DESIRE & FATE
Paperback
Extent: 260 pages
Trim: 12.5 x 19.6 cm
ISBN: 9781912475384
Price: $24
David Rieff's Desire and Fate is the most important study of the woke mind I know. Subtle and profound, forensically analytical and sharply aphoristic, it is all the more devastating because it is not a mere polemic. With incisive wit and lightly worn erudition, Rieff shows how woke is not the oppositional movement it claims to be but an expression of the dominant forces in society and the economy. Ranging across the role of identity politics as the latest version of capitalist ideology, the commodification of dissent, the meaning of kitsch and the triumph of the idea of trauma, Desire and Fate illuminates the true sources of the intellectual disorder of our time.
––John Gray, author of The New Leviathans
A wide-ranging, unpredictable, intensely thought-provoking and mordantly witty indictment of our current tendencies towards cultural suicide and capitalism’s role in them. A must-read.
––David A. Bell
A dazzling, ferocious, and funny attack on the prevailing conformism of the academic-cultural-philanthropic complex.
––Michael Ignatieff
“Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.”
At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff’s essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world’s most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression.
The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.
At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff’s essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world’s most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression.
The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.
DAVID RIEFF is one of the United States’ leading authorities on global affairs. Renowned for his reporting from conflict zones and on the work of international humanitarian organisations, his writings have shaped public debate on subjects ranging from liberal interventionism to the use and abuse of historical memory. He is also a widely published commentator on contemporary American culture and the author of an acclaimed volume of memoir. His many books include At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century, and In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.