It is difficult to know what constitutes the latest social media “scandal” for the news organizations that promote it as such. Of course, it follows the seemingly unending political concerns around social and digital media since the election of President Trump and other cornerstone events such as the Brexit vote. It stands in the long line of concerns about email hacking, Russian “meddling,” “fake news,” undignified presidential tweeting, and bots, and the indictments of workers of a Russian internet agency. There is the more general, but somewhat vacuous, thesis that the “politics of truth” has been replaced by a “politics of untruth.” Within this framing, there is the sense that “democracy” is under attack through social media; that populists, the “alt-right,” shady billionaire donors, foreign authoritarians and nativist Svengalis have found secret pathways to sow discontent within Western democracies and tip elections and plebiscites to previously unconscionable leaders and unimaginable outcomes.
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Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., is now available for purchase in our store. In Azade Seyhan’s article “Erdoğan and the Intellectuals,” which appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017), the institutional affiliation of Prof. Nilüfer Göle was incorrectly reported. Her correct affiliation is the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 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, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013). It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects. Writing at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, David Ragazzoni reviews Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, published by Telos Press Publishing. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and co-edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Schmitt’s Land and Sea is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on your purchase by using the coupon code BOOKS20.
Kellan Anfinson’s “Risk or Security: Carl Schmitt’s Ethos of the Event” appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are now available in both print and online formats. This article audits Schmitt’s theory of politics through the concept of the event, particularly the risk it entails. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “machine” to build on Michael Marder’s reading of the event in Schmitt, which envisions politics as unstable and open to transformation. Attending to flashpoints where Schmitt limits the potential of these transformations reveals two ways of orienting oneself toward political events: security or risk. Schmitt pushes decisions in the direction of security. But according to Schmitt’s argument that definitions of the political are also political, Schmitt’s attempt to limit the shape that political transformations take is polemical rather than analytical. Reading his theoretical analysis against such polemical interjections reveals the possibility of political partisanship as civil disobedience in which one gives up security and accepts the risk of placing oneself outside the legal order. |
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