Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks (Sacred Order / Social Order) | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Rieff
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $21.88
You Save: $13.07 (37%)
New (19) Used (11) from $19.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 311925
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 234
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0813925169
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.09182109045
EAN: 9780813925165
ASIN: 0813925169
Publication Date: March 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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 donnes 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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Philip Rieff's "My Life among the Deathworks" September 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I started reading this book but found that I could not easily tolerate
Rieff's opaque and turgid prose. He undoubtedly has interesting thoughts and valuable insights into past and present societies, but he should bear in mind the adage that good prose should be a windowpane (I think this was George Orwell's metaphor). His manner of writing contrasts most unfavourably with the clarity of (for example) Roger Scruton, another contemporary observer of society and culture. On almost every page of Rieff's book you will find examples of what I mean: thus on page 149, discussing Freud's works, he says:
"Freud's ingenious repressions of revelation serve continuously, and in
an intensely stipulative manner, against admitting sacred order back into a modern consciousness pregnant from the father of these repressions. The revelational father unacknowledged, except as "primal repression", modern sensibility has been achieved at the cost of a critical insensibility."
(The expression "primal repression" is actually in italics, but I can't print italics in this review).
Rieff would surely agree with me that the road to profundity should not pass through obscurity. Obscurity is, after all, a good hiding place for vacuity.
 Cultural Wars April 28, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This work develops themes Rieff introduced in his justifiably classic book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. According to the book's implicit dramatic structure, there is an on-going war between a third, therapeutic, cultural world and the second cultural world it seeks to replace. The third cultural world is unique in human history because it tries to maintain itself without connection to a sacred and commanding order. Rieff presents example after example of cultural, artistic, and historical "deathworks" that undermine the commanding authority and truths exhibited by second cultural worlds. The contrasts that Rieff establishes between third and second cultural worlds are familiar to similar contrasts that others have drawn between modernity and post-modernity: knowledge, authority and truth are superseded by functionality, choice and supreme fictions
Five comments:
1. Rieff's book does not present an argument in the conventional sense. It does not progress from premise to evidence to conclusion but goes from one example or image to another in a way that is more reminiscent of a novel than a thesis. The book ends rather than concludes. The concrete nature of the illustrative examples in this book makes an abstract summary both difficult and superfluous.
2. Ironically, the structure of the book and its style - filled as it is with indirection, allusions and word play - reflect the third cultural world more than the second cultural world Rieff defends. It's doubtful whether adopting the style of one's opponent is ever a successful strategy.
3. Rieff says that he is going to describe a 3-part typology of social history, prosaically identified as first, second, and third cultural worlds. While the description and contrast between the second and third cultural worlds is thorough to the point of being repetitive, he largely neglects to develop the characteristics and functions of the first cultural world of myth. To me this is a major and telling omission.
4. Rieff's critique of third world culture lacks balance without explaining the positive aspects of third world culture or the short comings of second world culture. If the third world culture is so bad, why did it emerge?
5. Finally, Rieff does not offer a resolution to the war between second and third world cultures. As a result, it is unclear whether Rieff thinks that the war is endless, necessary, inevitable, or a prelude to a fourth cultural world. Is he saying that we should return to the second cultural world he defends? I don't think so, nor do I think that such a return would be either possible or advisable. However entertaining the book may be, it fails in not suggesting an answer to the questions: what next or so what?
For an examination of cultural wars from a more philosophical perspective, see The Search for Meaning: A Short History.
Decline of the West, Part 93482 December 19, 2007
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
There is nothing new here: The world is going to hell, the sky is falling because of the Godless Liberal Elites, etc. Right-wing OpEd cliches dressed-up in fancy mid-20th century existentialist lingo.
But dayam, if he isn't a hypnotic master of that lingo, spinning webs of webs of webs of secret code. I just wish there were any point to cracking it, when i already know what the take-home message is (see above.) Rieff spends a huge amount of sophisticated learning in the service of an extremely crude point. (He calls this technique the "feeling intellect".) Maybe he was being too sophisticated/decadent for his own good. (He was married to Susan Sontag once - those Baal-worshipping wives can indeed corrupt the King!!)
