Kevin S. Amidon and Zachary Gray Sanderson’s “On Subjectivity and the Risk Pool; or, Žižek’s Lacuna” appears in Telos 160 (Fall 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 In his In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek poses more than a few heavy-gauge questions. Foremost among them: “The only true question today is: do we endorse this ‘naturalization’ of capitalism, or does contemporary global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its infinite reproduction?” Žižek’s analysis of this question, however, seems to us to be missing a crucial element. Where Žižek seems to posit a kind of reconvergence of the classical autonomous subject of the (neo-)liberal (and Frankfurt School) traditions with the class-based vocabulary of more radical Marxist and Lacanian analyses, we see another layer: the subject under the condition of the risk pool. The risk pool, protean and ubiquitous in today’s political economy, takes form in those meta-structures of institutionalized financial, political, and medical (i.e. bio-political) insurance and quasi-insurance that do not so much control the subject’s spheres of activity as regulate them. The (voluntarily or involuntarily) risk-pooled human being is thus in many ways neither subject nor class. She is always both, and navigating always between them in the sphere of financially and actuarially mediated risk. Such navigation in many ways evacuates the forms of political agency posited in both liberal and Marxist traditions, and focuses the individual centrally on the problem of uncertainty. Žižek’s complex analyses of topics as diverse as terrorism and Christianity approach reflections like these, but end where they must in fact begin.
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By Brendan O'Connor · Friday, October 19, 2012
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Meehan Crist reviews Catharine Malabou’s The New Wounded, translated from the French by Steven Miller, for Book Forum. Malabou tackles Descartes’s distinction between the brain and the mind using developments in neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
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“The revolution eats its own”: Jonathan Chait on the decline of moderates in the GOP for The New Republic.
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At Aeon Magazine, Michael Ruse wonders how Humanism has come to operate much like the religions and ideologies it set out to undermine.
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Ralph Harrington examines the Victorian roots of digital publishing for The Literary Platform.
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By Qi Zheng · Thursday, October 18, 2012 Qi Zheng’s “Carl Schmitt in China” appears in Telos 160 (Fall 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay explores the justification for studying Schmitt’s theory in China. It reveals the reasons why political philosophers who are interested in philosophical contributions to practical life should consider Schmitt’s theory as relevant for China. The first and second sections separately explore the two different schools of the critique of Schmitt in China. One school criticizes Schmitt either as a fascist theorist or a political philosopher whose theory is uncomfortably similar to the theory of Mao’s that directly produced the Great Cultural Revolution. I define this school as advancing a strong critique of Schmitt. The other school advances a weak critique of Schmitt. The weak critics aim to demonstrate a complicated relationship between Schmitt’s theory, liberalism and Chinese liberalism. On the one hand, they usually acknowledge the significance of Schmitt’s theory for showing the importance of the role of a strong state that is greatly ignored by Chinese liberalism. On the other hand, they criticize Schmitt for underestimating the ability of liberalism to build a strong state. In contrast to these two schools of Chinese criticism of Schmitt, the third and fourth sections of this essay provide a justification for studying Schmitt’s political theory in the current Chinese context by analyzing the inability of Chinese liberalism to provide the theoretical resources to deal with real political problems faced by China today.
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By Damien Booth · Tuesday, October 16, 2012 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, Damien Booth looks at Ronald Aronson’s “Interpreting Husserl and Heidegger: The Root of Sartre’s Thought” from Telos 13 (Fall 1972).
 Readers familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical writings understand that he inherited a great deal of his conceptual language from the phenomenological projects of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In “Interpreting Husserl and Heidegger: The Root of Sartre’s Thought,” Ronald Aronson strips away much of the mystery from Sartre’s concepts and, in so doing, reveals something about the framework that Sartre inherits that may well restrict his philosophical project from the very start. The accusation Aronson levies against Sartre is that he opens up a gap between consciousness and the world, a gap that Husserl wished to close by developing his transcendental phenomenological method. Essentially, Aronson thinks that Sartre abandons the very developments that made Husserl’s and Heidegger’s projects tenable in the first place: “we find [Sartre] erasing all the structures of consciousness (emotional, cognitive, and social) which make the world intelligible and making consciousness into a ‘nothing'” (47). As a result, Sartre becomes tangled up in his “own conceptual apparatus.” To find out why he gets so conceptually confused by these entanglements, Aronson traces Sartre’s key concepts back to their roots in Husserl’s cognitive projects and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.
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By James Hellings · Monday, October 15, 2012 James Hellings’s “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” appears in Telos 160 (Fall 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Drawing on a range of modern and contemporary works of art and literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Caspar David Friedrich, Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean), this essay seeks to exaggerate the aesthetic side of Adorno’s critical theory, re-evaluating the latter through a detailed analysis of the image of messages in a bottle. In overturning and displacing the critical genealogy of this image and in anchoring it to the construction of Adorno’s aesthetic and the work of art, I challenge the so-called “prevalent view” that transforms Adorno’s image into a pejorative logo for his alleged withdrawal into political quietism, pessimism, and resignation: a “strategy of hibernation.” Neither the critical theorists nor the activist critics of the Frankfurt School, I argue, have exclusivity over the image of messages in a bottle. If art is “the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked,” then the work of art in Adorno’s aesthetics best expresses the paradox of engagement through disengagement, which itself translates Adorno’s standpoint on social praxis. Art turns socio-political, as with Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, by turning away. Adorno valued radical new art for its distancing effect, for its great refusal, for becoming society’s Other. Art works well when complex antagonistic fragments crystallize into a force field, confronting, critiquing, and transforming the damaged life of society. Art, like the bottle of messages, is a container for truth and hope addressed to imaginary witnesses of an uncertain future, sent in spite of the aggressive indifference of the world, and aesthetics becomes, here at least, the privileged other of critical theory.
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By Göran Dahl · Friday, October 12, 2012 Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, reviewed in this essay, is available for purchase here.
I cannot refrain from first saying that this is a must read-book. That goes for those who are critical of “multiculturalism”—whatever this means—and for those wanting to defend it.
 Let us begin the central concept in this book—multiculturalism. I have, when confronted with the word, been wondering if the one who utters it is referring to an ideological ideal or a state of affairs. The authors use a similar distinction: multiculturalism is confusing since it is often not clear what is meant. It can be either an existing condition or a coming condition. This kind of use is descriptive. Then we have the normative one: a necessary way to think and act in a society when we have different (most often) ethnically based communities with different ideas on what is right or wrong. Just remember the Danish Mohamed cartoons from some years ago, and now recently the short film ridiculing “the prophet” available on YouTube. All of this has led to a discussion of whether there should be limits on free speech that involves ironies, jokes, pictures, etc., that could make religious believers feel insulted. The objection of many others, including me, is that in a modern, western liberal democracy one can say or illustrate any religious matter in whatever way you want. The public sphere is totally secular, or at least it should be so.[1] If you feel insulted, this is a private reaction, outside the public sphere. The bottom line would then be very simple: the public sphere gives anyone the right to argue his or her opinion, while civil society is the sphere of emotions. As long as these emotions remain just emotions, there is no problem. But the reason why this is an important book is that we have seen the emergence of leaders in the west who have considered limitations regarding free speech so that no minority gets insulted. If we follow this logic to its conclusion, then cartoons illustrating stereotypes of men, for example, should also illegal. A related problem is self-censorship, which many modern writers and artists have admitted suffering from. So the problem starts to get very complicated.
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