The Nobel laureate argues that we have reached a time in which there is no culture The intellectuals, the supine media, the political class have abandoned substance and discrimination and with treacherous enthusiasm adopted the idea of the image as truth. The liberal revolution of the 1960s, especially the events of 1968 in France, and… Read More ‘Notes on the Death of Culture’ by Mario Vargas Llosa
Dalya Alberge The north London home of Sigmund Freud is being recreated in Dublin for a major feature film in which Sir Anthony Hopkins, the Oscar-winning actor, will star as the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis. It will include the study, complete with reconstructions of his famous psychoanalytic couch and other possessions. Freud had meticulously arranged… Read More Freudian trip: psychoanalyst’s London home recreated in Dublin for major film
the core element in the Fascist state of mind (in the individual or the group) is the presence of an ideology that maintains its certainty through the operation of specific mental mechanisms aimed at eliminating all opposition. But the presence of ideology (political, theological, or psychological) is hardly unusual; indeed it is quite ordinary. The… Read More Christopher Bollas: The fascist state of mind (1992)
The author forcefully points out that the price of quiescence is tyranny, war, and a distorted and deprived sexual life, and he exhorts the average man and woman to assume a personal responsibility for themselves and their children. Supplemented in this edition by William Steig’s humurous drawings, Listen Little Man! bears witness to Reich’s unceasing and passionate search for a… Read More Wilhelm Reich’s classic essay: Listen, Little Man! (1945)
A timely guide to the Greek philosopher – and rival to the Stoics – who saw freedom from anxiety as the ultimate goal Julian Baggini Epicurus’s distinctive feature is his insistence that pleasure is the source of all happiness and is the only truly good thing. Hence the modern use of “epicurean” to mean gourmand.… Read More Living for Pleasure by Emily Austin: an Epicurean guide to happiness
Work and leisure, deemed opposite, are both caught up in the contemporary socio-economic pressure to be productive; time off, forced into servicing respite or distraction, is a commodified entity. Could a universal right to ‘otium’, the ancient concept of time, free from worldly concerns, create the opportunity to work on oneself through oneself? Jean-Miguel Pire… Read More Taking the time to exist
The late Marxist intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás captured Europe’s disorientation after the Cold War. By Anton Jäger In the late 1920s the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth took a series of trips through the Soviet Union. The timing was duly symbolic. Ten years earlier the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsarist regime and won the subsequent civil war.… Read More Gáspár Tamás; prophet of post-fascism
… there is a more foundational reason why DeSantis and the far right are attacking education: it is the means by which our young people are made into citizens. Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the experiences and worldviews of others, and learn… Read More Schools and universities are ground zero for America’s culture war
“A feeling grew on me that people didn’t talk about the things that really matter in human lives“ First posted January 26, 2018 Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work documenting the lives of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens. Her latest project, about love, is the… Read More ‘Only love can save those who are infected with anger.’ Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich speaks to Staffan Julén
NB: I can think of several ‘cultural organisations’, national-level leaders, news channels and ‘national security’ agencies for whom pathological lying has been a way of life, the sole purpose of their existence. Will they get a mental health check? Even if they do, they will get what we call a ‘clean chit’. We’re all very… Read More Pathological lying could finally be getting attention as a mental disorder
