The Examined Life chronicles the cases of thirty-one patients who, we are told, have collectively spent more than 50,000 hours in analysis with Grosz. These are not really case studies, at least not in the classical style of psychoanalysis or even psychiatry. The comparison that comes to mind, and may well have served as a [...]
Surprisingly, the study shows that thousands of mutations take place in the genome of each neuron: one by one, mutations occur within genes, between genes, fragments of DNA are gained or lost, as are the functions that have been identified –or not- as playing a part in certain illnesses. It seems these mutations occur by [...]
Despite the echo it received in the press –where it was described as a “punch”, a “jab”, a “swing” or “knock-out response”-, Ali’s reply did not, in fact, feel like anything like a knock-out. Donald Trump did not go down in the first, or even 5th round (as did Sonny Liston or Henry Cooper in [...]
I was in Paris on the night of the terrorist attacks, which occurred on the eve of the Journées of the ECF, where 3,400 people were due to attend. Like so many in France, and around the world, I watched the terrible events unfold on the screen of a television, refracted through a reportage in [...]
What strikes this reader is how quickly the veneer of civilization falls, once the task of saving one’s own skin comes to the fore. According to these testimonies, many people in Syria enjoyed a relaxed, contemporary lifestyle: the majority of women were going to college, planning careers, marrying later and choosing their own spouses. The [...]
What a riveting and rigorous piece of work with which to open the door to Lacan’s teaching in the English speaking world. When asked to write a few words in memoriam, I almost flinched at a lack of knowledge of his life and work, so many would do it so much better. Then two traces [...]
Only this year in Chicago, Illinois, not everybody was interested in buying. Some instead suggested a boycott amidst the Holiday shopping spree to condemn violence. They used Twitter hashtags such #NotOneDime and #RedistributeThePain, to condemn Black Friday’s consumerism in the “wake of an ongoing systemic violence against African-Americans” in the United States. On October 20th [...]
In fact the embryo of an animal is a living environment capable of producing the necessary signals for differentiation: in animals (in pigs for example) one has a "natural" environment that is a lot closer to the human than an incubator in a lab, with a 3D cellular culture impregnated with growth promoters. However, a [...]
Media discussions concerned its style, ‘a sunken apricot soufflé’, its preparation, whether Trump uses spray or gel, and even its ‘tactile feel and texture’.2 Scurrilous reports suggested that the toupee was made of ‘the hair of the critically-endangered Brown Spider Monkey of Columbia’ and the pubic plume of the water buffalo.3 Earlier in the year, [...]
The volunteers on the Greek islands who welcome refugees, who save them - when they actually manage to save them - are mostly everyday civilians of these islands. All of them find themselves in the dreadful position of experiencing a situation which becomes even more tragic, non-manageable, intolerable, bordering on the impossible, with every passing [...]
