Fraternal Forms and Forest Figures: Politics and Metapolitics in the Thought of Norman O. Brown

Abstract

This essay explores Norman O. Brown's conception of politics and metapolitics. Brown describes politics via Freud's family romance, as a sphere of conflict between fathers and sons. The first part of the argument focuses on Brown's notion of the fraternal—collectivities organized via metaphorical extensions of brotherhood—as a central, underemphasized, and socially ambiguous aspect of his understanding of politics. The second part discusses Brown's use of figures drawn from ecological or environmental spaces, in particular trees and forests, to outline a notion of metapolitics, even while he also critiques conventional connections between the natural world and motherhood as still beholden to familial frameworks. The essay closes by arguing that Brown's forest imagery combines functional competent stewardship with playful wilderness pleasure, aiming to articulate forms of collective life that transcend Oedipal drama.