By Helmut Müller-Sievers · Tuesday, May 1, 2012 Helmut Müller-Sievers’s “Kyklophorology: Hans Blumenberg and the Intellectual History of Technics” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 This essay seeks to identify the elements in Hans Blumenberg’s work that could constitute an “intellectual history of technics” (Geistesgeschichte der Technik). While examples of Blumenberg’s deep engagement with technological discovery and artifacts can be found throughout his oeuvre, his project of counterbalancing metaphorology, conceived as technological history of the intellect (Technikgeschichte des Geistes), never came to systematic fruition. Unlike theological and philosophical language, which confronts the “absolutism of reality” with a surplus of metaphors, technics, in Blumenberg’s estimation, has remained mute to the present day. The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) comes closest to identifying the “essence of technics” in the divergence between orbital motion of the planets and axial rotation of the earth. Axial rotation is unnatural, technical motion, as it requires for its induction the convergence of two oppositional forces on an extended body; only machines within a fixed frame are able to impart such forces. And yet the history of cosmology and technology consistently elides the difference between orbital motion and axial rotation—and thus parallels the elision of the difference between metaphors and concepts. Just as metaphorology seeks to write the history of this difference, kyklophorology seeks to open technical artifacts to historical and philosophical interpretation.
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By Sunil Kumar · Monday, April 30, 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, Sunil Kumar looks at Jean-François Lyotard’s “Adorno as the Devil,” from Telos 19 (Spring 1974).
Jean-François Lyotard, as the title of his essay “Adorno as the Devil” indicates, attempts to take Adorno and the “radical” Marxism of the Frankfurt School by the horns. The chosen apparatus for the purpose is his analysis of Thomas Mann’s last novel, Doctor Faustus, first published in 1947 as well as Adorno’s magnum opus, Aesthetic Theory:
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By Telos Press · Friday, April 27, 2012 Telos Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle, edited by Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic. Pre-order your copy in our store, and it will be shipped as soon as it is available.
 Are the things of this world given to thought? Are things really meant to be known, to be taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental constitution of the real—a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated recipient of the transcendental gift. Philosophy knows what things really are because things—all things—are given to philosophy to be known. Laruelle’s trenchant essays show how this presupposition controls even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these critiques persist in assuming that the disruptive other is in some way given to their own discourse—which shows itself thereby to be still philosophical. An effective critique of philosophy must be non-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of the One. From this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the question of another kind of thought—one that, instead of differentially relating to the world that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh, at One with what it can never know.
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By Brad Tabas · Thursday, April 26, 2012 Brad Tabas’s “Blumenberg, Politics, Anthropology” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article is one of the first attempts to take Hans Blumenberg seriously as a political thinker. Although he wrote on many subjects, Blumenberg directly addressed the theme of the political only rarely. I show, however, that when Blumenberg’s writings on philosophical anthropology are examined from from a political point of view, it becomes clear that one of their central concerns is responding to the politically disturbing implications of the anthropological theses of his conservative contemporaries, most notably Carl Schmitt and Arnold Gehlen. Unlike these thinkers, Blumenberg’s anthropology is essentially democratic and parliamentary, if it is also—quite paradoxically—a kind of anti-anthropology, a practice dedicated to the unending description of human beings.
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By Juan Carlos Donado · Wednesday, April 25, 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, Juan Carlos Donado looks at David Buxton’s “Rock Music, the Star-System and the Rise of Consumerism,” from Telos 57 (Fall 1983).
 From its origin to its social significance, almost everything about rock and roll music remains steeped in fierce debate. Exactly when and where was it born? Who, if in fact there is one only, is rock’s founding figure? What exactly did it and does “rock and roll” mean? Although all of them amount to approximations, certain answers have become commonplaces: it was born with bluesman Robert Johnson, with Chuck Berry, with Jerry Lee Lewis, with Elvis Presley, in the Mississippi Delta, in Memphis, and its sound was crafted by means of the technological breakthrough of the electric guitar. It signifies the rebelliousness of a generation, the nonconformity of the young, the break with the status quo. Yet rock and roll’s relationship with capitalism cannot be more complex.
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By Rüdiger Campe · Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Rüdiger Campe’s “Contingencies in Blumenberg and Luhmann” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
For both Hans Blumenberg and Niklas Luhmann, “contingency” is a key term in their respective philosophical endeavors. While their concepts differ significantly, they complement each other: Blumenberg’s “contingency” is onto-theological and refers to the Judeo-Christian God, the creator of the world. If God has created the world, he also could have created another world. Creation implies the contingency of the world’s beginning or constitution. Luhmann’s “contingency,” on the contrary, is procedural and pinpoints a feature in communication. According to Talcott Parsons, the selection in the action system of communication is not only dependent on the choices of the one partner in communication—Ego—but also on Ego’s assumptions about the selection of the other partner—Alter. Such contingency means dependence and—in Parsons’s famous theory further developed by Luhmann—double dependence. This essay argues that there is an important complementarity between cosmological contingency—the possibility of the world to be created this way or another—and procedural contingency—the mutual dependency of partners in interaction. Taken together, they allow a procedural understanding of origin or constitution. While the essay is mainly interested in structure, it is also suggested that contingency (in the double sense of Blumenberg and Luhmann) may be seen as essentially linked to the German situation after World War II.
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