Cultural Ontology

I returned to Montreal in 2008 after fifteen years away and my homecoming has made me think about the idea of having a place that I call home. I admire those modern day nomads who seem to be able to pull up roots and live anywhere, but I until recently I haven't fully understood them because it seems that they have either learned to live without holding some true home in their heart -- and I can't believe such a thing -- or they have learned to carry the possibility of home with them. And by this I do not mean that they carry bits and pieces of their home with them -- the idea of the business man travelling with a picture of his children to put on his hotel night table -- but that we carry with us the power of turning where we are into a kind of outpost of the home we love. When I left Montreal in 1992 the first thing I did after landing in Tennessee and going to my hotel was to sit and weep at what I had lost. Later in 2001, when I went to Fredericton, I spent my f

The recent debates on the burqa in France and Quebec point to a uniquely contemporary problem: the strange short-circuits we encounter today between the private and the public. I do not mean to be perversely provocative when I draw comparisons between the burqa debate and the popularity of more and more lurid kinds of reality television, but I do see a kind of underground connection that may clarify both our notions of privacy today and the disproportional anxiety that the burqa seems to cause to secular society, whether in Europe or North America. We live today in a media culture in which the notion of privacy seems quaint and outdated. Teenage celebrities are sure to be at the center of sex-tape or sexting scandals; we are fascinated by people like Tiger Woods with unique and extraordinary talents, not for those remarkable talents, but for the banal sexual appetites (always for porn stars and cocktail waitresses, the poutine of the sexual world) that make them just like a

     Multiculturalism depends upon the explicitly stated desire to be together. This desire is the public face of the multicultural ideal. It says "Let's talk to each other. You tell me about your way of doing things and I'll tell you about mine. I'll eat your cooking and you eat mine. I'll do a dance on your holiday and you light a candle on mine." Without this public proclamation of good will (and the proclamation must be not only public but ongoing; it doesn't count unless it is proclaimed as a regular part of our public discourse) there could be no understanding between cultures, races, language groups, religious beliefs. We all know this.           What we may not know is that there is another side to this open invitation into our lives. There is another proclamation, not so public, but enacted in public every day by every one of us. That proclamation is "Leave me alone." Just as we cannot live together unless we are open to bein

When my friend Karen adopted her daughter Jessica from Haiti she knew that she would face challenges. The problems adjusting to a new life, to a school where she was one of the only black children were to be expected. Jessica's terrible insomnia made for many anxious nights for her mother, and a divorce tested the limits of Karen's resilience. But through the years it was apparent that Jessica was growing up into an interesting person with a ribald sense of humor, and a sharp intuitive sense of people. However, it is one of the most intractable problems that Karen faces that has made me think about the difficulties of raising a child from Haiti in an almost all white environment and neighborhood: the problem of language. And I am not referring to what we Quebecers usually mean by "the problem of language" but rather something much closer to a universal human concern: how to give children the language to speak their experience. In any family this is a delicat

One of the most profound yet mysterious claims of psychoanalysis is that "our desire is always the other's desire." Like many truths, this one flies in the face of common sense. "My desire," I want to argue, "is my own. It involves me and only me. It is what is most private and intimate about me, and if I do not own my desires, I do not truly own myself." And that statement would be true if I lived in the glorious isolation of the solipsist. But it is a position that falls apart the moment it is subjected to the test of real life. My desires are not my own. In some uncanny way, the desires of others -- their dreams, their goals, their fantasies -- lend texture and shape and color to my own. This lesson came home to me a few years ago when I was showing a friend of mine from Japan around Montreal. I have come to the terms with the fact that I am constitutionally incapable of showing people this city without beaming with enthusiasm and pride

