This essay is framed by the work of Edward Sampson (1993), and is a sociohistorical analysis of the institutional vicissitudes in American history that have formed the ground of our current version of the “truth” about drugs, alcohol, the drug addict and the alcoholic. The drug and alcohol discourse has been used throughout American history to institute and maintain normative ideals. These ideals are contoured by Western individualistic understandings of human being. They revolve around a theme of freedom seen as access to unlimited possibilities, which arises as a right for those individuals who are self-reliant. Alcoholics and addicts have been used as political identities, silently portraying the opposite and living out the underside of these normative ideals. As political identities they are used discursively to maintain mainstream illusions of self-reliance and to hide the falsehood of the capitalist promise of unfettered access to unlimited possibilities. Capitalist interests flourish through the maintenance of these illusions, and are able to disown responsibility via the silencing, through embodiment, of those who have been marginalized. This self-celebratory discourse is, hence, a monologue that undermines the possibility of hierarchical revolutions. Encapsulated in the embodiment of the alcoholic and addict are the covering over of political conflicts, the leveling down of difference, and the marginalizing of those who represent dialogical possibility. Twelve-step mutual help organizations participate in self-celebratory monologues that maintain the version of truth supportive of the agendas of the wealthy; however, they also offer an other-centered strategy by which dialogue again becomes possible.

The Internet appears to have become an ever-increasing part in many areas of people’s day-to-day lives. One area that deserves further examination surrounds sex addiction and its relationship with excessive Internet usage. It has been alleged by some academics that social pathologies are beginning to surface in cyberspace and have been referred to as “technological addictions.” This article examines the concept of “Internet addiction” in relation to excessive sexual behavior. It contains discussions of the concept of sexual addiction and whether the whole concept is viable. This is done through the evaluation of the small amount of empirical data available. It is concluded that Internet sex is a new medium of expression that may increase participation because of the perceived anonymity and disinhibition factors. It is also argued that although the amount of empirical data is small, Internet sex addiction exists and that there are many opportunities for future research. These are explicitly outlined.

This essay explores connections between the fourteenth-century “Black Death” and the current COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the ways in which prejudice and inequality exacerbate their impacts and considering how the upheaval created by catastrophe creates opportunity for greater equity and community, but also exploitation and oppression, depending on human response.

Trendwatchers have spotted some seismic shifts in relations between business and politics. Particularly, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are increasingly weighing in on greater good issues. Although a global phenomenon, current CEO activism scholarship reflects a Western focus; an ideological bias for modernist perspectives; a preponderance of White male CEO voices, and the relative elision of female activist CEOs. While, generally, no empirically-based typology of the sociopolitical issues that matter to activist CEOs exists, the specific range of causes of particular concern to non-Western CEO activists is neatly absent. This paper addresses all of these concerns, offering an inquiry into the emerging CEO activism phenomenon in the Ghanaian non-Western sociocultural milieu. Data collection entailed three separate rounds of fieldwork that saw long interviews with a corps of 24 self-identified informants, featuring an even split of men and women activist CEOs. The hermeneutic phenomenological theme-based approach guided data analysis. Following extant brand activism models, a typology of six clusters of CEO activism issues is offered that highlights the weightier matters of sociocultural activism, environmental activism, business/workplace activism, political activism, legal activism, and economic activism. Sociocultural issues include Ghana’s fight against COVID-19, where activist CEOs pooled resources to construct and equip a new multimillion dollar 100-bed infectious diseases hospital facility, embarked on risk communication campaigns, donated critical health supplies, funded the screening and testing of employees, provided food and essential supplies to vulnerable groups, and called out the government for lapses in the management of this health crisis. Besides internationalizing CEO activism studies for the strategic communications, leadership, business ethics and responsible management fields, the results suggest the need to consider the perspectives of CEO activists in non- Western societies. This paper contributes mainly to current discussions in CEO activism (aka corporate social advocacy) and brand activism. It contributes to other theoretical and conceptual streams, including covenantal notions of public relations, Caritas, Ubuntu Philosophy, Africapitalism, and postmodern values in strategic communication. This paper contributes to the upper echelon perspective; insider activism; sustainability transitions; and current discussions concerning how to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and social justice in the public relations literature. Policy implications are laid out, and areas for future research are indicated.

