Library of Social Science Newsletter
Recent Issues of the Newsletter
Click a title below to read the complete essay.
| Nationalism as Love of Self-Destruction August 9, 2011 Paul Kahn explicates nationalism as a form of love seeking to “transcend the limits of the finite body.” By identifying with a nation, one discovers that the finite body is no longer the boundaries of the self. One becomes more than oneself. Love, Kahn says, is felt as an “expansion and relief.” As the boundary between self and other disappears, one experiences the presence of the “infinite in the finite,” which is the “very definition of the sacred.” The self-transcendence of love is the “truth of the self for which we will literally die.” |
| Warfare as Torture August 5, 2011 In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn investigates the reasons for the resort to violence characteristic of nation states. In a startling argument, he contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law. |
| Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty August 3, 2011 In Sacred Violence, Paul W. Kahn defines sacrifice as that moment when the “violent destruction of the self is the realization of the transcendent character of the sovereign.” The power of the sovereign comes into being at the moment that the sovereign “takes possession of the body of the citizen, emptying it of any meaning it may have previously represented, and claiming it entirely.” |
| Why Do Ideologies Exist? The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Culture June 28, 2011 In Hitler’s Ideology, I present a method for uncovering the “deep structure” of ideologies and cultural belief systems. By identifying recurring images and metaphors contained in Hitler’s rhetoric, I show how fantasies and other elements of psychic life are projected into ideologies and cultural forms. “The Jew”, for example, was a central component of Hitler’s ideology, described typically as a disease, force of disintegration and parasite within the body of the people. Recurring images and metaphors within Hitler’s writings and speeches allow one to perceive the core fantasies that structured Hitler’s vision of reality and energized historical action. |
| Civilization and the Fantasy of Immortality:
Review of The King's Two Bodies June 20, 2011 In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz describes a profound transformation in the concept of political authority that occurred over the course of the Middle Ages. Kantorowicz found in Edmund Plowden’s reports (1571)—a collection of law cases written under Queen Elizabeth I—the first clear elaboration of “that mystical talk with which the English crown jurists enveloped and trimmed their definitions of kingship and royal capacities.” The following discussion of the “King’s Two Bodies” is based on Kantorowicz’s presentation and analysis of Plowden’s reports. |
| Hitler, the Holocaust and War: The Final Solution June 8, 2011 Warfare articulates devotion to the nation: the willingness to sacrifice young men in the name of sacred ideals. This willingness to kill and die for one's nation is viewed as the highest form of virtue. War exists to express this virtue, and the soldier is required to submit absolutely: obedience unto death. Hitler illuminates and reveals this fundamental ideology of the 20th century, the devotion to the nation-state, turning it from the highest virtue into a crime. |
| War as a Ritual of Self-Destruction: Review Essay of Franco Fornari and Georges Bataille May 30, 2011 At the end of this essay, I reproduce a table entitled “First World War Casualties.” According to Matthew White, over 65 million troops were mobilized. White reports 8.5 million killed and died, over 21 million wounded and nearly 8 million prisoners and missing—for a total of 37,508,686 casualties. I’ve been studying this war for 21 years and still am unable to get my mind around these numbers. What could this war have been about? What could justify such prodigious slaughter? |
| The Psychoanalytic Meaning of Culture and History: Review Essay of Norman O. Brown May 24, 2011 Norman O. Brown sets forth a vision for the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture and history—one that has not yet been actualized. Why has this project had such difficulty making its way into the world? Perhaps most significantly, psychoanalysis has become identified as a form of therapy. Brown, on the other hand, is concerned with “reshaping psychoanalysis into a wider theory of human nature, culture and history” to be “appropriated by the consciousness of mankind as a new stage in the historical process of man’s coming to know himself.” |
| Warfare, Truth and the Body: Review Essay of Elaine Scarry May 16, 2011 Elaine Scarry observes that if designating a winner or loser was the essence of warfare, then any other “contest” could be substituted for it — since all contests can equally provide a “means for deciding a winner or a loser.” Does warfare genuinely revolve around the desire to “win” something? In the face of the endless war now occurring, it is necessary to begin to interrogate — and deconstruct — conventional ways of thinking about societal violence. Scarry identifies “injuring” as the essence of warfare. We regularly claim that soldiers (or civilians) are maimed and killed as societies attempt to achieve some objective. However, what if maiming and killing is the central objective of warfare? |
| Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Review Essay of Marvin and Ingle May 11, 2011 Marvin and Ingle define religion as a “system of cosmological propositions” grounded in a belief in a transcendent power expressed through a “cult of a divine being” that gives rise to a set of ethical propositions. Nationalism, the authors say, is the “most powerful religion in the United States, perhaps in many other countries.” What is “really true in any community,” Marvin and Ingle claim, is “what its members can agree is worth killing for,” or what they can be compelled to “sacrifice their lives for.” Thus, what is “sacred” within a given society is easily recognized. |
| Terrorism as Blood Sacrifice: Review Essay of James Jones May 9, 2011 James Jones seeks to understand Islamic terrorism as a form of sacrificial behavior undertaken in the name of a religious ideology and community. Citing Ivan Strenski, he observes that suicide bombers are regarded as “sacred” by their communities of reference—as sacrificial victims. A Palestinian militant stated that it is when a bomber gives his life that he earns the most respect and is “elevated to the highest level of martyrdom.” |
| Nationalism as a Political Religion: Review Essay of Emilio Gentile May 6, 2011 Emilio Gentile defines political religion as a “more or less developed system of beliefs, myths, rituals and symbols” that creates an “aura of sacredness around an entity belonging to the world and turns it into a cult or object of worship or devotion.” |
| The Myth of Fascism as the Myth of the Nation April 29, 2011 Roger Griffin writes about the First World War as a turn of the century “longing for community” that arose as a result of modernity’s attrition of traditional society. The 1914 spirit, he says, was an “antidote to anomie” that resulted from the sweep of powerful forces—urban, capitalistic and technological that were “tearing up primeval bonds.” The First World War revolved around the search for a “transcendental nomos and sense of belonging.” This is the “quest for rebirth” that Griffin identifies at the core of fascism. |
| The Meaning of Fascism: Review Essay of Roger Griffin April 26, 2011 Based on comprehensive research conveyed in numerous books and papers, Roger Griffin has developed a generic theory of fascism. He claims to have identified a core myth that lies at the root of various historical instances. One may say that at certain times in certain societies this myth is enacted. |
| Death to the Non-Believers: Terroristic Violence and the Meaning of the Holocaust April 25, 2011 The object of worship for Hitler was his beloved nation. Hitler declared to his people: “We do not want to have any other God, only Germany” and stated that Deutschland uber Alles (“Germany above all”) was a profession of faith that “fills millions with a greater strength”—with a faith that is “mightier than any earthly might.” Hitler was a profound devotee of his religion: a preacher who sought to persuade the German people to worship as he did. |
| Killing in the Name of Love: Review Essay of Ruth Stein's Book For Love of the Father April 20, 2011 After the September 11, 2001 suicide bombings, President Bush declared that the perpetrators “hated” Americans. In For Love of the Father, Ruth Stein suggests that this was not the case. Rather, the suicide bombers were driven by love—love of God. What’s more, in performing acts of violence, they imagined they were carrying out the will of God by destroying infidels—those who refused to acknowledge the greatness of Allah. |