We Cannot Choose With Whom We Cohabit

Sometimes There Are Ways To Minimize The Importance Of Gender In Life, Or To Confuse Gender Categories So That They No Longer Have Descriptive Power. But Other Times Gender Can Be Very Important To Us, And Some People Really Love The Gender That They Have Claimed For Themselves.

Not All Bodies Are Born In Male Or Female. There Is A Continuum Of Bodies And It Seems To Me That Trying To Persuade Medical And Psychiatrist Establishments To Deal With The Intersex Involves Critique Of The Binary Gender System. Similarly There Continues To Be Extreme, Sometimes Very Extreme Violence Against Transgender People.

The Pleasurable Part Of Public Mourning Can Also Lead To A Sense Of Self-sanctification That Justifies In Advance Any War Effort, Whether Or Not The Target And Destruction Are In Any Way Related To The Initial Event.

It Seems, Though, That Historically We Have Now Reached A Position In Which Jews Cannot Legitimately Be Understood Always And Only As Presumptive Victims.

I Do Not Mean To Say That Such Institutions Act Unilaterally On Psychic Life, Or That They Determine Certain Psychic Outcomes. Rather, They Exploit Forms Of Fear And Insecurity That Are There For Any Population - No Political Organisation Of Life Could Ever Fully Do Away With Fear And Insecurity; But Some Work To Intensify, Accelerate, And Make More Acute Forms Of Fear, And To Provide Ideological Focus For Such Intensified Fears, At Which Point Critical Thinking Has A Fierce Rival. The Critical Analysis That Shows Precisely How Those Forms Of Fear Are Promulgated, And For What Purpose.