Customer Reviews

Love's Body

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Twenty years ago a friend told me to read Life Against Death. He said it changed his life. I read it and liked it but it didn't change my life. Recently I finally got around to reading this, his second book. I'm afraid I'm too old for any book to change my life, but I thoroughly enjoyed this provocative book. It is a series of meditations, inspired by a wide range of other thinkers who are referenced after each section,as opposed to the unified argument put forward in Life Against Death. As in that book, Freud is an influence, but so is Blake, Buddhism,Roheim, and Nietzsche, who may have provided the aphoristic format. Brown was one of the intellectual gurus of the Sixties, but unlike many others from that time, his ideas hold up thirty years later.

This is a profound and learned book that is experienced as much as read. I first found it in college and the reread was an equalling enlightening journey. With insights from Freud, Blake, and buddhist mysticism it destroys the Reality Principle and the traps of literal interpretation. It leads us to know the Silence behind the words.

This is the kind of book to keep by the bedside. A few of these aphorisms are enough to think about at one time. Brown is remarkable in the way he gathers tidbits from the past to present a non literal interpretation of the Christian religion. He is much influenced by the poet William Blake. For all those who fear the concretization of the symbolic world in this culture, this is the book to read.

Prof. Brown enters into the heart of why we do what we do with references to psychiatry, art, philosophy and history. Yet his extraordinary intellectual approach is emotionally liberating. The book is a demanding but giving book with pleasures reverberating for a lifetime of re-reading.

Your basic synthesis of history, literature, mythology, psychology and magic. In a voice that is poetic, accessible and provocative. Essential. Mind-expanding. Classic. It changed the way I think. I first read it in 1967. Many re-readings have only reinforced its power. I bought this copy as a present for my son who is now a student at UC Santa Cruz, where Brown once taught. I consider it required reading.

Norman O. Brown says that Love's Body is a continuation of a voyage begun with Life Against Death: "It records a shaking of the foundations; and faintly foreshadows, like false dawn, the end". What end is he cryptically referring to here?

Love's Body is a loosely structured non-linear meditation on topics as far-ranging as Fire, Unity, Nature, Resurrection and Nothing. These are allegories wrapped up in aphoristic writing. The book is as enchantingly powerful as was its author. I listened to Brown speak several times in the mid-70's when I was studying philosophy at UC-Santa Cruz. The man was about as enigmatic and spellbinding as they come -

This book is already a classic and is one that insists on being re-read many times. The profundities are encased in crystalline little gems; should be required reading within the acadamies.

"Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry"

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

N.O. Brown once described his books as "acid trips", by which he meant that he was profoundly tested and transformed in the very writing of them. Although he wrote books after "Love's Body", no other work of his--including its great predecessor, "Life Against Death"--achieves its depth of power or profundity. The work's aphoristic style is neither accident nor embellishment. It is central to Brown's project of undermining the fiction of the continuous, self-identical ego and its willed separation from the cultural quests and illusions out of which it is formed and which it haplessly reinforces. But do not be misled by this into thinking that the thought expressed here lacks philosophical rigor. Brown had already proved, in "Life Against Death" and other works, that he is eminently capable of sustained argument of the highest degree. If you are attentive, you will see a developing argument that sweeps through the entirety of human psychology and culture to reveal the deepest underpinnings of our personal aspiration and collective behavior. Brown's is an orphic voice, calling us to a necessary disillusionment that is also the wellspring of all happiness. This is a work of incredible genius, one of the great moments of perception in all twentieth century literature. If you grasp its point you will inevitably be moved to a life of self-transcendence.

An exceedingly strange book. A shotgun wedding between psychoanalysis and Christian Mysticism. Philosophy as a fever dream. Brown's focus on the body, rooted as much in Blake's visionary poetry as in Freud, makes me realize what is wrong with so much postmodern criticism and philosophy: it is disembodied. Love's Body, written in the late sixties, and containing an attack on the literalism of both Protestant theology and modern humanistic criticism, sheds light on some avenues (and cul-de-sacs) postmodernism has left unexplored. Brown's book is highly suggestive, not instructive. It strives to unite unlike, even opposite, things. Extremes meet. The marriage of Heaven and Hell. He adopts an elliptical and incantatory style. Sentence fragments. Sentences repeated in different context. He eschews the linearity of a polemical work, separating loosely connected paragraphs from each other with empty space, as well as references to other books (the bibliography is integrated into the book proper, and it is not always clear why he lists certain works). These paragraphs are divided into sixteen chapters, the headings of which denote (abstract as Plato's Forms) aspects of experience: Liberty, Nature, Trinity, Unity, Person, Representative, Head, Boundary, Food, Fire, Fraction, Resurrection, Fulfillment, Judgment, Freedom, Nothing. It feels like a tentative (it would not work so well if it were exhaustive) exploration, a rough outline or foreshadowing, or, to use one of Brown's favorite words, an adumbration of a full-fledged Philosophy that never developed. Or an uncovering of one that has always been around, partially hidden. I often like to repeat this quote from the writer Charles Fort (whose books are even stranger than Brown's): "Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts . . . the unclipped ramifies away into all other things." Love's Body is one of the few books I've encountered that shows some of the disturbing contacts of unclipped (Brown might say "unrepressed" or "unsublimated") tentacles.

This is a profound and learned book that is experienced as much as read. It is a series of meditations, inspired by a wide range of other thinkers who are referenced after each section, as opposed to the unified argument put forward in Life Against Death. few of these aphorisms are enough to think about at one time. Among others Freud, Blake, Buddhism, Roheim, and Nietzsche are refered to.

Unfortunately, Brown is too wrapped up in religous mysticism and theistic nonesense. That's why I took off two stars; religous undertones aren't part of any ubiquitously coherent work and they're too prevalent here. If you can filter them out, this work is otherwise decent.

Brown was a a heavy influence on Jim Morrison and the music of The Doors, which is filled with Brownian imagery as are Morrison's books of poetry. "Crowds and Power" by Elias Canetti is another good book to read. It also has that typical Brownian style.