One Utah

So I have to fess up that I’m having a weird case of bloggers block this week. I have lots of ideas and I work on them for a while but end up deleting them.

So here’s a thought to chew on, from Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body:

Locke suggests that the fraternity is formed not by birth but by election, by contract; Plato’s fraternity based on the division of labor excludes the family; Durkehim’s organic solidarity is the opposite of kinship. This brotherhood is not made inside the family, nor by the father; is not born of the flesh, but of the spirit; is not natural, but artificial. Rousseau would say it is based on will; in the vocabulary of Freud’s Totem and Taboo it is totemic brotherhood. In totemic brotherhood the bond which unites the brothers is not family relationship or blood kinship. The totem clan is defined by a peculiar relation to its particular totem animal, plant, or object; by virtue of which they are of one body, and have one common totem ancestor. The body is mystical, and the ancestor mythical . . .

Conventional Anglo-Saxon political theory, dismissing Nazism as an irrelevant aberration, a lunatic episode, in the history of the west, is all patriarchal . . . Freud directs us to the idea that the true, the only contrary of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.

This entry was posted Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under American History, American People. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.