This is a transcription of Jean d'Ormesson's speech at UNESCO at the 50th anniversary celebrations of Diogenes in 2003. He describes the journal's origins, inspirations and editors, and the unique place it occupies in the promotion of international, interdisciplinary scholarship.

On November 9, 2002, a few hundred people, mostly mental health clinicians, gathered at the New York University Medical Center for two days of discussions on the theme, September 11th: Psychoanalytic Reflections in the Second Year. The conference was sponsored by the five New York Societies of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The presentations described various bits of learning that seemed to be emerging from the crisis clinical work with so many traumatized people since the attack on the World Trade Center. This paper discusses three of those presentations in the context of the author's reflections based on his psychotherapeutic work with very troubled patients in a therapeutic community setting. He emphasizes the effect of trauma, not only on individuals, but on the holding environments and symbolic order on which human beings depend for their psychic survival.

Porto-Novo (Benin), 19-21 September 2002. A conference on ‘The encounter between rationalities’, jointly organized by the Centre Africain des Hautes Etudes, the UNESCO network ‘Paths of Thought’ and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (ICPHS), took place there on the occasion of its 26th General Meeting. Seventy-two delegates from 33 countries. An ambitious academic programme, which, like all such programmes, we knew quite well we would never be able to cover, had been drawn up in four sections:

The term ‘Central Asia’ has been in use for 150 years, yet it is only since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more recently, growth in awareness and concern about international terrorism, particularly in the USA, that the countries of Central Asia have become significant players on the international political stage. Denis Sinor describes the historical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the newly independent republics of the area: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan.

What comes to my mind is my house in the woods with no neighbor in sight, a home I have to defend not against real burglars or imaginary terrorists but against deer that eat my flowers and raccoons that break into my porch and all that at a 15-minute drive from a superb library. I see the peaceful emptiness of the land. I see myself driving or riding my motorcycle on, say, Interstate 70, somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico perhaps along the legendary Santa Fe Railroad with barely a car on the magnificent highway. With some justification the USA is reproached for being the world's worst polluter yet it invented and maintains the most glorious National and State Parks. I recall the Natchez Trace running from Mississippi to Nashville Tennessee, a fine two-lane road with no buildings (not even a gas station) along its 443 miles (710 km), or the Appalachian Trail, a mountain footpath for hikers which extends over 2100 miles (3400 km). To those who equate America with New York it may sound surprising, but the overwhelming majority of the population of the United States leads a quiet, undisturbed life. One pays one's taxes - and is left alone in everything else. Years can pass without the need for any contact with the so-called ‘authorities’ to arise, and when it does - on city, state, or federal level - the contacts are usually pleasant. People elect their sheriffs, their judges, the employees of the court house, all of whom, to keep their jobs, try to be helpful. In the soup-kitchen where I have occasionally served, a good, appetizing meal is offered free of charge to anyone who comes in, with no questions asked about need or identity. Many who come could afford to buy themselves a meal.

For once our societies are in agreement with the social and human sciences, that is, the sciences that have made these societies their subject of study and claim to provide them with a knowledge of themselves that the societies treat with a distant respect without being very sure they really need it: for our societies, as well as for the social and human sciences, memory is on the agenda, it has become a compulsory reference point. Our societies even agree to hear about a ‘duty to remember’ resembling an ethical and political requirement they could not evade. The preservation and promotion of every trace of the past has become one of the most general and least discussed aspects of every cultural policy. The term ‘heritage’ has entered the official language and is combined with a large number of adjectives: artistic, ethnological, archaeological, ecological, animal and plant. It is as if, in order to find an excuse and make people forget, societies, which on one hand are clearly ambitious for strong economic growth, progress and adaptation to new technologies, had on the other to compensate by making frequent reference to a past they do not wish to lose, destroy or consign to oblivion, even though they continually turn their back on it.

In the topic ‘an encounter between rationalities’ I can discern two aspects: a postulate and a problem.

The postulate concerns the existence in the history of different societies and civilizations of rationalities that experts in the various academic disciplines relating to society and humanity, as well as philosophy, will be better able to define than I can. I have preferred to focus on the problem of this encounter of ours and wish to contribute to its clarification some theoretical ideas by way of pointers, or signposts.

A community's collective memory of a period or a concrete event largely consists of the representations shared by most of those, individuals or groups, who create that story. These representations are organized around a main axis giving them a meaning that allows them to function as the foundation for the community concerned. This founding condition of memory, which has already been highlighted by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering book La Mémoire collective, the act of rescuing the past from oblivion and setting it up as a reference point for community identity, transforms remembering into an imperative for survival, whose ethical character and collective influence make the duty to remember ‘a practice indispensable to any affirmation of belonging to a group’.

The article focuses on motivation, proposing the equation in its title and opposing the contrary view, that what moves people to action is the rational calculation of their material interests. The latter view is most familiar in economics, where it was for generations seen as the best (meaning, most ‘scientific’) mode of explanation. It had a great deal of influence on historiography and found a great deal of support among psychologists also. From these three areas of research it is being challenged, however, even to some extent displaced, in recent decades. The importance of emotions or feelings in explaining behavior is increasingly acknowledged, and the validity of conclusions reached about feelings in historical contexts through the operation of empathy. Illustrations of how this works can be easily supplied.

