By Nicole Burgoyne · Monday, February 22, 2010 Shannon Mariotti’s article “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy” appears in Telos 149 (Winter 2009): Adorno and America. Nicole Burgoyne follows up with some questions.
 Nicole Burgoyne: One of your main concerns with psychoanalysis as it developed in America in the postwar era is that it accepted a commercialized and materialistic view of happiness as an ideal. One can see how this sort of obsession with living life to the fullest is at odds with Freud’s early work toward curing suffering individuals and his later theories on the repressive nature of society in general. Do you see this uniquely American form of psychoanalysis, which Adorno characterizes as the loss of the individual experience, as related to his critique of America’s culture industry? Why are these phenomena prominent in American culture as opposed to elsewhere?
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By Neil Turnbull · Wednesday, February 17, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Historians of the future will no doubt claim that the “neo-liberal era,” the era of neo-Smithean celebrations of “market naturalism,” was essentially the era of the “intellectual retreat of the political left.”[1] Although the story of this retreat is far too complex and contradictory to explore here, clearly one of the main reasons for the intellectual emaciation of “left politics” after the 1970s was the political right’s ideological appropriation of much of the left’s critical philosophical discourse. Perhaps most significant in this regard was the right’s re-articulation of Hegelian historico-political philosophical narratives into a version of nineteenth-century Whig progressivism; where the telos of western culture and society was conceived as nothing less than a new and final stage of capitalism founded on a triad of consumer culture, information technology, and finance. On the left, the loss of faith in orthodox Hegelian accounts of politics—and the loss of faith in orthodox Marxism is of course a case in point here—was to give rise to a new set of philosophical sensibilities, perhaps the most influential of which was the heterodox Hegelianism of so-called post-structuralist modes of social and cultural critique.
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By Philip Crone · Tuesday, February 16, 2010 Each Tuesday in 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, Philip Crone looks at Aryeh Botwinick’s “Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt,” from Telos 132 (Fall 2005).
 Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress on healthcare reform in some ways overshadowed the content of the speech itself. Had Wilson shouted out in another, non-American context, such as during the Prime Minister’s Question Time in the United Kingdom, he would have received little notice. But with an eye to the protocol and tradition surrounding presidential addresses to Congress in the United States, commentators from both the left and the right lambasted Wilson’s actions. Of course, Wilson was not without his supporters who seemed to have little concern for such protocols, or at least seemed to think that the gravity of the situation warranted violating the traditional standards. Still, Wilson’s yell stood in stark contrast to the lines offered at the end of Obama’s speech in which the President called for “[replacing] acrimony with civility.”
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By Juan E. Corradi · Friday, February 12, 2010 Not to be caught off guard, most serious journals keep obituaries of the notables that will sooner or later succumb to the passing of time. I have prepared the following for Telos, not only on a man but also on his country. I propose to launch it ahead of the events.
From Hope to Fear: The Dilemma of Radical Equality
Ten years after the triumph of the Chinese revolution, in the Americas the island of Cuba underwent an equivalent upheaval. The Cuban revolution provoked an extraordinary interest and enthusiasm at the time throughout the world. In the middle of the Cold War, Cuba acquired a geopolitical significance out of proportion to its size and economic weight—and almost provoked a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.
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By Jeremy Fernando · Wednesday, February 10, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
On the 20th of January, 2009, there was euphoria when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. Five days earlier, the Lunar New Year arrived, heralding in the Year of the Ox. Perhaps there is no guiding symbol more apt for the year than a castrated bull; a work-horse, domesticated, obedient, and non-independent. After all, in this current climate of an economy in disarray, this seems to be a prudent call—”herd together, buckle down, and move in the same direction.”
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By Timothy Stacey · Tuesday, February 9, 2010 Each Tuesday in 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, Timothy Stacey looks at Paul Gottfried’s “Enforcing ‘Human Rights’: Rejoinder to Rick Johnstone” and Alain de Benoist’s “What is Sovereignty?” both from Telos 116 (Summer 1999).
 As Tony Blair remains a prime candidate for the EU presidency, despite (or, knowing Blair, in spite of) the protestations of his former adversaries at home, it is high time to pose the question of sovereignty in relation to the central enforcement of human rights. And this for four reasons: first, as Prime Minister of Britain, Blair showed little or no respect for localism, preferring the efficiency of top-down reforms from education to policing. If he cared little for provincial politics as the nation’s leader, what is to say he will care for national politics as the continent’s leader? Second, and as a means to achieving this centrism, Blair flouted parliamentary constraints on his leadership. With the EU checks on central control as lackadaisical as they have proved to be in recent years, all it requires is a maverick like Blair to go trampling through the fine red tape that protects national sovereignty. Third, Blair is an unashamed Europhile, in the past proving quite happy to give up his own nation’s sovereignty in the name of EU global clout. Fourth and finally, Blair is the champion of liberal interventionism. Whatever the discrepancy between his excuse for invading Iraq and his reason for staying it through, it is no secret that heavier on Blair’s conscious is whether Iraq was a ripe case for liberal intervention—not whether he lied to the British people. Before Blair becomes a new-age Charlemagne, it is worth assessing the case of sovereignty with respect to human rights.
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