MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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the forties and ftfties, when the classic expectations of revolution de–
faulted , when' 'the goods and services that the individuals buy con–
trol their needs and petrify their faculties, " when' 'they have dozens
of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals ," when
the "foe appears as the archenemy and Antichrist himself: he is
everywhere at all times ; he represents hidden and sinister forces, and
his omnipresence requires total mobilization." Even Brown, whose
book is far less political , writes in his introduction of having "lived
through the superannuation of the political categories which in–
formed liberal thought and action in the 1930's," but of being
"temperamentally incapable of embracing the politics of sin, cyni–
cism and despair" that followed . Clearly he sees the book as the
prophetic and uropian equivalent of his former Marxism, an attempt
to
bring the thirties up
to
date.
The difference between Brown and Marcuse must nevertheless
be stressed . Where Brown takes Marxism as one more set of symbols
and categories, another anthropological system to be merged with
Freud's , Marcuse sets out genuinely to historicize the Freudian
categories , to turn them from absolute and timeless truths into an
account and critique of a specifIc phase of our culture . Like the neo–
Freudians they attack, both of them aim
to
complete the social
psychology that Freud himself only began to sketch in his last two
decades . Both undercut the merely therapeutic use of Freud that has
prevailed since his death, yet neither is able to make the step from
utopian theorizing about' 'the natute and destiny of man"
to
a more
specifIc vision of the way people might actually live. This barrier helps
explain why both later retreated from Freud: Marcuse into more con–
ventional social criticism and Marxist militancy, Brown into Christian
" body mysticism" and then back to sublimation , especially the con–
ventional sublimations of the poetic imagination, which Marcuse too
had fallen back on for the content of his future state .
However much we may criticize Marcuse's later work, at least
it represents the development of a position , something we can dif–
fer with, while Brown's later career is in prose poetry, not in concep–
tual thinking. The rhetoric of the "Apocalypse" oration is breath–
taking, the best Nietzschean writing since
Zarathustra
itself. Though
we may legitimately ask just what Brown means by mystical phrases
like "holy madness" or " second sight," as a trumpet call to renewal
