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rence's puritan attitude toward sexuality in insisting as Lawrence
does on the spiritual conditions of sexuality (he calls him "a paradox–
ically conservative philosopher of sexuality"), Brown shares with
Lawrence an appreciation of religious intuitions of the sensual
mysteries. The final chapter of
Life Against Death
is titled "The Resur–
rection of the Body," imagined under the auspices of Dionysus
rather than Christ.
The effect of Marcuse's and Brown's performances is to illicitly
dialecticize Freud (in the Hegelian manner) by introducing a third
synthetic term, where there is none in Freud. Freud remained
throughout his career a dualist, a dramatist of irreconcilable conflict
in which death was the only resolution .
Both Marcuse and Brown wrote in the fifties before the explo–
sions of the sixties and, in particular, 1968, when an international
student revolt occurred in which erotic and passional liberation was
at the top of the revolutionary agenda . The locus of revolutionary
activity became the university rather than the factory, its agents
students rather than workers, and its grievances psychic and moral
rather than economic and moral. In France, Gilles Deleuze's and
Felix Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus
(1968) provided, so to speak, a
theoretical representation of the revolutionary explosion. The idiom
of the book is a potpourri of Marx, Freud (in its Lacanian formula–
tion), Saussurian linguistics, structuralism, etcetera. The book is
part analysis and part manifesto, at once brilliant and exasperating.
The enemy is capitalism in its familial form, the Oedipal structure,
seen as the chief agent of repression.
There is an irony in the fact that Michel Foucault wrote a
preface to
Anti-Oedipus,
for if the work of Deleuze and Guattari
represents a culminating expression of the revolution of desire,
Foucault's
History oj Sexuality,
composed in several volumes a decade
later, represents the most powerful "reaction" that we have against it.
But before I turn to Foucault, I want to look briefly at one of the
most significant and intelligent responses to the intellectual and im–
aginative ethos of 1968, Lionel Trilling's
Sincerity and Authenticity,
originally the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University
in 1969-70. The lectures were delivered at the very moment when
student confrontations were taking place at Harvard. Though Trill–
ing does not explicitly refer to the events of the year, they are suffi–
ciently present in the work of writers whom Trilling addresses: Sar–
tre, Marcuse, Brown, and R . D. Laing.
In the final and most important chapter, "The Authentic Un-
