Responses to commentators

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Notes

1 Here is a short list of books that indicate how different human gestures—whether hand, facial, or bodily—are in different cultures:

• Italian without Words, by Don Cangelosi and Joseph Delli Carpini

• The French Way: Aspects of Behavior, Attitudes, and Customs of the French, by Ross Steele

• Body Language in Business: Decoding the Signals, by Adrian Furnham and Evgeniya Petrova

• Cultural Intelligence: Living and Working Globally, by David C. Thomas and Kerr Inkson

• Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans, by Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall

• Culture Shock! Korea, by Sonja Vegdahl Hur and Ben Seunghua Hur

• Cultural Anthropology, by Conrad Phillip Kottak

• Gestures: The Do's and Taboos of Body Language around the World, by Roger E. Axtell

2 I would nevertheless point out that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a law of the land, or a set of moral or religious laws, that does not stem—when we look at its origins—from something that precedes all law: a “just because (I/we said so),” whether that be the “just because” of the “founding fathers,” of the God of the Old Testament, or of a parent in that parent’s own home. All systems, including those based on a supposed “social contract” or lists of “human rights,” can be questioned as to why we—who were not present at the hammering out of the contract and never agreed to the initial bill of rights—should adopt and obey them.

3 One might hypothesize that the importance of the “frame” is the only thing that the vast majority of non-Lacanian analysts still agree upon. Yet let us recall Winnicott’s (1958b) comment about working with neurotics, in which I believe the term “setting” was used in much the same way as many use the term “frame” today: “Where there is an intact ego and the analyst can take for granted these earliest details of infant care, then the setting of the analysis is unimportant relative to the interpretive work. (By setting, I mean the summation of all the details of management.)” (297).