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from Norman O. Brown
  • Big thinker in the 60s, now kind of obscure. Author of Life Against Death , an attempt at a psychoanlysis theory of history, and Love's Body, which was written to undo the first book
    • I did feel when writing Love's Body some kind of obligation to undo what I had done in Life Against Death. I wanted to release any followers I had acquired or at least to confuse them. Insofar as Life Against Death happened to end up by making me a leader, I did want to get lost...Thus I felt under some existential stress to write Love's Body in order to torpedo Life Against Death, to destroy it as a position.
from VGR-Liveness

Life Against Death

30 Oct 2021 - 07 Sep 2026
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    • But this static contrast of the sacred and the secular as mutually exclusive opposites is misleading, because it is undialectical. The secular is the negation of the sacred, and both Freud's and Hegel's negation affirms its own opposite. The psychological realities here are best grasped in terms of theology, and were already grasped by Luther. Modern secularism, and its companion Protestantism, do not usher in an era in which human consciousness is liberated from inhuman powers, or the natural world is liberated from supernatural manifestations; the essence of the Protestant (or capitalist) era is that the power over this world has passed from God to God's negation, God's ape, the Devil. And already Luther had seen in money the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic. The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religions complex, an attempt to find God in things.
    • The ultimate category of economics is power; but power is not an economic category. Marx fills up the emergent gap in his theory with the concept of force (violence) i.e., by conceiving power as a material reality. We have argued elsewhere that this is a crucial mistake; power is in essence a psychological category. And to pursue the tracks of power, we will have to enter the domain of the sacred, and map it: all power is essentially sacred power.
    • What the psychoanalytical paradox is asserting is that "things" which are possessed and accumulated, the property and the universal condensed precipitate of property, money, are in their essential nature excremental. Psychoanalysis must take a position not only as to the origin of the money complex but also as to its ultimate validity. Vulgar psychoanalytical exegesis limits itself to the argument that the category of property originates in infantile manipulation of the excremental product. But the real point is that property remains excremental, and is known to be excremental in our secret heart, the unconscious. Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth. The wisdom of folly is the wisdom of childhood. What the child knows consciously, and the adult unconsciously, is that we are nothing but body. However much the repressed and sublimating adult may consciously deny it, the fact remains that life is of the body and only life creates values; all values are bodily values. Hence the assimilation of money with excrement does not render money valueless; on the contrary, it is the path whereby extraneous things acquire significance for the human body, and hence value. If money were not excrement, it would be valueless.
    • The commitment to mathematize the world, intrinsic to modern science, is a commitment to sublimation. Mathematics is coeval with city life, because in the city culture is organized by the principle of sublimation. Plato was right: God geometrizes, and mathematics is the crucial discipline in converting human love to a suprasensual life. Bertrand Russell is right: Mathematics has "a beauty cold and austere," "without any appeal to our weaker nature," and gives "the sense of being more than man." 210 The psychoanalytical paradox of the anal character of mathematical thinking merely specifies what part of the life of the body is affirmed by negation by denial, as Russell says, of "our weaker nature"in order to construct the nonbodily life.
    • OK summarize the basic thesis of this book, what exactly is "Life"
      • Ask Claude
        • Here's a concise breakdown of the thesis and what "Life" means in the title:

        • The Basic Thesis

        • The central thesis is that human history represents the dialectical struggle between the life instincts (Eros) and the death instincts (Thanatos), with civilization's repressive mechanisms exacerbating the latter at the expense of vital bodily affirmation.
        • The key move Brown makes is to radicalize Freud rather than accept him.
        • Brown critiques Freud's formulation of the death drive as an innate force, contending instead that Thanatos emerges as a pathological consequence of repressed libidinal energies — transforming the pleasure principle into a death wish through the denial of polymorphous perversity.
        • In other words, the death drive isn't natural or inevitable — it's what happens to life energy when civilization crushes it.
        • This repression, rooted in the transition from oral to anal stages of psychosexual development, underpins cultural institutions like money and Protestantism, which symbolize the sublimation of life into abstract, lifeless forms.
        • This is precisely what you see in your quoted passages — money as demonic, mathematics as anal sublimation, property as excremental.

        • What "Life" Means

        • "Life" in the title is specifically Eros as embodied, polymorphous, unrepressed somatic existence. Brown's point is threefold:
        • **Life = the body in its totality.* As your quote says directly: "we are nothing but body... life is of the body and only life creates values; all values are bodily values."* The infant, before repression kicks in, experiences pleasure diffusely across the whole body — this is Freud's "polymorphous perversity." Brown takes this not as a primitive stage to be overcome, but as the model of what full living looks like.
        • **Life = desublimated Eros.**
        • Brown tries to provide a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization, drawing on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake.
        • "Life" is what remains when you stop diverting bodily energy into abstractions — money, mathematics, theology, capital accumulation.
        • Life opposes the "death" of civilization's repressions.
        • Brown's vision posits liberation through the abolition of repression, enabling a utopian reunion of body and mind.
        • The book's endpoint — its utopian demand — is what he calls the "resurrection of the body": not an afterlife, but a recovery of full, unashamed bodily existence in this life.

        • The Payoff

        • The three quotes you have in your notes illustrate the thesis perfectly in sequence:
        • **Money = excrement** → sublimated anal energy; "Life" is what money isn't, it's the raw bodily value money pretends to be
        • **Power = sacred/psychological, not economic** → Marx's materialism is incomplete because it misses the psychological (i.e., bodily/erotic) root of power
        • **Mathematics = sublimation** → the "commitment to mathematize the world" is civilization's flight from the body, the ultimate anti-Life move
        • So "Life" is essentially: the body, unashamed and unrepressed, as the ground of all value — against which "Death" is the entire edifice of civilization (money, abstraction, Protestantism, capitalism) built on the denial of that body.