By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 14, 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.
J. Peter Pham has reviewed Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred, in the journal American Foreign Policy Interests. The review is available here (in PDF format).
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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 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 Russell A. Berman · Saturday, December 29, 2007 Telos 141: Nature and Terror is available in our store.
 Classical figures of thought endure. A long-standing image of the health of nature contrasts the bucolic landscape with the corruption of the city, where violence abounds. The only security is a natural way of life, far from the brutal metropolis—until nature turns out to be a threat, and we succumb to the uncontrollable fear named for that destructive god: panic. The state of nature is the homeland of violence, its only law the law of the jungle, as we scurry back to the city to find security—until it morphs into the security state. Critical Theory described this dynamic as a sometimes too narrow narrative of domination: the human mastery of nature, in the interest of self-preservation, turns into the mastery of humanity by an encompassing machinery of control. This is an old story, but it comes to us anew in this political season, in which nature and terror—the anxieties about the environment and fear of terrorism, as well as the reaction to it—haunt us, in public and in private.
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By Russell A. Berman · Sunday, December 9, 2007 Whether correctly or not, the National Intelligence Estimate has been read (or misread) and seized upon by the press as claiming that Iran no longer has nuclear ambitions. Happy Days are Here Again, and the pre-election season is spiced up with this one more seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the mendacity of the administration.
Or maybe not so incontrovertible. Neither the French nor the British seem inclined to back down from their hard line on sanctions, effectively dismissing the findings of the American “intelligence” community. On the contrary, they have reaffirmed their concerns about Iranian ambitions, and even Putin has strengthened his position on sanctions. It’s as if the NIE has no credibility outside of Pulitzered op-ed pages and the circles where those pages are avidly celebrated in Tehran.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 25, 2007  Intellectuals and power: the relationship has always been fraught with tensions, dangers and disappointments. A certain enlightenment utopia imagined a world ruled by reason as a formula for universal peace and prosperity. If only the brightest—who, in this account, are identical with the best—could hold the reins of power, their intelligent schemes could banish the benighted habits of humanity. This aspiration to empower intellectuals took on various shapes during the past century, from the Leninist party, whose mission it was to lead the backward working class, treated as never class-conscious enough to act on its own, to the allegedly post-ideological technocracy of bureaucrats, constantly issuing new regulations on the lives of the rest of us. The mishaps are many. Intellectuals, finding themselves at a distance from political centers, succumb to a will to power, a desire to control. Should they succeed, their efforts to impose their plans on to the social world often take a repressive turn. More likely, they do not succeed but fool themselves about their own significance, projecting categories onto power only to facilitate systematic misunderstanding. Such is the fate of intellectuals who draw close to power or who participate in movements, deluding themselves about their import or having to come to grips with their own disillusionment.
Yet this is not only about the intellectuals themselves; it is also about the reason that they, purportedly, carry into political debate. Through its modern history, reason loses suppleness, growing every more instrumental, oriented toward the pursuit of scientistic solutions rather than a reflective investigation of the world. Catastrophic outcomes ensue, as with the self-described sciences of race for Nazi Germany and economics for Soviet Russia. Arendt wrote about the “logicality” of this degraded rational thought; for Horkheimer and Adorno, it represented the dialectic reversion of enlightenment reason into the mythic consciousness it thought it had long before overcome. The question of the relationship of intellectuals to power is inseparable from this fate of reason: the more instrumental reason grows through the process of modernity, the more technocratic intellectual empowerment becomes.
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