By Hannes Stein · Monday, October 8, 2007 [This review of the German edition of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great appeared in Die Welt. Translated by Russell Berman.]
There is always something edifying about attending an execution, especially if it’s not a human but an idea that is being dispatched from life to death. In God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens—for weeks on the bestseller list in the US and the UK—religion is devastated. One has to give it to Hitchens who, as executioner, does a thorough job. First he slips the noose of natural-scientific reason around the neck of piety. Then he lets it quarter itself on its own contradictions, before boiling the pieces in the oil of his righteous anger. Finally he shoots it through with the bullets of logic and, just in case, he lets the guillotine of irony fly down on its neck. Do recall that this is not about religious fundamentalism or fanaticism but rather religion as such. All, truly all, are meant and are buried alive: Catholics, Protestants, Muslims—whether Shiite or Sunni—Hindus, Buddhists, Osho-faithful and, last but not least, Jews as well, to whom Hitchens, with his Jewish mother, belongs at least in the sense of descent.
He is probably the smartest thinker of his generation of baby-boomers in the English-speaking world. He grew up in England, but left early for America where he has enjoyed a brilliant career as a journalist. For many years a Trotskyist, he was a star of the radical Left, fighting against Evil in the incarnations of Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, until September 11, 2001, when he was forced to recognize that “forces of reaction” had attacked the US. Suddenly he found himself close to George W. Bush, at least as far as the “War on Terror” went. His erstwhile comrades have never forgiven him this betrayal, but he doesn’t seem to care.
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Telos 140: Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics is available in our store.
 Literature has been a long-standing, if sometimes hidden, topic for Telos. While the journal has ostensibly focused on social and political theory, in various traditions and stretching from philosophy to culture, matters of literature have frequently percolated between the lines. This interlinear presence has certainly been the case for our engagements with those thinkers who made major contributions to literary and aesthetic theory, such as Adorno, as well as Baudrillard, Benjamin, Goldmann, Gramsci, and Lukács, but more broadly to the wide-ranging efforts to interpret and reinterpret works of the past: Telos has been about rereading, recovering, and reinterpreting parts of the intellectual legacy with reference to questions of current urgency. While the journal did succeed in keeping a healthy distance of common sense from the vanity fair of “literary theory” that gripped the universities during the 1980s and 1990s, our interest in mapping alternatives to the mentalities of bureaucracy—traditions, communities, the life-world, and religion—also indicated an underlying interest in literature, as well as in the arts in general. This testifies, of course, to the legacy of Critical Theory and the effort to correct the dominance of instrumental reason with an aesthetic dimension; but there is a much bigger picture, beyond the specific confines of Critical Theory per se, the pursuit of a richer life and a resistance to all the cultural and social forces that degrade human creativity and freedom, whether one attributes them to modernity or to conditions of longer duration. As a vehicle that can enhance imagination and expressivity, literature turns out to be indispensable.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, September 11, 2007 Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our collection: Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, by Matthias Küntzel.
This powerful and convincingly argued work traces the impact of European fascism and Nazism on Arab and Islamic activists. As Küntzel investigates the shift of global antisemitism from Nazi Germany to parts of the Arab world during and after World War II, he masterfully illustrates that antisemitism is not merely a supplementary feature of modern jihadism, but lies instead at its ideological core.
This fascinating study lays bare the antecedents of the antisemitism that runs rampant in our world today. Jihad and Jew-Hatred breaks the silence around the central role of antisemitism in Islamist terrorism.
For anyone interested in exploring the mindset of hatred that led to the crimes in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001, this book is a must-read. For readers interested in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, this book is a challenge to think outside of a narrowly European context. For everyone, this book provides crucial insight into the roots of terror that continue to threaten all of us.
Telos Press Publishing is committed to stimulating political and scholarly debate—no matter how provocative or unorthodox. Küntzel’s work rises to the challenge.
Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 will be released on November 1, 2007. Click here to pre-order a copy, and we will ship it to you as soon as it becomes available.
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By J. Peter Pham · Friday, August 31, 2007 [This essay first appeared in National Interest Online on July 23, 2007. We republish it here because of its attention to the Telos Press Publishing edition of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.]
Last Tuesday, the Bush Administration released portions of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland. The first of the “key judgments” of the NIE comes as no surprise to anyone following current events:
We judge the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic groups and cells, especially al-Qa’ida, driven by their undiminished intent to attack the homeland and a continued effort by these terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities.
