By Nicole Burgoyne · Tuesday, October 6, 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 Jonathan Leo’s “The Chemical Theory of Mental Illness,” from Telos 122 (Winter 2002).
 Even the first-time reader of Freud recognizes some outdated theory, in part because he or she has already heard Freudian psychology made fun of as part of the pop culture understanding of psychotherapy. But has Freud’s legacy—talk therapy—become obsolete in education as well as in practice? In his 2002 article “The Chemical Theory of Mental Illness,” Jonathan Leo reviews two books that analyze a still dominant trend toward biological psychiatry in modern day academia and the general public. Leo takes a closer look at the idea that mental illnesses are just like other diseases, chemical imbalances that should be rectified by introducing ameliorating substances.
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By Timothy W. Luke · Thursday, October 1, 2009 Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Hamlet or Hebuca: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play by Carl Schmitt, available for the first time in English translation.
Though Carl Schmitt is best known for his legal and political theory, his 1956 Hamlet or Hecuba provides an innovative and insightful analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedy in terms of the historical situation of its creation. Arguing that the construction of the figure of Hamlet was shaped by the politics of James I succession to the throne, Schmitt uses this interpretation to develop a theory of myth and politics that serves as a cultural foundation for his concept of political representation. More than literary criticism or historical analysis, Schmitt’s book lays out a comprehensive theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that responds to alternative ideas laid out by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Jennifer R. Rust’s and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s introduction places Schmitt’s work in the context of contemporary Renaissance studies, and David Pan’s afterword analyzes the links to Schmitt’s political theory. Presented in its entirety in an authorized translation, Hamlet or Hecuba is essential reading for scholars of Shakespeare and of Schmitt alike.
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By Marcus Michelsen · Tuesday, September 29, 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 Jean-Claude Paye’s “From the State of Emergency to the Permanent State of Exception,” from Telos 136 (Fall 2006).
 How long ago was 9/11? Is this really a new era? What does it look like? For many, for perhaps all of us, the terrorist attacks eight years ago came as a surprise and brought us to question our understanding of the world around us. Our answers have emerged in renewed and reinvigorated passions for social and international justice. Collectively, however, there is no one vision we can all subscribe to. Some blame the United States for the terrorist attacks; others call for the government to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. In the heat of the moment, emotions flare and opinions are erratic.
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By William Tullius · Monday, September 21, 2009 James V. Schall’s “Revelation and Political Philosophy: On Locating the Best City” appears in Telos 148. William Tullius follows up with some questions.
William Tullius: You wrote in your article that: “Political philosophy, at its best, is the discipline strategically located to reflect on how God, cosmos, man, and polity belong together.” Yet, fundamentally, political philosophy is “aware of its own inability to answer its own highest questions”; namely, in what does the “best city” consist. The answer to political philosophy is supplied by revelation, which answers that political philosophy is capable of recognizing as an intelligible gift. If, however, political philosophy is subject to this sort of limit from the start such that it is dependent for its own answers upon something higher, what do you see as the need for political philosophy in the first place and what does this imply for the relation between faith and reason?
James V. Schall: Political philosophy is not subject to any limits “from the start.” It arrives at its limits—my book is called precisely, At the Limits of Political Philosophy—by seeking itself to answer all its own questions. Philosophy must first be philosophy. We need political philosophy “in the first place” so that we know what it knows and, also, what it does not know but would like to know. Unless this reflection on what is known and what is not known by the discipline takes place in an inquiring mind, revelation has nothing to which to address itself. The great phrase fides quaerens intellectum means exactly that some intellect must be actively asking itself what it knows about political things. Thus, I would say that faith cannot be faith until reason becomes itself active reason knowing what it can know. Once this relationship is clarified or spelled out, we can wonder whether philosophy does not become more philosophy under this impetus.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, September 16, 2009 When asked whether the U.S. government considers Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the “legitimate president” of Iran, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs responded laconically that “he’s the elected leader,” according to an AP report of August 4. The phrasing—and the omission of any reference to the brutal suppression of Iranian protests—offers an insight into key political orientations of the current regime. What counts is the outcome, not the process; what matters are the ends, not the means; and what is of greatest importance is the state and its apparatus, not society and its complexities. No doubt, the Obama administration’s caution on this matter reflects its effort to emphasize diplomacy, as the opportunity for states to talk with states, and to back off from the democratization agenda of its predecessor. The way it has taken sides in Iran is, at least, consistent with its values. Diplomatic negotiations take place over the heads or behind the backs of society, which is why state departments and foreign ministries frequently find themselves at odds with the values of the polities they purport to represent.
This priority of state-to-state relations internationally corresponds domestically to the priority of the state over society. None of the expansion of policing powers of the previous era has been significantly retracted, while the management of the economy proceeds at a brisk pace, with the prospect of a biopolitical administration increasingly likely. Current events are breathing new life into Critical Theory’s nightmare of a “totally administered society.” Anxiety about the growth of the managerial state defined classical Critical Theory, and this was frequently enough one of the key issues that separated it from the orthodox left. For Telos, the political developments of the last third of the twentieth century seemed to indicate various rollbacks in the state apparatus and the potential emancipation of society. Has that historical episode come to an end?
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By Philip Crone · Tuesday, September 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, Philip Crone looks at Catherine Pickstock’s “Justice and Prudence: Principles of Order in the Platonic City,” from Telos 119 (Spring 2001), as well as a response to Pickstock’s article from Donald C. Hodges and Christopher A. Pynes.
 Recent discussions surrounding the death of Senator Ted Kennedy and talk about health care reform have reintroduced some of the most fundamental questions about justice and society into American political discourse. As ill-informed and histrionic as many of today’s arguments are, the matters being discussed are of great importance. And while at first it may not seem to have much relevance to the issues currently discussed, Plato’s Republic is in many ways the first comprehensive and influential work of Western political philosophy. The key questions of the Republic—the roles of social groups, the ideal qualifications for civic leaders, and the guiding principles for society—continue to have great contemporary relevance.
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