Feature Archives - Page 99 of 150

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John Kelly Is a Present Danger to the Republic

With all due respect

October 20, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Kelly spoke at length about the sacrifices of fallen soldiers, the duties of their military superiors, his own experiences as a commander and also as the father of a fallen soldier, and the advice he supposedly gave to Trump about how best to convey condolences to the families of fallen ...

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Neoliberal Horizons in Subjectivity

An excerpt from Jorge Alemán’s latest book

October 20, 2017 • by Jorge Alemán

It’s definitive to admit that when it comes to the symbolic order of language, in its distinct variants and modes of appearance, we must always distinguish two different dimensions. Firstly, we must indicate the “dependence and subordination” of the speaking being, with respect to the structural and ontological order of ...

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Act One of Turkey’s Post-1980 Political Drama

The mysterious clearing of Turkey’s political stage

October 20, 2017 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

Given this depiction of the present, it would be surprising to learn that AKP’s first electoral victory happened somewhat by accident. In the uncut version of the post-1980 Turkish political drama, AKP is the second of two acts. It is Act One, not Act Two, that made the party’s hegemony ...

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Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...

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Adorno with Freud, Adorno Beyond Freud

Part 4

October 19, 2017 • by Chiara Bottici

“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” is a strange text. It presents itself as a dynamic interpretation of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which, in its turn is, also, according to Adorno, a “dynamic interpretation” of Le Bon’s description of the mass mind.[1] It ...

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What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany

An excerpt from Jonathan Bach’s latest book

October 19, 2017 • by Jonathan Bach

Introduction The GDR never existed.” Nonsense, of course -- the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, existed for forty cold war years as the front line of the Soviet Bloc, as West Germany’s socialist double and as a lived reality for sixteen million people. Yet, eighteen years after German unification in 1990, ...

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Why Do You Call Us Ladies?

History, gender, and manners in public life

October 18, 2017 • by Jessica Halem and Jen Manion

Consider the story of Abigail Adams and her most famous quote. When Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” as he drafted the Declaration of Independence, she was not advocating for the rights of American women who were predominantly poor, indentured, and enslaved. Rather, she called specifically ...

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The Infant King and Washington’s Tripartite Soul

Freud, Plato, and Trump

October 18, 2017 • by Yuval Adler

In 1933 Charles Laughton won an Oscar for Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. It is a bravura performance, worth revisiting. Laughton’s Henry runs around like a child who just learned how to walk. He gropes, screams, whines, and eats like a baby playing with his food. His temper ...

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Why I Welcome John McCain’s “Liberty Medal” Speech

McCain on the ‘meaning of American politics’

October 17, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The Center is a bipartisan organization created by Congress to promote an appreciation for the U.S. Constitution. Its President and CEO is Jeffrey Rosen, a highly respected legal journalist. Its Chairman is Joseph Biden (previous chairs include Jeb Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush); its Executive Committee is chaired ...

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Subverting the Symbols of White Supremacy

The wolf and the fox

October 17, 2017 • by Keval Bhatt

Fascism had always seemed to me a thing of the past. It was almost like a fairy-tale I was told -- a passive deterrent, an unreal warning -- while going through school. But school was not my education; my real education occurred as I entered the fight against fascism in ...

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Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?

Remolding our Political Aesthetics

October 17, 2017 • by Gordon Mantler

The contrast between the two is striking and one reason why I take students there. The Emancipation Memorial, designed by Thomas Ball, portrays a stern Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling, newly freed black man. In one of Lincoln’s hands is the Emancipation Proclamation; the other floats above the prone ...

Is it Time for the Kneeling Freedman Statue to Go?

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A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Hope and Shame in American Identity

An “American Girl” to love

October 16, 2017 • by Stacey Novack

The song, with its adolescent breathlessness and jangly melody, is about life-altering promises and unrelenting hope, especially hope that persists in the face of disappointment. It’s a song that almost “can’t help” but generate a bouncy-kneed, happy nostalgia in the listener, and, at least for some, a mild accompanying shame. ...