Before the Law

The recent Supreme Court decision on U.S. healthcare legislation demarcated limits of government power, and in so doing it reminded us of the priority of existential human action—how we live with others and as individuals—over and above the efforts by the state to manage our life-worlds. Whatever transpires in the halls of Congress or, for that matter, even in the Court, there is substance to our lives, the vitality of community, that is not the invention of government offices or judicial principles. It is not merely produced by experts, defined by discourse, or contingent on statute. Our living precedes all that, thriving in a space that is, literally, before the law. This issue of Telos begins with the recognition that there is a substantive dimension of political life that comes before the normative and regulative activities of the empirical state, and this in turn opens the door to the pursuit of a political theory prior to the state or even at odds with the state.

Before the Law
Russell A. Berman

Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger in the Anti-Liberalism of Leo Strauss
Robert C. Miner

Carl Schmitt in China
Qi Zheng

The Architectonics of Hope: Apocalyptic Convergences and Constellations of Violence in Carl Schmitt and Johann Baptist Metz
Kyle Gingerich Hiebert

Messages in a Bottle and Other Things Lost to the Sea: The Other Side of Critical Theory or a Reevaluation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
James Hellings

At a Distance to the State: On the Politics of Hobbes and Badiou
Geoffrey Holsclaw

On Subjectivity and the Risk Pool; or, Žižek’s Lacuna
Kevin S. Amidon and Zachary Gray Sanderson

Pure and Impure in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben
Robbie Duschinsky

Notes and Commentary

Horkheimer’s Pessimism and Compassion
Ryan Gunderson

Reviews

The Right to Look Away
Ulrich Plass

Workers of the World . . . Love One Another?
Timothy Stacey