Review by Booklist Review
Phillips ends his twenty-seventh book by pointing out, pointedly, that giving up is a form of giving. This is typical of Phillips' wit. Like the poet Paul Muldoon, he is always alert to how idioms function a little like screen memories. Their ordinary usage often hides or elides another meaning. In eight essays, Phillips, a practicing psychoanalyst and general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, often uses Kafka's diaries and parables to uncover fresh insights into endings. Giving up isn't always surrender or the end of something but a necessary step, gesture, or ritual of inauguration. In "On Being Left Out," Phillips opines, "Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want." In another marvelous essay with the wry title, "On the Pleasures of Censorship," he speaks to whether censorship, devastating to political freedom, is, paradoxically, essential to social life. If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips' late style, we have a lot to look forward to.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't," observes psychoanalyst Phillips (On Wanting to Change) at the outset of this intermittently insightful analysis. Though he touches on the subject of suicide--the "ultimate giving up"--Phillips writes from the assumption "that life is by definition always worth living," and characterizes giving up as "sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better." The book's eight chapters interrogate what this notion might mean for death, wanting, exclusion, intellectual nihilism, loss, and censorship (for instance, what are "censors"--whether external or mental--attempting to protect through exclusion?). Unfortunately, Phillips's discussions are often weighed down by esoteric considerations of Freud and Lacan, as well as his own Freudian interpretations of literary masterpieces. He's at his best when distilling such ideas as psychoanalyst Marion Milner's concept of "narrow attention" versus "wide attention," the former an example of the mind as "questing beast" focusing on "what serves its immediate interests" and ignoring the rest, the latter showing how, without the drive of want, "it became possible to look at the whole at once." Many chapters evolved from previously published essays, which may account for the narrative's jagged feel. It's a scattershot exploration of an original and arresting idea. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A British psychoanalyst examines the "essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea." Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up--or giving up on something--is based on beliefs about change. "We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can't," he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: "defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism." At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take "sadistic pleasure" in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most "serious" of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, "What is worth surviving for?" Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these "answers" to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial "answer" of his own by building on Freud's ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss--being forced to reckon with it--is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author's tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating. A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
