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Death,desire and Loss in Western Culture
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416 pages, Paperback
First published August 10, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 16, 2017
I wanted to write this one now, given what is coming…
Jonathan Dollimore. I was fortunate to be taught by him during my literature degree. Unpredictable, sparky, intelligent. He once burst into song mid-lecture, for the sole reason it was an orally-assessed term: “And now you can all orally assess me” he declared prior to the musical interlude. His lectures on Shakespeare were edgy and compelling; his pronouncements on death, shocking and profound.
Mid-way through my second year at university my supervisor died. It was a shock, but tempered by the fact I knew he was ill, although the seriousness was kept as much as possible from his students. Four weeks later my best friend, a lad who I rented with experienced a more intimate trauma. A local friend from his hometown – someone he had known since a boy and grown up with – suddenly keeled over at the gym with a heart attack. He was only 20.
From the excitement of living independently and embarking on what would be intensely absorbing studies at a top institution for literature, to being plunged into the darkness of mortality, was the path from my first to my second year. I am sure other students have gone through similar experiences.
When these things happen you grieve. You question your own mortality. But, more than this, my intellectual curiosity about death deepened. We all want to know what happens when we die. We all want to know what the great beyond holds for us. But what does death mean for those left behind, and what is the new relationship between them and the ones who leave, as we all will one day?
With these questions humming in my mind Dollimore’s book offered intellectual respite and comfort. A safe place to explore these questions without having to worry about verbalising, upsetting my friend or (mistakenly) being placed on suicide watch. A fascinating survey of how western cultures have responded and integrated death in art and literature and philosophy – its relationship with desire, how they are intrinsically linked, how loss is inevitable (and therefore needs to be made a friend), and how a proper realigned perception would constantly encompass death, not shun it to one side as today’s society does.
I wouldn’t say it saved me, but it changed my life. It forced on me uncomfortable truths about religion, about what I believed and could accept as the truth, as my mind began to stretch. It made me more confident about accepting that I would die one day, and other realities over which I had no control. A central premise arises from an analysis of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished.’ Perhaps heaven – a word now loaded with unhelpful associations of clouds, angels, harps and pearly gates – is more appropriate as an imagining of annihilation – the complete extinguishing of experience and knowledge thereof. For, my young brain reasoned, would it be heaven to exist looking down on loved ones – their every action – but not be able to communicate or influence them? Or is it more heaven to be absorbed into the pre-foetal state of non-being, where suffering is sucked back into the vacuum of nothing, the void of non sentience?
There are no answers of course but the way Dollimore frames the question in this book enlightened me, and had a direct and positive impact on my life at a troubling time.
Follow me on Twitter @JerichoDominic
Jonathan Dollimore. I was fortunate to be taught by him during my literature degree. Unpredictable, sparky, intelligent. He once burst into song mid-lecture, for the sole reason it was an orally-assessed term: “And now you can all orally assess me” he declared prior to the musical interlude. His lectures on Shakespeare were edgy and compelling; his pronouncements on death, shocking and profound.
Mid-way through my second year at university my supervisor died. It was a shock, but tempered by the fact I knew he was ill, although the seriousness was kept as much as possible from his students. Four weeks later my best friend, a lad who I rented with experienced a more intimate trauma. A local friend from his hometown – someone he had known since a boy and grown up with – suddenly keeled over at the gym with a heart attack. He was only 20.
From the excitement of living independently and embarking on what would be intensely absorbing studies at a top institution for literature, to being plunged into the darkness of mortality, was the path from my first to my second year. I am sure other students have gone through similar experiences.
When these things happen you grieve. You question your own mortality. But, more than this, my intellectual curiosity about death deepened. We all want to know what happens when we die. We all want to know what the great beyond holds for us. But what does death mean for those left behind, and what is the new relationship between them and the ones who leave, as we all will one day?
