Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture
Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.
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Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual. Theological Studies This is a work of breath-taking scope and reach. ...impressive command of sources and penetrating vision....
AcknowledgementsIntroductionIThe Ancient World1Eros and Thanatos, Change and Loss in the Ancient World32'All Words Fail through Weariness': Ecclesiastes363Escaping Desire: Christianity, Gnosticism and Buddhism43IIMutability, Melancholy and Quest: The Renaissance4Fatal Confusions: Sex and Death in Early Modern Culture595'Death's Incessant Motion'716Death and Identity847'Desire is Death': Shakespeare102IIISocial Death8The Denial of Death?1199Degeneration and Dissidence12810Between Degeneration and the Death Drive: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness145IVModernity and Philosophy: The Authenticity of Nothingness11The Philosophical Embrace of Death: Hegel15312Heidegger, Kojeve and Sartre161VThe Desire not to be: Late Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis13Dying as the Real Aim of Life: Schopenhauer17314Freud: Life as a Detour to Death180VIRenouncing Death15The Philosophy of Praxis and Emancipation: Feuerbach, Marx, Marcuse201VIIThe Aesthetics of Energy16Fighting Decadence: Nietzsche against Schopenhauer and Wagner23117Ecstasy and Annihilation: Georges Bataille24918In Search of Potency: D. H. Lawrence258VIIIDeath and the Homoerotic19Wrecked by Desire: Thomas Mann27520Promiscuity and Death29421The Wonder of the Pleasure312NotesBibliographyIndex
\ London Review of Books...an impressively versatile survey... Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a boldly transhistorical book from one who would lay claim to the title of cultural materialist.\ \ \ \ \ Theological StudiesThis is a work of breath-taking scope and reach. ...impressive command of sources and penetrating vision....\ \ \ Publishers WeeklyIn his prodigiously intelligent, deeply challenging and ultimately rewarding book, Dollimore (Sexual Dissidence) argues that the death/desire dynamic, while banefully associated in recent times with AIDS, is not a new or alternate phenomenon but was crucial in the formation of Western culture. In chapter after chapter, inspired, finely honed analysis of canonical works of philosophy, fiction, drama and more shows how early civilization's ambiguous ideas about death repeat themselves and shape gender and identity. In the Renaissance, for example, death was fused with desire via the concept of mutability and its inherent paradox. To put it simply, if man loves most what is fleeting (especially beauty, which will eventually fade), then will his desire always be unfulfilled. Similarly, Socrates, accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, willingly takes the poison that kills him and his cravings while "the sun is still on the mountains," putting a strange twist to Seneca's carpe diem. Since Dollimore's analysis is structured by intellectual trends rather than by era, there is a dizzying effecthere, and one begins to wonder what kind of "non-specialist" reader the author has in mind, particularly given the density of many of the thinkers he takes on. Yet his hopeful conclusion works toward a way out of the death/desire rubric with convincing passion. (Oct.)\ \
