By David Pan · Tuesday, February 21, 2012 This paper was presented at the 2012 Telos Conference, “Space: Virtuality, Territoriality, Relationality,” held on January 14–15, in New York City.
 While the current financial crisis in Europe will certainly be a turning point in the development of the European Union, this is not primarily because of the economic consequences of saving or losing the euro. These monetary and fiscal events will almost certainly be overshadowed by the political implications. For the vision of a unified Europe does not just concern economics or regional politics but is built upon larger cosmopolitan hopes that go back at least to Immanuel Kant’s imagination of perpetual peace. As Ulrich Beck argues, for instance, a cosmopolitan vision is being realized today, not so much through ideology but through global economic integration and the consequent decline of regional and national allegiances in favor of transnational identities that have made older political conflicts obsolete.[1] Built upon this vision, the continuing expansion of the European Union promises to gradually widen a zone of free trade and movement that would eventually also clear a space of political freedom characterized by the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. Theoretically, this space of peace and freedom could expand to encompass all of Eurasia and then turn the entire world into a fulfillment of Kant’s original dream.
Continue reading →
By Zoltán Balázs · Tuesday, February 14, 2012 This paper was presented at the 2012 Telos Conference, “Space: Virtuality, Territoriality, Relationality,” held on January 14–15, in New York City.
I shall argue for a distinction made between two concepts of centrality. Both are rather metaphorical but whereas the first is best captured by a concrete symbol, the heart, the second is more abstract and geometrical, to be captured as the “line between.”
I further try to show how they may be interpreted as representations of two strands in the political or, more generally, in the collective thinking of the Western tradition. By referring to collective thinking, I wish to broaden the usually highly abstract perspective of academic political philosophy. For such thinking is scarcely done in scientific terms and concepts but more often in metaphors, images, symbols. Thomas Hobbes was very much aware that the concept of the sovereign needs a powerful image to understand, and he instructed Abraham Bosse how to design it. The resulting title page of the book, with Leviathan, the mortal god, is perhaps a better argument than half a dozen pages from the same book. In times of prevalent illiteracy, images, pictures, statues, coats of arms, costumes, and dynamic images like processions and marches have been an even more important source of inspiration and explanation in collective thinking.
Continue reading →
By Juan Carlos Donado · Monday, February 13, 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 Alberto Buela’s “The Katechon and the Future of Latin America,” from Telos 126 (Winter 2003).
 A recent Colombian periodical announced the news: by the end of 2011, the country’s capital, Bogotá, reported an unemployment rate, at least by official accounts, 0.3% lower than that of the United States. The headlines, mediatic as they may intend, aim at fixing in print the dynamics of a continental reality: while European and American economies struggle with unprecedented crises, at least eight Latin American economies closed the year, according to the Centre for Latin American Studies (CESLA), with above average growth.
Continue reading →
By Emily Zakin · Friday, February 10, 2012 Emily Zakin’s “The Image of the People: Freud and Schmitt’s Political Anti-Progressivism” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 The origin stories of Schmitt and Freud characterize “the people” as emerging and transmitted through processes of identification and embodied in an image. In both their views, the constitution of a body politic requires, logically and psychologically, a protective boundary that delimits inside and outside and a representation (however mythic or phantasmatic) of authority as the basis for preserving imaginary forms of identification and attachment that anchor bonds of association and provide the requisite boundaries for the unities of ego and nation to form. In this essay I develop the idea that the intensity of association that generates a people is not a metaphysical substance but a metaphysical image. I make use of the Freudian idea of a protective shield that enables an organism to withstand vulnerability and counter excitation with representation, in order to demonstrate that any image of the people is captive to tribal forms of affectivity. I conclude by discussing the danger of replacing the image of the people with the image of universal humanity, an appeal that Schmitt claims can only end in the transformation of cosmopolitanism into the terrifying violence of cosmopartisanship.
Continue reading →
By Katherine McGinity · Thursday, February 9, 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, Katherine McGinity looks at Michael Mack’s “Richard Wagner and the Trajectory of Transcendental Philosophy,” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
 Michael Mack’s “Richard Wagner and the Trajectory of Transcendental Philosophy” explores the differing brands of anti-Semitism in Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer, and explains how their scrutiny of Jews as a hindrance to society was radicalized by Richard Wagner. Mack details how each philosopher’s particular form of anti-Semitism fed into Wagner’s social-political writings as well as his “total works of art.” By investigating the concepts put forth by Wagner’s philosophical predecessors, one can more fully understand how a radicalized version of Kantian moral philosophy infiltrated German national culture through the composer’s art. Mack specifically addresses how these ideas manifested in Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Continue reading →
By Marcia Pally · Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Marcia Pally’s “Non-Market Motives at Work in the Market: ‘New Evangelicals’ in Civil Society in the United States and Overseas” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, a reassessment of our global market system seems to be afoot: if neoliberalism (too much market) yields the Great Recession, if socialist planned markets (not enough market) produce the failed economies of the former Soviet bloc, and if social-market combinations (too much market centralization) progress toward the high-cost and slow growth of Western Europe, what are better options? This essay describes the economic justice efforts of “new evangelicals,” those who have left the right for an anti-consumerist, anti-militarist focus on economic justice, environmental protection, immigration reform, and racial/religious reconciliation. It reviews the history of U.S. evangelicalism, describes the current shift away from the religious right, and details “new evangelical” common-good capitalism, where the benefits of capitalist markets are preserved yet embedded in—and constrained by—common-good values. This is not alms-giving but the restructuring of opportunity for those whom the market has failed—not an undoing of market relations but a radical change of relations within the market. The undergirding religious doctrines and case studies, both domestic and overseas, are described. Against the view that linking markets to common-good principles is romantic or useless, “new evangelicals” are already on the ground, doing just this sort of linking.
Continue reading →
|
|
