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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[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). . . . 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. The character of repression in Zimbabwe has already been widely discussed, including here, here, and here. The long postponement of the run-off election (the original version of which, by any reasonable estimation, Mugabe lost despite enormous efforts at manipulation) has been designed to allow for more meddling. How extensive must the repression become in order to guarantee security for the dictator? Infinite security may require unlimited repression. How much time, how much force does ZANU-PF need to thwart the popular will? Zvisinei C. Sandi is a writer from Zimbabwe, where she was active in the democratic movement. She is currently a Scholar Rescue Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. In an interview with Russell Berman, she addressed political violence and repression in Zimbabwe in the wake of the March 29 elections; the response of the South African political leadership to the Mugabe regime; the role of prominent public figures like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela; and the broader political relationship between Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially violence against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa. |
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With this issue, Telos marks forty years as an independent journal of critical thought. Founded amidst the events of 1968, Telos has remained true to its origins, maintaining a tradition of independent thinking, while also evolving through the change of four decades. What began as an effort to think philosophically about the political questions of the day continues with the same agenda: our reflections on various thinkers—to take examples from this issue: Alasdair MacIntyre, Walter Benjamin, Gillian Rose, or G. K. Chesterton—are not driven by antiquarianism or academic intellectual history. Rather, we have culled through philosophical traditions, modern and ancient, in order to address the changing character of society and the protean cultural expressions that have emerged from it. This constant redefinition of the critical project informs the teleology, a constant orientation toward the North Star of emancipation, as we navigate the shifting currents of circumstance. 
