The heaviness in this book is simply breath taking. That leaden, wrought-iron quality of such formidable all-capital letters spelling “LIFE AGAINST DEATH” is out of this world. Brown’s scope (“THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL MEANING OF HISTORY”) is so comprehensive, so eternal, so irrefutable. Its first chapter, “The Disease Called Man,” is such a beautifully smug condemnation of, well, the whole lot of us. The rest of the chapter titles maintain that same deepness:
VII Instinctual Dualism and Instinctual Dialectics
VIII Death, Time, and Eternity
X The Ambiguities of Sublimation
Sincerely, Life Against Death is a very intelligent, very novel study of psychoanalysis and sociology; and, if your sensibilities are so inclined, it also has that beautifully heavy-literary aesthetic to it. There are dense references to Martin Luther, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx: it’s got all the celebrities of Western thought a bibliophile could ever want. Brown postulates all kinds of compelling statements about the deepest crux of our psyches and desires. There’s an enormous amount of content and significance here.
The general thesis of Life Against Death is that repression, far from being the social restraint that enables instinct-driven humans to attain a beneficial structure to their world, actually causes not only individual psychosis but a broader social pathology. The logic behind Brown’s arguments, though, is clouded in heavy prejudice towards his own ideas and is overly based in rhetoric. Reading him, you come away feeling that every strand and fiber of our culture, anything associated with “society,” is a “lie” (which, by any estimation, could surely not be entirely correct). There is simply no mention or study of what works in our ways of living. (A decade later, Brown would continue these ideas in Love’s Body, which was written entirely in brief vignettes and argued within numerous quotations and parables.)
The flaws in Life Against Death, I feel, lie literally in its thickness, the denseness of his rhetoric which already presumes his audience is in complete agreement. But I do genuinely adore that heavy intellectual feel of Brown’s work (as well as recognize a little advanced kitsch to it).