With these questions humming in my mind Dollimore’s book offered intellectual respite and comfort. A safe place to explore these questions without having to worry about verbalising, upsetting my friend or (mistakenly) being placed on suicide watch. A fascinating survey of how western cultures have responded and integrated death in art and literature and philosophy – its relationship with desire, how they are intrinsically linked, how loss is inevitable (and therefore needs to be made a friend), and how a proper realigned perception would constantly encompass death, not shun it to one side as today’s society does.
I wouldn’t say it saved me, but it changed my life. It forced on me uncomfortable truths about religion, about what I believed and could accept as the truth, as my mind began to stretch. It made me more confident about accepting that I would die one day, and other realities over which I had no control. A central premise arises from an analysis of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished.’ Perhaps heaven – a word now loaded with unhelpful associations of clouds, angels, harps and pearly gates – is more appropriate as an imagining of annihilation – the complete extinguishing of experience and knowledge thereof. For, my young brain reasoned, would it be heaven to exist looking down on loved ones – their every action – but not be able to communicate or influence them? Or is it more heaven to be absorbed into the pre-foetal state of non-being, where suffering is sucked back into the vacuum of nothing, the void of non sentience?
There are no answers of course but the way Dollimore frames the question in this book enlightened me, and had a direct and positive impact on my life at a troubling time.
Follow me on Twitter @JerichoDominic
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May 28, 2025Once, when high on opium, he was hit by a car. As he lay in the street, for a few seconds, “I had the impression that I was dying and it was really a very, very intense pleasure... It was, it still is now, one of my best memories” (Michel Foucault, p. 12).
October 19, 2017
Dollimore is fascinated by the relationship between death and desire in Western culture. He traces it through literature and philosophy from Ancient Greece to modern times. While the book at times becomes a list of how various authors approached the relationship the ideas that Dollimore introduces are important for further research.
"From the outset, Hugo's fate (death) seems to latent in his desire." xi
"In particular, the sexually dissident have known that the strange dynamic which, in Western culture, binds death into desire is not the product of a marginal pathological imagination, but crucial in the formation of that culture. That is one argument of this book. " xii
"Thom Gunn writes:
My thoughts are crowded with death
and it draws so oddly on the sexual
that I am confused
by, in effect, my own annihilation.
"In Time of Plague" xii
"Happiness is somehow never fully known in the flux of time: then it was experienced as inconsequential, now as irrevocably gone. Happiness is always in a past where it never quite existed at the time. "xv
"Identity is experienced ambivalently, and the urge to consolidate it is complicated by the wish to relinquish it. The seductiveness of the idea of this death of the self has always been a part of Western individualism." xxi
"For Socrates the only way to acquire "pure knowledge" is to "get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. Here is the basis of Western metaphysics, and a crucial influence on Christianity; it is the most influential attempt to escape from the mortal world of flux and change and decay." 9
"Plato tells us that, whereas himeros refers to a desire whose fulfillment is possible and anticipated, pothos refers to a suffering desire for what cannot be fulfilled, for what is absent." 16
"Suicide is not only a way of escaping a life which is intolerable, but more importantly a way to escape the hold that others have over you; it is an assertion of human freedom." 32
"The person is only a fleeting series of discontinuous states held together by desire, by craving. When desire is extinguished the person is dissolved. Since life and suffering are synonymous, the extinction of desire is the goal of human endeavour." 55
"For other writers desire is so wracked by mutability it becomes the agent of death. Sexual ecstasy might be itself be a kind of death-an obliteration of identity." 69
"It's no secret that adolescent sexuality contains a powerful erotic charge for the adult, regardless of sexual orientation." 109
"Adults behold adolescent desire ambivalently because theirs is a gaze invested with hope-a gaze socially sanctioned in the name of hope-yet haunted by loss." 111
"A recurring point in Bataille is that prohibition, inhibition, horror, disgust-all 'heighten the intensity of erotic pleasure." 252
"Not inappropriately, Michel Foucault once called the bathhouses laboratories of sexual experimentation. It is this urban confinement of homosexual transgression that is most striking in postwar gay culture. Where once the romantic homosexual exile wandered abroad, sometimes literally across seas and continents, in search of liberation of the foreign and the exotic, now he tends to haunt the claustrophobic spaces of the bathhouse." 298
"Such self-identification also led him eventually to renounce the very idea of desire, speaking instead of pleasure. For Foucault desire is a notion already imbued with oppression; to desire is already to be subjectively policed.."306
"Death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret of existence, the most 'private.'" 310
"In this book Forster writes about the poet C.P. Cavafy. He says that, for Cavafy, the casual homosexual encounter involves
the power to snatch sensation, to triumph over the moment even if remorse ensues. Perhaps that physical snatching is courage; it is certainly the seed of exquisite memories and it is possibly the foundations of art." 315
"From the outset, Hugo's fate (death) seems to latent in his desire." xi
"In particular, the sexually dissident have known that the strange dynamic which, in Western culture, binds death into desire is not the product of a marginal pathological imagination, but crucial in the formation of that culture. That is one argument of this book. " xii
"Thom Gunn writes:
My thoughts are crowded with death
and it draws so oddly on the sexual
that I am confused
by, in effect, my own annihilation.
