THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks by Philip Rieff (University of Virginia, 234 pp., $34.95). Philip Rieff, the hermitic sociologist whose...
...In dissecting the implications of the analytic attitude driving socio-psychology, Rieff aims over people's heads...
...Jesus appears in Michelangelo's marble and Serrano's urine...
...Joining technological and artistic elites in the creation of deathworks—Rieff's term for "all-out" assaults "upon something vital to the established culture"—our cultural guardians are now foes of the very principle of guardianship, dedicated to the negation of authority and the erection of an "anti-culture" as "all-consuming" as it is "godless...
...By putting the stakes of the present struggle in those terms, Rieff is one of the most important philosophers in America...
...Death-works is by far his most user-friendly book: This is, literally, Rieff with pictures...
...Rieff calls this his "first law of sociology...
...Rieff's obscurity, however, is now more personal than intellectual...
...When his work intersected with more popular topics, crossing over did not make him more pedestrian...
...The reader is shown what he is told—deathworks by Picasso, Duchamp, Mapplethorpe...
...As the ivory tower was once a primary source of culture, it is now a primary source of culture's death...
...Our task is simple (not easy): to stop the rot...
...It is not an easy read, nor is it supposed to be...
...The war in which Rieff enlists rages "between those who assert that there are no truths, only readings, that is, fictions (which assume the very ephemeral status of truth for negational purposes) and what is left of . . . elites in the priesthood, rabbinate, and other teaching/directive elites dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in the light of the particular historical circumstance in which we live...
...Before he fled to privacy, Rieff dazzled...
...They made him an intellectual alien to both the academy and America at large...
...His enemy is those who kill the authority of permanent things and reanimate the murdered with endless fictions...
...Anyone at all concerned with joining him—and to oppose him is to join the anti-culture—must read this book...
...Rieff measures a cultural parabola, teaching by aesthetic parables: of our movement from the first point of primitive primordialism ("fate") to the heights of civilized "second culture" ("faith") to the new low of the anti-culture ("fiction...
...The atomiza-tion of society into a rabble of radical individualists has been followed by its real objective: the atomization of individuals themselves...
...Philip Rieff, the hermitic sociologist whose last proper book, Fellow Teachers, appeared in 1973, has returned...
...His clearest writing comes on obtuse ideas—topics like the competing contradictions of Freudian and Jungian therapy...
...This is no hyperbole...
...James Poulos...
...In his urgent journey, Rieff is more personal, more direct, and more ontological than ever before...
...Rieff describes in merciless terms how this mission must terminate in death—the untimely death of truth as well as human souls...
...We have moved from a civilization that sculpts with marble to one that prefers playing with marbles...
...Rieff is notoriously dense...
...Rieff is urgent for a reason...
...These knights of the living dead come under direct attack in Volume II of Sacred Order/Social Order, The Crises of the Officer Class: "The rot starts at the top, always...
...He lectured around the world (once with a cardinal named Ratzinger), showed up in other people's novels, and received the best fellowships...
...Rieff's "image entries" are helpful—vital—"sorties into an otherwise invisible sacred order that is inseparable from our lives in social order...
...His diagnoses of cultural decline, including The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), belong in the pantheon of conservative writing...
...He has grasped with both hands the most important problem facing Western civilization and throttles it into submission...
...Culture is work...
...Step one is our timely apprehension of this remarkable mind's remarkable new lifework...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 30
