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. The writings collected in Desire and Fate cover 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, however, by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking; together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.
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Brilliant and unsparing essays on the blind spots and maladies of contemporary culture.
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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781912475384
Publisert
2024-11-26
Utgiver
Vendor
ERIS
Høyde
195 mm
Bredde
124 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
100
Forfatter
Foreword by
Om bidragsyterne
David Rieff (Author)David Rieff is a journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and policy analyst. Beginning in the 1990s, he has reported on wars and humanitarian crises from Bosnia through Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq and Afghanistan, to Ukraine today. In books including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, and The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century, Rieff anatomized the liberal pieties of our age: humanitarian action, the human rights movement, and the United Nations system. He has also written on international migration, contemporary Latin America, and, most recently, on the uses and abuses of historical memory in his book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies.
John Banville (Foreword by)