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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By Ronald Olufemi Badru · Saturday, October 8, 2011 Ronald Olufemi Badru’s “The Ontology of Political Decisionism, Negative Statecraft, and the Nigerian State: Exploring Moral Altruism in Politics” 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 exercise in political philosophy adopts the research methods of conceptual analysis, extensive argumentation, and historical account. Using the theoretical framework of political decisionism, espoused by the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, the essay attempts to explain the operation of the main actors within Nigeria’s political space. There are two central claims. First, Nigeria’s political leadership has detached morality from the political sphere; political leaders have covertly eroded the authority of both legal and moral norms in satisfying their egoistic interests. Second, the political class regards one another as enemies, leading to numerous incidents of political assassinations and killings among them. These claims aptly instantiate and summarize the Schmittian political decisionism in Nigeria’s politics. However, the paper concludes that since politics in the ideal is service to the public, for an all-round development, and the egoism of political decisionism resists this objective, then there ought to be a new morality of altruism in Nigeria’s politics. Committing to the welfare of the other, rather than that of the self, moral altruism ensures that politics is rightly conducted in Nigeria to achieve the well being of the general other, leading to an all-inclusive social development in the final analysis.
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By Maria Piccone · Friday, October 7, 2011 On Tuesday, October 4, Telos Press hosted a book launch for A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory at St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City. Tim Luke (co-editor of the book), Russell Berman (editor of Telos), and publisher Mary Piccone (Telos Press) provided an engaging look at the history of a courageous and often controversial journal, its brilliant and volatile founder, Paul Piccone, and Telos‘s ongoing contributions to American intellectual life. We had an outstanding turnout—a testimonial to the past, present, and future of Telos, now celebrating its 43rd anniversary.
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By Franklin Hugh Adler · Wednesday, October 5, 2011 Franklin Hugh Adler’s “Israel’s Mizrahim: ‘Other’ Victims of Zionism or a Bridge to Regional Reconciliation?” 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.
Mizrahim, Jews who issued from Arab lands, comprise roughly half of Israel’s population. Most arrived after having been expelled from Arab states after 1948, and in number exceed those Palestinians who were displaced at Israel’s birth. They also possessed substantially greater property that was confiscated without compensation upon expulsion. Mizrahim have had a largely ignored and uneasy relation with Zionism, whose master narrative was based upon the return of European Jews to Palestine. An orientalist, anti-Arab blindness that became embedded in Zionism also encouraged a deracination of Mizrahim, as they, too, were Arabs and had been an enduring presence in the region predating by centuries the birth of Mohammad and the ascendance of Islam. In recent years there has been a reassertion of Mizrahi identity, often articulated by subsequent generations, which, at the same time, might become a source of regional reconciliation and help redeem the pluralism and cultural hybridity that once characterized Mediterranean-Levantine civilization. This essay attempts to explore these imaginative possibilities.
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By Telos Press · Saturday, October 1, 2011 Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory, edited by Timothy Luke and Ben Agger. Get your copy here.
In 1968, a young SUNY-Buffalo philosophy graduate student named Paul Piccone started a journal called Telos. No one then could have reasonably expected for it to become an intellectual institution. Originally conceived as the self-consciousness of the American New Left, the journal soon ranged more widely as its authors introduced European social theory and philosophy to a largely American audience unaware of these traditions. Piccone forged a “journal of no illusions” that was iconoclastic, skeptical, and yet motivated by the hope that critique and engagement could become constitutive principles for politics and everyday practices. In this book, an array of authors, many of whom participated in the development of Telos, examine the ongoing legacy of the journal, and address the ways in which Telos formed a generation of young intellectuals, who asked for a “critical theory” to understand both the impasses and possibilities for a progressive politics.
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