Niethammer, Posthistoire

[Dave Monroe]

... don't recall that I followed up on this last time Norman O. Brown
came up to any extent, but, seeing as we're on the subject of "the end
of history" or whatever, from Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History
Come to and End? (Trans. Patrick Camiller.  New York: Verso, 1992),
Chapter 3, "From 'End State' to 'Exterminism': On some Sceptical Tropes
Used in Diagnosing teh Twentieth Century," pp. 24- 55 ...

... a fundamental intellectual opposition took shape through a critique
of power and of its manifold risks, and then achieved a widespread
impact in the movement against teh Vietnam War and the formation of an
alternative youth culture.... teh new power and its anti-totalitarian
conscience called for a critique based on a distinctive set of themes.
Alongside the questions of race, poverty and civil rights, this
democratic-ecological critique mainly focused on the nexcus of power and
technology (the "magamachine"), drawing on the explosivce force of
psychoanalytic insights into culture and history to expose the WASP
potential for repression and its elevation to a seamless ethos of work
and domination.  Such new paths, which sometimes veered off into
mystical life-practices, coalesced around the late-fifties cult book
Life against Death, by the classical philologist Norman O. Brown.  Its
translation into German at the end of teh Adenauer period, with the
innocent title Zukunft im Zeichen des Eros [The Future under the Sign of
eros], went almost unnoticed.  But in America it had a powerful effect
which, in the early fiction of Thomas Pynchon, linked up with the
entropy tradition stremming from Henry Adams.  (43)

[and here Niethammer's endnote refers the reader to Heinz Ickstadt, ed.,
Ordnung und Entropie. Zum Romanwerk von Thomas Pynchon (Reinbek, 1981),
which apparently includes a German trans. of Lawrence C. Wolfley's
"Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O' Brown in Pynchon's Big
Novel," PMLA 92 (1977): 873-89]

Brown had begun to concern himself with psychoanalysis in 1953, at teh
age of forty, when the replacement of the liberal New deal ideals by
"the politics of sin, cynicsim, and despaire" became unbearable to him.
Contrasting Freud's later work on the death instinct and cultural
analysis to the mundane adaptationsim of teh American therapeutic
machine, he reread psychoanalysis in teh light of Nietzsche and Jacob
Boheme ... (43)

Brwon's view of history and culture as an ever higher degree of neurosis
was opposed both to Enlightenment optimism and to Marxism ... (44)

Brown's own theorization involved an emphasis on teh death instinct,
understood as a striving for separation, alongside the love or life
instinct with its striving for unity....  But he believed that teh
coinflict between libido and death instinct had come to structure the
late Freud's deep pessimism ... and he sought to go beyond this conflict
as well as culture itself, with its compulsive disorder of progress and
discontent.  (44)

Brown arrived at this solution through a seemingly minor shift.  With
the help of Kojeve, Nietzsche and Hegel, he reinterpreted the
instinctual polarity--which Freud had cautiously seen in terms of a
heuristic dualism--as a dialectical relationship.... he opened up a
broad programmatic perspective for teh halting of progress and the
overcoming of history.... whereby a change in individual life--above all
the elimination of repression, the freeing of sexuality and a return to
nature--might also stop the further propulsion of the historical
dialectic....  At teh end of this dialectical argument ...--an argument
which he tried tom make clearer with an ingenious critique of anal
fixation in teh culture of protestantism and capitalism--Brown saw a
mystical "resurrection of the body" beyond repression, history and time.
(44)

The powerful impact of this book on the protest movement in the USA was
intensified by Pynchon's adoption of its dialectical theory of
repression, in connection with an entropy-based macroperspective which
he, like Adams, extended from nature to an interpretation of the
historicity of society.... it was at best with astonishment that europe
learned of their roots in a cultural critique which sought to overcome
the suppresion of death--and hence the repetition compulsion of deadly
violence--through a return to teh animality of nature.  Here too, as
Pynchon's novels were pyblished and read over the next two decades, teh
imaginative world of an escape from history, filled with nature and
death metaphors, became increasingly conspicuous, long after it had
freed itself from teh existentialist movement of intellectual protest
against the protestant-capitalist Cold War culture of the new
superpower.  In Europe the clocks were set differently.  (44-5)

At that time it was a voice like that of Karl Jaspers which won a
greater hearing, with its emphasis on human responsibility and its
denunciations of the impermissible "Gnostic" speculations of teh
prophets of posthistory. (45)

... and here see Karl Jaspers' The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956).  I think this dovetails interestingly
with what Terrance has been emphasizing about Pynchon's relationship to
Brown, although I think we both agree that it is perhaps a more critical
one than Niethammer allows, and here, again, see Herbert Marcuse's "1966
political Preface" to his Eros and Civilization, and, apparently, HM's
afterword to an ed. of NOB's Love's Body (1966) that i've yet to locate
(from another note of Niethammer's) ...