Feature

Most of the debate about the European refugee crisis revolves around whether the responsibility of handling them belongs to European institutions or to individual nation states, and, if the latter, which among them: the first country of entry (as the Dublin regulations established) or some other country. In this brief intervention, I would like to suggest that this is a false dilemma: in terms of citizenship, the European Union is dependent on the nation states that comprise it and thus, as a whole, Europe, as a political organization, is still largely dependent on their underlying logic. But the states are incapable of handling the crisis precisely because they are the very source of it. 

I will be using “migrant” and “refugee” interchangeably. As the summer approaches, and quick rubber-boat rides become easier to access, Europe will again witness an intensification of the economic migration from the North African coast,  …

In 1943 Hannah Arendt published a short essay in the Jewish periodical “The Menorah Journal” entitled We Refugees. She described in it a widespread refusal among Jews who had escaped the Nazis to call themselves “refugees.” Having lost everything — their occupation, their language, their family — they were eager to adapt to their new country as quickly as possible and to become “normal” citizens. Arendt thought that this assimilation strategy was doomed to failure, because it ignored the fact that the European model of the nation state is structurally dependent upon the fabrication of stateless and displaced persons. Instead, Jews should remember what made them special precisely as refugees. Refugees, she wrote, are “the vanguard of their peoples,” since for them history was no longer “a sealed book.” They have already experienced and recognized what to others has only become obvious today, in the era of globalization: the violence, fragility, and historical obsolescence of a territorial understanding of citizenship. …

According to the 2014 United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report, some two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to reside in cities by 2050, more than double the percentage of urban dwellers that existed across the globe in 1950. To manage this growth, policymakers have embraced the notion that cities need to become ‘smart’, …

Anwar Shaikh has been teaching economics at The New School for 42 years. One of the world’s leading heterodox economists, he argues that the neoclassical models taught at most universities are bad tools for analyzing capitalism. He hopes that his recent book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crisis, can be the foundation for an alternate economic theory and pedagogy. He recently sat down with New School student Ebba Boye to talk about this work.

Why did you write this book? When I first entered economics it was with a wish to understand how the world works. I am from Pakistan, I grew up in a part of the world where disparity in wealth was enormous and growth was slow. My father was a diplomat who was posted in many countries so growing up I observed a diversity of peoples, cultures and economies. In Kuwait I observed how they had more money than they could count,  …

Anyone passingly familiar with the history of psychoanalysis knows that the field has occupied an embattled, marginalized, often indeterminate identity, and that its survival has often seemed precarious. Yet it is from this perch on the margins of culture and community that psychoanalysis speaks. By channeling a vortex of unconscious and conscious energies, it gives voice to raw, novel, free associations. In fact, because it speaks, and because it hails listening and speaking as the medium for therapeutic action (as “the talking cure”) psychoanalysis is powerfully relevant, even essential, to our personal and collective development. It sets in motion (as Lacan, by means of Bruce Fink, would frame it)[i] “‘a dialectic of desire,’…[desire] set free of the fixation inherent in demand.” 

Psychoanalysis achieves its results through a remarkably human, non-technological practice of talking freely, of free association.  …

Fidgety and a little bored in the crammed pews of the Church of St. Francis Xavier, my eight-year-old son waited with us for the service to begin. For distraction and readiness, he etched on his program, with his parents’ help: “Today we reflect on the life of Daniel Berrigan. He was a great priest, prophet, poet and peacemaker. He touched many lives with his actions and words. It is nice to be in such a beautiful church with so many people honoring a man they loved.” Simple and true, these words presaged a ceremony that edified and even transformed the two thousand or so people blessed to have been there. The death on April 30 of the 94-year-old Fr. Dan Berrigan, S.J. at a Jesuit infirmary in New York City has been big news. Heartfelt obituaries have poured forth: from fellow priest and political troublemaker John Dear; from the rogue Washington Post columnist Coleman McCarthy, …