Avatar and Erotic Multiculturalism      I am about to offer a jaundiced vision of James Cameron's Avatar , and I feel a bit like the guest who kicks the magician at a children's party. I will certainly see Avatar again, if only to revel in the hallucinatory flora and fauna, the waterfalls tumbling from mid-air mountains, the leonine beauty of the Na'vi 's faces. I am more than excited by the possibilities of the technology that had to be invented to make this movie, technology so dazzling that had it been used to make a movie about talking squirrels colonizing Neptune I would have been equally impressed.                     In a strange way, the breathtaking CGI of Avatar serves the same purpose as the use of black and white in Spielberg's Schindler's List : it is an index of the film's moral seriousness. After all, if we are to narrate the moral fairy tale of how an edenic world is protected from evil, it is desirable that the audience be dra

A strange thing happens when you say the word "culture." It is like a confession, the telling of a deep dark secret. The minute I defend my culture as a culture, I have already taken a step back from it. I say "my culture teaches that…," and it can be a whole range of teachings: my culture teaches that my accomplishments do honor to my ancestors. My culture teaches that God is a father who watches over us. My culture teaches that learning is the highest value. The confession implicit in all of these statements is that my culture is just that: a culture. It is not the divinely ordained order of things. It is not the unquestionable product of nature. It is a culture, something that has been made by people over a period of time. And just as human work turns out new forms and ideals, so culture will always change and adapt. When we are safely ensconced in a culture we pay little attention to it as a culture. There are times and places where the clash of cult

The Ice-Breakers At the end of winter, there is much this city teaches me about how civilization conquers nature, or rather how it acts out its conquest. This weekend I helped my girlfriend Tess break up ice in her back yard to prevent her basement from flooding when the big melt came. Ice breaking is a primally satisfying activity. You find a chunk of ice that is looking defiant and you approach it with authority and a steel shovel. When the weather is just right your victory is assured. The first blow of the shovel blade announces your presence. The second and third cut a thin groove in the ice, a target for further blows. After an hour of self-taught shovel technique, I realize that the secret of shoveling is much like the secret of chopping wood: let the axe (or in this case the shovel blade) do the work.   I lift the shovel loosely let it dangle in the air for a moment (while for some inexplicable reason the words "I sacrifice you in the name of Quetzalcoatl&quo

Heidegger and Gay Marriage What attracts me to philosophy and critical theory is that it answers questions. The answer may not be familiar, and indeed the answer may come with another question, but if philosophy can't engage the questions that we debate, then it is not worth much. We need philosophy more than ever now. The kinds of ethical questions we must tackle at the beginning of the 21 st century demand forms of direct and creative thinking. In fact, we find our conventional truths so often undermined today that the need for theoretical thinking is greater now than it has ever been. All this is in the way of introduction to one of the more controversial issues the United States faces: the legalization of gay marriage. I don't offer an answer to the question of whether it should be legalized or not (for me the question is not that interesting: of course it should. Full stop). The more interesting question is the source of the opposition to gay marriage. Why c

No one was more surprised than I was at discovering that a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (LTPP) (psychoanalysis, in other words) published in JAMA last year concluded that "In this meta-analysis, LTPP was significantly superior to shorter-term methods of psychotherapy with regard to overall outcome, target problems, and personality functioning. Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy yielded large and stable effect sizes in the treatment of patients with personality disorders, multiple mental disorders, and chronic mental disorders. The effect sizes for overall outcome increased significantly between end of therapy and follow-up." It turns out that statistical analyses have made an at least plausible case that those years spent in the "talking cure" are measurably effective, and even more effective than the more putatively efficient forms of therapy like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. What surprised me most about

   Every four years my normal interest in soccer (which I will hereafter call "football," thus indicating that I am a North American but not excessively proud of it, since the word "soccer" just catches in my throat) is elevated to a fever pitch when the World Cup rolls around. And every four years, like clockwork, we hear the predictions that football is about to come into its own in North America. The next decade, we were told in the eighties and nineties, is the decade when football will finally take hold. North Americans will develop the aficion that the world already embraces.          Of course, we are still waiting. It seems that there is something in football that fails to stir the North American imagination, some resistance we have to it as a meaningful activity. We embrace hockey, baseball, basketball, MMA, a whole range of sports. We can even get excited about bobsledding and decathalon every four years, but we hold back suspiciously from footba