I would say listen to Laura Ingraham instead, but the heady admixture mixture of preening Jewish narcissism puts it more in the Commentary magazine camp. My point: lower brow sources cut to the chase faster. Otherwise, read Durkheim or take an Art History course and make up your own mind.
(Added a star for including pictures of the works discussed, though I'm not sure I needed to see Mapplethorpe's rectum. I must not have the stomach for Decline, but my godless decadent sophisticate curiosity always made me wonder what that famous photograph really looked like - and Rieff was more than happy to indulge my idle devil. Ah... he truly was corrupted himself! )
 via Rieff October 27, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
A few notes on the experience of reading this book. It is akin to reading similar idiosyncratic works such as "The Twilight of the Idols" by Nietzsche. Rieff creates his own thought world- his own metaphysic- which is his cultural battle against what he calls the "Third World", which is, essentially, modernity. Why he does not call it the Modern World is unclear, as is why he calls the Pagan world "The First World", or the Medieval up to pre-modern times "The Second World". He clearly has preferences for the Second World Culture, as he continually drives at the phrase- among others of his own creation- in order to attempt certain illuminating points about the woes of the Third World "Deathworks". It is all very edifying, if you can follow the argument, which is not so much an illumination in any Historical Critical sense, as much as a more purely literary critical endevor to create a kind of preliminary metaphysics in his form of "fighting before the firing begins". There are many salvageable epigrams of this sort sprinkled through his text.
Ultimately, he suceeds in a kind of personal war against the Modern age. But so what? If it were not for the breadth of his knowledge and insight, we would not be so tolerable of his somewhat rigid ontology. One thinks, is it really possible for modernity to be without any redeeming qualities? Has he covered anything that Mumford or Richard Weaver have not?
The method employed is reminiscent of those phenomenologists in the first half of the previous century who attempted to help the soul escape from mechanization by using concepts born of mechanistic psychology. Here he uses the modern scattershot critical approach, and in the truly most illuminating-and weak- statements in his text, just asks us to indulge our credibility and bear witness. Thusly,"The method employed here is similar to biopsy: cut a slice from the whirling contemporaneity and hold it under the microscope so to see more clearly. Those slices can then be bounced off others, like billiard shots. I call that method the 'bricole technique', in which each shot, each juxtaposition, enables the reader to see the meaning of and in contemporary reality". If that is enough for you to go on, then you can proceed, but many will look for more in that what follows points to lofty revelations spoken in a prophetic style. Theory envelopes theory and soon we are in what Frederick Crews call "The Big House of Theory". Years from now one will discover this book , or soon to be Trilogy, on the shelves of second-hand bookshops just as one now finds old copies of odd books like "Sartor Resartus". And, one will likewise attempt to penetrate its oddities, though one will come away- perchance- feeling a bit more grim due to its total lack of levity. This is much like the works of "Third World" post-modern critics in its absolutist pose. None-the-less, it is hard to ignore such a salvo from one of our premier critics of the Modern Age.
 A Great Literary Achievement May 3, 2006
57 out of 62 found this review helpful
This is one of the best books I've read in over 40 years of being a Common Reader. My enthusiasm for it doubtless colors my review, but even with my cheerleading, there still must be a lot of there, there.
If you have not read widely and thought a lot about that reading, you probably will not enjoy or appreciate this book. And, chances are, that if you are a widely read person, you still probably wouldn't like this book. Philip Rieff draws upon a lifetime of reading and reflection from sources as diverse as the Bible, Freud, Nietzsche, Joyce, postmodernists, and images from art (Michaelangelo to Duchamp) and film (Kind Hearts and Coronets to Zelig) and develops three cultures (fate, faith, and fiction) as means of understanding life and text. As someone who lived through the postmodern temper tantrum at the university, I am amazed at Rieff's accomplishment. His work takes the wild, destructive postmodern methods and puts them in a small bottle for anyone's consideration.
I further suspect that you would like this book the stronger your faith in God. And that is a very weird outcome for a literary approach. Thomas Aquinas would probably like this book. So would Plato. Derrida, Foucault, and the postmoderns would not. Let me put this another way. Rieff's approach allows a well educated reader to also be faithful to God. Postmoderns think that this is impossible.
At the end: God was never dead.
Philip Rieff is amazing and this is a great book.
|
|
|
