Neurophysiologic findings in chronic alcohol abuse

Neurophysiological examinations of 100 long term alcohol dependent patients who were having neuropsychiatric treatment, showed symptoms of polytopic damage of the peripheral and central nervous system. The results show that for recognition of the damage an extensive diagnostic programme must be used.     

Lefort as a reader of Machiavelli and Marx

This essay begins with the contention that phenomenology has taken a “hermeneutic turn,” “the things themselves” are always already interpreted. Philosophers often elaborate their own positions through a “reading” of the works of other philosophers. This is the case for Claude Lefort. Through his interpretive reading of the works of Machiavelli one sees the origin of Lefort’s idea of the autonomy and the anonymity of the political and thus his notion of political modernity. In tracing the evolution of Lefort’s relationship to Marx, we witness the process by which he disengages himself from his early “enchantment” with the works of Marx and the idea of the proletariat as a class bearing universal interest. Ultimately he criticizes Marx for his attempt to derive the political from the dimension of the social. This issues in his theory of totalitarianism as the attempt of a regime to close in on itself, thus denying any gesture to the dimension of the other.     

The French mental health law of 1938

Prehistory, attendant circumstances, and consequences are scrutinised on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the first wide-ranging law on the treatment of the feeble-minded in France, forerunner of all subsequent laws on the matter.