By Saladdin Ahmed · Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Despite a decade of resistance since the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, another Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has yet to be born. In its way lie Sunni and Shia Islamist blocs, which have been remarkably successful in preventing entire societies from stepping forward. In countries where they have assumed state power, Islamist forces have been aggressive and totalitarian, while elsewhere they have hijacked popular liberal movements of regime change in recent years. Ultimately, if the anti-Islamist resistance does not soon bring down the main sponsors of the Sunni and Shia blocs—the Turkish and Iranian regimes, respectively—the coming era will be no less bloody than the period from 1919 to 1945.
In my view, the avalanche that will topple the regime in Iran is gaining speed, but as for the Sunni bloc, I am less optimistic. The Kurds are the last obstacle to Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman caliphate, and it seems they are being left to face their heroic yet tragic fate alone. If the Islamist momentum of militarization and mobilization is allowed to continue building, it will eventually shatter the prospects for international peace. Perhaps only then, looking back on these days, will liberal democracies recognize their own culpability for failing to support anti-Islamist struggles in the region.
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By Telos Press · Monday, December 9, 2019 New from Telos Press: Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, by Timothy W. Luke. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
 From the late 1970s, Timothy W. Luke has developed critical analyses of significant social, political, and cultural conflicts, with a particular focus on the entangled politics of culture, economy, and nature. Luke’s “ecocritiques,” many of which first appeared in the pages of Telos, advance a critical theory of the contemporary that takes aim at our ongoing ecological crisis, a period marked by rapid climate change, extensive biodiversity loss, and deep ecospheric damage. The essays collected here range across diverse topics, from the politics of the Anthropocene, Paolo Soleri’s urban design experiments, the Unabomber manifesto, the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental protections, and the informationalization of ecological change, to community agriculture projects, deep ecology, the symbolic politics of climate change treaties, Edward Abbey’s ecological writings, and the biopolitics of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment. Taken together, this collection documents crucial moments in Luke’s project of ecocritique as well as the commitment of Telos to environmental criticism, political theory, and policy analysis.
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By Maxwell Kennel · Friday, November 15, 2019 Maxwell Kennel’s “Periodization and Providence: Time and Eternity between Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Augustine’s Confessions” appears in Telos 188 (Fall 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 In order to address the politics of temporal regulation and periodization, while considering ways in which competing religious and secular narratives construct contemporary subjectivity, this article compares the quasi-autobiographical narratives of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Looking beneath the surface differences between these two works, this study draws out surprising affinities and continuities between Zarathustra and the Confessions and compares each work’s vision of time and eternity. By examining Zarathustra’s parable of the gate and its punctuating moment (Augenblick) alongside Augustine’s notion of the distentio animi in book 11 of the Confessions, this article questions competing Christian and anti-Christian narratives and their use of teleology and providence in the periodization of time, and concludes by contesting these narratives from the standpoint of postsecular critique.
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By Lillian Hingley · Thursday, September 19, 2019 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Shannon Mariotti’s “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009).
 In her article “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy,” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009), Shannon Mariotti claims that Adorno’s Minima Moralia ultimately rejects psychoanalysis for reinforcing the reification that it was supposed to resist. She argues that Adorno is particularly concerned with an American psychodynamic therapy that empties psychoanalysis of its European “pessimism” and that instead seeks “happiness” rather than a mere “cure.” While some points in Mariotti’s argument and a more critical psychoanalysis are not incompatible, her cautious application of Adorno’s critique of psychoanalysis to a contemporary context suggests that Minima Moralia might provide a useful framework for interpreting modern American pharmaceutical psychology. In turn, this brief analysis adds context to Mariotti’s grant of practical space to mental illness in therapy rather than seeing it as something to be merely glossed over. Indeed, she gives today’s readers a blueprint for carefully applying Adorno’s thinking to contemporary American therapeutic practices.
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By David Pan · Monday, September 9, 2019 Telos 188 (Fall 2019): Theology and World Order is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 It would be naive to consider the question of global political order without engaging in debates about theology. Not only has it become clear that religious conflicts drive political ones, the very attempt to move “beyond” religion must be understood in terms of its theological meaning. The postsecular turn has not meant a return to religion so much as a realization that secularization was never a turn away from religion in the first place but rather itself a specific theological alternative among many. Accordingly, if our deepest political conflicts arise as consequences of theological disputes, we must address theology directly in order to get to the roots of major conflicts. Not only clear cases, such as conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians or between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, but also those between the United States and China revolve around theological issues that shape political and military conflict. Yet, our current approaches rely on political scientific and military calculations that have not yet been able to evaluate theology as a key and deciding factor in such conflicts. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies debate the threat that Islamic State poses in Afghanistan, for instance, a key consideration should be the character and prospects of Islamic State’s theology, as well as the broader question of the role of theology in deciding political conflict. This issue of Telos engages in this discussion by considering how conceptions of world order arise from specific theologies.
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By J. E. Elliott · Thursday, August 1, 2019 J. E. Elliott’s “Insourcing Dissent: Brand English in the Entrepreneurial University” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 This essay addresses the emergence of dissent culture as a hallmark of teaching and research in English studies and the humanities more generally in the time and temper of the commercial-bureaucratic university. I argue that the most convincing explanation for the widespread adoption of a protest ethos in an institution ostensibly opposed to its prescriptions is not a paradigm shift from formalist to political approaches to texts and artifacts, much less principled opposition to late Western capitalism or technological reason, but a reproduction of the routines, scripts, norms, and values of American higher education as an entrepreneurial enterprise. Dissent, in other words, is an organizationally conservative force: it animates disciplinary alternatives to STEM and business curricula while articulating a remedial narrative of inclusiveness (“diversity”) that bears witness to American higher education’s residual commitments to political engagement and democracy building. This insourcing of protest has assured English studies’ viability in the corporate university by reconfiguring the discipline as an academic brand alongside Brand Science and Brand Business in the organizational field of the university. To the extent that the politics of advocating for the disempowered and marginalized is an in-house creation without demonstrable political or policy-related impact, however, dissent culture can also be read as a reflexive (and symptomatic) protest against its own institutional capture. The essay concludes with a discussion of prospective alterations to Brand English in light of recent developments in the digital humanities.
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