BEFORE AND AFTER MISOGYNY: A Psychoanalytic Discussion

: For those of us working in the fields of education and psychotherapy, the insistence that misogyny affects us all brings to the forefront the painful question of lifting negation in order to think of one’s own contribution to disclaimed bodily hatred. Thinking with the psychoanalytic temporality of before and after, misogyny is approached as a mental constellation of the mind’s attraction to the disavowal, objectification, and depersonalization of gender and sexual fluidity. I examine the psychical consequences of the emotional logic of insidious misogyny in practices of education and the clinic that resists working through their role in dissociated externalized mental states. My focus is on the generation and diffusion of psychical defences of ideality, splitting, denial, and disavowal of difference that compel phantasies of omnipotence and present as attacks on what comes before and after the human condition, namely: natality, bisexuality, dependency, vulnerability, and love for the maternal environment. Themes of feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory are offered as a counter-depressant.Keywords: thinking, deferred action, negation, ideality, symbolic collapse, reparation.

Religious Affirmation and Historical Criticism in Heschel's Biblical Interpretation

Not least among the bittersweet gifts of modernity to the Jews is the complication of dealing with the Bible both as sacred scripture and as a document subject to the same canons of inquiry as any other historical, or putatively historical, record. The problem goes far beyond the familiar one posed by narratives that ancient historians find doubtful or quite impossible. For historical critical research into the Tanakh (as into all other scriptures) also uncovers the processes of development of the worldviews within the literature and thus puts a painful question to those who wish to affirm Judaism as a contemporary reality. How can a literature so variegated and contradictory speak with a normative voice today? It is no wonder that so many biblical scholars avoid the normative theological questions altogether and content themselves with historical and philological description (which, of course, presupposes norms of its own). It is also no wonder that so many religious practitioners neglect the historical issues and treat their scriptures as representing a static, uniform, and unvarying worldview—not surprisingly, the worldview of their own, postbiblical affirmation.

Torture, The State and the Individual

The Report of the Landau Commission puts a painful question for public debate: can it ever be morally acceptable in a liberal democracy for the state to use cruel measures against a person to compel him to reveal information needed to prevent grave harms, such as the loss of lives? The question, of course, belongs to a class of questions that has baffled and divided people for generations. Are some actions inherently and intrinsically wrong, so that they may not be redeemed by the net good consequences they produce on balance? Even if this is the case in general, can it be true regardless of the enormity of the consequences? Battle lines in moral philosophy are drawn in terms of how these questions are answered. For consequentialists the morality of all actions is solely determined by their consequences, near and long term. For deontologists the morality of all actions is always determined, at least in part, by their intrinsic wrongness, so that if they are wrong they are not made right by their desirable consequences. Each side has, so it seems, an unanswerable objection to the position of the other. Deontologists ask: then you mean you are ready to declare, for example, that punishment of innocent persons may be morally justified if it is necessary to prevent crime? And consequentialists (without answering) ask in turn: then you mean that even if the life of thousands and the preservation of the basic freedoms of a democratic community depend on it, you would regard it as morally prohibited to use any force against a single innocent person?These questions are among the hardest of all hard questions. But they become even harder when they are asked in the context of a public debate over how a government should act in some immediate crisis.