How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

Part Two: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

Editor’s note: in the first part of her essay on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Wagner discussed origins of – and the rise of resistance to – the New Polish School of the History of Shoah. In this ...
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How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

French Feminism at the Barricade

An Excerpt from “Daughters of 1968”

Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement is the story of French feminism between 1944 and 1981, when feminism played a central political role in the history of France. The key women during this epoch were often leftists committed to a materialist critique of society and were ...
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French Feminism at the Barricade

Overhearing in the Public Sphere

Any conversation in any public sphere is doomed to entail consequences

1. Overhearing, intruding, my interview & Goffman I was once invited to speak at a conference in Sigtuna, near Uppsala, in Sweden. The conference dealt with religious sociology and a few clerics were present. One of them was a famous Danish Imam, Abu Laban. He had ignited what came to be known ...
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Overhearing in the Public Sphere

Simone Veil

A noble Frenchwoman is laid to rest in France’s Pantheon

On July 1 the mortal remains of French politician and historical figure Simone Veil were transferred from Paris’s famous Montparnasse Cemetery to be reinterred in the Pantheon, the national mausoleum where lie many of the country’s most outstanding personalities. During a solemn ceremony on the steps of the Pantheon, near the venerable Sorbonne ...
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Simone Veil

“Enjoy without Restraint!”

Fifty Years Ago in Paris

This is an introduction to an in-depth narrative recollection on one of the most significant episodes of the 20th Century, May 1968 in Paris, from one of its participants, famed psychoanalyst Sergio Benvenuto. The full essay can be found here. This is the first time this essay has been published ...
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“Enjoy without Restraint!”

Agent Sabina

On the abjection of Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva’s recently released secret service files reveal a similar persona to that which comes through her writing: unruly, witty, courageous. And yet Kristeva is denying the allegations. Is it something other than the truth that she fears?   ‘On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through’ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable ...
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Agent Sabina

In Memoriam

Ashbery’s poetic cosmopolitanism

Rimbaud’s Illuminations also presents the city as object of inspiration and denigration. Take the opening of “Metropolitan” (here translated by Ashbery): From the indigo strait to the seas of Ossian, on the pink and orange sand bathed by the wine-colored sky, crystal boulevards rise up and intersect, immediately populated by poor ...
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Normalizing the State of Emergency

France’s recent anti-terror legislation

This measure codifies what has been an ongoing state of emergency, originally enacted by the Socialist President Francois Hollande in the wake of the attacks of November 2015. Since then, the state of emergency has been extended six more times in the face of ten more attacks, reinforcing what has ...
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Remember the Bastille

Terror, Terrorism, and Jihadist Capitalism

Introduction: Terror and Terrorism On Friday, June 19th, a man rammed into a police car on the Champs Elysses. Though the driver died before he could carry out further violence, it was evident that his intention was to commit a larger-scale attack; inside the incinerated vehicle, investigators found explosives, ammunition, and ...
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Remember the Bastille

Recovering Community: Part II

Remembering the Jungle at Jules Ferry

In its time at Jules Ferry, the Jungle crossed a threshold in the nature of its transgression as a political subject. This transgression was its establishment of community. What the Jungle came to embody in political form was a common project; common, that is, in two senses of the word. ...
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Recovering Community: Part II