To shoah denial

The recent published Hebrew translation of Ana Maria Sigmund's book "Women of the Third Reich" is a very clear illustration of the only possible acces to the evil geometry implied in Shoah denial. It is posible to find there the description of how Magda Goebbels killed her six children before commiting suicide with her husband. How not to take this event as a part of the Shoah? This is the horror antecamera of all the horror scenes that the denial pretends to deny.

To Roger Cohen, Globalist (New York Times)

Dear Mr Roger Cohen,
I read your article on "Moral storm" with interest. You seem to have arrived to a question mark, but you turn it into a defence of what you call "liberal civilisation". Let me say that I have some doubts on the existence of such a thing, and beginning with the simple fact of the apories and paradoxes, like the ones that questioned the existence in mathematics of a perfectly complete and consistent formal system.
There is a limit to these systems, an also there is a limit to "liberal" civilisation, a limit that is very softly but not less quickly reached.
The Irving case is only an example. There is no such thing as "the right to differ" when "denial"--a word with strong connexions to psychoanalysis--is at stage.
For example: Freud used this word--in German "Verleugnung"--to point to the fact that in fetischism , the subject accepts that the mother has not a penis, but at the sme time he rejects it--he needs a fetisch for being able to reach a woman.
If you remember, Marx also used this word--fetisch--for commodities. He said that commodities conceal their relationship to human work, that has been sold and packed with that object.
To denial is not to differ. When somebody denials a crime that has been commited, it is not only differ or disent, but something in the word has transformed itself in an act, as we, lacanian psychoanalysts, say. It is an act, present and future. The word has transformed itself, it is not a word, it is something else. When the English people reached the conclusion that you cannot speak against the King if you are stepping on English soil, they were right, they grasped something that "liberal civilisation" has lost forever, and as such it is a question if it still merits the name of "civilisation".
Ths symbol sometimes touches the flesh. "Liberal" thinking --which is based on universal premises only--does not reach the singular, every time it clashes with universal. So democracy may be criminal--as Jean-Claude Milner writes in his superb book that I very much recommend you to read: Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique.

Daniel Dennet

Leon Wiseltier has made a very strong comment today at the IHT on the book by Daniel Dennet about religion. He writes that Dennet considers and treates himself as a real hero, a "Giordano Bruno--says Wiseltier--with a tenure at Tufts University." "He does not imagine other soil for us than the biological"--he continues. And Wiseltier says that Dennet is not so different than the fundamentalits that he so strongly condemns. Bravo, Wiseltier.

Evaluation in Tel-Aviv University

Ha'aretz today writes very politically correctly, that T-A University has not published the results of some teachers that have received not so good qualifications from the students in the evaluation-by-the-students. How lucky we are: we are still able to say that there are some heroic people, against-all-evaluated.

How much time will they resist the evaluation tsunami? Today the message is: you are going to be evaluated, no matter who you are, and this is going to be published, oh yeah, and this will surely tell every one who wants to know, how much are you worth. Students by teachers, teachers by students, and so on. And dont dare you resist, because this is transparency. This is the eye of the evaluator, much more terrible than terminator, because terminator used violent methods. And who is speaking about violence here?

Bernard Henri-Levy and Bob Dylan

BHL has published his new book "American Vertigo". I have not read it yet, but it has caused a sort of vertigo among americans. They do not know yet "how to eat him"--as we say in Israel. They say he is a good looking, welthy and talented philosopher, with a very sophisticated and pretty wife--an actress, the bigger gamle for american journalits. They even do not remark his position, they merely underline his assets as a star. But as Borges said so profoundly writing on Oscar Wilde, it may occur that the star is made to conceal that he says true things.
For example, BHL has participated very firmly in the "Forum Psy", in Paris, after the iniciative of Jacques-Alain Miller. This forum is aimed against the Accoyer law, which is a sort of legislation of psy-therapies, and looks to put under psychiatric authorisation and recommandation the conveniency of psy-treatments. BHL has written "seven principles" of psychoanalysis, that the World Association of Psychoanalysis has adopted tacitly as seven principles that merit being considered as nuclear to the practice of psychoanalysis. These things are opaque to Americans. Enough to see the last movie about Bob Dylan by Scorsese. Americans did not grasp the Dylan phenomenon, their Bob Dylan (!)-- they wanted to put it safely under some known classification. Protest singer? Anarchist? Against Vietnam war? Some implicit message? Bob Dylan was their BHL.

Jean-Claude Milner

My wife Perla is translating, practically alone, but now with the collaboration of two colleagues, the book from Jean-Claude Milner "La politique des Choses". It is very clear, a powerful book about the politics of evaluation in modern times.

Ritalin and company

There is a growing care among parents to accept Ritalin prescriptions for their children. This is encouraging, but it is not enough. Hillary Clinton once was said to be alarmed by the use of anti depressants in USA children. But this is also not enough. We need new Spinozas, we need new challenging approaches to the supposed "depression" entity as such. It surely exists as a modern symptom, as surely as ADHD in children. But it is also surely linked to language, to our modern form of life, which gives more credit to instant jouissance than to careful designed discourse. Spinoza said that sadness is a kind of moral defficiency. A couple of years ago I read a revision in Scientific American of a book by Antonio Damasio, the well-known neurologist, on Spinoza. This lady asked herself: "but who reads Spinoza today?" Well, we need more Spinozas, not only more readers of Spinoza.

The map and the territory

Once upon a time, Alfred Korzybsky imagined a sort of non-Aristotelian logics. He even invented an apparatus --"the structural differencial"--to teach how not to confuse beteween the map and the territory.
When we see and listen a message as "Israel must be erased from the map", coming from the Irani President, we may ask ourselves if he is referring to the map or to the territory. And the question is not a simple one, because fundamentalist regimes are supposed to know how to distinguish between the Divine Name and its properties.
If he was referring simply to the map, he may be excused by his ignorance. It is rather difficlt to erase from the map the name of Israel, simply because the region where it is--the Middle East--is the origin of religions and superstitions, as Freud once said, and these sort of things are not easy to erase. In our times, we paradoxically need them, even if it is only because they thirst for meaning. Jacques-Alain Miller speaked in London, 2005, about how to humanize religion, and surely he was pointing to this.
If, on the other side, the President of Iran was referring to the territory, well, he incurred in a sort of excess. Macedonio Fernandez, the argentine writer Borges admired so much, loved to recall a story of a discusion in a bar of the pampas. A man throwed a glass of liquor at another's man face. The man, very quietly, answerd: "this was an ex-abrupto. Now I listen to your arguments.