The Vigilant Jew as an Annoyance: How Hamid Dabashi Misreads Adorno

An article by Hamid Dabashi recently appeared in the online version of the English-language edition of Al Jazeera. Dabashi teaches Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where the exiled Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno found refuge during the period of National Socialism. Dabashi quotes Adorno’s 1949 thesis that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz and asks what it really means: “How could writing poetry after a calamity such as Auschwitz, and by extension a horror like the Holocaust, be something barbaric? Doesn’t poetry console in moments of mourning and despair?”

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Matthias Küntzel on Germany and Iran

Telos Press author Matthias Küntzel was recently interviewed by the Times of Israel regarding a planned trade mission by the German Near and Middle East Association, or NUMOV, to Iran in December. Küntzel’s forthcoming book, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, will be published by Telos Press in November.

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Christian Cosmopolis, Bastion of All Believers: A Response to Joshua Ralston

We agree with Joshua Ralston that all forms of religious fundamentalism demand both universal and unconditional condemnation as well as regional and global responses to help all the victims—irrespective of their faith. We also agree with him that it is wrong to judge age-old religious traditions by modern secular, liberal standards and that essentialized notions distort complex cultural and historical realities.

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Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century

Like Spinoza, many liberal thinkers have defined the liberty they promote in terms of the necessity of submitting to the law that guarantees it. This is a unique kind of rule of law, a rule of the “‘politically correct,’ universalist, managerial-liberal” (9) law of contemporary liberals. Both internationally and domestically, this law requires the muscular imposition of questionable political, moral, and economic principles, by means of an insidious and often nauseating bureaucratic, technocratic, mediacratic apparatus, onto largely unwilling publics. Crucially, the freedom championed by such liberals and allegedly secured by their law does not include the freedom to refuse their domination root and branch.

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Joel Kotkin on America’s Disappearing Middle Class

The Daily Beast has posted an excerpt from Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, forthcoming from Telos Press. Read the full excerpt here and pre-order your copy of The New Class Conflict in our online store.

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New Review of Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage

Writing in the current issue of Modern Age (Summer 2014), Tobias J. Lanz reviews Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage:

This is a book about freedom. It was first published in 1951 as a response to the Nazi experience and the perceived threat of Soviet expansion. Its explicit focus was resistance to the totalitarian state. Yet its implicit focus is resistance to all forms of social control, including the soft totalitarianism of present-day mass democracy. And this why Ernst Jünger’s classic remains relevant today, and that is why Telos Press has reissued it. . . .

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