Poetics of Dead Body: David Cronenberg as Norman's Brown Reader

Abstract

In the present article the philosophical consistence of David Cronenberg’s cinema.is considered His statements and theoretical investigations, devoted to his work, show that for Cronenberg cinema is aesthetical medium, which let him interpret antiessencialistic ontology of life in the contemporary social-historic perspective (1960s – to the present). It becomes possible only in the conversation with the icon figures of XXth century: among others it is Sigmund Freud, Marshall McLuhan and Norman Brown. In the frame of this conversation, science-fiction and psycho-physiological grotesque, which Cronenberg uses in his movies, gets investigative significance, making us to look in a new way on such actual phenomena, like technological and sexual revolutions, mutations, psychic deviations, appearance of internet and virtual reality. This article analyze early movie of Canadian director, called ‘Shivers’(1975), which grounds a foundations of Cronenberg’s creation process, developing in his further films. Author shows, that in ‘Shivers’ Cronenberg works with the image of ‘polymorphous sexuality’, which he takes from philosophy of Norman O. Brown, famous American Freudian and pupil of Herbert Marcuse. For Brown the former is mean of conceptualizing of reunion man with his body and bounded with it eschatological emancipation project. Cronenberg shows that in conditions of hypertechnological milieu this will be seemed like realisation of feminine (maternal) archetype through the physical invasion of ambiguous oral\anal erotic, expressed in new collective body, structured by aggressive sexuality. As well Croneberg disproves Brownian revolutionary pathos, supposing that this collective body can by integrated in middle class society.