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Life-philosophies -- Damaged life -- The life of things : critique of phenomenology -- Dialectics and life -- Suffering life -- Natural life -- The possibility of living -- Exhausted life

I am writing this on the anniversary of Russia's 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which the threat of sanctions had failed to deter. Following the invasion, the widest ever multilateral grouping of nations (if we leave to one side the obligation that exists for all UN Member States to implement UN Security Council sanctions), acting jointly and severally, have imposed on Russia economic and non-economic sanctions of exceptional scope and severity, including embargoes and 86Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 12 | Spring 2023DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.12.5energy boycotts, systemic financial sanctions, and sanctions targeted against numerous entities and individuals. (Even so, as has frequently been pointed out, although the countries imposing sanctions account for well over 50 per cent of global GDP, countries which have not imposed sanctions account for considerably more than half the world's population.) The imposition of sanctions, in the face of countersanctions from Russia and high economic and social costs for the sanctioning states, has been an unprecedented demonstration of unity and resolve by Western nations, with some others, in response to Russia's escalation of a brutal war, its existential threat to the sovereignty of a neighbouring state, and its disregard for the fundamental principles of the UN Charter. The sanctions have undoubtedly imposed significant economic and material costs on Russia, affecting its ability to deploy military equipment and to finance the costs of its war. As Russia continues its war, so sending states continue to impose new sanctions, in a strategy designed to counteract loopholes and to ratchet up pressure.

In his attempt at a renewal of the concept of reification, Axel Honneth has referred to reification as a kind of forgetting. He uses an epigraph from Adorno and Horkheimer's work to introduce this theme. This article considers the different accounts that are given by Honneth, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other, as to the way that reification is a forgetting of core experiential capacities of intersubjective human relations. It argues that Honneth's account relies too much on a foundational and undifferentiated notion of 'empathetic engagement', and that in order to articulate the damage done by reification, we need to contend with the more radical notion of forgetting that is outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer's work.

"This book equips readers with a sound understanding of the value-base of mental health care and provides them with the skills and knowledge to demystify complex values in decision-making in order to reach outcomes which are focused on the needs of service users. Engaging case examples and exercises link theory and practice throughout"--