Every corporation has an economic and moral responsibility to its stockholders to perform well financially. However, the number of bankruptcies in Slovakia has been growing for several years without an apparent macroeconomic cause. To prevent a rapid denigration and to prevent the outflow of foreign capital, various efforts are being zealously implemented. Robust analysis using conventional bankruptcy prediction tools revealed that the existing models are adaptable to local conditions, particularly local legislation. Furthermore, it was confirmed that most of these (...) outdated tools have sufficient capability to warn of impending financial problems several years in advance. A novel bankruptcy prediction tool that outperforms the conventional models was developed. However, it is increasingly challenging to predict bankruptcy risk as corporations have become more global and more complex and as they have developed sophisticated schemes to hide their actual situations under the guise of “optimization” for tax authorities. Nevertheless, scepticism remains because economic engineers have established bankruptcy as a strategy to limit the liability resulting from court-imposed penalties. (shrink)

This Article argues that when credit suppliers market and advertise their credit products, they utilize and enhance consumers’ cognitive biases, particularly their optimism bias and illusion of control. We apply the concept of manipulation to this practice. The biased and manipulated debtors attribute unrealistically low probability to negative life events, such as job loss, illness, accident or divorce, and high probability to positive life events. As a result of the manipulation, the biased debtors are triggered to borrow more than they (...) would have borrowed otherwise. This additional borrowing may contribute to the default of these debtors and to their eventual bankruptcy. Empirical studies of the causes of bankruptcy show that before their default, bankrupts have often experienced negative life events that decrease income, increase expenses, or both. The bias and its manipulation justify legal intervention. The Article discusses various justifications for legal intervention and offers tentative and partial prescriptions for intervention. It analyzes the comparative advantages and shortcomings of ex ante intervention, in the form of regulation of credit marketing practices and credit contracts, of tax and insurance, and ex post intervention, at the bankruptcy stage. Its main contribution is in bringing together bodies of literature on cognitive biases, consumer decision making, lifecycle, social influence, advertising and marketing, behavioral law and economics, economic analysis of bankruptcy and socio-legal studies of bankruptcy. By combining these bodies of literature, the Article provides a new perspective on bankruptcy and credit and offers a promising framework for future work. (shrink)

The number of credit delinquents in Korea had been growing steadily since 1997 and had reached 3,700,000 by the end of 2003, which was about 8.4% of the population. The government initiated several support programs, but the number of credit delinquents has decreased very slowly. In order to allow for successful recovery of credit delinquents, it is imperative to reduce debts in a more comprehensive manner, to clear the impediments for easy use of personal bankruptcy mechanisms, and to provide (...) incentives to encourage debtors to make progress on their repayment plans. While there has been much change in terms of learning to live with bankruptcy as an inevitable part of a market economy, there is still much to be done. The reality of "moral hazard" in bankruptcy discharge should be uncovered. Legal restraints discriminating against bankrupts must be removed. The repayment period of individual rehabilitation and individual workouts must be shortened to three years. Personal guarantors for debtors in rehabilitation proceedings should be protected as much as the debtors are during the repayment period in rehabilitation proceedings. Debtors need to be able to keep their mortgaged residences during the proceedings. The history of insolvency has shown that society can benefit as much as or more than debtors themselves from the discharge of unpaid debts because with a fresh start the debtor has an incentive to work hard. The starting point to personal bankruptcy law reform is this belief. (shrink)

This article assesses the state of empirical legal research and chronicles the field's history focusing on bankruptcy. This article begins with a discussion of what might have attracted bankruptcy scholars to extract an empirical vein in their scholarly work. It offers a short chronicle of the development of empirical bankruptcy scholarship from Justice Douglas to the current generation. Because of the relative paucity of such scholarship outside the U.S., this chronicle inevitably focuses on that country. It is (...) divided into separate discussions of individual and corporate bankruptcy. It elaborates the substantial amount of empirical scholarship in bankruptcy as compared with other fields, the grounds on which academic debates play out offer significant explanatory factors. This article concludes with some discussion regarding empirical questions on which bankruptcy scholars might probably focus future attention. (shrink)

