Dive into the archives.
- June 2011: Depleted in America
It is lonely in America. Sometimes, of course, our loneliness is stuffed full of self-satisfaction; but it often plummets in depletion to despair and confusion. These too are lonely states. From Reisman’s “The Lonely Crowd” to Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”, a trajectory of social development was begun with two recent contributions weighing in from the [...]
- Titanic Flaw in Reality Testing
Reporting on Davos, Simon Johnson presents a grim picture of CEO reality. What is even grimmer is that it lines up squarely with Gillian Tett’s report last week on the need, among CEO’s for therapeutic bonding, with Davos as group therapy. The incursion of clinical psychology into the world of corporate finance is insidious. It [...]
- On Twitter: Productive Narcissism
I am a late adaptor. A post-Luddite. Yesterday, I sent my first tweet. And my wife now claims that she is a “twidow”. There is some truth to this. I’m fascinated by the bricolage: the carnival and the possibility. This morning, having replied to a posting sent from an Irish academic, he and I exchanged [...]
- “The International”: Debriefing the Movies
A movie review: sometimes, the irreality of the movie is enough to provide a moment’s respite from the irrealities of daily life. The International is like that. Its about the unwinding of a super-intelligent plot by fiendish banks to dictate international politics. Ok, that’s banal enough: especially when Goldman Sachs says it’ll repay TARP loans [...]
- On Zizek’s Melville, Freud, and Meaning in the Downturn
I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but a recent article on Zizek’s “Bartelby” politics, named after Melville’s scribe whose preference is “not to”, aims at turning from the meaninglessness of societies predicated upon the empty non-deliverables of enjoyment or pleasure, and opening up a “space” from which we might critique the aimlessness of social [...]
- The Present Necessity for Kindness
When despair, fear, exhaustion and external answers beyond the encouragement to “keep on keeping on” are all: when the terror of occupational “redundancy” strips one’s sense of personal contribution, of meaning to others- what is left? The harsh formula of winner-loser is clear: this is no tv game show proclaiming, you are the weakest link: [...]
