By Kevin S. Amidon · Friday, March 11, 2011 This paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
 Slavoj Žižek poses more than a few heavy-gauge questions in his In Defense of Lost Causes. Foremost among them, at the beginning of chapter nine: “The only true question today is: do we endorse this ‘naturalization’ of capitalism, or does contemporary global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its infinite reproduction?” (421). This vast question—as well as its possible answers—develops in many ways out of the discussion in the previous chapter of the book, in which Žižek approaches Alain Badiou’s concepts of subtraction and the Event with his usual copious verve, as well as with substantial concern that Badiou’s “subtraction” means that one might have the capacity to stand “outside” the “state form,” but only in a way that is “not destructive of the state form” (402). Žižek thus concludes that Badiou has
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By Adrian Pabst · Wednesday, March 9, 2011 This paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
For Max Weber, the spirit of capitalism is best understood in terms of Calvinist divine predestination. But by focusing on the Protestant work ethic, Weber’s thesis about the origins of modern capitalism is at once too broad and too narrow. Too narrow because he neglects the counter-Reformation Baroque scholasticism of influential Catholic theologians like Francisco Suárez that sunders “pure nature” from the supernatural and thus divorces man’s natural end from his supernatural finality. As a result, human activity in the economy is separated from divine deification and the market is seen as increasingly autonomous. In short, human contract is severed from divine gift.
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By David Pan · Monday, March 7, 2011 This paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
When we consider the metaphysical foundations of our world, we must make a basic choice between a universal conception of metaphysics and a relativist one. This choice commits us to either of two possibilities for world order. With a universalist conception, world order will evolve through a gradual establishment of one universal metaphysical structure that will establish its universality everywhere. With the relativist conception, world order can only consist of a set of agreements and rituals that can be established between a number of separate spaces, each of which is organized according to its own metaphysical structure. The choice for one or the other of these perspectives is consequently a fundamental one that will have far-reaching consequences for our conception of politics in a global context.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, March 4, 2011 This post originally appeared at The Brahmsky Report.
The Gaza flotilla incident of 31 May 2010 cost the lives of nine Turkish men and left another flotillan grievously wounded in the head. Several Israeli soldiers were seriously injured as well, in an operation launched by Israel’s IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) to halt the advance of a small fleet of ships toward Gaza. Afterward, relations between Turkey and Israel—longtime allies in a tough neighborhood—were seen to have reached their nadir as a result, when the Prime Minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, denounced Israel’s actions. In the still turbulent wake of this notorious incident, TBR met recently in Istanbul with Huseyin Oruc, President of the Board of Directors of IHH (Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), one of the main organizers of the international sea-borne mission to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and filed this report.
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By James Noyes · Wednesday, March 2, 2011 Today marks the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. What does this anniversary tell us about attacks on images in the post-Bamiyan world, and the relationship of these attacks to both religious and political conflict? In this brief piece, I will attempt to put the relationship into context, comparing events ten years ago in Bamiyan to other subsequent acts of Islamist image-breaking, and will ask whether such acts can be categorized as a singular type of contemporary iconoclasm, interpretable through the often-used label of “Wahhabism.”
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, February 25, 2011 In her 1963 book, On Revolution, Hannah Arendt wrote poignantly of the “revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure.” What was this trove of priceless gems and relics, with a noble pedigree few are aware of and without a name? Why was it lost? And what’s this got to do with the events of January-February 2011 in Egypt?
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