ABSTRACT

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.

part |56 pages

The Ancient World

chapter |7 pages

‘All Words Fail through Weariness'

Ecclesiastes

chapter |14 pages

Escaping Desire

Christianity, Gnosticism and Buddhism

part |60 pages

Mutability, Melancholy and Quest

chapter |12 pages

Fatal Confusions

Sex and Death in Early Modern Culture

chapter |18 pages

Death and Identity

chapter |15 pages

‘Desire is Death'

Shakespeare

part |34 pages

Social Death

chapter |9 pages

The Denial of Death?

chapter |17 pages

Degeneration and Dissidence

chapter |6 pages

Between Degeneration and the Death Drive

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

part |20 pages

Modernity and Philosophy

part |157 pages

The Desire Not to Be

chapter |7 pages

Dying as the Real Aim of Life

Schopenhauer

chapter |18 pages

Freud

Life as a Detour to Death

part |29 pages

Renouncing Death

chapter |27 pages

The Philosophy of Praxis and Emancipation

Feuerbach, Marx, Marcuse

part |44 pages

The Aesthetics of Energy

chapter |18 pages

Fighting Décadence

Nietzsche against Schopenhauer and Wagner

chapter |9 pages

Ecstasy and Annihilation

Georges Bataille

chapter |15 pages

In Search of Potency

D. H. Lawrence

part |55 pages

Death and the Homoertic

chapter |19 pages

Wrecked by Desire

Thomas Mann

chapter |18 pages

Promiscuity and Death

chapter |16 pages

The Wonder of the Pleasure