Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1998"

Between myth and madness: the premigration dream of leaving among young Somali refugees.

Abstract: Many young Somali refugees experience long premigration waits and a poorly delimited transition period in a succession of countries before reaching their final destination. During this difficult passage, a myth dealing with departure and exodus is collectively constructed, and it serves as a dynamic, mobilizing dream that orients individual strategies. This substitution of 'dream travel' for real travel during the transition period, especially if it is prolonged, may cause Somali youths to lose contact with reality and eventually to slide into madness. The authors' approach is based on three assumptions: (a) that pastoralism predisposes the Somali to value travel as a way of maturing, (b) that age-based peer groups create special migratory dynamics, and (c) that an ethic of solidarity involves many people in the adventure of a migrant youth. When trapped in an indefinite transition period, young men share khat-chewing sessions during which they relate success stories and dreams of leaving. Many grow frustrated with the delay, and if their departure plans fall through, the 'dream trip' often becomes 'dream madness.' Actual cases illustrate how some young Somali get lost in their dreams. A young Somali's vulnerability is heightened when he extricates himself from the system of reciprocal obligations or when the liminal stage ends with the mourning of the impossible dream. In the universe of madness visited by some young Somali migrants, the boundaries between the real and the imaginary are poorly marked. The paper is based on fieldwork carried out in the Horn of Africa and in Canada, interviews with Somali immigrants and members of the community, and clinical psychiatric data collected in Montreal.

Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism

Abstract: This essay aims at a cultural and intellectual reconstruction of the ideological function of the Jewish-nationalist thematic complex in George Eliot9s Daniel Deronda (1876). Although a break with the national past is clearly needed, as indicated by the decadent figure of Henleigh Grandcourt, Eliot is nevertheless reluctant to abandon her conservative-organic politics. The "necessary laws" of cultural development have led to the cul-de-sac of decadent paralysis; at the same time, however, too little continuity with the national past, as indicated by Daniel9s aesthetic cosmopolitanism, results in an equally disastrous paralysis of moral discrimination. This essay argues that the Jewish-nationalist plot of Daniel, a revision of the classical Bildungsroman along nationalist lines, functions in many ways as a narrative and symbolic solution to Eliot9s emphasis on continuity as well as rupture. That solution, however, given that Daniel is Jewish, remains irrecuperable for English nationalist purposes and thus necessitates the modulation of Jewishness into an idea of Judaism that could speak to the moral and nationalist concerns of England. The essay shows that for Eliot, Judaism represents a nationalistmoral ideal in contradistinction to Matthew Arnold9s ideal of a cosmopolitan culture. Further, Eliot casts Judaism as a continuation of as well as a break with English national life. Judaism, in the nationalist imaginary of Daniel Deronda, serves as the middle term that conjoins both sequence and rupture, tradition and a burst of new energy. As an added bonus, through its inflection toward Zionism, Judaism also safeguards the purity of the English national tradition from the specter of racial hybridity.

Medicine, Symbolization and the 'Real Body': Lacan's Understanding of Medical Science

Abstract: Throughout the 20th century, philosophers have criticized the scientific understanding of the human body. Instead of presenting the body as a meaningful unity or Gestalt, it is regarded as a complex mechanism and described in quasi-mechanistic terms. In a phenomenological approach, a more intimate experience of the body is presented. This approach, however, is questioned by Jacques Lacan. According to Lacan, three basic possibilities of experiencing the body are to be distinguished: the symbolical (or scientific) body, the imaginary (or ideal) body and the real body. Whereas the symbolical body is increasingly objectified (and even digitalized) by medical science, the phenomenological perception amounts to an idealization of the body. The real body cannot be perceived immediately. Rather, it emerges in the folds and margins of our efforts to symbolize or idealize the body, which are bound to remain incomplete and fragile. In the first part of the article (§1–§3), Lacan’s conceptual distinction between the symbolical, the imaginary and the real body will be explained. In the second part (§4–§5), this distinction will be further clarified by relying on crucial chapters in the history of anatomy (notably Mundinus, Vesalius, Da Vinci and Descartes).

