Fwd: Yet another "another"

[Paul Mackin]

Rcfchess at aol.com wrote:

>  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> Re: Yet another "another"
> From:
> Rcfchess at aol.com
> Date:
> Sat, 13 Aug 2005 16:35:39 EDT
> To:
> paul.mackin at verizon.net
>
> To:
> paul.mackin at verizon.net
>
>
>     Brown was (is? Is he still around?) brilliant, to be sure; and, as 
> mentioned, his work became increasingly eclectic/mystical...if anyone 
> on the list is interested in similar ideas which are more 
> Marxist-oriented, I'd suggest Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which 
> has some parallel ideas to Life Against Death.

Good suggestion. I'd further suggest than instead of reading your 
parents' or grandparents' first edition you make use of the second 
edition, which came out in the 60s and contains the "political 
preface."  When radicalism had again became "respectable," Marcuse has 
some important second thoughts about unbriddled permissiveness and its 
role in the consumer economy.  I can't quote him on that because mine is 
the first edition. :-)  Marcuse's One Dimensional Man also is highly 
critical of at least the sex part of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll.




>  
> RF
>  
> In a message dated 08/13/2005 4:18:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, 
> paul.mackin at verizon.net writes:
>
>     Eric Yost wrote:
>
>     > Paul: Brown was primarily a literary personage--like Pynchon--not a
>     > philosopher or scientist.   Once Brown realized this, he dropped
>     the
>     > footnotes (to connect with another post).
>     >
>     > Eric: Yet some philosophers too--Nietzsche is a good example--go
>     from
>     > writing in a conventional style to a more condensed and aphoristic
>     > style. My hunch is that the change of emphasis from careful
>     exposition
>     > to aphorism shows a growing respect for paradox. The
>     architecture of
>     > "horizontal" rhetoric becomes less important than the "vertical"
>     range
>     > of a particular insight.
>
>
>     A growing respect for paradox AND a growing realization than his
>     thinking as it continued to develop did not fit awfully well
>     within the
>     boundaries of freudianism  or other established areas of secular
>     thought.  It got closer to religion and mysticism--Resurrection of
>     the
>     Body and such (a term incidentally that Pynchon likes). Marx didn't
>     figure very heavily at all in LAD despite the fact that its subtitle
>     included the word "history" (equal billing with the word
>     "psychoanalytical").  Brown just wasn't  historically inclined. If a
>     thinker is as radical and sui generis as the one Brown started out
>     as,
>     and turned further into with successive books, he has little
>     choice but
>     to argue vertically. He has few if any peers.
>
>     I think that's what I would say, though I may not remember much of
>     the
>     detail of the books. I did read the first two once a long time ago.
>
>