EUGENE GOODHEART
393
Descartes maintained, in thinking, but in desiring." To speak of
desire as an essence, as Brown does, is, of course, paradoxical,
because essence belongs to an antithetic rationalist discourse. The
radicalizing of insight and language is so strong that a slippage oc–
curs , for instance, in the chapter "Neuroses and History," from
neuroses to madness. According to Brown the so-called nQrmal
(neurotic) condition of man is insane. Modern literature has pro–
vided graphic instances of this condition in the characters of the
underground man in Dostoevsky's
Notes from Underground
and of
Kurtz in Conrad's
Heart ofDarkness,
among others. Kurtz may be the
most compelling instance, for his madness is perceived as a direct
result of his having raised reason, his own reason, to the position of
divinity. In carrying on the Nietzschean legacy, Brown anticipates
the poststructuralist attack on man, on a humanism that has to be
surpassed .
Like Marcuse, he turns to art as an antirepressive force which
encourages polymorphous perversity, regression to infantile eroti–
cism, etcetera. Again as in the case with Marcuse, one may wonder
about the accuracy or adequacy of Brown's representation of art,
which stresses (one might say overstresses) its child-like aspect at the
expense of the philosophic mind, and affirms Dionysus at the ex–
pense of Apollo with a rather vague concession that the murderous
risks of the Dionysian must be obviated by a reconstruction of the
Dionysian ego:
The work of constructing a Dionysian ego is immense, but
there are signs that it is already underway.
If
we can discern the
Dionysian witches' brew in the upheavals of modern history- in
the sexology of de Sade and the politics of Hitler-we can also
discern in the romantic reaction the entry of Dionysus into con–
sciousness. . . . The only alternative to the witches' brew is
psychoanalytical consciousness, which is not the Apollonian
scholasticism of orthodox psychoanalysis, but consciousness em–
bracing and affirming instinctual reality- Dionysian con–
sCIOusness .
The distinctive feature in Brown's argument is his affinity for
mystical and religious thought. Here, as we might expect, he is
sharply critical of Freud's hostility to religion. Freud viewed religion,
as he viewed art, as institutional neuroses, not as an instrument of
liberation. Though critical of what he understands as D. H. Law-