The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo

Abstract: Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law ... in language. (Cixous "The Laughing Medusa" 887) By creating a new mythos--that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave--la mestiza creates a new consciousness. (Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera 80) Ever since the initial success of vanguard Chicana writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Estela Portillo-Trambley, Gina Valdes, Bernice Zamora, Lucha Corpi and Alma Villanueva in the late 1970s and early 1980s and throughout the boom of Chicana literary output from the mid 1980s until now, Chicana writers have used the written word in order to "reveal" and "change," that is, they have been engage writers in one way or another.(1) According to Maria Hererra-Sobek, Chicana writers have been making "daring inroads into `new frontiers' ... exploring new vistas ... and new perspectives" which reveal "new dimensions" for both Chicano and mainstream American literatures (10-11). Focusing upon Ana Castillo's novels, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogonia, and So Far From God, this essay addresses the politics of dislocation and relocation as a key aspect of the interacting social and cultural practices and ideological discourses that constitute the narrative's signifying process. In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldua describes the border space as "a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary," a space "in a constant state of transition" (3). Those who live in the Chicano borderlands, this interstitial cross-cultural space, are "plagued by psychic restlessness ... torn between ways ... a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another" (78). I want to suggest that Castillo's characters, male and female, are border subjects positioned between cultures and in search of an alternative to their lived "nepantla" state of invisibility and transition.(2) In terms of her female characters, this state is aggravated by what Castillo calls in Massacre of the Dreamers "double sexism, being female and indigenous," that is, by the Chicana's identity as man's specularized Other,(3) a subject-position conditioned by racism and misogyny. Castillo, I want to demonstrate, uses writing to reveal and change the mestiza's imposed "subject-position," which, according to JanMohamed, can be defined only "in terms of the effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social manipulation, and ideological domination on the cultural formation of minority subjects and discourses" (9). In this process her narrative problematizes the "ethos" and "worldview" of Chicano and Anglo-American cultures through the aesthetic creation of a new mestiza consciousness, a repositioning of the marginalized subject by means of a counterhegemonic discourse that establishes what Goran Therborn has called a narrative "alterideology" (Identity of Power 28): a narrative "dialectic of difference"(4) as socially symbolic act with an ideological utopian function intent on finding imaginary solutions to existing social conflicts. This utopian function--an impulse of liberation and salvation--embraces the relation between both the individual and the collective and life as it is lived and experienced imaginatively. Hence, I want to argue that Ana Castillo's narrative instantiates counterhegemony (culture/ideology) as a substance of Chicana/o thinking and is therefore, in Frederic Jameson's terms, "informed by ... a political unconscious ... a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community" (The Political Unconscious 70). It becomes, as it creates, what Bhabha based on Jacques Lacan has termed the place of "the signifying time-lag of cultural difference" (The Location of Culture 237). In The Mixquiahuala Letters Castillo describes a Chicana's search for identity in the borderlands by foregrounding "the psychic restlessness" which characterizes the protagonist's endeavors to deconstruct her imposed identity as man's Other and create an authentic consciousness. …

"Baraka": World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry

Abstract: Honey, They Shrunk the Planet. Ever since Marshall McLuhan's celebrated proclamation that communications technology had "electrically contracted" the world to the dimensions of a global village, it would seem, the earth has been shrinking: satellite TV, frequent flyer miles, and, of course, The Web are making the world a smaller place. Thirty years after Understanding Media, the global village has become a commonplace, with McLuhan himself hailed as a visionary prophet of a world in which distance no longer matters. ATT IBM commercials show African tribesmen happily using laptop computers. This article considers the impact of these developments in the domain of film. On the one hand, the history of the cinema has been entangled from the outset with global processes, from colonialism to its postcolonial aftermath. Cinema today, most would agree, has become a global cultural form, however different its local manifestations. At the same time, McLuhan's trope of the global village both reflects and has lent further momentum to the emergence of an imaginary idea of "the world," and this global imaginary, we will see, has assumed increasing prominence in contemporary cinema. In turn, film today plays a significant role in articulating and perpetuating what might be called global mythologies: ideological discourses about the world and humanity's relationship to it. The growing attention to what is variously called "World Cinema" or "global cinema" in recent years might seem curious, given that film production, distribution, and consumption have long been a global affair. Studies of non-Western film industries abound, and "World Cinema" has long been approached much as "world

Medicine, symbolization and the “real” body — Lacan's understanding of medical science