Trump and his administration brought with them an inflammatory rhetoric that reduced complex issues into the simplified polarity of "us" and "them." With this as the dominant paradigm, racism was encouraged and spread like a virus throughout the nation, appearing in heightened jingoism against other nations, anger towards fellow citizens and violence towards neighbors. When the pandemic Covid-19 spread throughout the nation and the world, it became politicized, used by Trump as a novel corona vehicle help inflame intolerance. He repeatedly associated China and Chinese people with the virus to forward his political agenda regarding US trade with China and he used the resulting demonization of China as a foil for his complicity with Russian crimes. In response to increased and well-publicized acts of violence against Black Americans, systemic racism against Black people is finally being noticed. However, anti-Asian violence has largely been disregarded. This paper discusses both the increased violence against Asian Americans and the lack of attention to it. Dividing the paper into three sections, I correlate an artwork to the main issue in each section: the state-of-affairs provide a context in which to understand the artworks. Reciprocally, because artworks evoke an embodied understanding, involving our senses as well cognition, artworks change our relationship with issues from topical to personal. The artworks recontextualize what we thought we already knew and present possibilities for constructing the world differently.

This essay uses Hannah Arendt’s theory of action and her critique of modern politics to explore the themes of predictability and unpredictability in human affairs, and the political meaning of interruption and refusal. It draws on the life and literature of the Russian avant-gardist, Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942), alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky and several contemporary theorists, to offer a reading of action as taking the form, specifically, of playful interruption and generative refusal. A marginal figure whose deeds and writings were disruptively strange, Kharms is taken as an exemplar of action in this ludic mode. This serves to elaborate upon Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality, while challenging some weaknesses in her theory of action as a whole.

A number of writers have recently challenged the notion of the demonic as mere superstition, arguing for a need to understand the demonic in terms of the often-obscured ways in which it operates in relation to contemporary thought and critique. Building on this, this paper offers an analysis of the demonic as a rhetorical concept. Moving beyond the notion of the demonic as simply a trope at the disposal of a speaker or writer, the paper explores how the expression of the demonic performs a more foundational, repetitive, and indeed, deceptively banal role in shaping the discourses it inhabits. This precedes and frames the ethico-political discourses on evil commonly associated with demonology today.

In view of intensified danger from multiple causes manifesting what Heidegger understood as the rule of planetary technology and the possibility of pitting meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) against the dominant calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), there is enhanced need to think further Heidegger’s turn to the poetic word of Hölderlin. Here Heidegger’s attentiveness to Hölderlin’s “The Ister” is engaged with a view to clarifying the significance of “becoming homely” and “dwelling” as part of the task of thinking required of Western humanity if it is to appropriate a “second beginning” such as Heidegger intimates possible. Absent this thinking, the “first beginning” initiated in Greek antiquity promises a thoroughly techno-cratic world order.

In the 1990s, Julija Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek developed a unique discourse within psychoanalysis - the psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Their cultural and political analysis represented the Balkans as a pathological region of nations suffering from the syndrome of an “archaic mother.” They propose in their different ways that the subject (nation) must radically separate from oedipal attachment to the attachment to nationalism as unemancipated Oedipus and subordinate to the authority of the symbolic father, that is, to the West. At the heart of such an approach is a conservative policy of labeling the Balkans as primitive behind Kristeva and Žižek loom self-orientalization and geopolitical de-identification with the Balkans as a precondition for their cosmopolitan and universalist identity.

This dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi took place in Budapest on March 10, 2003 at Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies, which is affiliated with Central European University (CEU). Ricoeur was the honorary president of Pasts, Inc., and its spiritus rector. On March 8, he had given a lecture on "History, Memory, and Forgetting" in the context of an international conference entitled "Haunting Memories? History in Europe after Authoritarianism," and organized by Pasts Inc. and the Körber Foundation. On March 9, Ricoeur had received the first Honoris Causa doctorate ever granted by CEU. Ricoeur had already visited Hungary in 1933. At the time, he was participating in a Boy Scouts European jamboree at Gödöllö (where he also saw Horthy on his white horse). After WWII, he went back to Hungary to meet with Lukács. Mona Antohi has transcribed and edited the recording of the dialogue. The two interlocutors have then made some minor revisions. The original text, in French, is available on the website of Pasts, Inc. (www.ceu.hu/pasts). This English version, translated and annotated by Gil Anidjar, will be included in Sorin Antohi's book, Talking History. Making Sense of Pasts, forthcoming in 2006 from CEU Press. His own Romanian translation of the dialogue was published in the Iasi-based journal, Xenopoliana (3-4, 2004), as was the Hungarian translation by Réka Toth, which appeared in the Budapest-based journal, 2000 (November-December 2003).

Practicing the Goethean approach to science involves heightened methodological awareness and sensitivity to the way we engage in the phenomenal worlds. We need to overcome our habit of viewing the world in terms of objects and leave behind the scientific propensity to explain via reification and reductive models. I describe science as a conversation with nature and how this perspective can inform a new scientific frame of mind. I then present the Goethean approach via a practical example (a study of a plant, skunk cabbage) and discuss some of the essential features of Goethean methodology and insight: the riddle; into the phenomenon; exact picture building; and seeing the whole.