Wednesday, October 22, 2003

UN vote on wall Posted here Wednesday, October 22, 2003 at 3:33:41 PM     The General Assembly resolution is not legally binding, but it is seen as a barometer of international opinion. By that measure, the 144 to 4 vote signals widespread displeasure with Israel. The US and Israel were joined by the Marshall Islands and Micronesia in voting against the measure; 12 countries abstained. Abstentions were cast by Australia, Burundi, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Malawi, Nauru, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Tuvalu, and Uruguay. comment: The list of abstentions is amazing, and not found in the US press. ********

Reading Feyerbend's Conquest of Abundance. Posted here Wednesday, October 22, 2003 at 3:17:03 PM       I have been spending the day reading Paul Feyerabend's Conquest of Abundance. I attended Many seminars with him when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. His influence was pervasive and attitudinal more than substantive and precise. The book is of a peace with trying to show the science is a perspective among perspectives, perspective of social costs in terms of the complexity and humanity of our world. So, just to note that I am reading it, and very struck by his early references To some of my favorite thinkers such Eric Voegelin, Martha Nussbaum, Bruno Snell, Auerbach.   Note the coorespondence of the ideas with the review by Nussbaum just posted. ********

from a review in the Nation of a bio of Winnicott Posted here Wednesday, October 22, 2003 at 3:14:45 PM     Dr. True Self by Martha C. Nussbaum Post date 10.16.03 | Issue date 10.27.03 Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled. Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disciples and an impenetrable jargon. There is no school of Winnicott; there are no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidities that they induced. All his life Winnicott was obsessed with the freedom of the individual self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural demands, to be there without saying a word if silence was its choice. In his own writings he spoke with a voice that was determinedly his own, surprisingly personal, idiosyncratic, playful, and at the same time ordinary. One could not extract a jargon from it if one tried, and one cannot talk about his theoretical ideas without confronting live, complex human beings. That, perhaps, is why he has never had a secure home in the academy, which is so enamored of beautiful scientific or pseudo-scientific structures, and so often fearful of real people and the demands that their complexity imposes. And for these same reasons Winnicott has had an enormous influence on the practice of psychoanalysis, particularly in America.... ********