Abstract: Throughout the 20th century, philosophers have criticized the scientific understanding of the human body. Instead of presenting the body as a meaningful unity or Gestalt, it is regarded as a complex mechanism and described in quasi-mechanistic terms. In a phenomenological approach, a more intimate experience of the body is presented. This approach, however, is questioned by Jacques Lacan. According to Lacan, three basic possibilities of experiencing the body are to be distinguished: the symbolical (or scientific) body, the imaginary (or ideal) body and the real body. Whereas the symbolical body is increasingly objectified (and even digitalized) by medical science, the phenomenological perception amounts to an idealization of the body. The real body cannot be perceived immediately. Rather, it emerges in the folds and margins of our efforts to symbolize or idealize the body, which are bound to remain incomplete and fragile. In the first part of the article (§1-§3), Lacan's conceptual distinction between the symbolical, the imaginary and the real body will be explained. In the second part (§4-§5), this distinction will be further clarified by relying on crucial chapters in the history of anatomy (notably Mundinus, Vesalius, Da Vinci and Descartes).

''The Fractured Imaginary': Popular Thinking on Military Matters in Fifth-Century Athens'

Abstract: Military thought in fifth-century Athens was a potpourri of traditional hoplitic and newfangled naval material. The Athenians did not challenge the centrality and prominence of the hoplite in popular thought as he became an increasingly marginal figure militarily. Instead they simply added new imaginary capital about citizen sailors and their glorious fleet. While this babble contributed to the political cohesion of the imperial city, as both sailors and hoplites received acknowledgment, justification and praise, it also contained ideas that sat uncomfortably with each other or were even directly contradictory. Thus with respect to popular thinking on military matters in fifth century Athens it is fitting to speak once again of the fractured imaginary.

Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance

Abstract: to PMLA in 1968. A MONG THE MOST HORRIFYING images in recent film is one that occurs in Louis Malle's version (1993) of Josephine Hart's novel Damage (1991). It is that of a naked father (Jeremy Irons) cradling his fully-dressed, dead adult son (Rupert Graves). The two form a perverse piet'a of grieving parent and dead child. The image horrifies even more within the narrative context than outside it because while viewers know the father as a physician, a member of Britain's Parliament, the chair of a powerful healthservices committee, and a possible candidate for prime minister, they also know that he has had an affair with the son's fiancee (Juliet Binoche) and that the son has died from a twostory fall precipitated by his discovering father and fiancee in flagrante delicto. Occurring in both the film and the novel, the scene opens onto powerful themes of postmodem life that yield to analysis based on Lacanian concepts made particularly available by a cadre of psychoanalytic critics of culture I call the new Lacanians. Including Joan Copjec, Slavoj Zizek, Elizabeth Cowie, and Juliet Flower MacCannell, these critics form no school of which I am aware, but several traits identify them as a cohort: many have some link to the journal October (Copjec was long a senior editor, and Zizek, whose readings of Lacan have influenced the others perhaps as greatly as Lacan himself has, is a frequent contributor); most emphasize Lacan's late notions of drive, jouissance, and the real at the expense of his early concepts of desire, the imaginary, and the symbolic; most are more interested in cultural studies and elements of popular culture than in literature alone; most construe the universe as ironic, tragic, or perversely paradoxical (so that everything contains its opposite); and because most color culture and its artifacts in dark tones, they are fascinated by film noir and related forms and themes. Some new Lacanians have generated a vision of postmodern life that one may identify with the paradoxical, perhaps perverse, twist Lacan gives to ethics and traditional tragedy. In this vision, because Freudian

The East, the West and the Rest: Central and Eastern Europe between Techno-Orientalism and the New Electronic Frontier

Abstract: The article seeks to explore Central Europe's role and location within the imaginary cartography of techno-colonialist discourses on electronic networks. Ideologists of the European Union and of 'Mitteleuropa' (not to mention Eastern Europe) did not yet fully succeed in establishing a genuinely European high-tech identity. 'Networked Europe', as a fantasmatic technological space, rather seems to be caught between what has been called Techno-Orientalism on the one hand and the American New Frontier myth on the other. The article tries to map out the European imaginary in its differential relation towards both the 'Oriental' and the American myth of electronic space.

