The essay proposes that children should not participate in custody proceedings because they lack a place in the public world, a concept which was developed by Arendt and which I elaborate on the basis of her writings. Arendt’s concepts of place in the world and of childhood are correlated, polar ethical concepts. ‘Place in the world’ as described by Arendt combines commitment to worldbuilding as a collaborative enterprise, relations of mutual-recognition among equal co-builders of the public world, an inviolable place (...) in public and private realms, and self-disclosure through the staging of public appearances. We should recognize children as rightful participants in divorce proceedings when we are ready to treat them as occupants of place in the world, split between public and private realms and corresponding public and private voices. Recent practices of children’s participation undermine the intimate realm of childhood as well as the public world. (shrink)

Departing from Durkheim’s assertion of the primacy of public time, I argue that time is manufactured through the legal organization of society in the form of a corporate body. As a corporation, society enjoys fictive immortality, and it is this legal fiction that allows the flow of historical time. The institution of time, and of the corporate structure in general, is made possible through the political triumph over communal aspirations for timelessness, oneness and death: aspirations for an eternal present, to (...) which I refer as the communal body. The passage from a founding, pre-historical experience of timelessness into historical time is accomplished through the construction of a perpetual corporate body in place of a communal body that lacks a temporal dimension. I will argue that the establishment of historical time and of the corporate organization of society necessitates the normative regulation of sexuality. Thus, the relaxation of the traditional structure of historical time and of sexual morality in contemporary society are closely intertwined. (shrink)

It is argued that ideals emerge in the course of the individuation‐separation process, preserving the narcissism of primary Thingness. Ideals form an essential part of social structure, as opposed to communitas, where individuation is suspended. The anthropological distinction between social structure and communitas is reformulated in psychoanalytic terms. Structure and communitas are shown to correspond to two alternative organizations of narcissism. Ideals and myths figure among the manifestations of the narcissism of structure. In the last section, certain explanations of the (...) discourse of ideals are drawn from the preceding account. While the premises of the following reflections are broadly Kleinian, Lacanian concepts are supplemented, not on the basis of any definite synthesis but towards a piecemeal reconciliation. (shrink)