Who Remembers Norman O. Brown Today? Ever Heard of Love’s Body?
by Armando Maggi.
The core of the book concerns an alleged “carnal knowledge” that one would achieve after transcending the divide that lies in the unconscious between the symbolic and the physical. Brown wished to “resexualize” language. Brown mixes up Protestantism (emphasis on speech- the Holy Spirit descending at Pentecost) and psychoanalysis (the flames of the Holy Spirit resemble male members). All this stuff sounds like mumbo-jumbo now, but it was taken very seriously then.
Today it is hard to believe that, when it came out in 1966, Norman O. Brown’s best-seller Love’s body could be taken seriously. Brown was seen as the prophet of a new apocalyptic time, a future renewal, a radical transformation of what it meant to be human. It was the time of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, which influenced Norman O. Brown. I discovered Love’s Body while working on my book on Pasolini (Resurrection of the Body).
Brown was a classics professor who came up with this little book that reads like a hermetic treatise for initiated. It deserves to be forgotten. But what matters to me is the attention that it received when it came out. The core of the book concerns an alleged “carnal knowledge” that one would achieve after transcending the divide that lies in the unconscious between the symbolic and the physical. Brown wished to “resexualize” language. Brown mixes up Protestantism (emphasis on speech- the Holy Spirit descending at Pentecost) and psychoanalysis (the flames of the Holy Spirit resemble male members). All this stuff sounds like mumbo-jumbo now, but it was taken very seriously then. Pasolini absorbed and responded to Love’s Body in his final books and in his film Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom. In The Denial of Death Becker writes a scathing criticism of Love’s Body and Brown’s previous book.
Brown’s idea is essentially a form of mystical secular enlightenment based on the concept of the body as the place of human freedom from the shackles of the ‘primary scene’ in psychoanalytic terms. We live our life, according to Brown, as if we were asleep, because our life is the repetition of the ‘primal scene.’ For a man, to penetrate a woman sexually for Brown means to reiterate his father’s sex acts. Our existence is not original. We must free ourselves by overcoming the guilt connected to sex. Brown speaks of “pansexualism” as the manifestation of this utopian transcendence.
Today we can’t take this stuff seriously and it’s even difficult to convince someone that Love’s Body deserves to be read. I gave a talk at the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and no one had an idea of who Brown was. In the sixties this kind of language (sexuality, unconscious, utopia, apocalypse) made sense or at least it responded to a need for transcendence and hope that we lack now. In essence, Brown’s book is a hopeful one; it tells you that you can change yourself and your life by breaking away from a repetitive existence that is not even yours.
What do we hope for today?