By Timothy Stacey · Tuesday, January 12, 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 Luciano Pellicani’s article “Was Fascism Revolutionary?” from Telos 122 (Winter 2002).
 With wave after wave of Islamic extremist attacks across the globe in the last decade, two schools of thought have begun to emerge: the idealist and the realist. The idealist school says that Islam is dangerous; the realist school claims that economic deprivation is the chief cause of terrorism. Both schools are based on the presupposition that liberalism itself has nothing inherently provocative about it. Crucially, both sides ignore that liberalism can of itself be offensive—not because, as some media pundits suggest, its values are hard to swallow, but because it strictly has no values. There is something distinctly inhuman to this aspect of liberalism that is alienating to those that are new to the liberal rationale.
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By Timothy Stacey · Tuesday, January 5, 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 Philip Goodchild’s “Truth and Utopia,” from Telos 134 (Spring 2006).
 In the wake of the global economic meltdown, it is once again time to reassess the parameters of the free market. Politicians would have us believe that this reassessment can stand outside of ideology, offering us a clear choice at the ballot between the can-dos and the has-beens of fiscal responsibility. In his article “Truth and Utopia,” Philip Goodchild reveals how this attitude is philosophically misguided, using as it does contingencies of human error as scapegoats for deeper faults of the economy. For Goodchild these faults, alongside those of technology and science, reside in modern optimism, founded on the propositional model of truth, a model that presupposes the positivist Parmenidean maxim truth is true:
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By Alexander García Düttmann · Wednesday, December 30, 2009 “Even the loveliest dream,” Adorno notes in Minima Moralia, “bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.” It is as if, in the moment of waking, one were to experience the way in which the dream is “damaged,” indeed as if there were already something “damaged” in the dream itself. According to Adorno, the “description of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in Kafka’s Amerika” captures this experience most acutely.
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By Andrew Walker · Tuesday, December 22, 2009 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, Andrew Walker looks at Roger Foster’s ” Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique,” from Telos 120 (Summer 2001).
 It is often cited as the founding text of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition. Even Michel Foucault is said to have claimed that he could have saved himself a lot of time had he read Dialectic of Enlightenment years earlier. The book draws together threads from Weber, Freud, Lukács, and Marx in order to show the authors’ view of modernity as a world of restricted thought and suppressed alternatives. Rather than bringing forth a new age of human emancipation, the rise of Enlightenment reason has led to new forms of domination, it has become its opposite, it has reverted to myth. The book analyzes the all-pervasiveness of commoditizing social relations, the totalizing presence of cultural production, and the domination of the critical faculties of rational thought. Though its importance is widely recognized, Dialectic of Enlightenment has often been dismissed as being pessimistic to the point of anachronistic. It should continue to be read and re-read, however, as there is still a great deal of insight into the one-dimensionalism of dominant social thought within its pages.
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By Francisco Unger · Tuesday, December 15, 2009 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, Francisco Unger looks at Michael Marder’s article “Carl Schmitt’s ‘Cosmopolitan Restaurant’: Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum,” from Telos 142 (Spring 2008).
 Michael Marder’s essay on Carl Schmitt’s concept of complexio oppositorum, a term elaborated in Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), takes up this “complex of opposites” as a framework for understanding culture. Marder makes the provocative argument that what is normally a decorative centerpiece in the mantle of depoliticized liberalism, “multiculturalism,” can be rescued on Schmittian grounds in order to militate against the somnolence of its former master. When it is understood as the recognition of a charged plurality, or a complex of opposite cultures, multiculturalism satisfies the need for a living politics. Cultures are not paying mere lip service to a common framework of socially entrenched goals, or to the proselytizers of universalism by day (political players by night), but now cultures are seen as vehicles for a people’s political particularity. For Marder, novels, films, languages, manners, etc., can become political weapons by which a disempowered group shatters the fiction of an all-inclusive consensus, and intrudes on the atmosphere of sterility that often accompanies liberalism’s claim to “universality.”
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Since its beginnings in 1968, Telos has repeatedly turned to the work of Theodor Adorno, asking how his version of Critical Theory could cross the Atlantic and make sense in the United States. The extraordinary attention paid since to Adorno’s American experience, like that of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, derives in part from a constant fascination with the spectacle of the critical European intellectual’s encounter with the antithetical culture of a resistant America. In this classic meeting of Old World and New, misunderstandings abound. Americans regard the European intellectual as biased and arrogant, spinning grotesque caricatures of America from imagination. The European intellectual, in turn, theoretically inclined, immersed in high culture, and skeptical of American empiricism, generalizes from a narrow, unrepresentative slice of American culture.
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