Writings

I've written on the ethics and politics of stem cell research (e.g "Is Stem Cell Research a New Bay Area Revolution?") and have rewritten ever so many times -- with the assistance of co-author Joanne Brasil and "coach" Jane Wenger -- Hildegard's Wandertheater.     I've published these four essays in "Tikkun Magazine": The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Vision of Hope and Despair (1999) Buddhists Armed with Apples: Cultural Contradictions of the New Networking Technologies (2000) Medicine at the Millennium: Still Caught between Descartes and Spinoza (March/April 2002) The Stem Cell Wars: A Reply to Rifkin (July/August 2002) These are observations on our current political predicament in this country: "Building a Winning Popular Front Peace Movement" A psychoanalytic essay I've drafted is entitled: Silently the Wolves are Watching: An Essay on the Lacanian Gaze  (2001)

In Albrecht Dürer’s 16th-century engraving Melancholia I, the instruments of mathematics and science are of no use to the disconsolate angel. Yet, through the window of her study, the heavens illuminate a transcendent sea scape.

Computers, Dolphins, and Dreams: the Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information (Routledge) came out in 1994.  Drawing upon dreams and other artefacts of daily life, I explore in this book the possibility that "Computers, like automobiles before them, echo back to us metaphorical representations of our own experience and agency. Human identity itself is entwined with technological circumstance: information technology, like previous forms of mastery of nature, serves to fashion not only objects outside ourselves but also human subjects"

If you'd like to discuss anything in these writings, you can reach me at: rayxxx@barglow.com  (Omit the "xxx" in the above address  -- it's a subterfuge.  I'm hoping to foil automated spamming programs that mine the Internet to find email addresses.)