The possessions at Loudun: tracking the discourse of dissociation

Embedded in the history of dissociation is the best known case of possession in European history, the 17^th century possessions at Loudun, France (1632‐1638). The exorcisms and the trial drew crowds from all over Europe, the outcome prefiguring the direction in which the Western science of mind would be carried. The published debate about the possessed and obsessed Ursuline nuns of Loudun spans four centuries. One can track how theorizing about dissociation changed over time, with psychological contributions by Jean Martin Charcot, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Freud's psychoanalytic notion of demonological neurosis emphasized defensive strategies and a diabolic parody of adulthood. Jung's concepts of demonism and possession highlighted dissociated complexes that assimilate the ego and unseat the self, rendering a life ‘provisional’. Dissociation as possession provides a through‐line in Jung's Collected Works, from his 1902 dissertation to one of the last essays he wrote, in 1961. Within the context of psychotherapy, therapists and patients work towards psychological containment, consciously reorienting themselves to the presence of unconscious factors, personifying, embodying and thereby incorporating images of dissociated Otherness into the experience of selfhood.     

The Heterological Quest: Michel de Certeau's Travel Narratives and the "Other" of Comparative Religious Ethics

One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the "other" encountered in cross-cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a "science of the other." In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural "other" emerging from Certeau's analyses of a series of "travel narratives" documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau's meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the "return of the repressed" offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.     

Globalization and the Evolution of Democratic Civil Society: Democracy as Spatial Discourse

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve “political society” into “civil society” and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society.