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My Life Among the Deathworks (Sacred Order / Social Order)
by: Philip Rieff
Product Information
Condition: New
Binding: Hardcover
Author: Philip Rieff
Publisher: University of Virginia Press (March 2006)
ISBN: 0813925169
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With 'My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority,' the renowned cultural theorist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff inaugurates a trilogy that signals the summation of his scholarly lifework. With this series, 'Sacred Order/Social Order,' to be published in consecutive volumes, Rieff both continues and supersedes the lines of thought that characterize the earlier, influential works upon which his reputation was forged. Readers familiar with Rieff's distinctive oeuvre will recognize central themes and find final recitations on the cultural impact of Freud and his creation 'psychological man' or 'the therapeutic,' which Rieff here renames the 'new man.' Whether conversant with Rieff's work or new to its unique interpretive power, readers of 'Sacred Order/Social Order' will discover a series of provocative insights, illuminated by Rieff's wide-ranging expositions, theoretical advances, and stylistic innovations. In this first volume, Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations and unique juxtapositions, he displays remarkable erudition in drawing from such disciplines as sociology, history, literature, poetry, music, plastic arts, and film; he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history. Our modern culture--to Rieff's mind only the 'third' type in western history--is the object of his deepest scrutiny, described here as morally ruinous, death-affirming rather than life-affirming, and representing an unprecedented attempt to create a culture completely devoid of any concept of the sacred. For Rieff, culture represents the 'form of fighting before the firing begins' in a literal life-and-death struggle for a particular type of world-creation. Having concluded in this final phase of his career that there is no neutral ground in this struggle, Rieff takes aim at many of the most significant 'deathworks' in modern literature, art, and history--from Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' and Duchamp's Etant donnés to Hitler's death camps--in an attempt to undo them by using them against themselves. In so doing, he seeks to show the reader what really animates, and is ultimately at stake, in the contemporary 'culture wars' raging over such issues as euthanasia, education, medical research, sexuality, race, class, and gender.
'Gnomic, allusive, a strange blend of cultural analysis and sermon.' (Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe) 'Rieff is dismissive of feminism, modernism, gay rights, MTV-everything that, since the 1960's, might have been conceived as social progress or cultural innovation in America.' (John Sutherland, The Guardian) 'However - pace conservatives who saw him as an ally in the culture wars - Rieff hated nostalgia for some era in which values and meanings were 'settled' or universally agreed-upon. And he mocked politicos who railed on about 'family values.' 'Whenever I hear the word value,' Rieff would say in class, 'I automatically reach for my wallet.'' (Tirdad Darakhshani, The Philadelphia Inquirer) 'Curious readers will have to contend with Mr. Rieff's prose. Most of it is like chewing ball bearings; every once in a while, there is a cherry. Marching through this book, I considered the possibility that the jawbreakers were deliberate, an ironic invitation to Mr. Rieff's fellow academics: I am as dense as Heidegger-read me. I could only finish the book by murmuring it aloud; I haven't done that since See Spot Run. (Richard Brookhiser, The National Observer) Having issued a clear caveat emptor, we now allow ourselves license to add that Freudian expert (later Freudian debunker) Rieff, forty years ago redefined cultural criticism with his book Triumph of the Therapeutic, and it is just possible that he may do so again with this, the first of a three-volume work completed before his death in 2006. Conceiving world cultures as either rooted in a sacral, transcendent order or rebelling against such, Rieff considers 'deathworks' as monuments of art, literature or philosophy that hammer against traditional societies. He is not shy about sprinkling blunt critiques of these throughout his book. Rieff is an intellectual who has shaped, not followed, interpretive paradigms. His final bequest, after years of publishing silence, deserves careful and critical-or at least curious-attention.
'Gnomic, allusive, a strange blend of cultural analysis and sermon.' (Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe) 'Rieff is dismissive of feminism, modernism, gay rights, MTV-everything that, since the 1960's, might have been conceived as social progress or cultural innovation in America.' (John Sutherland, The Guardian) 'However - pace conservatives who saw him as an ally in the culture wars - Rieff hated nostalgia for some era in which values and meanings were 'settled' or universally agreed-upon. And he mocked politicos who railed on about 'family values.' 'Whenever I hear the word value,' Rieff would say in class, 'I automatically reach for my wallet.'' (Tirdad Darakhshani, The Philadelphia Inquirer) 'Curious readers will have to contend with Mr. Rieff's prose. Most of it is like chewing ball bearings; every once in a while, there is a cherry. Marching through this book, I considered the possibility that the jawbreakers were deliberate, an ironic invitation to Mr. Rieff's fellow academics: I am as dense as Heidegger-read me. I could only finish the book by murmuring it aloud; I haven't done that since See Spot Run. (Richard Brookhiser, The National Observer) Having issued a clear caveat emptor, we now allow ourselves license to add that Freudian expert (later Freudian debunker) Rieff, forty years ago redefined cultural criticism with his book Triumph of the Therapeutic, and it is just possible that he may do so again with this, the first of a three-volume work completed before his death in 2006. Conceiving world cultures as either rooted in a sacral, transcendent order or rebelling against such, Rieff considers 'deathworks' as monuments of art, literature or philosophy that hammer against traditional societies. He is not shy about sprinkling blunt critiques of these throughout his book. Rieff is an intellectual who has shaped, not followed, interpretive paradigms. His final bequest, after years of publishing silence, deserves careful and critical-or at least curious-attention.
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