Why resurrect the work of Norman O. Brown?

Norman O. Brown’s corpus spoke to many concerns that characterize our contemporary moment. Life Against Death searched for a Marxian Freud whose left-leaning and liberatory potential is once again sought in the pages of Parapraxis. Love’s Body wagered on the insufficiency of a liberatory politics based solely in rational demystification. Today many are making the same bet: those who look forward with Marx to “another possible world, of union, communion, communism,” the increasing numbers of young(er) people turning to formal religion and informal spiritual practices, and anyone who might agree with Brown that “the alternative to reification is mystification.” The Challenge of Islam and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis drew attention to the world-significance of Iran, prophecy as a theologico-political endeavor, and the experience of living through dramatic planetary change in ways that can only feel familiar today. 

Even as its spirit becomes ever more necessary, Brown's work has faded from view. Resurrecting Brown means resurrecting a politics for “those of us who are temperamentally incapable of embracing the politics of sin, cynicism, and despair” in the face of 21st century polycrisis.

In this seminar, we revisit important themes that Brown stages in his work, including but not limited to: 

• Eros, desire and the problem of unity;
• The relation of present to past;
• The prophetic tradition as a tradition ‘armed’ against empire, inequity, and hierarchy;
• The difficult relation between authority and liberatory politics;
• The tension between the symbolic and the literal;
• The relationship between psychoanalysis and mysticism;
• The necessity of mystical and theological language for a revolutionary politics;
• Islam’s challenge to what Brown called a “Christocentric” world history

While Brown’s work offers a generative entry point into these questions and themes, we are also interested in thinking about the limits of his work and what those limits reveal. For example, to what extent might Brown’s turn to mysticism take us away from rather than toward a revolutionary subjectivity and horizon? How does his treatment of Islam help us diagnose the limits of using psychoanalysis to think about the political? Finally, what might a re-examination of the tradition of Western historiography to which Brown belongs reveal about his attempts to critique it? 

We welcome papers that address the work of Norman O. Brown explicitly, as well as contributions that take up similar concerns and questions in the context of contemporary social, political, ecological, and aesthetic developments.