Although the document goes on to note that “al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities”, it also listed a series of other groups which are responsible for putting the United States “in a heightened threat environment”, including al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Lebanese Hizballah, the “growing number of radical, self-generating cells [among the Muslim population] in Western countries”, and “other, non-Muslim terrorist groups” and “single-issue” groups. Thus the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the sixteen intelligence community agencies who, sitting together as the National Intelligence Board (NIB), concluded:
We assess that globalization trends and recent technological advances will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack—all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader.
It is somewhat disconcerting—to say the least—that six years into America’s “Global War on Terror” these platitudes are passed off as an NIE, by definition the intelligence community’s “most authoritative written judgment on national security issues and designed to help U.S. civilian and military leaders develop policies to protect U.S. national security interests.” Thus it is somewhat fortuitous that, at virtually the same time the NIB was reviewing and approving the NIE, Telos Press released a new English translation of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. [1] Theory of the Partisan originated in two lectures which the German jurist and political philosopher delivered in Spain in 1962 as his better known The Concept of the Political was being brought back into print. In fact, in the subsequent foreword to the 1963 German edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt acknowledged the lacuna in the work pointed out to him by a number of scholars, including the French sociologist and political philosopher Julien Freund and the American political scientist George Schwab: his failure to separate and distinguish three types of enmity—conventional, real and absolute—which correspond to the three political actors (state, traditional partisan and global revolutionary) on the modern world stage. Theory of the Partisan fills that gap in the Schmittian corpus, but is eminently relevant today in evaluating the threats posed by various “terrors.”
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By Jean-Claude Paye · Thursday, August 30, 2007 The Concept of Empire
The fundamental problem is to construct the concept of Empire as a specific form of State and to place it in relation to the concept of “imperialism” or the “monopoly” stage of capitalist society. Two possibilities present themselves: Either Empire corresponds to a new organization of the social relations of production that is qualitatively distinct; it is the State-form corresponding to a new “stage” of the development of capital. Or Empire corresponds to a particular period of the development of the imperialist stage, the result of the tendency exhibited by this structure, the organization of a super-imperialism.
With Negri, Empire corresponds to a new mode of the accumulation of capital based on “immaterial labor.” The approach is tainted by technicism, expressing the primacy of the productive forces over the social relations of production. It is all the more puzzling since he himself fully criticized this conception during the 1970s. Any research in this sense must study the labor process through the forms of the new relations of production and new property relations of labor power.
The second option, Empire as a specific period of the imperialist stage, is more complex. It is thus necessary to break up the imperialist stage into two distinct periods.
The first period is characterized by the mass presence of labor power in the social relations of production. This directly political existence requires a reorganization of the State to manage the balance of power. This is what the Bourdieu school has taken note of, in a purely formal manner, under the name of “social State.”
The second period corresponds to the ongoing deconstruction of this balance of power. One can distinguish two moments. The first, mainly economic, is the dismantling of the labor structure through relocations, by the capability of multinational capital to put labor powers of different values into competition. The second phase corresponds to the current state of affairs, to setting up the conditions necessary for overturning property relations on the basis of criminal law.
This whole process can be perceived and theorized as a permanent state of exception insofar as the virtual war against terrorism makes possible an ever more intense offensive against freedoms. However, the overturning is such that it leads to the establishment of a “new order,” of a psychotic political structure where the word of power is substituted for the facts themselves (the government thesis on the September 11 attacks is exemplary in this regard). It is a question of a legal order set up where the law is formed by the word of the executive power.
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By Jean-Claude Paye · Wednesday, August 29, 2007 François Debrix should be thanked for the scope and quality of his work. His stimulating reading of the theses supported in Global War on Liberty brings them into sharp relief and encourages a critical development of them and thus of those contained in his own reading.
Debrix asserts that the book does not contain the concept of the modern form of the State. I agree with this observation. Moreover, this was not the objective of Global War on Liberty. The study is situated on a prior level. It is, first of all, a phenomenology of the transformations of the political. It aims at bringing together what is generally apprehended separately, event by event and without any interconnection at the national and international levels. We live in a globalized world, a world-system, and yet observations on political reforms are fragmented. The primary object of the book is to collect the components of knowledge and bring out their coherence, the tendency that is implicit in them. Obviously, the search for and handling of data are based on a set of hypotheses that are constructed at the same time as the research is devised. However, the elaboration of this research is situated entirely at the level of the political. But we know that the political does not possess its essence in itself.
Carl Schmitt asserts the phenomenological character of his approach. That is not our point of view. Phenomenological study is only a moment of a broader approach. The political cannot be studied as a separate level, but in relation to what founds it: the organization of the social relations of production. One cannot conceptualize the form of the State in itself, separately from its substance and its content, that is, from the mode of production, the organization of property relations and the society. To establish the concept of the modern form of the State supposes that one is producing, in the same movement, the form and its content in their interrelations. [1]
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