This Article discusses a triangle of forces that affect the activity of small-medium enterprises. These forces are: limited liability, shareholder guarantees, and bankruptcy. Limited liability encourages entrepreneurship by reducing the personal risks shareholders are exposed to as a result of business failure. However, the limited liability shield creates the potential moral hazard of overinvestment. That is, the entrepreneur may involve the corporation in overly risky projects. To combat this risk, the lending practice requires entrepreneurs to sign a personal guarantee (...) for corporate debt. The guarantee serves as a bonding device that forces the entrepreneur to internalize the costs of the corporate activity. This Article first argues that while personal guarantees can serve this economic goal, the lending industry demands them excessively and they are overused. The overuse of guarantees unnecessarily subjects good corporate borrowers as well as bad ones to this practice and causes underinvestment. The third force of the triangle, a discharge of the shareholder’s debts in bankruptcy, may balance this inefficiency. It potentially softens the effect of the guarantee and thus requires the lender to further gather borrowerspecific information at the lending stage. Unfortunately, personal bankruptcy is underused by individual debtors mainly because of the stigma it implies. To rebalance the triangle, this Article proposes to encourage the shareholder’s partial relief of the guarantee through an amicable procedure. I call this procedure Velvet Bankruptcy. Velvet Bankruptcy would first procedurally consolidate the private collection from the shareholder-guarantor with the pending corporate bankruptcy case, by authorizing the court to extend the automatic stay to protect the shareholder-guarantor. To the extent the court is convinced that the collection would render the shareholder insolvent, it could reduce the guarantor’s liability. This would effectively constitute discharge without officially declaring the shareholder bankrupt. (shrink)

In order to clarify the objectives of bankruptcy, to reveal the true essence of bankruptcy procedure and the origin of legal terms, it is necessary to ascertain the nature of this institute of law, as well as the reasons for its creation and development. This article provides historic analysis of the development of the institute of bankruptcy procedure. For this purpose, a historic comparative research is undertaken in the article, in order to find certain parallels of (...) class='Hi'>bankruptcy procedure under Roman law and the modern bankruptcy procedure. Roman law has been chosen as the most phenomenal ancient law for the purposes of undertaking a historic analysis of the development of bankruptcy procedure. In the authors’ opinion, it it the best example that reveals the origin of bankruptcy procedure, and the reasons for its formation. Analysis of certain private law institutes of Roman law enables the authors to conclude that the main features (principles) of the bankruptcy procedure formed precisely under Roman law: replacement of personal liability by pecuniary; public auction as a form of realization of debtor’s property; transition from selling of debtor’s property as a whole to disposal of property in divided property units; creation of subject, who administers auctions of debtor’s property under oath not to act in selfish purposes; setting of a term of 30 days, during which a debtor has to cover the debts (claims’ dispute resolution); establishment of the institute of informing creditors about initiated procedures of debt retrieval and encouragement to join these procedures; establishment of the ban to recover debts from household items; laying of the foundations of the institute of peace agreement between the debtor and his creditors; establishment of actio Pauliana - a remedy for the protection of creditors rights. The mentioned rules in one way or another eventually have been transferred to legal acts on legal relations in case of bankruptcy of many foreign countries. (shrink)

The words of the keynote speaker at the “After the Avant-Garde” Conference (University of Houston, March 6-9, 1985) were destined to fall on deaf ears. Here was the 55-year-old Hans Magnus Enzensberger—poet, essayist, editor of Kursbuch —who 15 years earlier had argued for a left-wing “takeover” of the media for revolutionary ends. Yet this night he had a more Socratic wisdom to convey: an innate distrust of the concept of the avant-garde, a notion that suggests the obligation of a self-styled (...) political or artistic elite to become standard-bearers for the rest of humanity — presumably, the unenlightened “masses” — who will in due time follow suit. Enzensberger subjected the sheer presumption of this conception to unsparing critical scrutiny. (shrink)

The safeguarding of credit represents one of the most important economic and juridical challenges for every complex society. Just by reading the news we can realize how current this topic is for us. By thinking back over the history of ideas and the social, economic, and political reasons that got Law makers to legislate on this subject, we can better understand what’s happening today and in which direction our societies are going. An analysis of the Italian juridical system’s development on (...) bankruptcy proceedings, starting from the attitude of ancient Roman law on over-indebtedness, can effectively shine light on the current regulation, reformed in 2006. This new bankruptcy law transforms the previous public nature of bankruptcy proceedings into a prevailingly private management of enterprises’ financial problems, completely changing the course of credit policy. The “Italian way” is just one result of an international trend, the guiding lines of which can be seen throughout the whole EU and also in the regulation of the USA. This historical-comparative perspective, in all its positive and negative potentiality, is an important paradigm. The final hope is that historians can perhaps give their contribution to more conscious reflections on important topics like this one, offering to other scholars the possibility to have a wider view on this juridical phenomenon. (shrink)

