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Redirecting examinations of the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on the mental life of modern society, The Material City translates contested views of everyday life and its management into a deeper reflection on urbanity as a system of desire.

Desperation as grey zone -- Fear and trembling -- The collective fantasizes death : the imaginary at the end of its tether -- Fear and likely stories -- Death, happiness and the meaning of life : the view from sociology -- Ending and beginning -- The enigma of the brain and its place as cause, character, and pretext in the imaginary of dementia -- The writing machine : public health, dementia and the spell of the brain as an object of social enthusiasm -- Plague strikes the family -- The cliche of depression -- Tragedy and comedy -- The travesty of end of life

With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health, illness, suffering and disease and the ethical and aesthetic implications of medical practice. Drawing on a range of thinkers from Plato to Lacan, the book identifies the Grey Zone as the persistence and function of ambiguity in everyday life that requires a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond

In response to Freud's notion that large things reveal themselves in small indications, this article analyses the greeting as a social form, using the resources of classical sociological theory and particularly the works of Simmel and Durkheim. The focus in not upon external aspects of the content studied, say, the difference between war as a macro-event and coquetry as a micro-event, nor on the social organisation of the event as an orderly phenomenon, but on the collective representation and its unstated configuration of layered meanings that discloses a tension in modern life around the enigma of acknowledgement. The example allows us to bring together a focus on language and embodiment through analysis of the gesture. In particular, the greeting raises the problem of the ambiguous relationship of intimacy and anonymity that haunts modernity. The method is illustrated through an analysis of the cliché as a circuit of commonplace representations and then traced as a narrative to disclose its form as mirroring a fundamental problem for the social actor's relationship to the gesture of acknowledgement as a problem of self-worth.

My method of reading Durkheim's (1965 [1915]) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life recovers as his fundamental interest the following question: How in collective life do we deal with ambiguity as a social phenomenon? The social actor always needs ways and means to bear this burden as something other than oppressive, for example, the conception of a self both finite and infinite, both sacred and profane, both free and constrained. Durkheim challenges the modern conceit that secular society supersedes the attachment to the sacred by exposing the force of the sacred in any society. Durkheim proceeds by formulating the social actor as an automaton and by expanding and enriching the notion of automation to reveal it as having a capacity for a degree of self-affection and affectivity that can be tapped as a resource in creative social action. It is an impersonality towards ambiguity as an impenetrable structure that makes such improvisational action possible as both automated, and yet capable of change through reflective practices that expose such automation.

This article recovers the understated engagement with the question of mortality and the relationship to death in life through a reading of the classics of sociology – Durkheim, Marx, Simmel and Weber–in order to dramatize the relationship of such a concern to the imaginary of perpetual happiness idealized by the bourgeoisie of each generation and exemplified by Lacan as the 'problem' of the city. If engaging mortality is conceived as an example of the thinking of limits, I suggest that this ban parallels disavowing the question of meaning that the bourgeoisie have cultivated and perfected in the name of practical thinking. In this way, the bourgeoisie can be said to have mastered the secret of life and the connection between mental hygiene and intellectual parsimony celebrated by Kant as the advance of enlightenment. This adjustment is located at least as far back as the Stoics and replayed in much thought and in popular culture as a symptom of the self-destructiveness of the fixation on 'ultimate meaning' and its realistic pursuit in life. In this sense, the conditions of citizenship in the city are said to require a systemic disregard of such 'deep' concerns on Kantian grounds that their inaccessibility and irresolute character can only distract circumspection from its limited goals. Georg Simmel is maintained as the classical figure who both engaged death (and so the risk of thinking limit) and suffered marginalization for this, making his resolution of this tension not tragic, as his idiom suggests, but an exemplification of sociological artistry and of the playful relationship to life that it promises when unencumbered by the fear of the bourgeoisie.

2010 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication by the New York State Journal of Medicine of the second of two theme issues on the world tobacco pandemic, the first comprehensive examination of the subject ever published by a medical journal. Aiming to challenge the medical profession to become actively involved in fighting smoking, the issues went beyond a discussion of the well known health consequences of tobacco to a consideration of the social, political, economic, agricultural, religious, and legal aspects of this growing problem.

Le discours sur la globalisation avance que l'identité locale est de plus en plus menacée par la similarité croissante qui s'établit entre les villes, contribuant à uniformiser leur apparence jusqu'à les rendre indifférenciables les unes des autres. Une des fonctions (ou une des conséquences non anticipées) de cette menace est de dramatiser la question de l'identité elle-même, et va jusqu'à mettre en cause son caractère illusoire et désuet. Si l'« identité » fait référence à la différence que fait un lieu, ce qui semble se perdre, toujours selon cette perspective, c'est la différence elle-même. La valeur d'usage des villes apparaît de plus en plus être confondue par une conception de leur valeur d'échange. Cela signifie que si la globalisation tend à nous faire traiter de l'identité d'une ville comme New York comme d'une ville globale (comme le centre du capitalisme), l'identité devient simultanément une « variable » liée à une norme qui sanctionne des visions génériques de l'identité urbaine. En formant ce spectre, la globalisation tend aussi à nous faire réfléchir l'identité comme quelque chose de plus que cela, comme partie prenante d'une dynamique et du détail local d'un lieu (dans ce cas-ci, New York) comme expression de l'accent spécifique que met une ville sur ce que Louis Wirth a appelé un « mode de vie urbain ». Le site de Ground Zero fait apparaître et spectacularise les limites de la notion de ville globale en tant qu'identité, non pas en lui substituant une identité autre dans un processus infini, mais en révélant, comme tout travail présuppose dans le cas d'une telle caractérisation générique, une référence implicite et inédite à un système de désir. Dans les termes de la sociologie, ceci fait référence à la ville en tant que situation d'action. Affronter ce problème de la reconstruction à New York signifie alors faire face au problème de recréer le désir selon des modes beaucoup plus profonds que la simple restauration économique. Dans ce sens, l'attaque du World Trade Center soulève la vieille question de la différence entre urbanisation et urbanité, et celle de la manière par laquelle l'identité, comme problème collectif, est constamment retravaillée dans un tel lieu. La reconstruction de Ground Zero révèle les débats au sujet de la différence de New York comme ville.