The Blue Monkey Review

I suspect that Pagina 12 must differ from most other Argentine daily newspapers. It carries a section devoted to “psychology” and seemingly draws opinion pieces from all over the western world. It also presents, from time to time, essays or interviews devoted to philosophy. In the Feburary 12 issue I noticed an article with the title, “Five imprudent remarks about Kant.” And, while I’m sure the article had been written for a general audience, it wasn’t “Kant for Dummies.”

The Pagina 12 for April 24, 2004 carried an interview with Fernando Saveter, a Spanish philosopher who recently presented a TV show in Latin America devoted to the Ten Commandments. The first line of the story points out that a basic premise of Savater’s thinking is his “agnosticismo confeso y militante.” So, he’s not talking about your father’s Ten Commandments. For Savater, the Decalogue, quite apart from its place in Judaism and Christianity, has become a moral reference point, allowing people in western culture to make a sharp distinction between good and evil. The commandments have persisted because human vices have persisted.

This short article contains some of the sharpest observations on the value of philosophy that I have seen in any popular format. Savater explains that we all ask philosophical questions concerning time, the universe, death. Philosophy contributes to human life by helping better understand life in this world.

Savater also includes an interesting observation on the development of western democracy. The interviewer, Silvina Friera, asked him how well the values of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—held up in contemporary western societies. These should have all continued to be vital values, Savater responded, but “there is a very curious case. Now one would say liberty, diversity, and fraternity. Equality is viewed badly [sorry, bad trans.], even though it is much more revolutionary than diversity.” That statement alone should send you to the original.

Posted by at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to the discussion that resulted from last week’s posting, I decided to improve my mind by reading Michel Foucault’s essay/chapter entitled “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish. It contains a remarkable discussion of an idea of Jeremy Bentham’s, the panopticon. This “all seeing machine” was Bentham’s plan for a prison in which the cells would be arranged in tiers around a central yard, with all of the cells having windows on the outside and inside. At the center of the circular yard would stand a tower with windows all around. This simple device would allow the warder (or anyone else) in the tower to see everything that the prisoners did, while the prisoners could not see the warder, could not even tell if it was the warder or someone else or no one at all watching them. Consequently, the constant visibility of the prisoners, and the invisibility of their guardians, would make control simple, almost automatic.

I don’t know if anyone ever built a prison on this design, and if so if the idea worked. Prison construction in the U.S. has boomed in recent decades, so a simple and automatic means of controlling the prison population would seemingly attract lots of attention. But the actual existence of a panopticon really is irrelevant as far as Foucault is concerned (though, he never tells us that in so many words, instead leaving the impression that panoptic structures are all over the place). Because the panopticon serves as a metaphor for the use of power in western societies since the 17th century. Foucault points to the persistent organization and ordering or humanity in every possible manner (but especially in imagination, in what we might call discourses, perhaps?). And this order serve to regularize and control the humanity that is so ordered. A system that orders must investigate, study, dissect, know what it is ordering—the subject must become transparent, seen in every possible way and at every possible time. Social structures flow into political structures flow into police structures. They are all panoptic, viewing everything from the obscure perch of social statistics or science, and they all serve to establish control over what they examine. At least, this is what I think Michel Foucault is telling us. It’s an interesting and useful perspective. In what follows, I want to try to use it to discuss a peculiarity of contemporary society known as “blogging.” And, of course, I want to take issue with it.

Continue reading "The Panoptiblog" »

Posted by at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Michel Foucault and The History of Sexuality

Before the Nazi occupation, Edmund Bergler was one of the leading psychoanalysts in Austria. He had studied with Sigmund Freud and at that time was assistant director of the Psychoanalytic Clinic in Vienna. Later he would immigrate to the United States and assume an important role in maintaining Freudian orthodoxy in the New World. In a 1937 article on “The Present Situation in the Genetic Investigation of Homosexuality” [Marriage and Hygiene 4: 16-29] Bergler provided a short account of five homosexuals convicted under Austria’s sodomy laws. The court offered the five men the choice of undergoing treatment to cure their homosexual drives or go to prison. One of the men chose treatment but disappeared soon after it began. The other four chose prison. On the face of it, this story is a testament to the satisfaction that these men must have taken in their homosexual lives. But for Bergler, the story (amazingly) supported his view that “there are no happy homosexuals.” Bergler claimed that guilt drove these men to atone for their wrongdoing. Through a long career, Bergler maintained his view of homosexuals as unhappy “injustice collectors” who provoked conflicts that they could then claim as persecution for their homosexuality.

