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The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.

AbstractThe recent controversy over a foreign-owned company running a US port brought attention to the creeping privatization of work in ports worldwide. Since the 1980s, there has been a head-long rush to privatize ports. The pace can be best described as rapid and chaotic. For some economists privatization is seen as a method to increase efficiency. But the process has substantial critics. For many privatization is perceived as problematic. There is evidence that the process does not indeed lead to savings and greater efficiency. Instead, the process has been haphazard and far from uniform in its application. Even where there is an entrenched presence, savings from privatization have yet to be realized. Others have made the point that the process cannot be transferred to ports in the developing world. That is, the multiplicity of ports and transportation problems in the interior make privatization more like wishful thinking than a policy that can work.

This article explores connections between the notion of diaspora and theories of subjectivity and language, especially in the work of Sartre and Derrida. In L'Etre et le néant Sartre relates the pour-soi to the Jewish Diaspora, and in Le Monolinguisme de l'autre Derrida refers to his own experience in Algeria to develop ideas about the originary alienation from place and language. The diasporic subject has no home or language of its own; it has no assurance of its place with a settled order which would secure its sense of belonging or even its existence. Some of the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of this are explored with reference to recent films and Camus's short story 'L'Hôte'.