By James Santucci · Tuesday, September 4, 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, James Santucci looks at Fredy Perlman’s “Essay on Commodity Fetishism” from Telos 6 (Fall 1970).
 Two interesting things happened in the brouhaha over the proper antecedent of “that” in “You didn’t build that.” First, Dylan Matthews, a senior at Harvard who writes for Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, explained several different theories of dessert and how each interpretation would inform the intent behind President Obama’s phrase. Soon afterward, Rush Limbaugh attempted to discredit Matthews’s and the Obama campaign’s defenses of the statement by accusing them of working with words. Never mind that they were accused of working with words; what we’re interested in is the suggestion that there is a fundamental antithesis between working with words and materially engaging with the world. Without meaning to do so, the two provided a perfect context for reading Fredy Perlman’s “Essay on Commodity Fetishism.” A close reading of the essay reveals that not only is there no antithesis, but also that because of the theory of the commodity fetish, Marxism is material engagement with real phenomena.
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By Damien Booth · Monday, August 27, 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 Giovanni Piana’s “History and Existence in Husserl’s Manuscripts” from Telos 13 (Fall 1972).
 In Giovanni Piana’s “History and Existence in Husserl’s Manuscripts,” we get a presentation of Edmund Husserl’s thought regarding the “problem of others” and external-world skepticism in various manuscripts written in Husserl’s later period. The inclusion of the thought contained within these manuscripts serves to give us deeper access to the problem of others and the way Husserl approaches the problem in his later works. Of particular interest for Piana is the way Husserl describes how history and culture play a generative role in the constitution of human intersubjective relations. Importantly however, we must not lose sight of the original, epistemological aim of transcendental phenomenology. Losing sight of this aim may lead back into skepticism, or a move toward existentialism, which aims to describe the essence of human existence as opposed to a philosophical grounding of knowledge.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World
The Seventh Annual Telos Conference
February 16-17, 2013
New York City
The 21st century has been marked by both events and reflections that have explicitly challenged the long-standing liberal project of maintaining a separation between religion and politics. Not only have political conflicts become inseparable from theological and metaphysical considerations, but standard liberal claims of value-neutrality have been undermined by insights into the theological presuppositions of secular institutions. The goal of the 2013 Telos Conference will be to investigate the changing relationship between religion and politics. Possible topics include secularization and the “post-secular” turn; the theological foundations of political systems such as liberalism, socialism, and fascism; political theology; religion and the public sphere; separation of church and state; new civil forms of religious practice; the politics of religious pluralism; myth and sovereignty; theology and modernity; religion and political values; theocracy and religious law.
Please send short cv, paper title, and a 200-word abstract for a 15-minute presentation to David Pan (dtpan@uci.edu) with “2013 Telos Conference” in subject line by October 15, 2012.
Let’s say you’re invited to make a savory but unusual choice. Each night, you may get a fine four-course steak dinner from a drive-thru and eat it in your car on the way home. Or, you may elect to have burgers at home in the company of your family and friends. Taken alone, the four-course dinner may be more delicious and more nutritive, unquestionably the better assortment of consumable items. But is the meal better? Meal begins to sound like an ambiguous term. What do we mean by meal? Is a meal a social experience or an object we consume? These days we are asking the same of university classes.
There is no hotter topic in higher education today than online learning. This summer, online courses helped fuel a firestorm at our own University of Virginia. The Board of Visitors offered several vague reasons for President Teresa Sullivan’s ouster, but one rang clear enough: in the rector’s eyes, UVa had fallen behind its peer institutions by failing to develop a greater online presence. Since Sullivan’s reinstatement, the administration has rushed to show that this is not the case. The University recently announced that it would join peer institutions like Berkeley, Michigan, Princeton, and Stanford in offering free online classes through Coursera.
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By Nassim Benchaabane · Monday, August 20, 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, Nassim Benchaabane looks at James V. Schall’s “On Choosing Not to See” from Telos 136 (Fall 2006).
 Two tourists happen upon a waterfall on the order of Niagara. One describes it as “sublime,” the other as “pretty,” but “pretty” is the wrong description. This scenario, from a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, is not merely about the proper use of words. It poses a more serious question, a question of objective reality, and it weighs heavily not only on philosophical studies such as epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology, but also on life in general. This is the powerful question at the heart of James V. Shall’s “On Choosing Not to See,” a profound and expertly written article that carries a controversial declaration: modern society, often a constructed alternate to the truth of what is, is gripped by our power to choose “not to see.”
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By Wes Tirey · Thursday, August 16, 2012 Democratic theorists everywhere should be gushing—to some extent, at least—over the current Chick-fil-a controversy. While it is by no means an isolated instance of disagreement in the United States, it nonetheless displays in a public fashion the dissensus that is so central to the concept of democracy itself.
Democracy is inherently dialectical. That is, it is borne out of a tension that endeavors toward particular ends, such as liberty, equality, and autonomy. As its own kind of regime or regimes, the people (demos) of a democracy are to wield the power (kratos) that ultimately defines and renews the institutions they live under and the laws to which they are subject. This of course requires the organization of regimes within the public sphere to display their dissent or disagreement openly and freely.
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