By Nicole Burgoyne · Wednesday, December 9, 2009 Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play is now available in English translation from Telos Press. Nicole Burgoyne recently discussed some of the book’s central arguments with translator David Pan.
 Nicole Burgoyne: Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play represents a bit of a departure from Schmitt’s usual juristic theoretical work. At the beginning of the book he makes quite clear that he means to appeal to the literary lover of Shakespeare and to provide a new understanding of the text. How important was literature to Schmitt? Is literature simply another vehicle to explore Schmitt’s other key concepts, such as his definition of the sovereign, the exception, the friend/enemy dichotomy, etc.?
David Pan: Literature was important to Schmitt from very early in his career; one of his first publications was a book of literary criticism on the Expressionist poem Nordlicht, by Theodor Däubler. This interest was linked to his political theory to the extent that this theory began with the assumption that politics was based in theology. Though his Roman Catholicism and Political Form theorizes this link in terms of the Catholic Church, his nationalist attitudes brought his interest in theology back to an engagement with the kinds of literary texts, such as Hamlet for England, that make up a national culture.
Continue reading →
By Nicole Burgoyne · Tuesday, December 8, 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, Nicole Burgoyne looks at Donald W. Livingston’s “Lincoln Symbols,” a review of Barry Schwartz’s Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, from Telos 122 (Winter 2002).
 In his 2002 review of Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Donald W. Livingston praises author Barry Schwartz for grappling with the theory of commemorative national memory and images, but then proceeds to tear the substance of Schwartz’s argument to bloody bits. The issue of “truth” proves to be Livingston’s main point of contention in this article, which not only points out the discrepancies between Lincoln myth and reality, but poses a polemical alternative to the ideals that Lincoln is meant to represent.
Continue reading →
By Juan E. Corradi · Thursday, December 3, 2009 It was the dull abruptness of it all. I was walking along the shores of Newport Harbor, with friends, on a fine Thanksgiving afternoon, when the cell phone rang and we got the news from Maria Piccone. Then there was the immediate call to Rome, to the number under his very name. Elena Aga Rossi, in tears, told me it happened in the morning, while walking with a friend, a thrombosis hitting like a bolt from nowhere, and sending him to the big nowhere.
So little to say—and absolutely nothing to do.
Continue reading →
By Lev Marder · Tuesday, December 1, 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, Lev Marder looks at David M. Rasmussen’s “Preserving the Eidetic Moment: A Contribution of Phenomenology to Critical Theory,” from Telos 145 (Winter 2008).
 As with Paul Ricouer’s work, David M. Rasmussen’s article “Preserving the Eidetic Moment: A Contribution of Phenomenology to Critical Theory,” from Telos 145, can be praised for refusing to think of theory and praxis in oppositional terms and for preserving the eidetic moment. Relying on his vast experience with the living works he engages and with the theorists of the phenomenological/hermeneutical and critical theory traditions, Rasmussen’s essay exemplifies how theory blends into praxis and praxis into theory. Deliberately injecting subjectivity into an essay that most theorists would claim requires a “scientific” approach, he refuses to hide the subjectivity at the essence of all expression. Where was subjectivity lost in Western thought’s understanding of identity and why should it, why can it, be recovered?
Continue reading →
By Etel Sverdlov · Tuesday, November 24, 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, Etel Sverdlov looks at Elena Aga Rossi and Giovanni Orsina’s article “The United States According to the Italian Communist Press (1945–1953),” from Telos 127 (Spring 2004).
 I wonder at times whether the Internet provides people around the world with greater access to the “truth.” Possibly as a result of the widespread availability of almost any information, propaganda today must become more subtle and broad generalizations, or even bold lies, more covert. Such distortions—some deliberate, some unintentional—once permeated Italian communist publications. In their article “The United States According to the Italian Communist Press (1945–1953),” Elena Aga Rossi and Giovanni Orsina trace the rhetoric with which the Italian communists attacked the United States. What stands out most within their analysis is the striking similarity between the charges that the communists and capitalists hurled at each other.
Continue reading →
By Marcus Michelsen · Tuesday, November 17, 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, Marcus Michelsen looks at Todd Samuel Presner’s “Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death,” from Telos 135 (Summer 2006).
 We are all going to die. Of course, this is a platitude. Is death a social or a personal event? It is a strange point of intersection where an inexpressibly personal experience gives expression to meaning for the group. A meaning that is enjoyed or suffered by people who, in a very clear sense, are not taking part in the very event that serves as its point of origin. Whose event, then, is my death? This question becomes irrelevant in the face of mass death, because, here, my death ceases to be a singular event. It is buried in a crowd, innumerable through the multiplication of the killed—my life and my death are both stolen from me. How are we to think of this other kind of death?
Continue reading →
|
|
