From Telos 152 (Fall 2010), Dimitri Ginev’s “The Erotic Attitude Toward Nature and Cognitive Existentialism.” Read the full version at TELOS Online website.

The article considers the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s project for a “new science” to the contemporary studies in hermeneutics of science. This project involves new criteria of epistemological rationality, non-traditional views of nature, and new empirical data models for verifying science’s hypothesis. In scrutinizing the idea of an “erotic attitude toward nature,” the article suggests an approach to revealing the interpretative fore-structure and the hermeneutic situation of the “dialogue with nature.” According to the principal argument, the chance for such a dialogue lies in science’s hermeneutic and self-critical potential. The only way of putting the dialogue with nature into effect is by actualizing alternative possibilities projected by readable technologies of scientific research. The essay makes the case for the claim that since the dialogue is necessarily involved in the reading that constitutes meaning within domains of research, then there is a non-eliminable political dimension that will be associated with the search for an “authentic normality” of nature’s entities. It suggests a broadening the scope of the critique of scientism, in opposing at the same the constructivist rejection of a “politics of nature.”

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From Telos 152 (Fall 2010), Agata Bielik-Robson’s “A Broken Constellation: Agamben’s Theology between Tragedy and Messianism.” Read the full version at TELOS Online website.

This article analyzes the following constellation of concepts from a theologico-philosophical perspective: “state of exception,” “bare life,” and “the remnant.” Recently employed in the work of Giorgio Agamben, none of these concepts is his own coinage. Agamben borrowed “state of exception” from Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, “bare life” from Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, and “the remnant” from biblical sources, which include Isaiah and the letters of Saint Paul. Nevertheless, the reemergence of these concepts within Agamben’s system provides each with an altered meaning, which emerges only through interplay with the others. Agamben claims to be offering us in this way a new constellation of radical messianic hope. Bielik-Robson’s intention is to examine critically Agamben’s assemblage of ideas under what Gershom Scholem called “the severe light of the canonical,” and ascertain whether it delivers what it promises—be it even the weakest spark of messianic power.

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From Telos 152 (Fall 2010), Annabel Herzog’s “Political Equality in Levinas’s ‘Judaism and Revolution’.” Read the full version at TELOS Online website.

Abstract

This article is an interpretation of Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Judaism and Revolution” (1969), whose philosophical aim was to propose a critical answer to Marxist revolutionary materialism. The paper argues that, in that reading, Levinas uses the Talmud to exemplify the confrontation between the question of equality (namely, politics) and that of absolute and non-egalitarian responsibility (namely, ethics). Levinas’s essay follows the order of the Talmud page Baba Metsi’a 83a-b, which starts in enunciating rules about employer-worker relationships, and ends with a discussion about the collaboration of Jews with the Roman political power. In other words, it starts with a question about labor laws and workers’ rights and becomes a political and a theological problem—the problem of the irreducibility of evil. This article shows how Levinas connects these two apparently unrelated questions and uses the Talmudic text as an illustration of his own philosophy.

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