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“I define suggestion in the broadest sense: the act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and accepted by it.”––Hippolyte Bernheim 

Here is the paradox of suggestion: How can you induce someone to become passive (suggestible) if this passivity requires his prior acceptance? If he accepts, it is because he was already willing. But if he was willing, can we say that he passively executed a suggestion? Another way of formulating the problem: Is suggestion the act of le suggestionneur ("the act by which an idea is introduced into the brain ... "), or that of le suggestionné? (" . . . and accepted by it")? Bernheim, in his writings, never manages to fully answer this crucial question. Very often he decides in favor of le suggestionneur, investing him with an exorbitant power of psychic manipulation. According to this conception, eagerly spread by the gazettes of the time, le suggestionneur (the hypnotist) literally takes over the other's mind, he penetrates it ("rapes" it) and manipulates its machinery as if le suggestionné (the hypnotized person) were an automaton: "Sleep!" "Wake up!" "Hallucinate!" "Become anesthetic!” “Be cured!" "Forget!" "Remember!”

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The tlacuilo who painted this page (fol. 46r) of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (ca. 1563) was responding to the demand, "Tell me the story of how I conquered you." The missionaries asked her not only to produce a book in iconic script describing the feasts, ancient calendar, and pre-Columbian Mexican history, but also to devise a pictorial vocabulary depicting the colonial order and her subjection to it. The friars supervising the production of this book were surprised, perhaps, when they realized that they had requested a return of the gaze, a particularly brilliant instance of the observer observed. This possibly explains why the project was abandoned only a few pages later when the Dominican Fray Pedro de los Rios took over the production of the book; the aesthetically pleasing and informative use of color and iconic script were supplanted by boxes enclosing the names of the years written in a shoddy calligraphy.

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The Social Existence of the Moral

Imagine morality as a domain or a social sphere with stakes, concerns, and interests of its own. The stakes would be the distress, humiliation, suffering, and, more generally, the mal-being of others, the concern would be how to reduce them, and the interest –– the wellbeing of others. Interest and concerns do not necessarily express inner motivation, but the logic of a specific field of action, whose raison d'être is the ongoing presence of others in distress, their unbearable suffering and humiliation, and the obligation to reduce their mal-being. The pursuit of ideals or regulative ideas like liberty, justice, and equality would be judged according to their contribution to and impact upon the mal-being of all men and women, or even of all sentient beings. "Moral values" would be nothing but discursive devices employed by teachers, parents, or politicians in attempts to regulate behavior, and their value would be evaluated in the same vein. Indifference to the suffering of sentient beings would demarcate the moral domain from the outside, in the same way that indifference to error, deception, and illusion demarcates the limits of science, and indifference to appearances marks the limits of the visual arts. By crossing the threshold of such indifference, one can be "within the moral" without necessarily behaving morally or being correct in one's moral judgments, in the same way that one can be within "the game of truth" and still hold false ideas and incredulous beliefs.

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While the war on Iraq has been raging with no end in sight, the European and American press has been having a heyday reporting on the atrocities Islam commits daily against women deemed unfortunate enough to have been born into its fold. Hardly a week goes by without one of the major dailies running a story on the latest affront, if not act of violence, Islam has committed yet again against the collectivity of Muslim womanhood. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the Euro-American publishing industry has produced a series of best-sellers that tell harrowing tales of Muslim (and at times non-Muslim) women's survival under misogynist cultural practices that are supposed to characterize most, if not all, Islamic societies. These autobiographical accounts help secure the popular judgment, now issued unequivocally from progressives, liberals, and conservatives alike, that Islam must reform. In this judgment, Islam's mistreatment of women serves both as a site for the diagnosis of the ills that haunt this faith and a strategic point of intervention for its restructuration. If the path to such a reformation is unclear, its promise is not: Nothing short of "democracy" lies waiting in the wings if recalcitrant Muslims can be made to see the light.

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Frederick Douglass, man of letters, abolitionist, and former slave, did not initially believe in the American Union's capability to emancipate the Africans it had enslaved. For the first ten years of his public career in the anti-slavery movement, Douglass was a practitioner of William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery philosophy, a philosophy which argued that the American Union was tragically flawed, and that the institution of slavery was the undeniable proof of it. Although Douglass did, in fact, publicly change his opinion on the Union's emancipatory capability, I believe that his initial reservations about the Union are just as profound as his subsequent confidence in it. A study of both positions is in order for those seeking to better understand the integrity of United States democracy.

In his essay "Declarations of Independence," Jacques Derrida offers us a brief but shrewd deconstructive critique of the American Union's foundational declaration of its freedoms. Among other things, Derrida presents for our consideration the fact that there is always a pragmatic gap between the speech act of declarations of freedom and their actual performance. Serving both as the space of national critique and the uncanny space of potential national perfection, this pragmatic gap, I shall argue, provides the very basis for Frederick Douglass' differing positions on the question of the pro-slavery character of the American Union.

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