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Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Philip Rieff, A Curious Character… …has died. Exactly like Susan Sontag, to whom he was once married, he was a titanic, uncompromising personality, an almost comically intense intellectual, devoted to doom-laden cultural pronouncements. Although Sontag had a clearer writing style, she never ventured far from the haughty oracular ways of the University of Chicago professor with whom she fell in love when she was a teenager. The conventional reading of these two is that after their passionate intellectual/sexual courtship and marriage, they experienced an archetypal philosophical split, she tearing off in the direction of personal experimentation, avant-gardism, Euro boho whatever; and he clutching up and clinging ever more fiercely to conservative moral pieties. Read Rieff and Sontag with care and you can never buy this. Both (as Camille Paglia, for instance, discerned in Sontag) were always cerebral mandarins, defenders of the best that’s been thought and written, defenders of moral and aesthetic judgment. Equally tending toward the extreme, they both at various points in their lives took absurd political positions. I think, on balance, Rieff’s contribution will prove more lasting. His intellectual influence is already much more powerful. He had greater depth and focus than she, correctly identifying the Freudian legacy as the central catastrophe of modern culture. His extensively elaborated social type, “psychological man,” with his genial, high-functioning vacuity, represents an enormous contribution to our self-knowledge. Rieff’s sensitive analysis of the “up front” society, in which cruel, self-satisfying acting out replaces a thoughtful politics, introduced us to Denice Denton’s tormentors at Santa Cruz long before they were born. |