Product Description

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war . . . that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4464 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .60 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The final volume in intellectual guru Brown's trilogy of mystical philosophy, following Life Against Death and Love's Body .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Like H.G. Wells, Brown finds "mind . . . at the end of its tether." We are all more or less mad, but there are better and worse insanities, and the best is a kind of Dionysian ecstasy that will lead us to give ourselves to others and the world. Written over 30 years, these essays chronicle Brown's path from Marx to Freud to Dionysius. His ideas of freedom and ecstasy recall the playfulness of Derrida, but he is closest to George Bataille (see Visions of Excess , Univ. of Minnesota Pr., 1986), and he admits that hard work and suffering are needed. Brown links the creativity he wants to prophetic knowledge that ought to embrace Islamic as well as Judeo-Christian elements. Scientific knowledge won't do: "So called science is the attempt to democratise knowledge, . . . to substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius." He is still looking for the naturally good human being, but perhaps it takes cool reason to keep even good ecstatic Dionysians from colliding. Ordinary readers looking for fun and insight into trendy ideas will, however, find their reward here if they can survive Brown's rush of words and ideas.
- Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"The long-awaited sequel to "Love's Body, "Apocalypse is a biography of the art of thinking. . . Brown employs ideas in such a volatile manner that every reading and re-reading is an act of creation. A book for the ages."--James Duncan, "Washington International Arts Letter