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Neuroscience has become a popular source of metaphors and images for political and social theorists. Among the most popular is the 'missing moment,' used to characterize the delay between an unconscious experience and the subject's reaction. The goal, several authors suggest, is to come closer to the original non-conscious experience, wherein resides real freedom. If one follows this argument very far, however, it begins to look a lot like a popular theory of trauma. More troublingly, it leaves no room for either a psychoanalytic or narrative account that stresses the role of human relationships and human community in confronting trauma. In opposition to this account, this article sets the work of Stern, Segal, and Winnicott. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas 's thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas's political theory, the term "inverted liberalism" would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term "inverted" over "liberalism." Levinas 's defense of liberalism is likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected, for the sake of the other individual. Whether this has anything to do with "real" liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.