From Politics to Metapolitics

I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.

—R. W. Emerson, in Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination

While an undergraduate classics major in the late 1970s, I chatted with a professor and some fellow students about the classicists whose work we admired. When one of my colleagues mentioned, with a mischievous smile, Friedrich Nietzsche, our professor acknowledged with a heavy sigh that, indeed, Nietzsche had been a member of our guild. Feeling encouraged to "push the envelope" a little further, I brought up the name of Norman O. Brown, celebrated author of the psychoanalytical meditations Life Against Death and Love's Body.¹ At the mention of Brown, the professor stiffened her back and observed with a note of disdain, "Yes, Professor Brown is a classicist—but what he does is not what we do." My sotto voce response: "so much the worse for us."

Almost thirty years later, now a trained Islamicist, I spent two weeks in June of 2009 researching the archive of unpublished notes and typescripts that Brown had produced thirty years before during an intense period of study of Islamic history and civilization. Among these archived materials are audio recordings of a series of lectures that Brown gave in 1980-81 at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Tufts. Titled "The Challenge of Islam: the Prophetic Tradition," these lectures were then received as yet another mercurial twist in what was one of the more unusual intellectual careers of any classicist in recent memory. But that was the "Nobby" that friends and colleagues of Brown (who passed away in late 2002) cherished. It was no accident that his first full-length book had been a study of the god Hermes, trickster and thief.²

"The Challenge of Islam" was the fruit of a rigorous program of study that Brown undertook as a consequence of two signal events: one world-historical, the other professional, but also quite personal. The world-historical event was the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. Judging from remarks repeated in his archived notes and commentary, the personal moment occurred with the response of Brown's old friend, Herbert Marcuse, to the "mystical turn" he had taken in his 1966 book, Love's Body. In February 1967, Marcuse published a critical review of Love's Body ("Love Mystified") in the journal Commentary.³ Always gracious to his critics—especially to those he loved—Brown took Marcuse's somewhat exasperated review to heart. He penned a brief reply (published in Commentary the following month), but the controversy did not end there.⁴ Not for Brown anyway. For Marcuse had dared to publicly question Brown's commitment to revolutionary politics; and that cut Brown—who had worn his Marxism on his sleeve for decades—close to the bone. He turned his attention to other matters and wrote another book (Closing Time, 1973), but he continued to brood silently on Marcuse's remarks. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, a new world was dawning.

The eruption of the popular revolt in Iran against the Western-backed Shah appears to have taken Brown by surprise. He confesses in his notes that he had always been focused upon the history of European civilization and its colonial progeny. But the world, he was well aware, was bigger; and now that surplus was demanding to be placed at the center of his attentions—in a revolutionary way. As he began to educate himself about the events in Tehran, he suddenly found himself face to face with a civilization unimaginably rich in history and tradition; a civilization that, as a classicist, he had been trained to keep at arm's length—to repress, to parry aside as a symbol of material opulence, dissipation, Oriental despotism, barbarism. And yet the images he observed on the daily news were largely those of ordinary people, the proletariat, rising up to overthrow an absolute monarch who had ruled his country through oppressive violence...