Desire and Fate - by David Rieff (Paperback)

About the Book

Brilliant and unsparing essays on the blind spots and maladies of contemporary culture.

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

This book is a rare, breathtaking instance of an exquisite moral imagination in full flight.--Lee Siegel "The New Statesman"

A dazzling, ferocious, and funny attack on the prevailing conformism of the academic-cultural-philanthropic complex.--Michael Ignatieff

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

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

Further praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Important and thought-provoking

--Christopher Kissane "Irish Times"

Further praise for Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir

[Characterized by] unflinching honesty

--Julia Neuberger "Jewish Chronicle"

Praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Painfully relevant [...] [a] rich book

--New York Times "Gary K. Bass"

Praise for Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir:

An eloquent record of grief

--New York Review of Books "Diane Johnson and John F. Murray"

About the Author

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)