By Kenneth D. Johnson · Monday, March 19, 2018 Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., is now available for purchase in our store.
 1968 was a tough year for the United States and for many around the world. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam started in January, and the My Lai massacre occurred there in March. In Paris, the student uprising started in May. The Prague Spring, during which Czechoslovakian activists sought a measure of greater freedom for their country from the Soviet Union, was crushed by Warsaw Pact military forces in August. Police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, beating student protestors indiscriminately in the streets. The Weather Underground emerged in October, and black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their gloved Black Power salute as a protest during the Mexico City Olympics that same month. Richard M. Nixon was elected as president in November. And, there were two pivotal deaths: Robert F. Kennedy in June, and Reverend King in April. After King’s assassination, many U.S. cities erupted in flames as their African American residents protested his killing and the moribund state of civil rights progress at the time of King’s death.
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By Telos Press · Sunday, March 18, 2018 In Azade Seyhan’s article “Erdoğan and the Intellectuals,” which appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017), the institutional affiliation of Prof. Nilüfer Göle was incorrectly reported. Her correct affiliation is the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Monday, March 12, 2018 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, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013).
It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Writing at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, David Ragazzoni reviews Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, published by Telos Press Publishing. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and co-edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Schmitt’s Land and Sea is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on your purchase by using the coupon code BOOKS20.
Land und Meer appeared in English for the first time in 1997, but the new translation offered by Zeitlin and Berman stands out for its philological accuracy. It takes into account multiple variations between the 1942, 1954, and 1981 German editions, as well as textual changes in the 1952 Spanish translation (in which some passages omitted in the 1954 version were retained). It also explores the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt’s geopolitical thought before Der Nomos der Erde (1950), in which he offered his most systematic analysis of the trajectory of the jus publicum Europaeum from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
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By Kellan Anfinson · Thursday, February 22, 2018 Kellan Anfinson’s “Risk or Security: Carl Schmitt’s Ethos of the Event” appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017). 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 now available in both print and online formats.
This article audits Schmitt’s theory of politics through the concept of the event, particularly the risk it entails. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “machine” to build on Michael Marder’s reading of the event in Schmitt, which envisions politics as unstable and open to transformation. Attending to flashpoints where Schmitt limits the potential of these transformations reveals two ways of orienting oneself toward political events: security or risk. Schmitt pushes decisions in the direction of security. But according to Schmitt’s argument that definitions of the political are also political, Schmitt’s attempt to limit the shape that political transformations take is polemical rather than analytical. Reading his theoretical analysis against such polemical interjections reveals the possibility of political partisanship as civil disobedience in which one gives up security and accepts the risk of placing oneself outside the legal order.
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By Wayne Hudson and Arran Gare · Tuesday, February 6, 2018 For a New Naturalism, edited by Arran Gare and Wayne Hudson, is now available from Telos Press in our online store. Order your copy today and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
Contemporary political and social theory needs to be rethought with reference to posthistorical conditions and developments in the natural sciences. More emphasis needs to be placed on a wider naturalism that goes beyond modern objectivating naturalism: a naturalism that opens up to both differential naturalisms and to differential humanities. In place of critique without concrete alternatives and American identity politics, a version of enlightenment is needed that stands for the rational reform of human affairs in all areas. This enlightenment is not the mainstream European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is not hostile to indigenous and premodern social traditions, but seeks to learn from them. Nor is it confined to Western social thought or to a political thought based on the citizens of cities. This enlightenment engages with the sciences and with global historical dynamics.
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