Abstract

The work of Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History and Love's Body , exemplifies the shift in focus that distinguishes contemporary thought from the modern sources on which it initially depends. Brown's work should be seen as an extension of modern thought in its preoccupation with time and history, and as an early example of postmodern thought in its attention to the body, death, language, and power. The study explicates Brown's thought and engages it with more recent scholarship. ;The recent surge of interest in the body indicates Brown's early intuition of a broad cultural phenomenon. Modern thought, he argues, especially the works of Freud and Marx, implicitly reveals the ontological priority of the human body. This ontology inverts the traditional priority of mind over body, derived from Greek thought and dominant in western philosophy for 2,000 years. An analysis of Brown's work suggests that one of the implications of this inversion is an apprehension of finitude which culminates in a confrontation with the body's subjection to death. This confrontation becomes the source of new insights into the relation between power and bodies, between sacred and secular power, and between absolute and relative time. ;Brown's reclamation of the insights into embodiment contained in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a central theme. Brown writes sacred history as counter-memory, revealing affinities between the axioms of psychoanalysis and economic theory and the older symbolism of Fall and Resurrection. ;Love's Body represents a transformation from a modern to a postmodern conception of the relationship between language and reality. Here Brown abandons linear exposition in favor of a spatial and symbolic approach to the body and calls into question the relationships he had postulated in Life Against Death. The consonance of his formulations on the metaphorical nature of all experience with the themes of post-structuralism is here explored. The conclusion suggests that Life Against Death, even though it is the earlier work, contains the potential to respond to some of the central concerns raised by the later book and by postmodern thought more generally