Chapter 6 examines the special challenges public carry of firearms pose for public protest. Arming public protests is incompatible with peaceful forms of dissent. It threatens to intimidate protesters and chill protected First Amendment activity in the public square. The chapter proposes several measures that can reduce or eliminate these harms, including prohibitions on public carry at permitted events, bans on armed groups in public places, and place restrictions deemed presumptively valid under the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has recently issued an expansive interpretation of public carry rights, based on the nation’s historical practice of gun regulation. But there is historical support for at least some restrictions on public carry at or near public protest events. Even if the best that can be done is a ban on open carry, that would alleviate some of the most nefarious effects public carry has on public protest.

The notion of an ‘aesthetics of war’ immediately raises questions about how artistic cynosures concerned with order, beauty, and the discernment of taste can be applied to the ignoble horrors of modern warfare. For that very reason, modern literature has striven to find aesthetic alternatives to the mandates of direct representation. In the first half of the twentieth century, this striving is starkly visible, as an aesthetics of realism (practiced by the War Poets) vies with an aesthetics of indirection (evident in the modernist works of Yeats and Woolf). In the second half of the century, in the shadow of nuclear terror, there is a turn to the satirical and the scabrous – most notably, in the trio of American World War II novels that defined the field for a generation or more: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Subsequently, wars in Vietnam and Bosnia prompt writers to use field reportage in resourceful, post-realist ways, sometimes echoing modernist poetics. Examining the aesthetic changes noted above, this chapter shows how the formal conundrum of representation has been illuminated, engaged with and, ultimately, used to productive ends in modern war literature.

This chapter maps five stages of the founding history of the psychoanalytic periodical enterprise, beginning with Freud’s pre-analytic phantasies around a journal, its social form, and unavoidable emotional content. Freud later nurtured a small group of followers expressly to establish a periodical and found the discourse on religion critical to the enterprise. With the arrival of competing periodicals on the scene, the use of religious rhetoric editors utilized the discourse on religion to narrate group dynamics within the Freudian circle and to enact change in the periodical enterprise itself. In is only in 1912 that religious content became a charged site in Christian-Jewish debates for working out contemporary rivalries and for marking out one’s territory. Jung and his circle began to abandon the analogic treatment of religion for the evidence that the history of religion could provide as the basis for their theoretical differences with Freud.