Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture

417 Pages·2011·19.818 MB·English

by  Jonathan Dollimore

Death, Desire and Loss
in Western Culture
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the
Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Political Shakespeare
(editor, with Alan Sinfield)
Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
J O N A T H AN D O L L I M O RE
Death, Desire and Loss
in Western Culture
This edition published 2011 by Routledge:
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park
New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
Published in the United States in 1998 by Routledge
29 West 35 Street, New York, NY IOOOI
www.routledge-ny.com
Published by arrangement with Allen Lane, The Penguin Press,
Penguin Books Ltd., 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England
Copyright © Jonathan Dollimore, 1998
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner
and the above publisher of this book
Set in 11/14 pt PostScript Monotype Sabon
typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds Suffolk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-415-92.174-0
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
I T HE A N C I E NT W O R LD
1 Eros and Thanatos, Change and Loss in the Ancient World 3
2 'All Words Fail through Weariness': Ecclesiastes 36
3 Escaping Desire: Christianity, Gnosticism and Buddhism 43
II M U T A B I L I T Y, M E L A N C H O LY A ND
QUEST: T HE R E N A I S S A N CE
4 Fatal Confusions: Sex and Death in Early Modern Culture 59
5 'Death's Incessant Motion' 71
6 Death and Identity 84
7 'Desire is Death': Shakespeare 102
III SOCIAL D E A TH
8 The Denial of Death? 119
9 Degeneration and Dissidence 128
10 Between Degeneration and the Death Drive: Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness 145
IV M O D E R N I TY A ND P H I L O S O P H Y:
T HE A U T H E N T I C I TY OF N O T H I N G N E SS
11 The Philosophical Embrace of Death: Hegel 153
12 Heidegger, Kojeve and Sartre 161
CONTENTS
V T HE DESIRE N OT TO BE: LATE M E T A P H Y S I CS
A ND P S Y C H O A N A L Y S IS
13 Dying as the Real Aim of Life: Schopenhauer 173
14 Freud: Life as a Detour to Death 180
VI R E N O U N C I NG D E A TH
15 The Philosophy of Praxis and Emancipation: Feuerbach,
Marx, Marcuse 201
VII T HE A E S T H E T I CS OF E N E R GY
16 Fighting Decadence: Nietzsche against Schopenhauer and
Wagner 231
17 Ecstasy and Annihilation: Georges Bataille 249
18 In Search of Potency: D. H. Lawrence 258
VIII D E A TH A ND T HE H O M O E R O T IC
19 Wrecked by Desire: Thomas Mann 275
20 Promiscuity and Death 294
21 The Wonder of the Pleasure 312
Notes 329
Bibliography 360
Index 381
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Percival Mars, who changed me, to Alan Sinfield
and Rachel Bowlby for changing me some more. And to Helena
Dollimore for her wit and for keeping me half honest.
Others deserving of thanks include Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Clark,
Laura Chrisman, Bob Davenport, Margretta de Grazia, Rodney
Hillman, Tony Inglis, Richard King, Penny McCarthy, Charles
Martindale, Peter Osborne, William Outhwaite, Peter Stallybrass,
Kate Soper, Ted Timms, Cedric Watts. I am very grateful to the
Humanities Research Board of the British Academy for the grant
which made the time to write some of this book.
For permission to reprint copyright material, the author and publishers
gratefully acknowledge as follows:
For The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, i88y-
1904, translated by J M Masson, copyright 1985 to J M Masson and
Sigmund Freud Copyright Ltd, reprinted by permission of Harvard
University Press; for Collected Poems, C P Cavafy, (1990) to Chatto
&C Windus on behalf of C P Cavafy; for Thomas Mann: Diaries
1918-1939, Ed R & C Winston, (1983) to Andre Deutsch Ltd; for
'Our Shadows' by Alan Brayne in Take Any Train ed. Peter Daniels
(1991) to Peter Daniels, The Oscars Press; for 'The Second Coming'
and 'Supernatural Songs, VIII' from The Collected Poems ofW. B.
Yeats (1971) to A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael Yeats; for 'Death
in Venice' from Selected Stories by Thomas Mann (1988) to Martin
Seeker & Warburg; for Letters 1889—1955 by Thomas Mann (1970)
to Martin Seeker & Warburg; for extracts from "On Sexuality" from
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
"On the Universal Tendency", "On Metapsychology", "Beyond the
Pleasure Principle", "Why War?", "Civilisation and its Discontents",
and "Civilisation, Society and Religion" from The Standard Edition
of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud translated and edited
by James Strachey to Sigmund Freud Copyrights, The Institute of
Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press; for 'Burnt Norton', in Tour
Quartets', Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot (1944) to Faber
and Faber; for 'Lullaby' in Collected Poems by W. H. Auden (1944)
to Faber and Faber.
Every effort has been made to contact or trace copyright holders. The
publishers would be grateful to be notified of any additions that should
be incorporated in the next edition of this volume.
Introduction
Hugo, the protagonist of Oscar Moore's 1991 novel A Matter of Life
and Sex, initially promises to be the horny adolescent so desirable in
modern culture: knowing and streetwise, yet innocently narcissistic
too — the 'sassy street urchin who knew what he wanted and wanted
it now'; the 'flouting, flaunting rudeboy' who doesn't come into tissues,
preferring instead 'to see his sperm fly'. Full of life, and the more so
for being wildly dissident. But in this narrative he is also the boy who
courts death through sex and who dies of AIDS. Eventually, in the
midst of anarchic sexual yearning in a Paris bathhouse, death is
entertained with a strange calm amid the desperate urgency of it all.
'With sex choking his throat and thumping against his chest', Hugo
throws himself
into the clinch of sex with the smile of one preparing his last fix. There, in
the stream of sweat and hallucination of amyl... as the man's penis swelled
and loomed . . . and Hugo's mouth and eyes drooled in one gasping hunger,
a quiet voice whispered - this could be the boy that kills you. And a quiet
voice answered back - so then, this is the way to die. (pp. 29, 39, 116, 49,
Compare that with a reviewer of James Miller's controversial 1993
biography of Michel Foucault, whom some regard as the most signifi
cant philosopher of the late twentieth century:
In the autumn of 1983, after he had already collapsed and less than a year
before his own death, [Foucault] could still be found in the baths and bars.
He laughed at talk of 'safe-sex' and reportedly said [to D. A. Miller] 'to die
for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful?' (Lilla, p. 4)
ix