Philip Rieff: defender or enemy of our culture?

The noted sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, recently passed away, and an article by Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times sums up the bracingly conservative-sounding views Rieff articulated in his later years:

An imaginative if dyspectic critic, Dr. Rieff withdrew from publishing for 26 years, breaking his silence this year with “Life Among the Deathworks,” which he dedicated to Susan Sontag, the essayist and cultural critic from whom he was acrimoniously divorced in the late 1950s.

Dr. Rieff defined a “deathwork” as a work of art that presents “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” His examples included James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake” and a sexually explicit self-portrait by the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He cites Freud’s theories as an extended deathwork that demolished prevailing world views without offering a new cultural order.

He called legalized abortion “an odorless flushaway world indifferent to life,” denounced gay rights as “a movement of hate and indifference” and dismissed popular music for being dominated by the “black underclass in America.”

He said the solution to all these cultural problems was “inactivism.” People of good will should stifle their best impulses because, he said, they will “do less damage that way.”

It is a rare critic who gets down to essentials and identifies leading cultural works and trends of our times as “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” It makes Rieff, the one-time husband of Susan Sontag and the father of journalist David Rieff, sound like a genuine traditionalist conservative and a defender of our civilization. Unfortunately, Rieff also wrote this:

I am no advocate of some earlier credal organization. In particular, I have not the slightest affection for the dead church civilization of the West. I am a Jew. No Jew in his right mind can long for some variant of that civilization. Its one enduring quality is its transgressive energy against the Jew of culture…. The gospels were not good news; the ungospelled present has its supremely pleasant feature, the death of the church. [Philip Rieff, “Fellow Teachers,” Salmagundi, no. 20 (Summer-Fall 1972), p. 27; quoted in John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, p. 172].

Now, I don’t know Rieff’s writings. I don’t know whether he later repudiated his all-out attack on Christianity. But, standing by itself, doesn’t this passage perfectly fit Rieff’s own definition of a “deathwork”?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 10, 2006 01:26 PM | Send