1. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

 

For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the "reforms" permanent.In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as the shock doctrine. He observed that "only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

 

Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo." He estimated that "a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity."

 

A variation on Machiavelli's advice that injuries should be inflicted "all at once," this proved to be one of Friedman's most lasting strategic legacies."tyranny of the status quo." He estimated that "a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity." A variation on Machiavelli's advice that injuries should be inflicted "all at once," this proved to be one of Friedman's most lasting strategic legacies.

 

1. What is the political significance of "limit" experiences, such as psychosis, trauma, possession, and torture?

 

2.Trauma, psychosis, torture are commonly regarded as radical exceptions, existing in a place “beyond” culture and language. However, can they play a constitutive role in shaping everyday subjective experience and social life?

 

3.In the limit, what does it mean to be a subject? What is the relationship between mental disorder and social-political order?

 

4. Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”

 

Eichmann in Jerusalem was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in April 15, 1961. The New York Times had announced Eichmann's capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, in May 24, 1960. Israel and Argentina had discussed Eichmann's extradition to Israel, and the United Nations finally decided the legality of Jerusalem Trial. After the confirmation that Eichamnn was to be judged in Israel, Arendt asked The New Yorker's director, William Shamn, to do a complete report of the Eichmann case in Israel. Arendt's first reaction to Eichmann, "the man in the glass booth," was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister." She argues that "The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous." Arendt's perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann's ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: "... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think."(emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought.

by Bethania Assy

ARENDT, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report of the banality of evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

 

5. Can the quotidian absence of critical thought be interpreted as evil? Explain.

 

6. How do Hanna Arendt’s observations relate to Stanley Milgram’s obedience experience and Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”?

 

7. Is madness treated as a disease or as obedience to an authority?