Background: This article started out as a lecture for a celebration of Hannah Arendt’s centenary in Berlin, April, 2005. Later, it was issued, revised, in a journal called The Good Society, volume 16/2 in 2007.
THE BIGGER DEBATE: POLITICS VS. ANTI-POLITICS
Summary: This reflection was written in 2002, after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, for an essay competition held by The Economist. Not surprisingly, it was not the winner. But it seems to me still pertinent. The argument is that the then current debate over “freedom vs. security,” which pitted s civil libertarians against proponents of emergency security measures, needed to be viewed in the context of a much bigger debate that was barely audible. Two crucial pillars of the American political tradition were being eroded in an emergency that focused so much attention on security. The Bush Administration was not respecting the separation of church and state, and felt no obligation to protect the political realm from corporate interests. The year after September 11th proved to be a year of assaults from within America upon not just particular freedoms but political life generally. I wondered it would become a year of debate about “politics vs. anti-politics.”
The answer, it can be said now, was that this debate never arose.
Background: Below is a paper that reflects on the opera La juive , which was staged last September in Amsterdam in connection with a Nexus Institute Conference on the “End of History.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Rabbi for the British Commonwealth) gave the keynote address, which is alluded to in this paper, as is the opera (and a summary of its arcane plot). My paper is a critique of the politics of sacrifice and the type of (to my mind quite false) universalism Rabbi Sacks invoked.
REFLECTING ON 9/11 AND THE PRESENT POLITICAL MOMENT
This is a contribution I made to an on-line psychoanalytic symposium, October 18, 2001. The topic of the symposium was what psychoanalysts might have to say in the wake of the 9/11 attack.
