By Ñacha E. Chiundiza · Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass. —Immanuel Kant
As an act of reflexive thought, the question “What is Enlightenment?” may be its very own enlightenment. Foucault’s reiteration of Kant’s question revolves around this issue of reflexivity. Putting aside the Enlightenment’s audacious projections of the future of humankind, Foucault zeroed in on what he deemed the emblematic disposition of the modern: self-critique. In its microcosmic tenor, the question zeroes in on the problematique of the relation of the self to the self, and of the self to the other. In a Kierkegaardian sense, it proposes an ironic relationship both to one’s self and to one’s other. Sapere Audere is envisioned as a bi-directional activity.
Strangely enough, as interrelated as Zimbabwean post-colonial discourse has been to western thought categories, it is rare to find a serious consideration of the problematic of self-constitution and freedom, especially regarding the emancipatory goals of the Liberation Era.
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By Elke Van der Steen · Monday, June 23, 2008 In its most recent issue, British political journal Democratiya features both Telos editor Russell Berman and Telos Press author of the award-winning Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism , Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11, Matthias Küntzel.
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By Adrian Pabst · Saturday, June 21, 2008 After Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Reform Treaty in last week’s referendum, the European Union is in uncharted waters and needs a complete rethink. But the early signs are that Brussels and the national capitals have not grasped the true nature of this latest crisis. Paradoxically, the No vote in Ireland is pro-European. Like the Dutch and the French in 2005 (when both rebuffed the Constitutional Treaty), the Irish support a wider political project—they just want a Union different from the one currently on offer.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Sunday, June 15, 2008 Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred, received an invitation to write on Germany and Iran for Neues Deutschland : the former “Pravda” of Communist East Germany, it is now a daily, close to the “Linkspartei,” the Party of the Left, itself undergoing various organizational restructurings. It is the home of various “post-communist” currents. It is represented in the Bundestag and several state legislatures; it also exercises some influence on discussions within the much larger Social Democratic Party. Within the Left, the evaluations of Iran—as reactionary or an “anti-imperialist” ally—and of Israel are both hotly contested.
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By Nellie Bowles · Friday, June 13, 2008 [Vincent Lloyd’s essay on Gillian Rose, available here, has just appeared in Telos 143. Nellie Bowles, a Telos intern, asks him some questions.]
In your essay, “On Gillian Rose and Love,” you read Gillian Rose’s often autobiographical Love’s Work. Rose has been, in many ways, breezed over by modern academia. Why do you think this is?
Firstly, Rose’s work is difficult. It’s hard to read. She engages with complex writers, ranging from Bergson to Strauss to Lacan to Buber. Discerning how she positions herself in relation to those she critically engages with takes effort. And her prose is often painfully dense (a style perhaps inflected by her early work on Adorno). . . .
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By David Pan · Thursday, June 12, 2008 Though it is still premature to speak of a victory in Iraq, there seems to be no question that the tide of the war has turned against al-Qaeda and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militias and toward the Iraqi government. As Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan remark, “where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.” This turn of events in the last 18 months, and particularly since March, confirms the wisdom of the U.S. military’s turn to a classic counterinsurgency approach to the war, involving a focus on protecting the civilian population and building close relationships with local groups. Their ability to effect this turnaround so quickly is a tribute to their flexibility and resourcefulness in shifting their basic stance. But it is also an indication about some of the ideological realities in Iraq.
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