The fundamental ethical problem in bankruptcy is that insolvents have promised to pay their debts but can not keep their promise. The Ethics of Bankruptcy examines the morality of bankruptcy. The author compares and contrasts the Humean doctrine of promises as useful conventions with the Kantian view of autonomous agency constituting promissory obligations; he explores ethical concerns raised by forgiveness, utilitarianism and distributive justice and the moral aspects of insolvents' contractual, fiduciary, tortious and criminal liability. Finally, the (...) author assesses recent bankruptcy law reforms. Bankruptcies severly hurt creditors and society. For the insolvents and their families the experience is painful and stigmatising, yet philosophers have paid little attention to the moral aspects of this violent social phenomenon. The Ethics of Bankruptcy is the first comprehensive study that employs the tools of ethics to examine the controversies surrounding insolvency, which makes valuable and sometimes controversial reading in a decade recovering from the Recession. (shrink)

The modern doctrine of the “fresh start” reflects the differences between the past paradigm of punishment of the insolvent person and the current focus on the economic effectiveness and activeness. Global practice in the field of insolvency shows that the “limited liability rule” is eminently effective in the economic and social perspective. The appending threat of abuse and misapplication of the system might be neutralized through the legal regulation of prevention and rehabilitation means, which are analyzed in this article. The (...) aim of this research is to: 1) present a summary of the paradigm of bankruptcy of natural persons; 2) evaluate the categories of prevention and rehabilitation means set in the Lithuanian concept of the bankruptcy of natural persons; 3) identify the physical factors affecting the bankruptcy of natural persons; 4) provide a conceptual model of rehabilitation after bankruptcy and insolvency prevention measures have been implemented in the field of bankruptcy of natural persons. (shrink)

The fundamental ethical problem in bankruptcy is that insolvents have promised to pay their debts but can not keep their promise. _The Ethics of Bankruptcy_ examines the morality of bankruptcy. The author compares and contrasts the Humean doctrine of promises as useful conventions with the Kantian view of autonomous agency constituting promissory obligations; he explores ethical concerns raised by forgiveness, utilitarianism and distributive justice and the moral aspects of insolvents' contractual, fiduciary, tortious and criminal liability. Finally, the author (...) assesses recent bankruptcy law reforms. Bankruptcies severly hurt creditors and society. For the insolvents and their families the experience is painful and stigmatising, yet philosophers have paid little attention to the moral aspects of this violent social phenomenon. _The Ethics of Bankruptcy_ is the first comprehensive study that employs the tools of ethics to examine the controversies surrounding insolvency, which makes valuable and sometimes controversial reading in a decade recovering from the Recession. (shrink)

. From the bankruptcy of relations to the reality of connections: language and semantics in Bradley and Bosanquet. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 26, Special Issue: British Idealism: Language, Aesthetics and Emotions. Guest Editors: Colin Tyler and James Connelly, pp. 700-718.

Historically, individuals who file for bankruptcy protection have been viewed harshly by society. The negative perception of bankrupts was manifested in the punitive measures employed against bankruptcy petitioners, in the degrading public rituals directed at them, and in the contemptuous discourse used by officials to refer to the bankrupts. This traditional negative image of bankrupts was shared in colonial America, and vigorously continued throughout the Victorian era and into the 20th century. By the 1960s, a number of critics (...) began to voice their concerns about the dramatic rise in consumer bankruptcy filings in the United States. The critics have mostly attributed the increase in filings to an alleged decline both in morals and in the shame associated with bankruptcy. Charges of the fading stigma of bankruptcy have recently intensified. A number of recent studies have attempted to corroborate assertions of the declining stigma of bankruptcy through the use of indirect variables as proxies. These attempts to measure bankruptcy stigma have been roundly criticized. The disapproval centers mainly on the studies’ failure to directly measure changes in public perception of bankruptcy. This study attempts to measure the evolution of stigma in bankruptcy by addressing the methodological concerns attributed to previous empirical studies on this subject. Rather than measuring bankruptcy stigma through the examination of indirect bankruptcy stigma proxies or through the questioning of former petitioners, this study measures evolving public perceptions about bankruptcy by examining the expressed sentiments of the general public. To ascertain whether the negative image of bankrupts has eroded in the United States over the past century and a half, 171 newspaper articles published between 1864 and 2002 about personal bankruptcy were examined for content. Examination of the content of personal bankruptcy related newspaper articles provides valuable information about the evolution of public perceptions of bankrupts during that period. This study detected a noticeable shift, beginning in the 1960s, in public attitudes towards individuals filing for personal bankruptcy. However, it did not find that the changing public perception necessarily prompted an increase in the bankruptcy filings. (shrink)

