By Etel Sverdlov · Tuesday, February 2, 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, Etel Sverdlov looks at Rick Johnstone’s “Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue,” from Telos 115 (Spring 1999).
 Optimism can never be overrated. It is simply too easy, when examining the world with a keen eye, to become lost within daily strife. For this reason, I found Rick Johnstone’s article “Ethnic Purges and Neighborly Pacts: Reflections on a Swiss Statue” particularly refreshing. Within his text, he traces the development and achievements of Switzerland, emphasizing the modesty of their political ambitions as one of the causes for their success. What saturates the article, however, more than anything, is a committed positive outlook concerning the Swiss. Johnstone glories in their pacifism and applauds them for their tolerance. When analyzing national policy, most people judge countries by what they have accomplished; Johnstone, on the other hand, steps through the looking glass and rejoices in what the Swiss have not done. And what they have not done is a lot. He points out with satisfaction the lack of war monuments to the fallen of World War I in Swiss villages: they had no desire to die by machine-gun fire in the muddy trenches. He emphasizes their invisibility on the political scene: “People jest that no one knows who is the President of Switzerland. . . . If no one knows who the President of Switzerland is, that is because it does not matter, and if it does not matter, that is not because Switzerland is not a success, but because it is, and because its success comes not from above, but from below.” He praises the most useless weapon of war, the Swiss Army Knife—a symbol, with its miniature corkscrew and scissors, of self-reliance and autonomy.
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By Michael Marder · Monday, February 1, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Carl Schmitt has been often accused of uncritically utilizing metaphysical concepts, such as “the will,” in his political philosophy. In this talk, I will begin to reconstruct the onto-phenomenological foundations of the Schmittian conception of the political will, arguing that it is not a pre-fabricated or transcendental entity, but a historical instant of what Edmund Husserl called “constitutive subjectivity.” The argument entails two crucial theoretical steps. First, I will draw a parallel between Husserl’s account of the crisis of European sciences and Schmitt’s version of the crisis of the political. In each case, the crisis reveals multiple disconnects between the institutional, bureaucratized reality, on the one hand, and the suppressed lifeworld (political or otherwise) that underpins this reality, on the other. Second, I will explore the Schmittian analogue to the Husserlian subject who inhabits this lifeworld. I hope to demonstrate that, for Schmitt, the will is not a numinous, interiorized entity but power in its lived, historical actuality, in other words, political facticity. To reclaim the political lifeworld in 2010, then, we need to tease out the living political will buried beneath the institutionalized, bureaucratized edifice of contemporary politics.
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By Lev Marder · Tuesday, January 26, 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, Lev Marder looks at Russell Berman’s article “From Brecht to Schleiermacher: Religion and Critical Theory,” from Telos 115 (Spring 1999).
Enlightenment forced the individual to turn toward the light and become “enlightened.” Two centuries after this compelling, compulsive transformation began, where has education guided, or misguided, its followers? In Russell Berman’s article “From Brecht to Schleiermacher: Religion and Critical Theory,” a tortured figure emerges. When considering the chastised innocent victim in a discussion of religion, one is conditioned to think back to the inquisition by the Church, stoning under Islamic shariah law, etc. Yet can the discussion of religion be dismissed, condemned, outlawed, or silenced on the basis of the most egregious episodes? Is this figure suffering simply because of religion or, rather, because of a certain dogmatism that is in need of critical discussion? These are some of the questions Berman examines in his article.
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By Maurizio Meloni · Monday, January 25, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Scientific naturalism represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews, to follow here Jürgen Habermas’s diagnostic of our present.[1] In a broader intellectual landscape dominated by research programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and so on, contemporary naturalism symbolizes not only the philosophical framework of these leading intellectual enterprises, but more fundamentally a sort of zeitgeist for our epoch.
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By Adrian Pabst · Wednesday, January 20, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Over the past thirty years or so, globalization has supplanted the sovereign national state with the globalized “market-state.” In this complex and non-linear process, the sovereign national state, which provides public investment and universal welfare for the citizenry, has been superseded by the “market-state,” which instead maximizes client and consumer choice by opening up all levels of the economy to global finance and trade, as Philip Bobbitt has documented in his seminal book The Shield of Achilles.[1] Beyond Bobbitt, I have argued elsewhere that the “market-state” fuses centralized bureaucracy with the extension of market exchange to all areas of public policy and the private sphere. In consequence, the institutions of civil society and the practices of civic culture have been largely absorbed into the “market-state” and subordinated to the logic of formal contract and exchange value.[2]
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By Marcus Michelsen · Tuesday, January 19, 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, Marcus Michelsen looks at Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis’s article “Nietzsche on the Future of Education,” from Telos 111 (Spring 1998).
 If someone were to ask me the question “What is authoritative?” I might as well say, “I am. What I give my assent to has authority in my life.” Though true if one admits that for authority to manifest itself it must be recognized by someone, and for something to become authoritative in my life it requires just such a manifestation to me; still, this turns the question around. If I am pursued by the following question “How do I recognize what I should assent to?” the Enlightenment provides me with the answer: “Reason. Reason has authority in our lives. History itself testifies to the reason that formed it in the decisions of great men and in freedom, the spirit of the people. Moreover, to be enlightened means precisely to be in possession of reason.” There are, however, reasons to suppose that such an answer is suspicious, and that the Enlightenment, by glorifying itself, leads us astray. What if, in the belief that authority comes from reason, we have got it wrong?
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