A hundred years on the Great War still casts its shadow over our society, and in some ways, even more so over mainland Europe. The legacy of the war was not only the collapse of empires, but also the rise of new ones – most notably the United States and …
Brexit as symptom It is now less than a year to ‘B-day’ (March 2019) and opinion in the UK seems as divided as ever regarding Brexit, with many wondering whether it will ever happen at all, except in name only. Therefore it seems an opportune time to pull together and …
The latest US-led air strike on Syria, purportedly as punishment for Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on the town of Douma last week, reminds me of Baudrillard’s short book of essays on the first Gulf War The Gulf War did not take place.1 The third essay, which bears the …
There is a very interesting article by Barbara Hewson that takes a critical look at the whole concept of ‘victimology’ and, interestingly enough, the idea that justice can be a form of therapy.1 Although the article is now two years old, it is in fact eerily prescient with regards to …
In a memorable scene in Menno Meyjes’ 2002 film Max, the would-be artist Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) remarks to his would-be Jewish mentor, the (fictional) Munich art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack), that ‘politics is the new art’. Too late Rothman realises the true meaning of Hitler’s words: this failed …
Twenty years ago Howard Schwartz wrote a paper on the Psychodynamics of Political Correctness which might easily have disappeared into the academic graveyard along with all those other countless publications that no-one outside their particular sub-discipline would ever read in the first place. However, times change and today political correctness …
The first thing to point out is that the term ‘psychopathology’ is not meant in a derogatory sense, i.e. implying that those individuals who voted to leave the EU in June 2016 were somehow ‘deluded’ (and likewise for those who voted to remain). Rather, it is to explore the possible …
The BBC news channel recently broadcast a fascinating documentary on American film noir and its relationship to small town America. In it, the historian Adam Smith argues that Donald Trump’s election victory has highlighted the division between the cultures of the (corrupt) big city and the (innocent) small town. Although …
There was an interesting book review in the Boston Review recently by Peter Gordon of Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory. In his introduction Gordon was very quick to link the book’s subject with the recent election of Trump: November 9, 2016, was a strange day to walk …
There are two ways to think about trauma. The first, and the one that I’ve consistently emphasised in the writings on this blog, is as a manifestation of the Real, as an encounter with the Real. In fact, to be traumatised is essentially to touch the Real (or perhaps it …