The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

Participatory Governance in Social Enterprise

This paper emphasizes the importance of participative governance in the study of social enterprise. Furthermore, it argues that social enterprise must be analyzed through a multi-dimensional perspective. The EMES approach is based on three dimensions emphasizing the social, economic, and political dimension, while many Anglo-American definitions tend to use a one-dimensional spectrum framework. The latter often see social enterprise as a simple phenomenon that can be arranged along a continuum, ranging from economic to social, where more of one means less of the other. However, this fails to acknowledge the multi-disciplinary nature of social enterprise. Scholars inspired by the EMES approach should devote greater attention to exploring the interactive and interrelated nature of the three dimensions of social enterprise, especially the governance dimension.     

Contextualising Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well

Between East and West: The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk. Robert J. Brym with the assistance of Rozalina Ryvkina, The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk: Identity, Antisemitism, Emigration, edited and with an introduction by Howard Spier. London: Macmillan and New York: New York University Press, both in association with the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1994. 142 pp. Tables. Appendices. Illus. Name Index. Subject Index. £35.00 hardcover; $30.00 hardcover; $18.50 paperback.

A Jewish Ambassador at the Kremlin Court. Mordechai Altshuler, Yitshak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski (eds.), Sovetskiye evrei pishut llye Erenburgu 1943–1966 (Soviet Jews Write to llya Ehrenburg 1943–1966). Jerusalem: The Centre for Research and Documentation of East‐European Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1993. 539 pp. Bibl. Name and Subject Index. Paperback.

An Encouraging Start. Yakiv Suslensky, Spravzhni heroi: pro uchast hromadian Ukrainy u riatuvaniiyevreiv vid fashystskoho henotsydu (True Heroes: The Part Played by Ukrainian Citizens in Rescuing Jews from the Fascist Genocide). Ed. I. F. Kuras et al. Foreword by Leonid Kravchuk. Kiev: Tovarystvo ‘Ukraina’, 1993. 152 pp. Photographs. (Hromadiany Ukrainy—pravednyky svitu 1 (Ukrainian Citizens—Righteous of the World, Series, no. 1)). Paperback. Printrun 25,000. ISBN 5–87168–026–7.

The ‘Rational Core’ of Nazism. Ernst Nolte, Streitpunkte. Heutige und künftige Kontroversen um den Nafionalsozialismus. Berlin/Frankfurt (Main): Propyläen, 1993. 493 pp.

Volume on Hungarian Holocaust Updated. Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, revised and enlarged ed., 2 vols. New York: The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Boulder, Co: Social Science Monographs, 1994. 1,486 pp. Illus. Chronology. Index. $310.50; £155.00 hardcover. (Distributed by Columbia University Press.)

Gray Dawn or Swan Song?. Charles Hoffman, Gray Dawn: The Jews of Eastern Europe in the Post‐Communist Era. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 349pp. Index. Selected bibliography. $25.00 hardcover.     

Whither pogromshchina – historiographical synthesis or deconstruction? 1

This historiographical discussion piece on the implication of Simon Petliura and the Directory in the pogroms during the ill‐fated struggle for Ukrainian independence between 1917 and 1920 focuses on four core issues. Firstly, it suggests that those committed to the current Ukrainian nation‐building agenda face a crucial paradox: for the Directory’s endeavours to qualify as a precedent in nation building, one has to talk up its ability to influence the developments in the territory under its control. Yet to get Petliura and the Directory off the hook as far as the pogroms are concerned, one has to talk down their ability to influence those same developments. Secondly, it fundamentally questions the juxtaposition of “Ukrainian” and “Jewish” approaches on which Henry Abramson’s claim to have achieved a new synthesis between these two positions hinges. Thirdly, it demonstrates just how crucial conceptual transparency is for any useful debate on the significance of antisemitism in this context. Finally, it revisits the contention that it is a priori implausible to hold Petliura and his colleagues responsible because their attitudes towards Jews were generally positive as demonstrated not least by their commitment to Jewish autonomy rights.     

Knowledge management and the missing tradition - on the role of tradition,knowledge and competencies in industrial production

The ideas of knowledge management, competence strategy and learning organisation have been dominating debates on organisational behaviour and management recently. This article argues that most contributions to this debate are based on a quite naïve conception of knowledge and competencies. One important problem is the neglect of tradition. Through an analysis of the conventional views of knowledge and competencies and through a rehabilitation of tradition the article shows how tradition can provide us with another conception of knowledge management and related ideas. Two case studies from small Danish manufacturing companies are presented in order to show how tradition functions even in the most modem organisations.     

The ‘Failed State Index’ Offers More than Just a Simple Ranking

The role of indicators to measure trends in every area of interest is increasing. Especially in the field of politics and sociology, where modeling based on multiple indicators typically is difficult, multi-indicator systems call for attention. Multi-indicator systems are most often the first step to derive a ranking indicator. Correspondingly there is a high interest in how to transform multi-indicator systems into a one-dimensional metric scale. The scientific discipline of decision support systems provides many well-known techniques, classical examples are PROMETHEE, ELECTRE, DEA or the simple TOPSIS. The mathematical technique is pretty sophisticated, therefore the simplest variant, namely the weighted sum of indicators plays its role too, just because of its simplicity and transparency. Although the need of a derivation of a one-dimensional scale is evident, we argue that there is an interim step, between the multi-indicator system and the ranking index, provided by simple elements of partial order theory. This interim step bears useful information too and in this paper we show how and which useful additional information can be derived. We derive for example a bias-free sensitivity study, where the indicator “chronic and sustained human flight” turns out to be the most important indicator within the multi-indicator system of 12 indicators, which are the basis of the Failed State Index.