By Zvi Tauber · Thursday, April 19, 2012 Zvi Tauber’s “Herbert Marcuse on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: His Conversation with Moshe Dayan” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version of the article as well as the protocol of the conversation between Marcuse and Dayan at the TELOS Online website. You can also purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 Herbert Marcuse visited Israel in late December 1971. Recently I found in The Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives (IDFA) an unpublished document concerning his visit to Israel: the protocol of his meeting (December 29, 1971) with Moshe Dayan, the then Israel’s Defense Minister and the topmost Israeli politician at the time. The document was unknown to researchers of Marcuse’s writings and political activity till now, as if the content of the meeting were defined a confidential material. In my short commentary article, I seek to understand why this meeting was never publicized by Dayan or Marcuse. I also reconstruct Dayan’s and Marcuse’s ideas and statements, that came up in their conversation, while comparing them to the well-known political views and positions of each of them. Lastly, I dedicate special discussion and analysis to three relevant themes that were mentioned in that meeting: (1) on possible negotiations between Israel and Egypt in the period between the Six Day War (June 1967) and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973); (2) on Dayan’s explicit admission, that the State of Israel was, in fact, established on Arab land, and on Marcuse’s supporting the idea of the Palestinian State, i.e., the solution of “two states for two peoples”; and (3) on historical prognoses of the politician and the philosopher—Marcuse’s fear of the outbreak of war between Egypt and Israel and his quasi-prediction of Sadat’s assassination.
Continue reading →
By Paul Fleming · Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Paul Fleming’s “On the Edge of Non-Contingency: Anecdotes and the Lifeworld” 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 examines Hans Blumenberg’s reorientation of metaphorology toward the lifeworld and the resulting expansion of his project into a “theory of nonconceptuality.” I argue for an intimate relation in Blumenberg between the lifeworld as a “universe of self-evidence” and the anecdote as a genre in which “no detail is capricious.” Blumenberg’s increasing interest in anecdotal narration and its explication is central to his reorientation of nonconceptuality, since both—the lifeworld and the anecdote—converge at the limit of contingent thought. Through a close reading of Blumenberg’s extensive engagement with the multifarious rewritings of the Thales-Thracian Maid anecdote throughout the history of philosophy, the essay hones in on the tension between non-contingency (lifeworld) and contingency (theory). In explicating the anecdote’s re-narrations, Blumenberg unfolds a dual tension: first, between the individual anecdote’s apparent non-contingent narrative economy and its radical variability over time so as to continually re-write and re-occupy the story of theory’s ‘beginning’; and, second, between thinking and non-thinking, since Blumenberg’s project of nonconceptuality inscribes an essential element of non-thinking within theory. This is the lifeworld for him, which cannot be thought away.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Monday, April 16, 2012 Time was when standard accounts of modernity and modernization involved the claim of pervasive secularization. Progress meant the disappearance of religion, clearing the way for the unchallenged reign of reason and science. Yet if anything has become clear in world politics in the past decade or two, it is the durability of religion and, especially, the mobilization of religion in political processes. At the same time, it has become apparent how complex and multiform the connection between religion and politics can become and how religion continues to pose new questions to the secularization thesis.
Continue reading →
By Steven Knepper · Friday, April 6, 2012 One basic account of modernity holds that we are leaving behind a rural past for an urban future. Some see in this account a story of decline. A golden age is passing. We are spiraling into a soulless, dystopian future full of alienation and excess. Others see in this same basic account a story of progress. We are leaving behind a backward age of rural idiocy for an enlightened age of increased choice and prosperity. Some see a simple narrative of decline, others a simple narrative of progress. Yet these pervasive narratives are flip sides of the same coin. They share the premise of a vanishing countryside.
Continue reading →
By Danilo Breschi · Wednesday, April 4, 2012 There seems to be a need for a book like this amid the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Pensare l’Italia (2011, Einaudi) is the title of a tightly organized and explosive dialogue between Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Aldo Schiavone, two conversationalists who relate to each other like night and day. At times their dialogue seems to be a conversation between the deaf or a juxtaposition of two monologues. Although they rarely agree, it may benefit the reader to have access to two books instead of one.
Continue reading →
By Tomash Dabrowski · Tuesday, April 3, 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, Tomash Dabrowski looks at Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Western Marxism,” from Telos 6 (Fall 1970).
 Prior to 1960, the work of György Lukács was largely unknown in France; Lukács’s work had only belatedly gained influence there with Lucien Goldmann’s translation of History and Class Consciousness almost forty years after its first publication, and five years after the 1955 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s study of his work in Les Aventures de la Dialectique. Merleau-Ponty had in a sense anticipated the French debates on Lukács’s otherwise eminent text, already having cited passages from History and Class Consciousness in 1946. “Western Marxism,” however, is a meditation on a Marxism far removed from the type that Merleau-Ponty was enthusiastic about almost ten years prior. Until 1950 his political commitments were supportive, albeit cautiously, toward the Soviet project; the present work is however concurrent with a disillusionment of institutionalized Marxism, a cynicism that had grown in Merleau-Ponty since the Korean War.
Continue reading →
|
|
