Gideon Lewis-Kraus – författare

Philip Rieff earned recognition as one of the most profound social theorists of culture and authority of the twentieth century. Through such works as ""Freud: The Mind of the Moralist"" and ""The Triumph of the Therapeutic"", he proved himself an incisive interpreter of Freud and his legacy. His work now culminates with the long-awaited trilogy ""Sacred Order/Social Order"", a three-volume work on social theory and contemporary culture.Arnold Eisen chose the selections for the final volume of the trilogy in consultation with Philip Rieff. All of the selections bear on the nature of the ""Jew of culture."" Rieff explicitly and consistently identified with this ideal-type, named for the first time in Fellow Teachers, and crucial in one form or another to everything he wrote. For the rest of Rieff's long career, ""Jew of culture"" would serve as foil, countertype, corrective, and adversary to the ""therapeutics"" who represented both Rieff's analysands and his antagonists. The purpose of this collection of Rieff's writings, undertaken at his suggestion, is to trace the evolution of the ""Jew of culture"" over the course of his work. In doing so we gain particular insight into his distinctive theory of society and the self; we also come to better understand the theorist.

In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, he grabs his sneakers, glad of the chance to be committed to something and someone.        Irreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus''s dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles - the thousand-year-old Camino de Santiago, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and, together with his father and brother, an annual mass migration to the tomb of a famous Hasidic mystic in the Ukraine - he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is - and find a way forward, with purpose?