Brown on Poetry, Dialectical Thinking, Dreams, for BtZ

[Smoke Teff]

This comes in the final pages (318-319) of *Life Against Death*, and is
something I will keep in mind for the BtZ read:

Psychoanalysis, mysticism, poetry, the philosophy of organism, Feuerbach,
and Marx--this is a miscellaneous assemblage; but, as Heraclitus said, the
unseen harmony is stronger than the seen. Common to all of them is a mode
of consciousness that can be called--although the term causes fresh
difficulties--the dialectical imagination. By "dialectical" I mean an
activity of consciousness struggling to circumvent the limitations imposed
by the formal-logical law of contradiction. Marxism, of course, has no
monopoly of "dialectics." Needham has shown the dialectical character of
Whitehead's philosophy, and he constantly draws attention to dialectical
patterns in mystical thought. The goal of Indian body mysticism, according
to Eliade, is the "conjunction of contrarieties" (*coincidentia oppositorum*).
Scholem, in his survey of Jewish mysticism, says, "Mysticism, intent on
formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of
dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only
witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking."

As for poetry, are not those basic poetic devices emphasized by recent
criticism--paradox, ambiguity, irony, tension--devices whereby the poetic
imagination subverts the "reasonableness" of language, the chains it
imposes? [...] And from the psychoanalytical point of view, if we, with
Trilling, accept the substantial identity between poetic logic (with its
symbolism, condensation of meaning, and displacement of accent) and dream
logic, then the connection between poetry and dialectics, as defined, is
more substantially grounded. Dreams are certainly an activity of the mind
struggling to circumvent the formal-logical law of contradiction.

[...]psychoanalysis, either as a body of doctrine or an experience of the
analysand, is no total revelation of the unconscious repressed. The
struggle of consciousness to circumvent the limitations of formal logic, of
language, and of "common sense" is under conditions of general repression
never ending.
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