Desire and Fate

by David Rieff, John Banville (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912475384
Publisher:	Eris
Publication date:	11/26/2024
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	4.88(w) x 7.68(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Rieff (Author)
David Rieff is one of the United States’s 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 memoirs. 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.

John Banville (Foreword by)

Editorial Reviews

Further praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Important and thought-provoking

Christopher Kissane

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

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

[Characterized by] unflinching honesty

Jewish Chronicle - Julia Neuberger

Praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Painfully relevant […] [a] rich book

Gary K. Bass - New York Times

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

An eloquent record of grief

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