By Telos Press · Monday, March 14, 2016 An important report by Alex Chalmers on antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) has just appeared at Fathom. An excerpt:
In a way, the antisemitic incidents I witnessed in OULC are less troubling than the culture which allowed such behaviour to become normalised. It is common to encounter antisemitic individuals in all walks of life, but the mass turning of a blind eye that has come to characterise vast parts of the Left is chilling. As antisemites can double up as vocal critics of Israel, there is a marked tendency on the Left to view them as fellow travellers whose hearts are in the right place – so their rhetoric passes the test of social acceptability.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 14, 2016 Telos 174 (Spring 2016): Philosophy, Literature, Theory is now available for purchase in our store.
 In this issue, Telos turns to a diverse set of philosophers, contemporary and classical, and questions, concerning ethics and politics on the one hand, and literature and aesthetics on the other. More often than not, those distinctions turn out to be difficult to maintain. A case in point is the opening essay, which examines how statements by Levinas have been subjected to political readings in order to impute to him positions that he did not hold. What are the ethics of intentional misreadings? In their meticulously argued analysis, Oona Eisenstadt and Claire Elise Katz demonstrate how the philosopher’s comments in a 1982 radio interview, in the immediate aftermath of the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, have been subjected to increasing degrees of misrepresentation, culminating in false accusations that he justified the killings. These insinuations involved fabricating quotations to put words in his mouth. Eisenstadt and Katz expose the poor philology and tendentious politics implicit in such distortion.
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By Sean McMorrow · Tuesday, March 8, 2016
With the publication of “The Crisis of Western Societies” (1982), Cornelius Castoriadis returns to an early theme in his work by proposing that over the previous twenty years Western societies had begun to enter a new phase, one that could be considered to be a situation of crisis. In his earlier political thought—associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie—Castoriadis identified signs of a transition into this new phase, marked by a widespread bureaucratization of political decision-making that emerged alongside a general turn toward the privatization of social life. At the time of his revisitation of this theme, Castoriadis’s work had undergone what would be the first of two ontological turns: a turn that involved a radical rethinking of historicity, which understood the historical dimension of society as a socially contingent mode of creation that is central to the constitution of the world of a given society. This article reflects an articulation of his previous theme of crisis with regard to this broader rethinking of historicity throughout the 1970s, which extended political analysis into more foundational issues of social institution and cultural expression.
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By Telos Press · Monday, March 7, 2016 A panel on Renzo De Felice’s The Jews in Fascist Italy: An Historical Appraisal was held at the Calandra Institute on January 28, 2016. The panel included Frank Adler, Telos Editorial Associate and editor of Telos 164 (Fall 2013): Italian Jews and Fascism. Copies of Telos 164 can be purchased in our online store. Panelists explored the genesis of De Felice’s book and its place in contemporary historiography. Commissioned by the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities and published in 1961, it was the first study of the anti-Jewish persecution in Italy to reach a general audience. It was also a young historian’s first book on the Fascist era. This glance into a chapter of national history, that Italy had been quick to bury, set De Felice on a path to become one of the leading and most controversial scholars of Fascism. How was his attempt to capture an unsettling past received at the time of the book’s publication? What place does this book have in the current scholarship when many of its conclusions have been overturned after five decades of research on Italian state-sponsored anti-Semitism? And to which degree have the studies of Fascism and of the persecution of the Jews shed light on one another?
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By Göran Adamson · Thursday, March 3, 2016
In today’s public life, marked by large-scale migration, welfare states under pressure, and a soaring right-wing scene, “multiculturalism” and “right-wing populism” remain at the center of political debate. It is assumed, moreover, that they stand in sharp opposition to one another. On the one hand, multiculturalism is widely acclaimed for being progressive, radical, and safely leftist. It is seen as a vital precondition for a modern society: tolerant, humble, and anti-racist. Anyone who opposes multiculturalism, then, will be deemed at best a conservative or reactionary—if not outright racist, xenophobe, nationalist, or fascist. On the other hand, we have right-wing populism. Due to its allegiance with racism, virulent nationalism, and fascism, right-wing populism has a dubious reputation. Multiculturalism, as it seems, is anything that right-wing populism is not.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, March 1, 2016 From the Desk of Mary Piccone, Publisher
Dear Friends of Telos,
I am reaching out to you and asking for your help.
When you purchase a subscription to Telos, you make it possible for us to publish the kinds of writing that you want to read. As a small independent publisher, we rely on the support of our readers to continue producing new, challenging works in politics, philosophy, and critical theory.
If your library is not a current subscriber to Telos, you have the power to influence your library’s decision to subscribe. It’s your recommendation and your interest in Telos, rather than sales calls from publishers, that make a difference in library subscription decisions.
And when it comes to our books, it really helps support our mission when you order directly from our online store at telospress.com. Online shopping sites like Amazon require publishers to accept significant distribution costs to carry their books, and that is certainly challenging for small independent presses like ours. At our website, you can save 20% on the list price of all our books. Just enter the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process, and the discount will be applied to your order.
My passion for continuing Telos is to keep Paul Piccone’s legacy alive and thriving. Telos is a unique forum that gives each of you a place to speak and be heard, and now more than ever such forums are essential. This May we are celebrating forty-eight years of publishing our journal. Let’s make it fifty, and then a hundred. Paul would be proud!
Warm wishes,
Mary Piccone
Publisher, Telos Press Publishing
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