By Jesse Gelburd-Meyers · Monday, August 10, 2009 Michael Marder’s essay “From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics” appears in Telos 147 (Summer 2009), a special issue on “Carl Schmitt and the Event” for which he is the guest editor. Jesse Gelburd-Meyers follows up with some questions.
Jesse Gelburd-Meyers: In a world in which liberal doctrine informs the partitioning off of every segment of society so as to minimize the reach of the political sphere and give an ever privileged role to the economic realm, it is essential that we keep a proper perspective as to just how elusive the political truly is. If there is no autonomous political “sphere,” then what does a constitution constitute? What legitimates the sovereign’s decision to declare an entity an enemy if his sovereignty itself is not made by previously created rules that demarcate who can legally make such decisions? Isn’t it inevitable that a nation that is not ruled by the mere force of man, and which peacefully transfers the reins of power from regime to regime, will have some rules that, at the very least, establish the preconditions for the political event by declaring the type of sovereign who is permitted to make such decisions?
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By Paul Gottfried · Sunday, August 2, 2009 Panajotis Kondylis, Machtfragen. Ausgewählte Beiträge zu Politik und Gesellschaft, ed. Volker Gerhart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006). Paul Piccone, Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, ed. Gary Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2008).
There are two main reasons for pairing these posthumously published essays of Paul Piccone (1940–2004) with those of Panajotis Kondylis (1943–1998). One, both of these authors, who died in the last few years, were my friends, whose lives moved along much the same general trajectory as my own. None of us could be described as an academic luminary; although neither Paul, who mentored later successful professors, nor Panajotis, who called himself a “Privatgelehrter,” periodically associated with Heidelberg and the University of Athens, had as close an association as I’ve had with a long-term academic post. These brilliant social thinkers spent their lives on the edge of a university world that would have benefited greatly if they had been linked to it in appropriately high places.
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By William Tullius · Monday, July 27, 2009 In the following conversation with Bill Tullius, Victor Zaslavsky discusses some of the political and historiographical issues raised by his research into the Katyn massacre. Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, published by Telos Press Publishing, is available here.
Bill Tullius: Your book has highlighted important aspects of the ways in which the process of historical research has been subjected to ideological and political concerns and deceptions. As a result the public at large has long been kept more or less in the dark about such events as the massacre of some 25,000 Polish nationals at Katyn at the hands of the highest officials of the Soviet Union while the crimes of the Nazi regime have long been well known. How does this fact affect the way in which scholars and students alike are to engage in and trust the historiological process from now on?
Victor Zaslavsky: The case of the Katyn massacre is not the first and not the last example of the falsification of the historical truth, even if probably one of the most blatant ones. The first task of any historian remains the establishing of the factual truth. In the words of Leopold von Ranke, establishing “what actually happened.” Boris Pasternak said it differently, criticizing Soviet official writers: “their inability to find and tell the truth cannot be compensated by their skill in telling lies.” Young researchers should trust that in a democratic society the historical truth will sooner or later be discovered.
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By Jesse Gelburd-Meyers · Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Roy Ben-Shai’s article “Schmitt or Hamlet: The Unsovereign Event” appears in Telos 147 (Summer 2009). Jesse Gelburd-Meyers follows up with some questions.
Jesse Gelburd-Meyers: If the irruption of the “real” into the play both constitutes an event and leads to the transformation of the play into a tragedy, then does the irruption of the sovereign’s political decision into the flow of historical reality make that drama which takes place on the world stage into a tragedy? Under this framework, is the concept of the political one which is fundamentally tragic?
Roy Ben-Shai: On the one hand, yes. I think that if we apply the categories Schmitt develops here to his discussion on the political, then the political can be shown to be fundamentally “tragic.” On the other hand, my emphasis in this essay, which I take to be Schmitt’s own emphasis, is on the non-subjective nature of the tragic as such, and by implication perhaps, of the political. In other words, no less important than seeing the continuity of this essay with Schmitt’s earlier and more famous texts, is to see the revision it contains. What is being dropped out is the moment of decision as the ground (subiectum) of the tragic/political event. As far as individual characters go, the tragic is what befalls, not what is enacted or decided upon. But this feature is essential to the tragic as such. Here, in this modern tragedy, we identify no specific guiding force, neither an immanent nor a transcendent sovereign entity, but only an imbrication of human beings living through the impacts of a transitional and chiasmic period.
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By Rasoul Nafisi · Monday, July 13, 2009 Instead of engendering a renaissance of interest among Western intellectuals in the conditions of the 1979 revolution, the post-electoral crisis in Iran has unfortunately obfuscated what was already a complex historical event. Given that the protests in Iran cannot be understood without an adequate knowledge of their historical precedent from 1979 and earlier, we are making available here an edited version of Rasoul Nafisi’s “The Genesis of the Clerical State in Iran” from Telos 51 (Spring 1982). Telos 51 is available for purchase here.
The Genesis of the Clerical State in Iran
by Rasoul Nafisi
The religious state that has emerged in revolutionary Iran poses serious questions that, because of the rapidity of developments, have remained unanswered. In order to understand the Iranian revolution and the emergence of the clerical state, therefore, it is necessary to analyze the revolution’s genesis, its course, its aftermath, and, most importantly, the clergy’s role as a key sector of the power elite and its alliances.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, June 26, 2009 The Iranians who are resisting the electoral putsch are not only being humiliated and beaten by the batons and bullets of the Pasdaran but also by the inaction of the so-called freedom-loving world: no call for a special session of the UN, no threats of sanctions, no boycott declaration, no economic embargo, not even the smallest warning—let’s just not take sides or make any commitments as long as the result of the struggle in Iran remains open. The West, so the argument goes, has to be careful to avoid providing any pretext to vilify the Iranian opposition. So Obama doesn’t need days but weeks to slowly pull back his outstretched hand, while the German Foreign Ministry argues all the more emphatically for a dialogue with the putsch-regime. Undauntedly, the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran advertises the building of a German-Iranian Business Center in Berlin, while the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg reported today that its upcoming seminar on “Export Certification in Iran Trade” (July 13) is already overcrowded. And haven’t we gotten along somehow or other with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the past four years?
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