By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 7, 2008 Thursday is book day at Telos. We use this time and space for posts about books, authors, and all sorts of writing, considered in light of the sorts of questions that are at home at Telos. As with all our blogs, you are invited to post a comment. If you have a book review that you’d like to post here, or some other comment on the worlds of writing, drop a line to us at telospress@aol.com.
On January 26, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, delivered an address in the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool on “Europe, Faith and Culture.” It delivers a diagnosis of contemporary European culture not far from that in Benedict XVI’s famous Regensburg lecture. In both, the disappearance of faith leads to a cultural decline. Williams posits a parallel between a post-Christian Europe marked both by a flat post-modernism and a primitivist reduction of Islam into fundamentalism—these are parallel reifications.
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By Jeffrey Herf · Monday, February 4, 2008 On November 16, 2007, Jeffrey Herf delivered this talk in Frankfurt as part of the public lecture series “Römerberggespräche.” He argues that the postwar German mandate to “come to terms with its past” and face the legacy of the Holocaust has renewed relevance today facing the antisemitism of radical Islam.
In a key passage he writes:
” . . . today’s radical Islamists have much in common with their fascist and Nazi predecessors. The ideological attack on liberal democracy and cultural modernity, on full equality for women, on the priority of the freedom of the individual in the face of the pressures of collectivism, the vision of a totalitarian society and especially and most of all the murderous hatred of the Jews, all of this returns now enveloped in a religious discourse. As their fascist and Nazi predecessors once did, now the radical Islamist propagate paranoid conspiracy theories combined with fanatical anti-Semitism and the radical anti-Americanism that is bound up with it. With these ideological foundations, the Islamists, just as the Nazis of the 1940s, have legitimated the murder of defenseless civilians.”
The full text is here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, January 31, 2008 Thursday is book day at Telos. We use this time and space for posts about books, authors, and all sorts of writing, considered in light of the sorts of questions that are at home at Telos. As with all our blogs, you are invited to post a comment. If you have a book review that you’d like to post here, or some other comment on the worlds of writing, drop a line to us at telospress@aol.com.
Daniel Fuchs, The Golden West: Hollywood Stories. Introduction by John Updike. Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow, 2005. Pp. xiv + 258. Daniel Fuchs, The Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, Low Company. Introduction by Jonathan Lethen. Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow, 2006. Pp. xiv + 927.
During the mid-1930s, Fuchs (born in 1909) published his three accounts of tenement life in New York; they hold a significant, if not prominent place in the literary history of the Jewish-American novel and have been republished periodically. In the late thirties, Fuchs moved to Hollywood, part of the literary migration into the film industry (he worked once briefly with William Faulkner). He would continue to write fiction, now with a California focus, thematically comparable to West’s Day of the Locust, although in a very different register. Some of this writing would appear in the New Yorker, and several of his stories (and a short novel) are collected in The Golden West, along with some memoir-like documents. In Hollywood, however, his attention had shifted primarily to writing screenplays. While each of these Black Sparrow volumes therefore represents a noteworthy contribution to the historical documentation of two venues of writing, taken together they raise important issues about the transformation of culture in the United States of the mid-twentieth century, the interplay of culture and commerce, and—a central question for Critical Theory—the constitution of the culture industry as well as its standing as a magnet for derisive critique.
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By Zoltán Balázs · Monday, January 28, 2008 One of the most idiosyncratic features of human communities is the way they think of time, even though there has been little reflection on that in political theory. To mention just one example that indicates how different the collective experience of time may be, I allude to the South American Aymara people, who associate the past with the spatial front, and the future with the spatial back. That is, past is ahead of us, and future is behind us. In this framework progress in time makes perhaps less sense, since the very concept of progress is, at its root, advance in space, and we can hardly move back to the past. (In science fiction, time travel to the past is a problem just because we presuppose that in the past we would be as free to act as we are in the present, and shall be in the future—that is, we take our present back with us to the past!)
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By Adrian Pabst · Saturday, January 12, 2008 Last Sunday Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, published a controversial article in The Sunday Telegraph, linking Muslim immigration and multiculturalism to the loss of the Christian culture that, in his words, “made Britain great.”
Unsurprisingly, the political and religious establishment reacted in entirely predictable ways. Politicians from both right and left condemned his remarks for being divisive and excessive. Religious figures, especially some representatives of the Muslim community, accused the Bishop of scaremongering in the face of Christianity’s decline in the UK. In either case, the implicit charge is that his analysis is one-sided and that it feeds the growing Islamophobia that apparently threatens the country’s unity and cohesion.
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By B. Venkat Mani · Sunday, December 30, 2007 State-sponsored suppression of political opposition is the first step for a polity’s regression to political tyranny. Use of terror and torture without recourse to trial is the second. Use of extremist forces to kill political opponents is the third and final step to assure the death of democracy. Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), the former prime minister of Pakistan, was well aware of all three steps when she boldly opposed General Parvez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and suspension of human rights and free speech in Pakistan on November 3, 2007. Ms. Bhutto’s political career was shaped by the struggle between populist and absolutist power, and informed by the moderate and extremist ideologies, that often threatened to obstruct democratic lifelines of Pakistan. These struggles were rehearsed within the family as they were performed on the public stage. Her father and political mentor was the former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), who was executed in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a political opponent. Her brother Murtaza opposed her allegedly ambitious “misrepresentation” of their father’s democratic political legacy; a family dispute that led to her brief political falling-out with her mother Nusret in the early 90s. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari—one of the main reasons for her last departure from Pakistan in 1999—faced many charges of corruption and political opposition on grounds of abuse of spousal power.
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