Book Information The Ethics of Bankruptcy. By J. Kilpi. Routledge. London. 1999. Pp. xiii + 220. Paperback, £15.99.

The meaning of life is not just some ordinary old philosophical problem, butalso a practical one that, in some form, everyone wonders about. The wholemeaning of life has always been linked with belief in higher values that formthe incentive for the spiritual uplift of humanity. Even if spiritual values areillusions, they are absolutely necessary in order to give life meaning. Whenthey disappear, it causes a serious disease of the axiological consciousnessof man. The characters that are involved in the cultural stage (...) hosting thisdrama are the idealist, who sets values as necessary illusions of the humanspirit, and the wise man, who shatters any illusion of salvation throughfaith in values. (shrink)

Adopting a comparative UK/US approach, this article argues for the need to rethink corporate bankruptcy theory in the light of developments in the finance market. It argues that these developments have produced an effective mechanism, in large cases, for selecting between companies which will be worth more if they continue to trade and companies which ought to be allowed to fail, so that corporate bankruptcy law need no longer concern itself with steering creditor choice away from a sale (...) of the business and assets and towards a restructuring. Moreover, it suggests that whilst the automatic stay remains a central tenet of corporate bankruptcy law where the market decides that the business and assets should be sold, in cases where the market sees more value if a company continues to trade, corporate bankruptcy law may operate very well without a stay as a resolution procedure for deadlocked negotiations. The article identifies that in many large restructuring cases the only liabilities that are implicated are financial liabilities, and queries the extent to which the distributional concerns of the progressive movement, and US federal bankruptcy law, apply where losses are shared amongst sophisticated financial institutions. It ends with an explanation of why the analysis is limited to large cases, an indication of areas for further research and a note of caution for the future. (shrink)

The ethical issues involved in bankruptcy affect the debtor, the creditor and the society in which they operate. Facing the debtor is his responsibility to pay back the loans and credit extended to him while the creditor has to decide whether or not to press his legal rights, irrespective of the consequences to the debtor. Society will have to determine to what extent, if any, it is prepared or obligated to fund the rehabilitation of the debtor and those employees, (...) whose employment is terminated as a result of the bankruptcy. These issues will be determined according to the value structure of the particular souly in which debtor and creditor operate. This paper views the issues in a Jewish perspective. Debtors are considered to always be liable for their debts and there is a moral shame attached to bankruptcy, except in those cases where it is caused by natural disasters. While creditors are taught and encouraged to voluntarily waive their rights, this is considered charity with all its negative overtones. The courts are obligated to review the debtors assets and sell them, if necessary, to meet the creditors loans, leaving only basic necessities for minimal living of the debtor and his family. Society however, including the creditor, a part of the group, are obligated to fund the rehabilitation of the debtor either through its interest-free loan, charity or the provision of alternative employment. These may be funded out of communal taxes. (shrink)

