The Experience of Time as Crisis. On Croce’s and Benjamin’s Concept of History

In the early decades of the twentieth century the experience of time as crisis became the catalyst for a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between historical materialism and idealism, leading to the rejection of simplistic mechanical concepts of historical time. This reorientation represents a turning point in the history of European ideas, clearly evident in the work of two major thinkers of this period, usually associated with opposing political ideologies: the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin and the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. Based on a conceptual framework borrowed partly from Reinhart Koselleck, this article explains how the experience of acute crisis led both thinkers to develop a new understanding of historical time, which shows surprising parallels. Both authors used the reorientation in the relationship between idealism and materialism to criticize positivist approaches to the analysis of historical change and to reject deterministic accounts of the future

Lokale und transnationale Dimensionen sakralisierter Politik. Nationale Bewegung und Zivilgesellschaft im liberalen Italien

How do politics and civil society develop a symbolic language which corresponds to the nineteenth-century experience of modernity and societal change? Taking post-risorgmental Italy as an example, this article examines local and transnational languages of sacralised politics, identifying symbolic forms which relate back to established traditions of local religious praxis while at the same time integrating international models of political ritual. The political cult of the dead as well as the staging of local identity within the new and still largely unfamiliar nation state offer historiens a rich field of research. Of particular interest are the ways in which Italian democrates and republicans confront political developments in the United States. Taking account of tensions between local, national and transnational symbolic language, the article demonstrates how context, usage and reception offer insights also into the political content of rituals. In Italy, since the 1860s, we notice in particular new municipal and civic frameworks for the sacralisation of politics, contributing to a new and different staging of nationality which at the same time relaxes estabished tensions between state and nation

Semileptonic and nonleptonic decays of Bc

Using our relativistic constituent quark model we present results on the exclusive nonleptonic and semileptonic decays of the Bc-meson. The nonleptonic decays are studied in the framework of the factorization approximation. We calculate the branching ratios for a large set of exclusive nonleptonic and semileptonic decays of the Bc-meson and compare our results with the results of other models.Comment: 4 pages, proceeding of the talk given by Pietro Santorelli at IFAE 2006, Pavia, 19-21 Aprile 200

J/\psi dissociation cross sections in a relativistic quark model

We calculate the amplitudes and the cross sections of the charm dissociation processes J/\psi \pi => D \bar D, D* \bar D, D \bar D*, D* \bar D* within a relativistic constituent quark model. We consistently account for the contributions coming from both the box and triangle diagrams that contribute to the dissociation processes. The cross section is dominated by the D* \bar D and D* \bar D* channels. When summing up the four channels we find a maximum total cross section of about 2.3 mb at sqrt(s) \approx 4.1 GeV. We compare our results to the results of other model calculations.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, typos corrected, this version will appear on Phys. Rev.

Semileptonic decays of Bc mesons into charmonium states in a relativistic quark model

We use the framework of a relativistic constituent quark model to study the semileptonic transitions of the Bc meson into CCbar charmonium states where CCbar = etaC (1S0), J/psi (3S1), chiC0 (3P0), chiC1 (3P1), hc (1P1), chiC2 (3P2), psi (3D2). We compute the q^2-dependence of all relevant form factors and give predictions for their semileptonic Bc decay modes including also their tau-modes. We derive a formula for the polar angle distribution of the charged lepton in the (l nu) c.m. frame and compute the partial helicity rates that multiply the angular factors in the decay distribution. For the discovery channel [B_c => J/psi (=> mu+ mu-) l nu] we compute the transverse/longitudinal composition of the J/psi which can be determined by an angular analysis of the decay J/psi => mu+ mu-. We compare our results with the results of other calculations.Comment: 16 pages RevTex, this version will appear in Physical Review