I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to an apparently random collection of things. On each paper was written the name of the object it was stuck to; ‘toaster’, ‘cooker’, ‘sink’, ‘chair’ and so on. Over time, as she forgot …
Since the late 1980s growing numbers of mental health professionals and media commentators in Britain and the USA have been concerned with a behaviour labelled as ‘self-harm’, ‘deliberate self-harm’ or ‘self-injury’. It is often seen as a secret or hidden practice, and it is almost always ‘on the rise’, especially among adolescent females. Most commonly it refers to self-cutting or …
“Tolerance” never made it into Raymond Williams’ Keywords, a rare mistake: it should have been a tempting subject for his critical sensibility.[1] By the late-eighteenth century, the word often had come to substitute in English for the older “toleration,” meaning forbearance, patience, and indulgence of the opinions of others. Later, physiologists took up its connotation of the endurance …
Recently the Minister of Health of Trinidad and Tobago explained the problem of chronic disease in the country: “The population do not listen to the message we are sending out – love yourself, eat right, exercise and decrease your sugar and salt intake.”[i] The exhortation to “love yourself” in a disciplined approach to health suggests the curious place of …
The brain speaks the truth of the self. I imagine it would not be controversial by now to suggest that this general formulation indexes a set of implicit constraints that have to some significant degree underwritten and informed the historical ontology of the modern self since the nineteenth century.
But let me be clear: to assert that the brain speaks …
Identity and Difference:
John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness
By Etienne Balibar
Introduction by Stella Sanford
Translated by Warren Montag
Verso, 2013, 158 pp
Multi-layered, multi-dimensional, and in important respects multi-lingual, the English edition of Etienne Balibar’s groundbreaking Identity and Difference presents a layered approach to one of the most significant philosophical debates of our age.
John Locke’s Essay …