Significant research has found that corporations have a social responsibility beyond maximizing shareholders' value. This study examines the effect of high-profile corporate bankruptcies on perception of corporate social responsibility. Undergraduate and graduate business students rated the importance of corporate social responsibility on profitability, long-term success and short-term success, before and after high-profile bankruptcies. The results indicated that students in general perceived corporate social responsibility to be more important to profitability and long-term success of the firm and less important to short-term (...) success after media publicity of corporate scandals. Several demographic factors such as gender, age and college major played a role in this perception. These findings have important implications for business education, especially as it relates to corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: Multiculturalism, Postmodernism, and the Bankruptcy of Fundamentalism 1Robert Baker (bio)AbstractThis first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews “moral fundamentalism,” the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at (...) the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model—a model of negotiated moral order—as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments.Man in the Twentieth Century can not be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture.American Anthropological Association (1948) in a statement officially denouncing the 1948 United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights.Recently... so-called “liberal” medicine has revived the old rights of a clinic understood in terms of a special contract, a tacit pact made between one man and another. This patient gaze has even been attributed the power of assuming [a role in clinical decision making].Miracles are not so easy to come by....Michel Foucault (1975, p. 5) [End Page 201]An Overview of the AnalysisInternational bioethics originated in the trauma of the Holocaust, specifically, in the 1946–1947 Nuremberg “Doctors Trial” when a tribunal of three American judges convicted Nazi medical researchers of “crimes against humanity.” In justifying their judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal cited 10 principles for morally permissible research, which, they claimed, were based on “fundamental” principles that civilized societies “all agree” upon and accept as the foundations of their “moral, ethical, and legal” norms. Foremost among the principles was one stating that morally permissible human experiments require the informed voluntary consent of the subject. The Nuremberg judgment soon became associated with the ideal of human rights declared in the 1948 United Nations Charter. These two ideas—fundamental principles of morality and human rights—have been linked in all major formulations of international bioethics promulgated in the past 50 years, including the Council of Europe’s 1997 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine (Council of Europe 1997; Dommel and Alexander 1997). In this paper, I explore the received justification for international bioethics—the idea that it is grounded in fundamental principles accepted in all societies—tracing it from its initial, almost off-hand, promulgation by the Nuremberg Tribunal, through its more thoughtful development by such bioethicists as Ruth Macklin, to its more complex use by the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.After a brief review of the evolution of the received justification, I discuss the viability of this justification in the face of the critique implicit in two important intellectual movements: multiculturalism and postmodernism. In the international context, multiculturalism asserts the claim that there are no common moral principles shared by all cultures. Postmodernism asserts a similar claim against all universal standards, moral and nonmoral. In the 1990s, bioethicists have attempted to respond to these claims in various ways. These responses are documented, analyzed, and then shown to be “bankrupt,” in the sense that they undercut the most important objective of moral fundamentalism: the justification of transcultural moral judgments, such as the condemnation of the Nazi doctors.A second article, which follows the present one in the same issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, revisits the contractarian tradition [End Page 202] of Hobbes and Locke, as it has been reinterpreted by David Gauthier (1986), John Rawls (1971, 1993), and Robert Nozick (1974), to develop the idea of negotiated moral order as the basis of international bioethics. When conceptualized as a negotiated moral order, international bioethics can accept the genuine insights... (shrink)

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, most legacy airlines filed for bankruptcy protection as a way to cut costs drastically, with the exception of American Airlines. This article applies the Principle of Double-Effect to the act of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for reasons of management strategy, in particular, cost-cutting. It argues that the Principle can be a useful tool for discerning the ethicality of the action, and demonstrates the usefulness by proposing three double-effect criteria (...) that, when fulfilled, argues for the ethical justifiability the action in question. (shrink)

This Article explores the relationship between consumer credit markets and bankruptcy policy. In general, I argue that the causative relationships running between borrowing and bankruptcy compel a new strategy for policing the conduct of lenders and borrowers in modern consumer credit markets. The strategy must be sensitive to the role of the credit card in lending markets and must recognize that both issuers and cardholders are well placed to respond to the increased levels of spending and indebtedness. In (...) the latter parts of the Article, I recommend mandatory minimum payment requirements, a tax on distressed credit card debt, and the subordination of payments to credit card lenders in bankruptcy. I also argue that many aspects of the American bankruptcy system, as recently reformed, are overly protective of credit card issuers. (shrink)

The received wisdom among welfare state scholars is that policy feedbacks render social insurance programs durable. Yet, in the case of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, a voting majority of retired city workers accepted a settlement that asked them to waive key legal protections, formally accept gutted medical benefits, trimmed pension benefits, and a new public-private pension financing mechanism. This article synthesizes interactionist theories of loss to introduce the concept of “collective cooling.” I argue that collective cooling helps to establish the (...) limits of policy feedbacks by explaining how a group of retirees’ collective self-understandings were adjusted from that of contractual rights holders to charitable dependents. Key components of this process included: First, seeking to adjust understandings of how pensioners were perceived by powerful outsiders; And, second, seeking to adjust the loss from one that reflected poorly on pensioners to one that did not. Implications are discussed for how people accept unexpected economic losses, especially those imposed by a trusted institution such as an employer or government organization. (shrink)

