the
"body fitted for many things" as the bodily counterpart of the
intellectual love of God: "He who possesses a body fitted for doing many
things, possesses the power of causing all the modifications of the body to be
related to the idea of God, in consequence of which he is affected with a love
of God which must occupy or form the greatest part of his mind, and therefore
he possesses a mind of which the greatest part is eternal."29
Spinoza's intellectual love of God is identical with Freud's polymorphous perversity
of children.
Uit hoofdstuk IX Death and Childhood
The Oedipal project is not, as Freud's
earlier formulations suggest, a natural love of the mother, but as his later
writings recognize, a product of the conflict of ambivalence and an attempt to
overcome that conflict by narcissistic inflation.22 The essence of
the Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God in Spinoza's formula, causa
sui; in Sartre's, être-en-soi-poursoi. By the same token, it plainly
exhibits infantile narcissism perverted by the flight from death. At this stage
(and in adult genital organization) masculinity is equated with activity; the
fantasy of becoming father of oneself is attached to the penis, thus
establishing a concentration of narcissistic libido in the genital.23
Uit hoofdstuk XVI The Resurrection of
the Body
And, on the other hand, Freud's essay
"On Negation"40 may throw light on the nature of the
"dialectical" dissatisfaction with formal logic. Negation is the
primal act of repression; but it at the same time liberates the mind to think
about the repressed under the general condition that it is denied and thus
remains essentially repressed.
With Spinoza's formula omnis
determinatio est negatio in mind, examine the following formulations of
Freud: "A negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for repression;
the 'No' in which it is expressed is the hall-mark of repression. . . . By the
help of the symbol of negation, the thinking process frees itself from the
limitations of repression and enriches itself with the subject-matter without
which it could not work efficiently." But: "Negation only assists in
undoing one of the consequences of repressionthe fact that the subject-matter
of the image in question is unable to enter consciousness. The result is a kind
of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the
repression persists."41
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