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David Roberts has always had a keen, sharp and even mischievous eye for paradox, for pointing to what used to be termed in Hegelianese, 'contradictions' or 'dialectics' of modern society and its forms. Roberts' keen eye has focused on the paradoxes (rather than negative dialectics) of aesthetic modernity and the forms that these paradoxes have taken within the historical time consciousness and self-understanding of modernity. This paper will suggest – although only sketchily and in outline – that Roberts' keen eye notices and reconstructs three paradoxical models or forms of aesthetic modernity: 1. The total work of art of aesthetic modernism; 2. the contemporary postmodern plurality of the present which is captured as musealization; 3. interpretation, play and humour as the open acceptance of the contingency and paradoxes of the present.

This paper explores the constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. The paper's underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the city. It begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to the ideal of the metropolis and the counter-ideal of the stranger. The stranger invariably accompanies the image of the city, as someone who comes to it from the outside. This co-existence between integration and the experience of being outside generates the inner tension or unease of city life, especially when we are all strangers.

Current changes in the intimate sphere are denoted by an expansion of emotional vocabularies, of freedom in sex and sexual preference, and the extension of sexual life with neither inhibition, nor obligation, nor marriage for both women and men. This reading of the works of Jean-Claude Kaufmann and Niklas Luhmann suggests that the result of this current revolution of the intimate sphere is mixed. A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between sex qua leisure and committed love-relationality. Although sex qua leisure is mediated by the new communications technology, this technological mediation is not what is important here. Rather, the actions are configured and mediated by the neo-liberal paradigm by all participants. Leisure-sex is simply a game that combines autonomy, leisure, power and rational choice – a combination that is open to men and women alike. But there is still love, and in ways that enable it to be expressed beyond traditional forms. From the position of committed love-relationality, rather than marriage, love is between people – but it is a different between to the one of leisure sex. Love is double-sided: whilst heightening a sense of self-orientation, one is also focused on an other. Love involves all kinds of complexity in the everyday because it involves the well-being of an other or others – with joys and heartaches, responsibilities and conflicts.

In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that 'the discovery of the imagination' occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte's The Science of Knowledge.