Desire And Its Discontents

This book redefines the discrimination among the discourse of desire: between Marcuse's "rationalism of desire" and Lacan's celebration of tragedy, and between early and late Foucault. Goodheart confronts a crucial strain of utopianism--the position of desire in culture--in modern thought and literature, deftly arguing that the classic moderns (Proust, Durkheim, Mann, and Lawrence) appreciated desire not only for its liberating potentialities for the imagination, but also understood its potential for destructiveness.