I opened this conference by referring to the medical metaphor within which we have framed the question of democracy in order to point toward two paths for understanding this metaphor and to plead for the practice of both medicine and politics, not as mechanical sciences but as healing arts. In the following paper I would like to provide an example of the kind of artistic practice I have in mind by looking at two case histories of revolutionary movements from below, one success and one failure. What I would like to show in both cases is that the path to success lies in understanding the problem of democracy, first, as a problem of metaphor and thus of representation in the aesthetic sense and, second, as a problem that involves intervention in a developing metaphorical dynamic.
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At the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference in L’Aquila, Italy, sociologist Dan Krier talked about his experiences at the conference as well as what distinguished the Telos conference from more discipline-specific academic gatherings. For anyone interested in participating in the upcoming 2015 Telos Conference in New York, abstracts will be accepted through October 20. For complete details and the full call for papers, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. We hope to see you there! Whether you attended or not, you’ll want to see this wonderful collection of photos from the recent Telos in Europe Conference, held in L’Aquila, Italy, in early September. Below is a sample, but you can view the full set over at our Facebook page. And just a reminder, there’s still time to submit your abstract for the upcoming 2015 Telos Conference in New York. For complete details, visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. At the recent Telos Conference in L’Aquila, Italy, Associate Editor Adrian Pabst discussed his new article “Commonwealth and Covenant: The West in a Neo-Medieval Era of International Affairs,” which appears in Telos 168 (Fall 2014), a special issue on the theme of “The West: Its Past and Its Prospects.” Telos 168 is now available for purchase in our online store. Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce that Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on November 1, 2014. Pre-order your copy today, and we will ship it as soon as it is in stock. |
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When Karl Marx described the commodity, he invoked the language of faith. For him, the commodity remained “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”[1] Marx, a dedicated secular economist, hesitated to pinpoint the exact power of the commodity. He could not fully understand it without recourse to a mythology he abhorred, one that far predated his radical recasting of accepted historical narratives. Here religion colors economics: the logic of exchange resembles a curious mysticism. 
