Love’s Body

Norman O. Brown – 1966

“It is always daybreak.  Suspended between first and second coming; between prophecy and fulfillment; between presence and absence; between seeing and not seeing; between sleeping and waking.  The authentic psychoanalytical epiphany – do I wake or sleep?”

A curious, poetic and daunting work of scholarship from the 60s by renowned intellectual Norman O. Brown.  Love’s Body is in a category of its own, with Brown seemingly inventing a new genre; humanities learning so passionate that it borders on the evangelical.  (It’s easy to see Brown’s influence on Camille Paglia, who places him in a triumvirate of American thinkers – with Marshall McLuhan and Leslie Fielder – who should be embraced by students as a vaccine against post-structuralism.)  Brown’s more conventional (and more influential) Life Against Death in 1959 had drawn followers and almost turned him into a Dionysian guru of the New Age.  As a result, Brown felt driven to make his follow-up a work that would challenge rather than encourage the trend towards cultism that he correctly sensed would doom the 60s youth movements.  Love’s Body is not a work of measured logic or persuasion; it is a compendium of aggressive observations about a delicate concept; the state of being that the truly evolved man will attain by unlearning culture and embracing the guileless joy of childhood.  Not unlike McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), the book is organized non-sequentially in that it can theoretically be opened anywhere or can even be read backwards.  And also as with McLuhan, it’s quite easy – (at least for an uneducated person like myself) – to get hopelessly lost in the thicket of Brown’s wordplay.  Brown’s philosophy is intrinsically bound up with sensuality, which is why it struck such a nerve with 60s advocates of “free love.”  Brown’s interest in the erotic, however, was always more symbolic than literal, as borne out by the self-admitted asceticism of his own personal life.  The book’s language is almost foreign to me; he alternately seems to be using Elizabethan English and inventing a frustrating new grammar of his own.  I can’t say that I always knew what he was talking about, but the book is overwhelmingly hypnotic and beautiful. 

“The mask is magic. Character is not innate: a man’s character is his demon, his tutelar spirit; received in a dream.  This character is his destiny, which is to act out his dream.”