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Fifty years of institutional teaching has brought me this lesson: try to learn to learn how to teach this group, for me the two ends of the spectrum: Columbia University in the City of New York and six elementary schools on the border between West Bengal and Jharkhand. Everything I say will be marked by this. I take my motto from Kafka: “Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: Impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”

"For my part, I practice affirmative dissociation. Prompted mostly by a Nietzschean will to fiction and love of masks, I “fake it ‘til I make it,” assuming shrewd yet fragile identities, rotating signatures, reappropriating for myself syntactical maneuvers and rhetorical feints."

Neoliberalism, of course, is not unified or constant but differs across its geographical instantiations and transmogrifies over time. In the Euro Atlantic world today, two different and quite contingent forces are giving neoliberalism a new shape: on the one hand, financialization is configuring states, firms, associations and subjects in terms of capital valuation or credit worthiness (as opposed to productivity, efficiency, cost-benefit or interest maximization), and on the other hand, austerity regimes are effecting enormous shrinkages in human well being through cuts in jobs, pay, benefits and services.

Thinking about humanity begins with the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus: forgotten during the distribution of efficient organs, humans remained naked. While Epimetheus gave claws to some, shells to others, speed or cunning to still others, humans were neglected and ended up the poorest of creatures. To help them provide for the necessities of life and to repair as best he could his brother’s fundamental and foundational omission, Prometheus came to the rescue.

This study of The Fifth Child (1988) attempts to show that the eponymous character, a traumatic semi-human creature who neither assimilates into his ordinary family nor conforms to the demands of society impersonates a drive for disorder, chaos and violence undermining collective ideals. On the one hand, the fact that the alien child is not only excluded from family life but also from any type of “normal” human interaction, especially in Ben, in the World (2000), reveals hidden discordant notes that further lead to the disruption of his model family. On the other hand, as the symbol of a dark, destructive force fighting against enlightenment and progress, Ben’s inherently disruptive figure is a reminder of the two World Wars and the impersonation of social unrest. Through the various patterns of exclusion triggered off by his subversive presence, the fifth child reveals that the primitive dimension of the self and of humanity at large should be understood as part and parcel of human nature.

The prevention discourse, which has existed for so long has gone a step further with the belief of scientific capability to predict human behaviour by sophisticated software. It is not enough to assess possible futures, to do simulation and alternative scenarios and to guess what virtual future has the most chance to become actualised, now the professionals of security technologies want to reduce all these possible futures to only one future; often the future of the worst case scenario. And it is this selected future that they read as a future perfect, as a future already fixed, a future they already know...

Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa, philosophe, est l'auteur d'un essai personnel sur le thème de l'éthique environnementale anglo-américaine, La Communauté des êtres de nature, dans lequel il propose une approche originale des problèmes environnementaux en marge de l'écologisme français.

Les diverses déclinaisons de « X marks the spot » délimitent les pôles entre lesquels évolue cette quête de sens qui se fait jour à travers The Brooklyn Follies. « X marks the spot » évoque non seulement la croix du condamné à mort, le poids de la culpabilité, mais aussi les comptines pour enfants, l’insouciance, le jeu. Et si c’était ça, l’existence humaine ? Une suite de combinaisons aléatoires d’ombres et de lumières à travers lesquelles l’individu se fraye bon gré mal gré un chemin l’espace d’une vie. Moments de désespoir, de folie destructrice, mais aussi d’innocence retrouvée et d’adéquation au monde.