Les Lais de Marie de France présentent un jeu subtil entre l’impossibilité de décrire l’acte charnel et l’utilisation d’un langage travaillé qui y fait allusion suivant les codes de la courtoisie. S’allonger l’un près de l’autre dans un lit, rire, jouer et parler, le pinceau de Marie de France n’ira pas plus loin. Mais l’intensité du désir sexuel sera dénotée par d’autres éléments symboliques appartenant au monde naturel. Les amants, captifs d’amours interdites et abandonnés à leurs plaisirs sensuels, risquent parfois (...) la mort mais, dans une dialectique entre l’amour et la mort, leurs lits funéraires, posés l’un à côté de l’autre, rétablissent mythiquement l’amour par la promesse d’une fusion éternelle. (shrink)

Les Lais de Marie de France présentent un jeu subtil entre l’impossibilité de décrire l’acte charnel et l’utilisation d’un langage travaillé qui y fait allusion suivant les codes de la courtoisie. S’allonger l’un près de l’autre dans un lit, rire, jouer et parler, le pinceau de Marie de France n’ira pas plus loin. Mais l’intensité du désir sexuel sera dénotée par d’autres éléments symboliques appartenant au monde naturel (arbres, plantes, oiseaux). Les amants, captifs d’amours interdites et abandonnés à leurs plaisirs (...) sensuels, risquent parfois la mort mais, dans une dialectique entre l’amour et la mort, leurs lits funéraires, posés l’un à côté de l’autre, rétablissent mythiquement l’amour par la promesse d’une fusion éternelle. (shrink)

Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested (...) in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively. (shrink)

_Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time_ provides us with a unique pictorial window into a fascinating period of psychoanalytic history. It is the gift of Edward Bibring, a passionate photographer who, Rolleiflex in hand, chronicled international psychoanalytic congresses from 1932 to 1938. The period in question spans the ascendancy of Hitler, the great exodus of analysts to England and the U.S., and the Anschluss of 1938. A year after the Paris Congress, the last meeting photographed by (...) Bibring, Europe would be in flames. At Wiesbaden in 1932, we find an ever dignified Ernest Jones relaxing aboard a sight-seeing ship, and Helene Deutsch and Heinz Hartmann delightfully at ease at a coffee shop. At the Lucerne Congress of 1934, Anna Freud, Ludwig Jekels, Wilhelm Reich, Grete Bibring, Max Eitingon, and Franz Alexander happily converse outside a hotel. At Marienbad in 1936, there are smiling new faces: Annie Reich, Ernst Kris, Otto Fenichel, Edward Glover, and others. At Budapest in1937 the women – Anna Freud, Vilma Kovacs, Dorothy Burlingham, and Elisabeth Geleerd – speak animatedly among themselves. A demure Margaret Mahler and a chic Marianne Kris make their appearance. In 1938, we see a series of table shots, where analysts, now with suit jackets removed and even a few collars loosened, relax with their food, wine, and cigars. Bracketed by Sanford Gifford’s brief introduction and biographical sketches of all the captured parties, Bibring’s photographs, digitized and enlarged, retain just enough graininess to evoke a different era in the history of psychoanalysis. It is heartening to see the paragons of “classical psychoanalysis” as warmly human, their analytic reserve supplanted by relaxed affability. But it is sobering to remember that the high spirit engendered by Congresses – in Bibring’s time no less than our own – may overlay the gravest political developments and the deepest personal anxieties. (shrink)

Wilhem von Humboldt -- Karl Jaspers -- Odo Marquand -- Karl Mannheim -- Lucien Goldmann -- Terry Eagleton.

Commentary, with Bengali translation, of Anumānakhaṇḍa, a portion of Tattvacintamaṇi, basic work on the neo-Nyaya school in Hindu philosophy, by Gaṅgeśa, 13th century.

Commentary on Praśastapādācārya's Praśastapādabhāṣya, compendium of the Vaiśeṣika philosophy; includes text.