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, Charles Kollmer looks at Stephanie Frank’s “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” from Telos 153 (Winter 2010).
In “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” Stephanie Frank outlines a compelling approach to Carl Schmitt’s complex oeuvre. She sets out to rectify a common mistake made in existing treatments of Schmitt; in studies of Schmitt’s early work Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), scholars tend to rely on a later work, Constitutional Theory (1928), as an explanatory crutch. Both texts model representation, but a conflation of their respective models obscures how Schmitt’s project changes between the works. As a corrective, Frank traces the nuances of Roman Catholicism‘s model back to the influence of seventeenth-century theologian Malebranche, who in turn influenced the eighteenth-century revolutionary Abbé Sieyès. By grounding Roman Catholicism in this historical context, Frank not only sidesteps the circularity of her colleagues’ interpretations but also lays the groundwork for a persuasive reading of Schmitt’s turn to aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).
In an apropos piece of metaphilosophy entitled “How Should Philosophy Be Clear?” Nicholas Joll offers several insights on the concept of clarity in relation to philosophical texts. On initial inspection, Joll’s style seems to reveal a bias towards the Analytical tradition in philosophy: his argumentation is clearly organized, rigorous, and formulated in logical propositions. Yet his work also attains the savvy and self-awareness that renders metaphilosophy convincing, as demonstrated in his first proposition, which states that any notion of clarity will be partisan with regards to the Analytical-Continental divide. In spite of this partisanship, Joll champions a concept of “default clarity” and demonstrates its aptitude for judiciously evaluating argumentation. He shrewdly refuses to overdetermine the prescriptive force of default clarity. Far from an immutable law, default clarity offers broad guidelines with the caveat that “the justificatory burden lies with those who would eschew such clarity.” 
The work of Theodor W. Adorno is replete with paradox, and the abundant and irresolvable tensions in his writings reflect the disheartening milieu in which he wrote. Based on a cursory reading of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, we might be left with the impression that Adorno wielded this rhetorical weapon in a uniform manner, indicating the ways in which the modern fruits of Enlightenment contradict the original ethos of Enlightenment thought. Indeed, these are difficult charges to refute, as modernity’s myriad episodes of mass violence render notions of teleological “progress” rather untenable. Poststructuralist thought exhibits a reverence for this innovation in thinking. According to Antoni Negri, “Adorno’s model of cultural criticism genuinely uncovered the ontology of the new world” (cited in Jenemann). Yet these same tracts always contain caveats, noting that, despite the paradox and contradiction inherent in modern infrastructure and society, modernity presents us with multitudinous opportunities for radically disrupting the stasis of the status quo. This is the “situation of those who are living through the passage from modernity to postmodernity,” writes Negri. Such caveats imply that Adorno’s critical theory fails to recognize these possibilities for change, at worst typecasting him as a grumpy Luddite. 
A central concern of critical theory revolves around the difficulty of communicating in the wake of modernity’s crises. Unprecedented trauma and violence obliterate tradition, which historically formed the necessary context for lucid and comprehensible stories. Walter Benjamin famously observed that veterans of World War I returned “not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” In the wake of the war, he notes, the word bekanntlich, or “as everybody well knows,” lost its currency, leaving only Erfahrungsarmut, “the new poverty of experience.” In response to this situation, Benjamin valorized the anti-aesthetic manifest in the works of Karl Kraus and Berthold Brecht, concluding that “all that remains is the discipline of those who destroy.” A similar current of thought underpins many of the philosophical and aesthetic developments in postwar culture, from the Frankfurt School’s critique of Enlightenment empiricism to the Dadaist rejection of canonical artistic authority. 
Even readers with a cursory familiarity with Gilles Deleuze’s work will have no trouble surmising his critical attitude toward the law. As an abstracting and generalizing social force, law seems to stand in stark opposition to watchwords like immanence and singularity that pervade Deleuze’s texts. In “A New Image of Law: Deleuze and Jurisprudence,” Alexandre Lefebvre offers a novel interpretation of this antagonism toward the law, starting by distinguishing between law and jurisprudence. As the philosophy that informs the practice of law, jurisprudence interrupts the stasis of the legal code by actively applying it to a case. In turn, a given case takes on a genetic role in future versions of the law (conventionally referred to as precedent). Jurisprudence liberates law from appeals to transcendent values by insisting on its relevance to the here-and-now, as well as its role in the genesis of the yet-to-come. In his article, Lefebvre elaborates on this dynamic, starting with a summary of Deleuzian critiques of law, then moving toward what he terms “a new image of law,” drawing on Henri Bergson’s metaphysics in the process. 