In the early twentieth century a majority of psychiatrists and physicians supported the view that homosexuality indicated maladjustment, at best, or, at worst, mental illness. This psychiatric viewpoint can stand as an example of a sexual discourse, a concept developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s idea of discourse stands alongside liberalization and revolution as one of the major theoretical tools used today to understand the history of sexuality. Today Blue Monkey will attempt to explain Foucault’s idea of sexual discourse, and to explore its implications for the history and sexuality. We will return to Dr. Bergler and his psychiatric colleagues.

Continue reading "Sexual Discourses" »

Posted by at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the words of one expert, “the main reason for doing the operation is that it usually works; it brings results sufficiently successful to make it worthwhile.” The operation in question was the lobotomy, the subject of a very interesting book by Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge, 1998) (Dewey Decimal Call # 616.891 P93). The lukewarm endorsement of psychosurgery seems appalling to us today, when we know that slicing up parts of the brain serves no medical therapeutic good. Even one of its proponents, reflecting on the lack of understanding of brain function, called the lobotomy a “stab in the dark.” Mortality rates for the operation were 1 to 3%, and around 10% of those operated on developed induced epilepsy.

Continue reading "Last Resort" »

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week Haaretz published an interview with Aharon Appelfeld. The noted author and Holocaust survivor discussed the ambivalence of Israelis concerning their own identity as Jews. This becomes an element in the struggle of the Jewish state to survive in a region of hostile Arab neighbors. Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right to Exist, sent me this link and referred to is as "perhaps the most important piece I've sent around, in more than three years." An excerpt follows.

Continue reading "Struggle for the Israeli Soul" »

Posted by at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yaacov continues to surprise and educate in Right to Exist. In these chapters he identifies and condemns mistakes of Israeli governments in dealing with the occupation of Palestine and with the Arab minority in Israel. He also shows his respect and affection for the diversity of modern Israel. These chapters made me return to issues of nationhood that I've pondered for many years.

Continue reading "Right to Exist, 6 & 7" »

Posted by at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For me, Right to Exist, reads like an extended letter from a friend. I’ve become so accustomed to Yaacov’s “voice” (the literary kind) from his casual and sometimes not so casual correspondence that reading his book makes me feel like I’m listening to him. In literal terms, I haven’t heard Yaacov speak for much more than ten years, though I’m sure I’d recognize him right away if he called on the phone. But in Right to Exist, Yaacov takes the straightforward, somewhat didactic tone that he often took when speaking to members of my study group in Israel. He was always confident of his thinking, and very logical. And as a historian, he has the mother load of examples to support his points.

Continue reading "Right to Exist, chapters 4 and 5" »

Posted by at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The first three chapters of Right to Exist provide an overview of Jewish history and of Palestine, but the bookends of these chapters are the second-century ethnic cleansing that removed Jews from Judea, and the 1947-48 Israeli War of Independence, when Jews reclaimed part of Palestine.

Continue reading "Right to Exist, chapters 1 to 3" »

Posted by at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From my long correspndence with Yaacov, I knew many of the stories he shared in his Introduction. I also did not find many of his major themes surprising. Yet I found myself emotionally connected to the topic of the book almost from the first page. Yaacov shares much of himself, here, and asks the reader to prepare for an intellectual as well as emotional struggle.

Continue reading "Right to Exist, Introduction" »

Posted by at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I plan to blog my reflections on the book Right to Exist by Yaacov Lozowick. But, before I begin, I come clean on what I bring to this task.

Continue reading "Right to Exist" »

Posted by at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The book I reviwed on the free love movement in the 19th century inspired a whole range of reflections. My first book dealt with the same movement, so this recent work made me feel like I was renewing old acquaintance. But, because the work had challenged some of my published ideas, it gave me a chance to change my mind about free love, or at least to think about free love in new ways.

Continue reading "Free Love and Sex Radicals" »

Posted by at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)