Choral Rieff

The sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff died July 1 at the age of 83. Rieff was once married to Susan Sontag and was the father of her son David Rieff. Rieff père is best known for his books Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, and as the editor of the 10-volume Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud. He was both precursor and peer to such critics of narcissistic, post-traditional culture as Allan Bloom and Christopher Lasch. His new posthumous collection of essays, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations on the Aesthetics of Authority, is, according to Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn in The New Republic, a dense and difficult but rewarding read. You might just want to skip the book and read her essay (it may require a free trial subscription), which distills the essence of Rieff's ideas, his belief that only culture and religion can save us from the solipsism and ultimately the nihilism of our own desires. Some excerpts:

Forever anxious and insecure, psychological man eschews political and religious commitments, and even economic calculation, for an obsession with self that is unprecedented in human history. He is "anti-heroic, shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided." Driven by the "ideal of insight" and "self-contemplative manipulation," his interest resides only in himself.

* * *

[T]he Triumph of the Therapeutic was a study of the Freudian aftermath, of Freudianism as a kind of civil religion--of how the breakdown of reticence, convention, and social distance had promoted the treatment hour into an emblem of society at large, as everyone learned to live like analysands and analysts. [ ... ]

If it is now widely understood that the terms by which Americans live their lives have everything to do with this therapeutic sensibility, much of the credit goes to Rieff's pioneering work. His investigations helped to inaugurate a new tradition of social criticism [ ... ]. Rieff's work was one of the first sustained efforts to make sense of the transition from a culture based on faith to a culture based on therapy.

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[Rieff] believes that in America transgression has now replaced creation as a cultural ideal; that creativity in our time has more to do with the urge to destroy. [ ... ] Art gave way over the course of the twentieth century to transgression for transgression's sake. [ ... ]

A pretense of creativity hides a practice of destruction [ ... ] Human beings are experienced only as objects in the self's quest for gratification, and eventually are turned into trash. [ ... ] The destruction of boundaries prepares the ground, Rieff insists, for an erotics of destruction. Without legitimate limits on desire, aggressive impulses often take over.

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And to me, the three most striking:

That a way of life devoted to the freeing of the individual actually deprives people of the sources of freedom of self-creation, which is a moral endeavor, is the bitter irony of our age.

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Rather than a benign lifestyle choice, Rieff sees culture as highly serious, "the continuation of war by other--normative--means."

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Rieff believes that we need fewer "scourges" and more "sacred messengers," such as Lincoln, who remind us of what is hallowed in our social order. Can a society really function without a sense of the sacred?

Comments

[Walrus]

I am impressed. His comment about transgression supplanting creation as a cultural ideal is earth-shaking and so very, very true. Depressing too.

[realpc]

Isn't that what the religious Right and Muslim radicals have been reacting against?

Recent history is about the freeing of the individual from bonds of class, race and ethnic group. We have been freed from ritual and family obligations, and now we're alienated and isolated.

Having your mother-in-law move in, having to be in church every Sunday, marrying within your religion, following in your father's footsteps -- our modern secular society liberated us from all of that.

But nothing is free, not even freedom.

We're torn between the lure of freedom and progress, and our needs for community, faith and ritual.

This is the drama we are now experiencing in the world and in our internal politics.

[amba]

Going back is a failure of nerve.

Going forward is a step into the void.

This is the koan or dilemma we're living right now.

[amba]

Going back is a failure of nerve.

Going forward is a step into the void.

This is the koan or dilemma we're living right now.

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Beautiful, important thoughts and cogent comments. And the title of your post! Hmm...

Among the comments, I'd like to qualify Realpc's "Recent history is about the freeing of the individual from bonds of class, race and ethnic group." I think that was true in an earlier generation. Unfortunately, in the most recent generation the academic left has been trying to re-enslave people to those bonds, providing that the bonds are to a non-hegemonic Other.

[karen]

He must have been a really cool man, amba. I'm ashamed to have never heard of him and i really try to ignore much of Freud(how ignorant am i, really??? :0)) because he kinda freaks me out. As more input to my ignorance, i'm kinda freaked about the Book of Revelations, too (hehehe she twitters nervously).

I wonder if, in all his knowledge of Freud- Rieff is the anti- Freud? As i understand Freud(very limited and fearfully)- he liked to cross boundries and push up against the good fences of his neighbours- am i mistaken?

What nationality is/was Rieff?