In this paper, Professor Wiggins explores the relationship between conservative economic theories and major bankruptcy reforms recently enacted by the United States Congress. First, she describes three key components of conservative economic theory as advanced by the Bush Administration and conservative scholars. These include: a strong preference for private ordering over public ordering, the promotion of private property as a means to expand personal freedom and liberty, and the encouragement of individual risk internalization. Next, she describes two theoretical components (...) of the new bankruptcy reforms. These include: a preference for creditor collection over debt relief and the promotion of individual risk internalization. Then Professor Wiggins examines two questions: First, is there meaningful theoretical symmetry between conservative economics and the new bankruptcy law? Second, is there significant operational symmetry between the two? The paper suggests theoretical convergence for two reasons: First, both conservative economics and the new bankruptcy law aim to promote private bargains over administratively adjusted ones. Second, both seek to force individuals to absorb more of the risks of financial decision-making. The paper suggests, however, that at the operational level there exists significant divergence between the aims of conservative economics and the predicted consequences of the new law. Professor Wiggins concludes, among other things, that economic conservatives should pay more rigorous attention to personal bankruptcy policy because operational asymmetry between their theories and the new legislation could blunt their ambitious economic agenda for American consumers. (shrink)

The paper aims to investigate the effects of corporate social performance (CSP) on bankruptcy likelihood in times of economic upswing. This is important because prior related literature focused on data containing times of economic crises. We measure bankruptcy likelihood with the Altman Z score and CSP with Refinitiv ESG scores. By applying static panel data regressions and instrumental variable regressions on a sample of 6696 US-firm-year observations from 2010 to 2019 our main findings are: (i) In contrast to (...) existing research, the level of firms’ CSP seems to have no (positive) effect on the likelihood of bankruptcy during times of economic upswing. (ii) Increasing a firm’s CSP in times of economic upswing leads to a rise in bankruptcy likelihood. We conclude that the positive effects of CSP on stakeholder relationships fail to materialize in flourishing business environments. The costs of increasing CSP, thus, exceed their immediate positive effects and raise bankruptcy likelihood. However, as they reduce financial default risk in subsequent crises, CSP investments can be seen as a balancing measure. Our findings bear implications for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the economic assumptions of economic theory via an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor–debtor relations in the 18th century. This transformation enabled masses of people to obtain credit without moral opprobrium or social subordination. Classical 18th century economics had the ethical concepts to appreciate these facts. Ironically, contemporary economic theory cannot. I trace this fault to its abstract representations of freedom, efficiency, and markets. The virtues of capitalism lie in the concrete social relations and social meanings (...) through which capital and commodities are exchanged. Contrary to laissez faire capitalism, the conditions for sustaining these concrete capitalist formations require limits on freedom of contract and the scope of private property rights. (shrink)

Without the maternal hold, without its herethical ethics and sublimation, without the stability that this hold can bring, we are melancholically or defensively driven to commit the most heinous acts of atrocity and violence in the name of eternal life, development, and progress. For the most part, Kristeva has described the combination of personal loss and social, cultural, and historical pressures brought to bear on the vexed sublimation of the maternal hold by artists like Giovanni Bellini. More recently, however, her (...) attention has turned to other contemporary examples, in particular, Max Beckmann whose works, she claims, sublimate the loss of the maternal hold itself. They are examples of a Sacred Family, a Pietà, or a Dormition that have undergone a radical transformation. They are representations of a society, a culture, indeed a world, that is losing its maternal hold; a world that is losing both its herethical ethics, and the capacity to sublimate its apoptotic inheritance. Following Kristeva, I will put Eduardo Lalo’s book of poems and drawings Necrópolis in a tradition of representation of the maternal hold that is close to a thousand years old. This tradition goes from the confrontation with nothingness in Theophane the Greek’s Dormition to the modern matricide represented in Pablo Picasso’s Maternity Apple. (shrink)