"In Time of Plague" xii
"Happiness is somehow never fully known in the flux of time: then it was experienced as inconsequential, now as irrevocably gone. Happiness is always in a past where it never quite existed at the time. "xv
"Identity is experienced ambivalently, and the urge to consolidate it is complicated by the wish to relinquish it. The seductiveness of the idea of this death of the self has always been a part of Western individualism." xxi
"For Socrates the only way to acquire "pure knowledge" is to "get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. Here is the basis of Western metaphysics, and a crucial influence on Christianity; it is the most influential attempt to escape from the mortal world of flux and change and decay." 9
"Plato tells us that, whereas himeros refers to a desire whose fulfillment is possible and anticipated, pothos refers to a suffering desire for what cannot be fulfilled, for what is absent." 16
"Suicide is not only a way of escaping a life which is intolerable, but more importantly a way to escape the hold that others have over you; it is an assertion of human freedom." 32
"The person is only a fleeting series of discontinuous states held together by desire, by craving. When desire is extinguished the person is dissolved. Since life and suffering are synonymous, the extinction of desire is the goal of human endeavour." 55
"For other writers desire is so wracked by mutability it becomes the agent of death. Sexual ecstasy might be itself be a kind of death-an obliteration of identity." 69
"It's no secret that adolescent sexuality contains a powerful erotic charge for the adult, regardless of sexual orientation." 109
"Adults behold adolescent desire ambivalently because theirs is a gaze invested with hope-a gaze socially sanctioned in the name of hope-yet haunted by loss." 111
"A recurring point in Bataille is that prohibition, inhibition, horror, disgust-all 'heighten the intensity of erotic pleasure." 252
"Not inappropriately, Michel Foucault once called the bathhouses laboratories of sexual experimentation. It is this urban confinement of homosexual transgression that is most striking in postwar gay culture. Where once the romantic homosexual exile wandered abroad, sometimes literally across seas and continents, in search of liberation of the foreign and the exotic, now he tends to haunt the claustrophobic spaces of the bathhouse." 298
"Such self-identification also led him eventually to renounce the very idea of desire, speaking instead of pleasure. For Foucault desire is a notion already imbued with oppression; to desire is already to be subjectively policed.."306
"Death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret of existence, the most 'private.'" 310
"In this book Forster writes about the poet C.P. Cavafy. He says that, for Cavafy, the casual homosexual encounter involves
the power to snatch sensation, to triumph over the moment even if remorse ensues. Perhaps that physical snatching is courage; it is certainly the seed of exquisite memories and it is possibly the foundations of art." 315
July 22, 2011
Heavy shit. Good dissection of the modern westerner.
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August 14, 2011I absolutely love this book! Thrilling in a way few academic works manage to be.
June 19, 2012
Can't say I agree with his conclusions but an interesting read nonetheless.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews