Abstract
There are moments that shape cultural memory and that a generation can draw upon to articulate a particular spirit they might otherwise find difficult to put into words. This is the stuff that myths are made of for they embody values that established institutions can find threatening. They serve as provocations within history. Earl Spencer’s tribute to his sister Diana at her funeral in Westminster Abbey was such a moment as he shared his attempts to understand her almost global appeal:
Your joy for life, transmitted wherever you took your smile, and the sparkle in those unforgettable eyes. Your boundless energy, which you could barely contain. But your greatest gift was your intuition and it was a gift you used wisely. That is what underpinned all your other wonderful attributes and if we look to analyse what it was about you that had such a wide appeal we find it in your instinctive feel for what was really important in all our lives (Guardian, 8 September 1997, p. 3).
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Notes
Stanley Cavell first explored this theme in the introduction to Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). He shows how the new sciences served to provide models for understanding human life that served to objectify human experience making it difficult to honour inner emotional life. This was a theme that is further explored, particularly in relation to Wittgenstein in The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
A useful discussion of the ways in which the denigration of women went hand in hand with the denigration of nature in relation to the Scientific Revolution is provided by Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1982).
See also Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good (London: Pluto Press, 1979).
For reflections that insist upon thinking the Holocaust, not as a moment of madness but in relation to the project of modernity, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
See also Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London: HarperCollins, 2007)
Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust (New York: The New Press, 2005).
For helpful reflections on the Slave Trade that think its connections to modernity, see, for instance, D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
The Frankfurt School is introduced in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973).
See also David Held, An Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas (University of California Press, 1992)
Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of the Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Bejamin and the Frankfurt School (Brighton: Harvester Books, 1977).
A helpful introduction to the writings of Walter Benjamin is given in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973). For helpful discussions of his life and work see, for instance, Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetics of Redemption (New York: 1982)
Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 2000)
Howard Caygill, Walter BenjaminJAMIN: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge 1998)
Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).
Some of the relations between mind and body and the ways that have silenced any notion of the wisdom of the heart is explored in Mary Midgeley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (London: Routledge Classics, 2003).
It is also a theme in Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1983).
A helpful and illuminating discussion of early Christian ethics that explores the connections between goodness and selflessness is Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (Yale University Press, 1995).
For a historical grasp of the how the body within a dominant Christian culture was identified with the sins of the flesh, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber, 1990).
For an understanding of the importance of consciousness-raising for women in the early women’s movement, see Michelle Wandor, The Body Politic: Women’s Liberation in Britain 1969–1972. For a more general reader drawing upon different issues raised by the early feminist movements see Women in a Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, eds Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran. See also, T. M. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992)
G.C Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988) and C. T. Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes’ Re-visited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2): 499–535.
For some sense of the diversity of alternative psychotherapies and the ways they were to be interpreted by women see, for instance, Sheila Ernst and Lucy Goodison, In Our Own Hands (London: The Women’s Press, 1981).
For a sense of more psychoanalytically inclined work see Sheila Ernst and Marie Maguire, Living with the Sphinx: Papers from the Women’s Therapy Centre (London: The Women’s Press: 1987).
For some discussion about how we might think of a new critical humanism that can come to terms with questions of identity and belonging see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and After Empire: Conviviality or Postcolonial Melancholy (London: Routledge 2005)
Victor J. Seidler, Recovering the Self: Morality and Social Theory (London: Routledge 1994) and Kant, Respect and Injustice: The Limits of Liberal Moral Theory (London: Routledge, 1986 and 2010).
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© 2013 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
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Seidler, V.J. (2013). Cultural Memories, Vulnerability and Human Values. In: Remembering Diana. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_8
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