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My Life Among the Deathworks
Rieff's 2006 posthumous masterwork diagnosing contemporary culture through its characteristic productions — objects that use art's forms to dissolve art's authority, completing the triumph of the therapeutic.
My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority is Philip Rieff's final and most severe work, published posthumously in 2006 as the first volume of his projected multi-volume Sacred Order/Social Order. The book examines visual culture, literary production, and institutional practice through the framework of deathworks and anti-culture — analyzing how contemporary productions use the forms of high culture to accomplish the dissolution of culture's formative authority. Rieff's method is allusive rather than systematic, moving through galleries and museums, examining paintings and sculptures, tracking the transformation from works that made demands on their audiences to works that offer only the frictionless consumption the therapeutic age expects. The book is difficult, deliberately so — refusing the smooth exposition that would make it accessible to the therapeutic reader seeking takeaways. It is also one of the most diagnostically precise accounts of what has happened to cultural authority in the post-sacred West.
