Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and HedonismWhat happens when ‘life’s simple joys’ become complicated? When pleasure is transformed as a function of consumption, the innocent comforts of food, nature and place are embedded in complex practices of distribution and exploitation. Exotic and diverse objects of pleasure are made available only at the price of a heightened awareness of their origins, genealogies and possible effects; ‘authenticity’ recedes behind objects produced as pleasures. Troubled Pleasures considers the ways in which modern pleasure is fraught with unhappy implications, at the same time as contemporary critical arguments put into question the touchstones of identity, morality, subjectivity and desire. It brings together writings which explore the sources of pleasure’s ‘loss of innocence’, and which argue the case for a scrupulous ‘alternative hedonism’. Including essays on human needs, socialism and gender, a feminist response to Joyce’s Ulysses, and a fictional reflection on appetite and excess, Troubled Pleasures plots an Epicurean path between righteous asceticism and conspicuous consumption. |
Contents
Rethinking Ourselves | 23 |
Who Needs Socialism? | 45 |
A Difference of Needs | 71 |
PART TWO Morals Politics and the Subject | 87 |
Marxism and Morality | 126 |
Constructa ergo sum? | 146 |
Patchwork Dragon Power? | 165 |
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argue argument aspiration autonomy bourgeois capitalism capitalist claim Cold War commitment communism conception consciousness consumption critical cultural defence deny dialectic difference discourse E.P. Thompson economic equally Eric Erysichthon essential ethical Europe Evans existence existentialist experience fact feeling female feminine Feminism as Critique feminist gender Habermas Ibid idea ideology Ignatieff individual issue Joyce kind labour Left Review Leszek Kolakowski liberal logic London male Marx Marx's Marxism and Morality Marxism Today Marxist masculine material means modes moral relativism nature needs Norman Geras nuclear offer particular patriarchal peace movement Perry Anderson perspective Philosophy pleasure political position postmodernism postmodernist poststructuralist Poverty of Theory precisely question reason recognize relations response role Sartre Sartre's Second Sex sense sexual Simone de Beauvoir simply social socialist socialist humanism socialist humanist society speak Stalinism suggested symbolic traditional transcendence true Ulysses utopian values woman women words writing