By Telos Press · Monday, September 20, 2010 Please note: the deadline for proposals has been extended to October 1, 2010.
Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception:
Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics
January 15-16, 2011
New York City
 Whether they allow the circulation of ambassadors or of capital, exchange networks provide the basis for global cross-cultural relationships. Though liberal democratic governments pride themselves on the rationality of their procedures, diplomatic protocols and the give-and-take of parliamentary politics attest to complex customs that lie at the heart of such practices. Similarly, recent crises have demonstrated that international financial markets cannot be reduced to a numbers game, however complex, but function on the foundation of a network of promises whose dependability is a matter of habits. Focusing on the contemporary world, this conference will investigate the rituals and protocols that regulate political and economic relations in areas of stability and the underlying forces that come to the fore in periods of crisis. We encourage submissions of paper proposals from scholars in a variety of disciplines including critical theory, philosophy, literature, politics, theology, anthropology, political economy, and cultural studies.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 13, 2010  Enlightenment and modernity, the social formation with which it has been inextricably entwined, have had a complicated relationship with religion. Of course there have been important moments of genuine compatibility, when trust in reason converged with trust in God. A deist imagination animated the philosophers of the eighteenth century, including the leading figures of the American Revolution, who did not shy away from declaring that our inalienable rights derived from a Creator who had endowed us with them. The revolutionary act displaced the divine right of kings with the divine rights of all, and Thomas Jefferson could conclude that bold statement with “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” While such modern thinkers valued faith, we can easily identify faithful believers who were simultaneously at home in the tradition of reason: Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna, or more recently, Benedict XVI, consistently claiming that faith and reason belong together.
Continue reading →
By Jennifer Wang · Tuesday, September 7, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at Amos Morris-Reich’s “Simmel’s and Lacan’s Ethics of the Exception,” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
 In “Simmel’s and Lacan’s Ethics of the Exception,” Amos Morris-Reich examines in parallel the theoretical proximity of Simmel and Lacan’s post-Kantian ethics of the exception. Historically, the Kantian universal rule met its end at the outbreak of World War I, the horrors of which opened up space for theories on the exception to the rule that did not consider such a structure oxymoronic. The theories of both Lacan and Simmel address the monstrosity of the twentieth century, but are not exclusive to it. They are shown to formulate a structure of rule and exception that takes for inputs life, death, and money. To the question posed by medieval robbers (“your life or your money?”), life is unanimously chosen but what’s of interest is the contradictory ethics grounding each decision.
Continue reading →
By Adrian Pabst · Tuesday, August 17, 2010 The ongoing debate about budget deficits, public debt, and the case for or against austerity reflects old ideological disagreements that ignore the new realities of late-modern capitalism. Both left and right rehash virtually the same arguments since Reagan and Thatcher, but lack the imagination for genuinely fresh ideas and transformative policies.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Tuesday, August 10, 2010 Though his defense of National Socialism has earned him the reputation of being an ideologue, the most striking aspect of Carl Schmitt’s political career is the changeable nature of his political loyalties, in which he defended both Roman Catholicism and then the Weimar Republic before he came to ally himself with the Nazis. If a certain amount of opportunism may have also played a part in his decision-making, his promiscuity also testifies to a basic agnosticism in his political beliefs that is grounded in his theoretical approach to the notion of culture. Because this approach begins with a Nietzschean delegitimation of value systems with a universal and preordained claim to truth, Schmitt’s thinking develops as an attempt to understand politics in a multicultural world. His theories of decisionism and representation presume a world in which diverse value systems compete in order to establish the metaphysical foundations for order in a given time and place.
Continue reading →
By Danilo Breschi · Thursday, July 29, 2010 From the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, Italian Communism—represented by the biggest Communist political party in the West—lost its propulsive force. The myth of “revolution” expired; the crucial social and economic role of the industrial working class disappeared; the capitalistic system consolidated itself as a mass consumerist society. In addition, there were important sociological changes in the leadership of the Italian Communist Party. First, we must specify who the Italian Communist militants were at the beginning, especially in the immediate years after World War II and in the first twenty years of the Republican period (1945-1965). During these years the Communist Party presented itself as an organization with a clearly defined identity and sense of purpose toward both outsiders and its own militants: the militant’s everyday life was dominated by the so-called “Stalinist metaphor” (“metafora staliniana,” a term coined by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Carlo Marino). What does that mean? To Communists, words such as “Stalin” and “USSR” signified an “ideal of absolute happiness, synthesis of moral standards and welfare, in opposition to the disturbing and corrupting promises of the American capitalism.”
Continue reading →
|
|
