By James V. Schall · Tuesday, January 24, 2012 James V. Schall’s “A Catholic Reading of the Gorgias of Plato” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 The Gorgias of Plato is of particular interest to political philosophy. Not only is there a detailed discussion of punishment and oratory, but also of practical political ways of action and their foundation. This dialogue is of particular worth for the Roman Catholic notion of the relation of reason and revelation. Political life leaves us with the notion that not all crimes are punished, nor are all good deeds rewarded. This fact leaves the Platonic concern of whether the world is created in injustice. The myth at the end of the Gorgias suggests that politicians are the ones most likely to cause extensive damage and evil in the world. It also argues that unless such deeds are suffered for, thus righting the principle, they will be punished. This consideration naturally leads to the issue of resurrection, an issue about which even Marxist-oriented philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer saw the logic.
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By Mark Chou · Friday, January 20, 2012 Mark Chou’s “Morgenthau, the Tragic: On Tragedy and the Transition from Scientific Man to Politics Among Nations” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
When Hans J. Morgenthau first penned Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, it was his scorn of modern science or “dogmatic scientism,” as he put it, that spoke most loudly. But with the publication of Politics Among Nations several years later, his concerns had shifted, as he set about to present a rational theory of international politics. In a matter of only two years, or so it seemed, Morgenthau’s tune had changed—from a clear denunciation of science to the espousal of a nascent science of International Relations. Why did Morgenthau so vehemently decry dogmatic scientism and all that it embodied in Scientific Man, only to establish a theory of international politics that would eventually inspire the “science” of International Relations? The answer, at least the one that this article entertains, was tragedy. Using the lens of tragedy, which Morgenthau first embraced in Scientific Man, this article offers a narrative of the seemingly paradoxical transition that occurs between Scientific Man and Politics Among Nations.
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By Charles Kollmer · Thursday, January 19, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Charles Kollmer looks at Stephanie Frank’s “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” from Telos 153 (Winter 2010).
In “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” Stephanie Frank outlines a compelling approach to Carl Schmitt’s complex oeuvre. She sets out to rectify a common mistake made in existing treatments of Schmitt; in studies of Schmitt’s early work Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), scholars tend to rely on a later work, Constitutional Theory (1928), as an explanatory crutch. Both texts model representation, but a conflation of their respective models obscures how Schmitt’s project changes between the works. As a corrective, Frank traces the nuances of Roman Catholicism‘s model back to the influence of seventeenth-century theologian Malebranche, who in turn influenced the eighteenth-century revolutionary Abbé Sieyès. By grounding Roman Catholicism in this historical context, Frank not only sidesteps the circularity of her colleagues’ interpretations but also lays the groundwork for a persuasive reading of Schmitt’s turn to aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, January 17, 2012 The West: Its Legacy and Future
September 7–10, 2012
L’Aquila, Italy
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS: MARCH 15, 2012
Conference Theme
Recent developments appear to end the “end of history” and foreshadow instead the end of the West. After 1989, many expected a gradual convergence toward Western models of liberal market democracy. But Western responses to 9/11 and the 2007–8 transatlantic “credit crunch” have exposed the limits of U.S. international primacy and accelerated the global shift of power from West to East and North to South—as evinced by the rise of China, India, and other emerging markets.
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By Wesley Phillips · Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Wesley Phillips’s “Melancholy Science? German Idealism and Critical Theory Reconsidered” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
What is the relationship between theory and praxis today? During the 1960s, Adorno’s melancholy science was reproached with the charge of resignation, echoes of which have continued up to the present day—whether in Agamben or in praxis-oriented radical thought. In what is the most substantial critique to date, Gillian Rose initially sympathized with Adorno only to reject his neo-Kantian Marxism—the problem being that the melancholy science would involve a masochistically infinite task concerned with the recovery of an irretrievable utopia, leading to a methodological detachment from the social object. Understood in this way, the question of finite social praxis becomes an immanently philosophical matter. While following Rose’s orientation toward German idealism—for its imagined critique of neo-Kantianism and theory-ism—this article argues that, due to his unsatisfactory treatment of historical suffering, a return to Hegel alone (albeit after Marx) is insufficient. Rather, a dialectic of Hegel and his adversary Schelling suggests a distinctive account of determinate activity that avoids Melancholia without rejoicing the actuality of world spirit. This is made possible by way of an affinity between conceptions of melancholy and history in Schelling and Benjamin, from whom Adorno develops his traurige Wissenschaft.
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By Jakob Norberg · Thursday, January 12, 2012 Jakob Norberg’s “Day-to-Day Politics: Carl Schmitt on the Diary” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Early on in his career, Carl Schmitt articulated a cultural critique of the diary. He saw the personal journal as a manifestation and reinforcement of the writing subject’s vanity and self-importance in a sterile modern world. The resulting record, moreover, offered up the diarist’s inner life to the gaze of dissecting readers, who tended to convert polemical arguments into psychological symptoms. Yet Schmitt also kept something like a daily journal and was thus forced to struggle against the diary from within the genre itself. His post-1945 notebooks, entitled Glossarium, constitute a cultural battlefield upon which this struggle takes place. By means of strategies such as scathing portraits of famous diarists and displays of sententious concision, Schmitt sought to expel the diary from his own notebooks, or stage a paradoxical day-to-day resistance to the pathologies of the age emblematized in the diary form itself. The study of Schmitt’s non-diary ultimately sheds light on his political understanding of writing. For him, genres are never neutral vehicles of ideas but rather inflect thought in ideologically relevant ways.
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