Two New World "Wilderness" Texts: Re-reading the "Writing That Conquers"

Abstract: This paper offers a re-reading of two texts whose place and date of origin span two continents and more than 200 years, but which nevertheless participate in a similiar colonist discourse that constructs as its object of knowledge the New World "wilderness." L'Amerique historique (c.1638), an engraving by the Flemish artist Theodor Galle and The Champlain Monument (1915) by the Ottawa sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy are both texts that work to re- inscribe the Self/Other Civilized/Savage model of colonial identification and are, as such, examples of what Michel de Certeau has named "writing that conquers"; however, as sites and scenes of instruction, they also work to resist, destabilize and fundamentally interrogate the colonist binary thinking that informs them. As a result, both may be re-read and utilized as powerful tools of cultural decolonization.Cet article offre une relecture de deux textes dont la source et la date d'orgine s'etendent sur deux continents et plus de 200 ans mais qui, en depit de cela, participent a un discours colonialiste similaire en construisant le "pays sauvage" du Nouveau Monde comme leur objet de savoir. L'Amerique historique (1638), une gravure de l'artiste flamand Theodor Galle et The Champlain Monument (1915) du sculpteur outaouais Hamilton MacCarthy offrent tous deux des textes qui visent a reinscire le modele d'identification colonial Soi/Autre Civilise/Sauvage. Ces textes offrent des exemples de ce que Michel Certeau appelle "l'ecriture qui cherche a conquerir"; cependant, en tant que sites et scenes d'instruction ils cherchent aussi a resister, destabiliser et interroger de maniere fondamentale la pensee binaire coloniale qui les informent. En consequence on peut les relire et les utiliser comme des outils de decolonisation puissants.They have been called "liars - few of them steady liars ... but frequent and cunning liars none the less" (Greenblatt 7), their texts "fake[s]" and "fraud[s]" (Bordo 101). I refer here not only to those heroes of early modern Europe - explorers, merchant-navigators and missionaries - but also to the writers, artists and poets who since 1492 have mapped, illustrated and written the New World(f.1) into being. Canonical texts with the signatures of Columbus, Spenser and Shakespeare immediately come to mind; however, equally important are those countless others now nearly forgotten and nameless. Since the advent of the printing press in Europe and the emergence of capitalism, these texts have proliferated astonishingly, (re)producing a New World colonial discourse and, in the process, constructing an imaginary space called "wilderness" as its object of knowledge and desire.These writers, artists and poets were, however, neither "unredeemable frauds" nor "steady liars"(f.2) if only because for them as for the colonial adventurers of the early-modern period the "truth" of the New World was unavailable. What was available as they directed their disciplining gaze westward was a cultural storehouse(f.3) of European discursive strategies from which they necessarily borrowed and with which they constructed their invented landscapes. As a result, "the blank 'savage' page" (de Certeau 182) of the New World was increasingly filled with Old World representations and meanings. Erased from this discourse were all but residual traces of New World indigenous histories and cultures - its peoples pushed to the margins, unable to write themselves into being as subjects and instead becoming its silenced and violated objects.The focus of this work is two such texts that span two continents and more than 200 years of the New World colonial project. Despite this dislocation in time and space, they parallel each other in their discursive strategies and, in doing so, demonstrate the extraordinary (re)productive power of this discourse. The first is the Flemish engraver Theodor Galle's L'Amerique historique (c. 1638), copied from a drawing by the Flemish artist Jan van der Street (c. …

Nabokov's Invitation to a beheading : a critical companion

Abstract: In an unnamed dream country, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude, an imaginary crime that defies definition. After spending his last days in jail, he simply wills his executioners out of existence.

Cura, culpa e imaginário radical em Cornelius Castoriadis: percursos de um sociobárbaro

Abstract: This article accosts the theoretic-political procedure of Cornelius Castoriadis within the period which extends itself from the immediate post-war to the decade of 1970 - moment of the publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society. The ties between theoretic and social constitutions of the castoriadian concepts and analysis are emphasized, as well as the relevance of the same within a discussion of the contemporary world.

Semantics, General Semantics, and Ecology in Frank Herbert's 'Dune.'