Not onlç waçs of behavior are objects of value judgments, but words as well. The term ‘rational’ is such a word: to be rational is good. This is probablç the reason whç, as a reaction to so-called ‘western rationalitç’, people started speaking of manç ‘rationalities’, a claim propounded especiallç bç postmodernists during the past few decades.

‘Culturology’ is an integral, often compulsory, part of Russian university courses; the discipline has largely replaced chairs in Marxist-Leninism and dialectical materialism, and bookshops are full of texts on the subject. This article is based on analysis of more than ten university textbooks recommended to first-year students. Marlène Laruelle examines why culturology has become so important, the place claimed for it within the human sciences, and what it means for changing Russian ideas of identity and nation.

Social memory does not exist only as a collection of remembrances that a group recognizes as theirs. Much more than simple forms of expression of memory, the more or less ritualized situations it is involved in serve to express its continuity. Rituals are an attempt to preserve the cultural identity of a people, or a section of a people. It is clear that the social imaginary more often than not tends to give them a very big part to play. And so rituals appear to be an expression of memory that should be represented, or presented again, as synonymous with history. This imaginary sets up memory as something absolute: it must know everything. Symbolically confused with history, memory may even, in this imaginary, make it possible for people to find their place in the world. Memory and history may then be the elements making up reason. In losing their memory - or their history - they would lose the ability to distinguish and discern.

Recently I listened to an interesting dinner-table debate between my teenage children about an issue that, to my mind, clearly raised questions closely related to the theme of encounter of rationalities. In a conversation about indigenous Kenyan hairstyles, my son had wanted to know why the Maasai ‘made’ their women folk shave their heads bald while young men stylishly braided their hair into what has become a popular and fashionable African hairstyle, not for men, but for women. My daughter, who is quite a gifted debater, responded that it was just tradition, and tradition never answers to anyone's ‘why’ question, especially when the questioner is an insider who is expected to just practice the norm. My son, in obviously frustrated wonder, then sought to know whether they could ever answer the question if it were asked by an outsider (of the tradition) like himself, to which his sister responded: ‘what makes you ask? I guess every tradition sets its own ways.’ The boy: ‘why can't everyone be left free to do what they feel they like at different times, just like I dress differently for different occasions?’ The girl: ‘You see, you are always reading and shifting your dressing according to the norms you want to conform to. You may not be aware, but you change from one set of norms to another, one when you are at College, and the other when you come home, can't you see?’ The rest of us sat there, choking with the temptation to join in, and suffering the frustration of being denied the chance. I in particular struggled to stay neutral, but I succeeded not only by not joining in, but also by not revealing that I was working on this paper, all the while thinking to myself: ‘this is all about the encounter of rationalities, and the arguments’ turns, back and forth, are all about the relative rationality of ends’. In many respects, and to my amazement, my daughter and son got immersed in debating the merits of the idea of autonomous reason. My amazement was not only about the depth of the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that these teenagers revealed in their debate, it also was about the revealed transient nature of the communities from which people source the points of view on the basis of which they question the rationality of opposing points of view. The topic of encounter of rationalities seemed, at least in the context of this dinnertime debate by teenagers, to be such a natural occurrence to anyone who consciously moves between different social and cultural locations. In this paper, I apply and expand the theoretical concerns raised by the two young people to the assessment of Kant's culture-free moral principles against a communitarian view of the resources of reason.

Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial expansionism, and an idealization of cultivation all characterize the thinking of Cato the Censor, like that of more recent perpetrators. The tragedy of Carthage, its details lost with most of the works of Livy and other ancient authors, and concealed behind allegory in Virgil's Aeneid, became known to early modern Europeans from briefer ancient accounts rediscovered only in the 15th century, as Europe's own expansion began.

Delusion is an exceptional test case for the principal categories of common sense and philosophical thought such as ‘reason’, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Via an engagement with the legacy of Freud and the most remarkable results of 20th-century psychiatry, the author's aim is to analyse the paradoxical forms of delusion and to shed light on the logics that underlie and orient its specific modalities of temporalization, conceptualization and argumentation.

Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault's contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals.

This article is an attempt at a ‘political’ reading of Kafka's The Castle, as an ironical, radical critique - from a libertarian perspective - of the despotism of the modern bureaucratic apparatus. This reading is not self-evident. Like all Kafka's unfinished novels, Das Schloss is a strange and fascinating literary document that creates perplexity and inspires various contradictory and/or dissonant interpretations. And like The Trial it has been the object of very many religious and theological readings. Michael Löwy concludes by arguing that commentators have neglected the character of Amalia, one of the most impressive female figures in Kafka's work, who is at the heart of the libertarian individualism of the Prague writer.

These notes are inspired by two experiences and their convergence. First a clinical experience that led Françoise Davoine and myself to work over more than twenty-five years as psychoanalysts in the psychiatric hospital with patients diagnosed as mad, psychotic, schizophrenic, etc. The other experience interrogates, year on year, these clinical issues from the work of other clinicians, and also philosophers or writers of literature and poetry, who in their fields come across lessons relating to madness.

The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their social reality has not yet reached the end of its struggle.