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donate Abstracts for Mittelweg 36 4/2008
Jan Philipp Reemtsma
Gewaltopfer – kann man Abstinenz von der Öffentlichkeit fordern?
Victims of Violence – Can We Demand That the Public Exercise Abstinence?
This essay about contemporary relations between the general public, the media, and victims of violent crime begins with critical assessments of the public's purported right to be informed, the limits of freedom of the press, and the reasons for increased public interest in media reporting on the victims of violence. The author then discusses crime victims' contradictory needs with respect to communication with the public and considers how media representations undermine victims' self-determination by feigning intimacy while in fact exposing them.
Christian Schneider
Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Diagnose oder Parole?
The Inability to Grieve: Diagnosis or Rallying Cry?
Psychoanalyst Christian Schneider revisits a controversy about "Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern" (published by Mitscherlich and his wife Margarete in 1967), a book that had an unparalleled influence on the post-1945 German culture of memory. In the 1992 debate unleashed by Tilmann Moser's article in the journal PSYCHE criticizing the analytical and methodological shortcomings of Mitscherlichs' diagnosis of German society as incapable of grieving, Schneider defended their work as a rallying cry for those committed to confronting the country's Nazi past. In this text, the author recalls Freud's work on the subject to elucidate the Mitscherlichs' misinterpretation of the relationship between memory and grieving and discuss the unintended and ambivalent effects of the resulting metaphorization of grief.
Ulrich Bröckling
Enthusiasten, Ironiker, Melancholiker. Vom Umgang mit der unternehmerischen Anru-fung
Enthusiasts, Ironists, and Melancholiacs: On Dealing with the Adjuration to Act as an Entrepreneurial Self
This article outlines the aporias of the contemporary adjuration to act as an entrepreneurial self in all life contexts and discusses the enthusiast, the ironist, and the melancholiac, as three ideal types that represent problematic variations on the entrepreneurial self and the corresponding modes of dealing with these aporias.
Published 2008-08-20
Original in German
Contributed by Mittelweg 36
© Mittelweg 36
© Eurozine
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