Abstract: Frank Herbert's Dune, a thematically rich and varied work of science fiction, is the first novel in a trilogy about the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, and the rise to power of Paul Atreides, its messianic leader. Herbert initially conceived of writing one long novel about "the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders - all were to have a part" ("Dune Genesis" p.72). Ultimately, Herbert produced six novels about Dune comprising what has become known as The Dune Chronicles. The intricate ecology of the planet, encompassing the Fremen natives' desire to turn Dune into a "green and fertile world" and the need of the Empire for the indigenous spice melange to facilitate space travel, forms the backdrop for Paul's struggle to overcome his enemies, control the planet, and fulfill his personal destiny. Throughout the novel Paul must meet and overcome challenges that serve to confirm him in the minds of the Fremen as being their messiah. Paul does not seek this position but is instead caught up in the events that lead to his deposing of the Emperor and control of the throne. Herbert's decision to examine the messianic superhero against a backdrop of ecological concerns was no accident. Drawing on his experience in journalism, he noted: I had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next banner for demagogues and would-be heroes, for the power seekers and others ready to find an "adrenaline high" in the launching of a new crusade. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other - social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. I find fresh nuances in religions, psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, theories of history, geology, anthropology, plant research, soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study arises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's caldron: the psychology of planetary societies. ("Dune Genesis" p.74) It seems, therefore, evident that a central theme of the novel is not only ecology, but ecology examined in many different contexts. In addition to exploring environmental ecology, the study of the relationship and interaction between organisms and their environment, Dune explores social, political, economic, and language ecologies as well (Touponce pp.13-14). Herbert compared these variations on a central theme to a musical fugue: Sometimes there are free voices that do fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a single fabric. What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts, things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different, myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common heritage. ("Dune Genesis" p.74) These various ecologies evolve out of their respective relationships and interactions with the planetary environment of Arrakis. Specifically, Herbert believed language mirrors the ecosystem from which life evolves: (Touponce p.2) ... we commonly believe meaning is found - in printed words (such as these), in the noises of a speaker, in the reader's or listener's awareness, or in some imaginary thought-land between these. We tend to forget that we human animals evolved in an ecosystem that has demanded constant improvisation from us. In a mirror sense, we reflect this history of mutual influences in all our systems and processes. ("Listening" pp.98, 100) Another major theme of the novel is that of power, and the nature of the superhero or leader who emerges to discover that he or she must wage war to gain and maintain that power. Herbert strongly believed war to be the logical consequence of any struggle to gain and maintain power whether political or economic. …

The uses of anachronism Deleuze's history of the subject

Abstract: Even the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself.1 History of Philosophy: Recounting Imaginary Books Gilles Deleuze observes a distinction between writing history of philosophy and "doing" philosophy. We are interested here in how this distinction is set up. How does Deleuze conceive of the relation between history of philosophy and doing philosophy? What is the use of historiography and how can it be brought to bear on the present? In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes this: There is a great difference between writing history of philosophy and writing philosophy. In the one case we study the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey, the continents discovered. In the other case we trim our own arrows, or gather those which seem to us the finest in order to try and send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical but relatively small. We try to speak in our own name only to learn that a proper name designates no more than the outcome of a body of work-in other words the concepts discovered, on condition that we were able to express and imbue them with life using all the possibilities of language.2 This metaphor of the arrow is instructive. Deleuze says that "After I had studied Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Proust, all of whom fired me with enthusiasm, Difference and Repetition was the first book in which I tried to `do philosophy."' Deleuze distinguishes here between his earlier texts on the history of philosophy and his first text which does philosophy-on the one hand, the selection of some arrows and tools, the tensioning of a bow, and, on the other, their deployment in a new direction. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze wants to be an untimely philosopher-he desires a philosophy that is not a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the universal, but untimely. That is to say-and these words are Nietzsche's"acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come." Deleuze anticipates a time when it will no longer be possible to write philosophy books as they have been traditionally produced. The search for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche, and Deleuze hints here that his own work on cinema, theatre, and the visual arts is animated by this need for new modes of philosophical expression. At any rate it is in this context that Deleuze raises the question of the history of philosophy. He says that the history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to collage in painting. This means that elements, or more precisely concepts, are lifted from the textual context in which they were created and juxtaposed with concepts from other places in ways that make familiar concepts strange and imbue them with new powers. A commentary reproduces a concept but it is reproduced in a new context-or rather, on a different plane-and for Deleuze commentary must be conscious of the mutations that occur when historical concepts are reproduced in the present. In fact it is the field of possible mutations which constitute commentary's possibilities. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximum modification appropriate to a double.3 Even more provocatively, Deleuze suggests that it should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book. And here, by way of explanation, he mentions a story by Borges. The story is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."4 As a guide to what Deleuze might mean here it is quite illuminating. Borges had an extraordinary talent for the invention of imaginary texts. …

