[...] In a well-known passage from his Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the Resistance and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori an…
[...] To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, ‘I’d like to have both!’ Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No – he explains: ‘So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife …’ ‘And then, w…
there is what I call 'systemic' violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.