By Pekka Sulkunen · Friday, October 21, 2011 Pekka Sulkunen’s “Autonomy against Intimacy: On the Problem of Governing Lifestyle-Related Risks” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 Most risk society analyses focus on external risks caused by production, neglecting internal risks produced by consumption. Tobacco, alcohol, obesity, lack of exercise, and other lifestyle-related causes are top global burdens of health, growing with emerging consumer society outside western capitalism. Modern societies have a poor track record in regulating these risks. Neo-liberal hegemony is a weak explanation of the failure. We must see the issue as a problem of justification. Modern social order is founded on individual biography, autonomy, and intimacy as principles of human worth. The twentieth-century modern state has guided the progress to make these ideals reality. Autonomy, the right to individual self-control, has supported the right to intimacy, experience of life as unique and separate from other lives. Today, only quite recently, these principles of worth are fully matured, but autonomy and intimacy are now conflicting. One person’s uniqueness—the pleasure of consumption or cultural identity—is felt to tax the autonomy of others. Vice versa, the autonomy of the majority cuts into the uniqueness of the few. The state has lost its pastoral role to lead the flock to progress, and become apostolic authority merely instructing the faithful on health, security, and well-being from a distance.
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By Rusmir Mahmutćehajić · Tuesday, October 18, 2011 Rusmir Mahmutćehajić’s “On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar: The Poet, the Road, and the Word” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay investigates certain key ontological, cosmological, anthropological, and psychological aspects of Mak Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper, the best-known poetic work of the Slavic south. Written during the 1960s, the book was recognized immediately on publication as an authentic voice of perennial wisdom finding expression through major elements of Bosnian culture. Although distorted and obscured in modern ideological perspectives, the idea of “Bosnian Culture” preserves nearly all the vital elements of perennial wisdom. The poet’s confident expression of this wisdom is, in the author’s view, his witness to the need for dialogue between interlocutors of both the traditional and modern viewpoints that can assist our exit from confusion and ideological reductionism. In spite of its origins during the period of Communist totalitarianism, Stone Sleeper presents a clear picture of how human openness to the principle of existence, which transcends any and all ideological construction, is and remains irreducible to closed form. This book has been recognized as both a supreme achievement and a crucial moment in the poetry of the Slavic south, confirming Bosnia’s centrality to and rich impact upon that complex whole.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 17, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Robert Antonio about the influence of Paul Piccone and Telos on his intellectual development.
Maxwell Woods: In your article “Absolutizing Particularity,” you discuss Telos and Paul Piccone’s critique of liberalism. How do you view this article today? How did this piece fit into your intellectual world when you wrote it?
 Robert Antonio: Every or nearly every participant at Telos and, probably, most of its serious readers have had serious objections, fears, or dissatisfaction with liberalism as we have known it from the start. However, there have always been different liberalisms, and, as Paul stressed, divergent positions toward them among the Telos circle and readership. When I started reading the journal, “social liberalism” (Keynsianism and the welfare state) was the dominant capitalist regime, but already riven with contradictions and in decay. Many of us split with the journal when “market liberalism,” or neoliberalism, was in ascendance and took different positions toward it. I rejected the Schmittian and populist turn and return to tradition and had more affirmative views about key facets of liberal political and legal institutions, civil society, and social liberalism. However, I don’t believe that liberalism and capitalism as we have known them are sustainable. We have a huge environmental wall ahead and fundamental problems with capitalism’s growth imperative, and we also face multiple deep crises related to finance, real economy joblessness, and inequality. I have always disagreed with Paul’s exhaustion thesis about the liberal-left, but I fear that the consequent crises are upon us and the political culture is not responding; there is a profound lack of political vision and political will. We are in trouble, but not in exactly the way that Paul expected. The crisis and future of liberalism and capitalism is for me the most central issue for social theory and politics today. Thus, I try to follow divergent views about this issue.
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By Pedro Blas González · Friday, October 14, 2011 Pedro Blas González’s “Czesław Miłosz: Old-World Values Confront Late-Modern Nihilism” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind is unrivalled by other theoretical and abstract treatises in its sheer ability to grasp the criminal essence of political reality under communism. The Captive Mind, which was published in 1953 by the 1980 recipient of the Noble Prize in literature, chronicles and dissects the mind and soul of Marxist intellectuals and their readiness to embrace communism. Focusing his attention on the life-trajectory of real writers and thinkers who were acquaintances of Milosz’s, the Polish writer is able to pinpoint the many rewards that communism offers the intellectuals who embrace it. In this and other respects, Miłosz keeps some very distinguished company, with writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karl Popper, Leszek Kołakowski, Arthur Koestler, Jean-Francois Revel, and Paul Hollander, some who lived under communism. These writers have enlightened western democracies about the structure of realpolitiks and dialectical materialism, and the necessary outcome of what some naïvely like to call “praxis.” Miłosz’s formation as a writer and thinker took place during the 1930s, a time that saw Europe in the grasp of the two dominant totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century: fascism and communism. This historical context was to form the backbone of The Captive Mind. From a historical and humanistic perspective, this context remains very important today, for it gives us an opportunity to revisit the essential human qualities and virtues that have to be subsumed by totalitarianism in order for such governments to rule with an iron fist.
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By Raf Geenens · Tuesday, October 11, 2011 Raf Geenens’s “The Emergence of Supranational Politics: A New Breath of Life for the Nation-State?” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
While cosmopolitan authors are eager to forecast the demise of the nation-state, this article looks at a number of authors who believe that the emergence of supranational politics actually provides the nation-state with a new or at least an altered raison d’être. I explore two lines of argument of this kind. Some theorists fear that the development of supranational institutions will eventually bring about a “depoliticization” of collective life. We risk ending up in a “postpolitical” world where individuals no longer see themselves as political actors with responsibility for the fate of a collectivity, but are instead reduced to purely economic units. Accordingly, these authors defend the nation-state as an irreplaceable context of political agency. Other theorists fear that the concentration of powers at the supranational level risks bringing about a new kind of despotism. In response, they propose to recast nation-states in the role of “intermediary bodies” that can form a counterweight against the centralizing tendencies of supranational institutions. Assessing these two lines of argument, I conclude that the dangers these authors point to are real. I also conclude, though, that there are no reasons to assume that the nation-state is indeed the optimal “political form” to counter these alarming developments.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 10, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with co-editor Ben Agger about the influence Telos has had on his intellectual development.
Maxwell Woods: How do you view your article, “My Telos: A Journal of No Illusions,” and your relationship to Telos today?
Ben Agger: There has been such an explosion of publishing and publications since the late 60s, when Paul [Piccone] started Telos, that I just can’t keep up with journals and books. I used to pore over the latest issue of Telos as important intellectual sustenance, especially the latest intellectual news from Europe. Today there is less urgency about “keeping up” with publications, even though Telos remains a central part of my intellectual identity. As I say in my chapter, Telos helped formed me as I and others grappled with a humanist and phenomenological Marxism that helped explain America and the world during the 60s and 70s. Telos was a primer, although often a difficult one, for all of us on the New Left who were using Hegel, early Marx, Husserl, Sartre, et al. to understand civil rights, the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam—and our opposition to them. It is a sad commentary on the decline of discourse, as I term it, that books and journals matter less in our Internet age of instantaneity.
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