Mutable Identity and the Postmodern

Abstract: The trend in postmodern Australian literature to deal with mutable identity of characters, as in Patrick White's novel 'A Fringe of Leaves' (1976), Patrick White's 'The Twyborn Affair' (1979) and Malouf's 'An Imaginary Life' (1980), is discussed. It is suggested that social disintegration, described in the fictional works as the consequence of a destabilised personal and social identity, is evident in contemporary Australian society.

A semiotic framework for the social imaginary

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to provide a semiotic or sociosemiotic basis for the much used notion of social imaginary. A frequent notion in the writings on the social sciences, the social imaginary can benefit from a more strict characterization. The triadic model of sign action or semiosis elaborated by C.S. Pierce is ideally suited for that theoretical framework. Castoriadis' notion of social imaginary is criticized, and some concrete examples are given of how a semiotic-based concept can account for some important social phenomena, namely the representations of mass-media in relation to a country's hegemonic ideology

Everybody's Faneuil Hall: The Imaginary Institution of Democracy

Abstract: The case of boston's faneuil hall suggests that a politically conscious citizenry of the post-revolutionary era did not lack in imagination when it came to conceiving its public space. From its inception in 1 742, the building had suffered through an abortive career as a city-run marketplace and been widely reviled, but during the Revolutionary War, Faneuil Hall served as the historic site of the Stamp Act protest, the tea tax protest, and the Boston Massacre commemoration. In the aftermath, a civic monument to Boston's tradition of public assemblies was born, as was a figurative expression: the \"Cradle of liberty,\" synonymous with the name of Faneuil Hall, and signifying the popular sovereignty of free speech. By the early nineteenth century, this trope and its historic associations had gained such purchase on the civic life of Bostonians that the building's previous incarnation was forgotten. In keeping with its standing as the \"Cradle of liberty,\" Faneuil Hall was recreated as the birthplace of democracy, the place where colonial subjects grasped their right of free speech and became \"the people.\" Dignitaries and public officials of the new republic gathered in the building to toast its name, while civic architect Charles Bulfinch was commissioned in 1805 to adorn the old marketplace with republican ornamentation suitable to its figurative appellation. Indeed, the trope for Faneuil Hall seemed to authorize not only the form and function of the public space but the exercise of free speech, which was said to pay tribute to Faneuil Hall. An 1826 pamphlet offered an appropri-

Tardes de maio

Abstract: Considering May as an abreviation of the historical time which concentrates lots of expeiriences in politics, this text tries to translate the past into present, in the benjaminian sense of celebration To celebrate a date is to be born in each birthday It is intended to show true mutations of colective imaginary which doesn't know the transcendency of the power and the efficiency of its laws This movement was neither guided by the set of ideas of "a show society" or its laws Gathering together the politician and the politician, it assured the truth of the desire Whereas it is understood as insurration, rebelion or revolution, it can be said to be a "reharsal " of the revolution , which using no violence, generous culture of cosmopolitism , and intencionalism, has indicated the way from the "scientific socialism ' to the socialism which was possible to be stablished, the Utopic This text also reflects about some revolutionary icons and their new meanings , setting the difference between the mythical hero and the historical hero, between Lenin or Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburgo or Fidel and the myth Guevara

Psychoanalysis and Ontology: Lacan, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to show the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan Our concern is to examine how the relationship changed from Merleau-Ponty’s early thought to his later philosophy In addition to this, in order to explore the complicated relations, we must take into consideration that Freud’s theory and Heidegger’s thought were combined in the later philosophy of Merleau-Ponty It is true that their influence on Merleau-Ponty has been considered separately by many scholars, but as it is for Merleau-Ponty Freudian thought had to be interpreted ontologically and so Merleau-Ponty’s ontological psychoanalysis was created Our second aim is to then compare Lacan’s ideas and Merleau-Ponty’s ontological psychoanalysis In relation to this comparison, the issue of negativity will be taken up, because in negativity both thinkers came close to agreeing, even though with respect to the same we can find a marked difference between the two