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The sociologist Emmanuel Levinas is frequently compared and contrasted with the deconstructionists, above all Jacques Derr. There is something in itself totalistic about sweeping summaries of Western thought, as though each thinker were not more complex than his system, as though Western thought were defined by a dozen thinkers. However tendentious Levinas's interpretation, in this he is matched by the Frankfurt School. Not only do Levinas and the Frankfurt School share a similar analysis of Enlightened thinking, but they share the guilt of it. For Levinas, the primordial experience of consciousness is the guilt of having taken away the other's possibilities of existence. More similar to Levinas in tone than teaching, it is this that makes their comparison interesting. Levinas would never put it this way, and not just because it places the subject on an equal footing with the object. The other about whom Levinas writes is not an object. Infinity is the profusion of particulars, as though the method of negative dialectics was itself the model for utopia.

Capillary power is the power that reaches into individuals so deeply that it makes them who they are. The privatization of prisons, which dates from the mid-1980s, is a dramatic indicator that no matter how enlarged, the center is always recreating margins against which it defines itself. Surveillance, classification and categorization, the time-table, non-idleness and regimentation of the body, all are the mark of modern discipline, according to sociologist Michel Foucault. All he says, originate in the prison, the asylum and the clinic, subsequently migrating to the rest of the society. Power is everywhere, life itself is a contest among powers. Decentralized power is not necessarily more subtle, just less visible.

This article discusses the association between responsibility and freedom. Responsibility without freedom is not terrifying when people feel so unconnected and apart from others that the only conceivable relationship with them is as an instrument, a means, in which people become responsible for they do. The tragic poets, on the other hand, would overcome this same fear by embedding men and women more deeply in responsible relationships with others, a strategy that requires not the subordination of the subject to the other, but their mutual connection. Such connections can do much to assuage the fear of being a mere instrument to the other. Such connections also make it less likely that the inhumanity within each individual will them to regard the other as a mere instrument or means. Responsible connections do this by giving acts, causing them to matter in the world, in this way linking the acceptance of responsibility to others with a sense of self as a creative, responsible agent who is not merely absurd. Traits and dispositions need not be immutable to be stable. It is given to people, not chosen, and is often conceptualized as a daimon, a spirit that accompanies people throughout life, neither subject nor object. Responsibility, from this perspective, has much to do with coming to terms with the otherness of one's own character.

This article focuses on the book "Eros and Civilization," by Herbert Marcuse. The book is based almost entirely upon a reinterpretation of Freudian psychology. Yet, even as the book sharply attacks revisionists who would deviate from this psychology, it introduces a theme that Marcuse would develop more fully in subsequent articles. He argues that key Freudian categories such as the Oedipus complex no longer seem to capture the experience of growing up in a one-dimensional society. In such a society the male child no longer develops his ego in a protracted and highly personalized conflict with father, who represents the reality principle. Rather, the child is "pre-socialized" by the administrative organs of the state, such as the schools. The father is either absent, seen as ineffectual in comparison with the power of the state, or both. Actually, this issue had been a concern of the Frankfurt School for some time. This was a theme developed by sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in a number of essays written in the 1940s and 1950s.