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David Seelow. Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud/Reich/D. H. Lawrence and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. $74.95 (cloth).
In this generally innovative and provocative study, David Seelow "focuses on the cultural movement of modernism in relationship to the historical confines of modernity." As prime exemplars of a process of cultural subversion paradoxically caused by the intrinsic fact that "modernity and the process of modernization frequently create the very norms that modernism rebels against," Seelow integrates selected works and doctrines by Freud, Reich, and D. H. Lawrence to engage the implications of this subversion for standard epistemologies of postmodernism. He rightly considers these three writers as "frontier thinkers" or "radical moderns"-a radicalism that he legitimately foregrounds in the context of "sexuality as a field of inquiry." These three revolutionary thinkers remain united in their insistence on a radical theory of sexuality that connects an emphasis on libidinal freedom with an exhortative disapproval of social mechanisms that foster pervasive patterns of inhibition and repression.
In his recapitulative and often revisionist consideration of Freud, Seelow goes beyond Freud to demonstrate the critical role and value of fetishism as a normative aspect of sexual life, and within his argument he highlights the often insufficiently analyzed notion of masochism that operates as a foundation for Freud's theory of sexuality. He also focuses on Reich's major reassessment of Freudian doctrines of the libido into an ideology of orgone energy and its biologically-based potential for enhancing bodily and emotional health. Finally, Seelow interprets several short and long fictional works by Lawrence within the themes of erotic emancipation and pansexuality that he previously outlined in his chapters on Freud and Reich. Throughout this study he consistently relates his discussions of these three radical visionaries to the theorizing of such prominent figures in postmodern hermeneutics as Baudrillard, Kristeva, Foucault, Irigiray, and Bataille.
A major strength of Seelow's volume is his introductory chapter on the history of sexuality as both a complex phenomenon and a relatively recent field of study.He describes the importance of Charles Fourier as providing a relevant background within the nineteenth century for the development in later decades of various branches of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory. Fourier 's prescient articulation of an Edenic vision based on the "significance of sexuality to human expression and...