Diogenes articles from September 2004

Diogenes archives from September 2004

Psychoanalysis and trauma: September 11 revisited.
September 22, 2004... On November 9, 2002, a few hundred people, mostly mental health clinicians, gathered at the New York University Medical Center for two days of discussions on the theme, September 11th: Psychoanalytic Reflections in the Second Year. The...

Interlude 1 my house in the woods.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Q1. What comes to mind when you think about your country? (1) What comes to my mind is my house in the woods with no neighbor in sight, a home I have to defend not against real burglars or imaginary terrorists but against deer that eat my...

Historians take note: motivation = emotion.
September 22, 2004... The article focuses on motivation, proposing the equation in its title and opposing the contrary view, that what moves people to action is the rational calculation of their material interests. The latter view is most familiar in economics,...

The first genocide: Carthage, 146 BC.
September 22, 2004... Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial...

The 18th-century body and the origins of human rights.
September 22, 2004... Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault's contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here,...

Interlude 2 diversity--our greatest asset.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Q1. What comes to mind when you think about your country? When I think about America, I think about a great diversity of types of people, from different backgrounds, national origins, races, religions, classes and points of view. The US is...

Going beyond the national state in the USA: the politics of minoritized groups in global cities.
September 22, 2004... This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of...

Interlude 3 the real benefits of fairness.
September 22, 2004... Q1. What comes to mind when you think about your country? It would be comforting to think of a disjunction between America at home and America in the world, to imagine the arrogance of government a matter of distance rather than character,...

To shape the nation's foreign policy: struggles for dominance among American international relations scholars.
September 22, 2004... Whatever its other effects, the Soviet-American Cold War helped launch and sustain an era of feverish intellectual activity in the linked fields of international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. One sign of the importance of more...

Ever changing America: the universities.
September 22, 2004... American universities, which were pale copies of European counterparts before World War II, afterwards exploded into pragmatic centers of research and teaching. Previous isolationism turned into concern with foreign affairs. Change is now the...

The global role of US philosophy.
September 22, 2004... This essay focuses on the danger of complicity. American philosophers, given their country's hegemonic position, exert global influence; what form should it take? Comparison is made with the situation of France when it still controlled Algeria....

War, words and self-perpetuating force: timely reflections in the light of Simone Weil.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... The author presents Simone Weil's theory that force, an inherent part of the human condition, generates and regenerates its own existence. She examines three essays by Weil: 'The Iliad of a Poem of Force', 'Reflections on War', and 'The Power...

The state of the hip-hop generation: how hip-hop's cultural movement is evolving into political power.
September 22, 2004... In the short decade between 1985 and 1995, the dominant cultural movement of our time, hip-hop culture, has become, seemingly overnight, mainstream American popular culture. This centering of hip-hop art, most specifically rap music, in...

Against France: an American novelistic fantasy.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America's two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with...

Interlude 4 telling and listening to stories.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Q1. What comes to mind when you think about your country? Like most liberal Democrats in the USA, I am alarmed and embarrassed by my country's current presidential administration: its heavy-handed unilateralism; its rejection of such...

Dark and light: the strange case of the decline of illustration.
September 22, 2004... One can make the case that we have lost the capacity for abstract thought. When we read or listen to the radio, the mind forms images in response to the suggestion. The same thing can be said to occur when an illustration provokes the viewer by...