By Arthur C. T. Strum · Thursday, July 26, 2012 Arthur C. T. Strum’s “The Politics of ‘Theory’ in a Late Twentieth-Century University: A Memoir” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 In this essay, I explore my own experience as an undergraduate of two formations. One of these formations might be called “liberal pedagogy,” by which I mean something which its practitioners do not in the rule consciously profess, but which underlies their everyday practice, in and out of the classroom. The other formation is what denizens of the American university have for the past thirty years commonly called “theory,” whose adherents tended to define themselves against what they saw and see as the self-deceptions of liberal thought. I contend, against both the “theorists” and the university’s liberal defenders, that liberal pedagogy is in fact deeply political—far more profound, politically, than most “theory,” which tends not to get very far beyond what it thinks it contests: the structuring prejudices of present-day civil society. But I also try to show that the inclination towards “theory” has its own political profundity—whose ultimate implications, however, are ambiguous.
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By Katharina Gerstenberger · Monday, July 23, 2012 Katharina Gerstenberger’s “The Public Intellectual as Survivor: The Cases of Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 The article contrasts recent works by the Austrian writers Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla, both of whom have made names for themselves as political and cultural commentators, about their respective experiences of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Titled Phi Phi Island (2007), Haslinger’s narrative is a personal yet highly self-reflective account of his survival. His overarching concern is the coincidence of survival and the challenge this poses to his self-identity as an engaged author who believes his work to be politically meaningful. Röggla, whose life, unlike Haslinger’s, was not in immediate danger, chronicles the unfolding public response to the attacks through comments she collected from a variety of interlocutors in New York City as well as from television. The division between the public and the private, which for Haslinger remains central, becomes obsolete in Röggla’s really ground zero (2001). Her expressed inability to transform her experience into a coherent narrative is symptomatic of her fragmented text. In the end, both authors must acknowledge that surviving a catastrophe is an assault on private as well as public subject positions, forcing them to rethink from where and how cultural critique can be launched.
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By Sean Franzel · Thursday, July 19, 2012 Sean Franzel’s “Toward an Anti-Monumental Literary-Critical Style: Notes on Benjamin and Jean Paul” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay— modest notes rather than a systematic exploration of the problem of critical style— examines certain striking similarities between the critical vocabularies of Jean Paul and Walter Benjamin. In rejecting heroic conceptions of individual authorship, both writers treat the personal lives of literary figures as phenomena of larger significance, and both seek to undermine metaphors of monumentality. Through readings of Jean Paul’s 1804 Vorschule der Ästhetik (School of Aesthetics) and Benjamin’s pseudonymously published 1936 anthology Deutsche Menschen (German Men and Women), this essay argues that both writers remind us of the decidedly human sides of literary and critical life: of the weaknesses and limitations of this life, that is to say, as well as its potential for ethical direction.
By Frederick H. Pitts · Tuesday, July 17, 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, Frederick H. Pitts looks at Herbert Marcuse’s “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics” from Telos 16 (Summer 1973).
 In his 1933 essay “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Marcuse’s thesis is that the conception of labor as economic activity gives a one-sided picture of human praxis. According to Marcuse, such a conceptualization overlooks the way in which labor is an eternal condition of human existence geared toward self-creation and becoming. Marcuse’s elucidation of these issues invites contention. As Douglas Kellner asserts in his introduction to the essay, the two principal problems with Marcuse’s position pertain to the way in which labor is, on the one hand, presented as an entirely trans- or a-historical phenomenon, capable only of being “liberated” rather than offering the possibility of being “liberated from,” and, on the other, associated with an absolutized self through the process of labor-as-becoming, holding subjectivity to be forged consciously rather than foisted upon oneself from outside (Kellner, 3–6). To these I would add a related third, which is that an economic perspective such as that challenged by Marcuse is necessary to rectify the first and second stumbling blocks. In spite of this, as we shall see, Marcuse’s theorization of the philosophical and economic conceptualization of labor might provide useful insights for a rethink of productive activity in the context of contemporary capitalism.
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By Frederick Wertz · Monday, July 16, 2012 While supporters of the Affordable Care Act are celebrating the late-June decision upholding the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the biggest victory in the decision was for supporters of states’ rights. The sole provision struck down by the Court, Medicaid expansion, marked the first time the Supreme Court halted federal legislation based on the coercion theory. It may be that this somewhat overlooked aspect of the decision will have the greatest impact in future American politics. Coercion theory argues that the federal government can overstep its power by threatening to withhold federal funding if states do not bend to Congress’ will. Since the argument was first used in the 1936, the Court has been largely unwilling to even hear cases citing it as a main argument, and when it has, it has refused to validate the argument. The history of cases argued that cite such alleged coercion sheds much light on this recent decision. By looking closely at the coercion theory, one can see the enormous impact this recently validated argument will have in creating a new, 21st-century federalism.
In 1936, the validity of a tax imposed by the Social Security Act on employers was determined by the Supreme Court. In the case of Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, an Alabama corporation claimed the federal government had levied a tax on employers with the sole
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By Jeffrey S. Librett · Monday, July 16, 2012 Jeffrey S. Librett’s “Historicist Orientalism as a Public Absolute: on Herder’s Typo-teleology” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
After the Enlightenment attempted to replace the revealed public absolute with a self-grounding universal rationality, an attempt the Counterenlightenment charged with arbitrariness, the historicist discourse tried to establish the narrative of the origin and development of culture as a public, objective absolute that escapes this critique. In this narrative, the Orient functioned as a fetish of origin subserving the disavowal of the lack of grounding that the Enlightenment had introduced. In historicist Orientalism, the Occident appropriated this alien origin by applying the logic of medieval typology—hitherto the principal model for the supersession of Judaism by Christianity—to the Oriental-Occidental relation in general. Historicist Orientalism constituted a typological teleology to assert the supersession of East by West as a quasi-secularized, objective, public absolute. In the anxiety-inducing metaphysical void of modernity, the story of culture provided an “orientation” that revelation failed to deliver. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784-91) was one of the most important inaugural instances of this historicist Orientalism in the German tradition. The essay retraces the outlines of the problematic logic through which Herder recounted the passage from the origins of culture in Asia to their Western appropriation. Situating the Jews as the realization of the Oriental prefiguration, Herder’s discourse provides an exemplary version of the passage from the Judaeo-Christian application of typology to its Orientalist generalization and secularization.
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