My friend Marcuse1 and I: Romulus and Remus quarreling; which of them is the real “revolutionary.”
He will not see the recurrence in revolution. Revolution is not a slate wiped clean, but a revolving cycle (Love’s Body, p. 204). Even newness is renewal. As it was in the beginning. The idea of progress is in question; the reality of Marx cannot hide the reality of Nietzsche. The thing is to change the world; but it is also true that everything remains always the same. The assignment then is (to put it simply) the simultaneous affirmation and rejection of what is; not in a system, as in Hegel, but in an instant, as in poetry.
There is eternal recurrence; there are “eternal objects” (Whitehead); archetypes. This is a hard lesson. There is a sense in which war cannot be abolished (Love’s Body, p. 182). Or, there is an eternal object of which literal war is a false image, or inadequate idea. The thing to be abolished is literalism; the worship of false images; idolatry. Allen Ginsberg saw it just the way it is: Moloch. A false idol fed with real victims. This is no joke. (Nor is fire; Heraclitean fire.)
Idolatry is fetishism, mystification; demystification would be an end to idolatry. But an end to idolatry is not so easy (Love’s Body, p. 114). It is not the abolition of the temple, but the discovery of the true temple: Love’s body. Karl Barth saw religion as idolatry; Karl Marx saw religion as the heart of a heartless world. The Sacred Heart. The thing is not to excise the heart but to put it where it belongs. The real atheism is to become divine. In a dialectical view, atheism becomes theurgy, god-making; demystification becomes the discovery of a new mystery; and everything remains the same.
There is another sense in which mystification must be affirmed. We have to surpass the Enlightenment notion that in the life of the species or of the individual there is a definitive change-over from darkness to light. Light is always light in darkness; that is what the unconscious is all about (Love’s Body, p. 216). Nor can the light become a current, always turned on, in ordinary prosaic language. Truth is always in poetic form; not literal but symbolic; hiding, or veiled; light in darkness. Yes, mysterious. Literalism is idolatry of words; the alternative to idolatry is mystery. And literalism reifies, makes out of everything things, these tables and chairs, commodities. The alternative to reification is mystification (Love’s Body, p. 234). The world is actually not a collection of commodities;
When silence
Blooms in the house, all the para-
phernalia of our existence
Shed the twitterings of value and
reappear as heraldic devices.—Robert Duncan
Heraldic devices: airplanes as penis symbols rather than “modern conveniences.” One of the eternal verities is the human body as the measure of all things, including technology. The businessman does not have the last word; the real meaning of technology is its hidden relation to the human body; a symbolical or mystical relation.
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With the whole world still in the bourgeois stage of competitive development and war, the thing to remember about Marx is that he was able to look beyond this world to another possible world, of union, communion, communism. What needs to be reiterated is not reassurance to the bourgeois that he will be able to carry his little old Self, Person, and Property into that world, but that the kingdom of heaven on earth is possible; and that other world, the negation of this jungle, cannot possibly be anything except Communitas. A higher form of chaos; instead of confusion, fusion (Love’s Body, pp. 248, 253).
And, after Freud, we have to add that there is also a sexual revolution; which is not to be found in the bourgeois cycle of repression and promiscuity, but in a transformation of the human body, an abolition of genital organization. Indeed, Love’s Body shows that genital organization is the same thing as Self, Person, Property; and, therefore, the abolition of genital organization, foretold by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, turns out to mean what Marcuse calls the impossible unity and union of everything.
Yes, indeed, there was a God that failed; that mortal God, the great Leviathan; or Moloch; discovered to be not only mortal but also dead, an idol. From literalism to symbolism; the lesson of my life. The next generation needs to be told that the real fight is not the political fight, but to put an end to politics. From politics to meta-politics.
From politics to poetry. Legislation is not politics, nor philosophy, but poetry. Poetry, art, is not an epiphenomenal reflection of some other (political, economic) realm which is the “real thing”; nor a still contemplation of something else which is the “real action”; nor a sublimation of something else which is the “real,” carnal “act.” Poetry, art, imagination, the creator spirit is life itself; the real revolutionary power to change the world; and to change the human body. To change the human body: here is the crisis, hic Rhodus, hic salta; which, as Hegel said, is to be translated “here is the Rose, here begin to dance.” To begin to dance; who can tell the dancer from the dance; it is the impossible unity and union of everything.
From politics to life. And therefore revolution as creation; resurrection; renaissance instead of progress. To perceive in all human culture the hidden reality of the human body. This is to discover as Freud did, the Holy Communion as the basis of community; the Eucharist; the cannibalism, the hidden eating; one of the forms of which is war—making children pass through the fire unto Moloch. Go to the end of the road and that is what you will find. And so the God is not Freud’s God Logos, abstract or disembodied Reason, but the Human Form Divine. And the language is the language not of reason but of love. Reason is power; powerful arguments; power-politics; Realpolitik; reality-principle. Love comes emptyhanded (Love’s Body, p. 237); the eternal proletariat; like Cordelia, bringing Nothing.
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1 Mr. Brown is here replying to Herbert Marcuse’s essay, “Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown,” which appeared in our February issue—Ed.
