By Maxwell Woods · Monday, December 10, 2012 Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios is now available for the first time in English translation from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods spoke with the book’s translator, Thomas Friese, about the challenges of translating Jünger into English as well as the increasing relevance of the author’s writings to our current social and political landscape. Purchase your copy of The Adventurous Heart here.
 Maxwell Woods: In your preface to The Adventurous Heart, by Ernst Jünger, you write that “this book hooked me on the author for life.” What is it about this particular book that you found so captivating? Do you find yourself returning to this book in your studies of Jünger? Of Jünger’s work does this book hold a special place for you?
Thomas Friese: First impressions obviously have special value, and The Adventurous Heart was my first encounter with Jünger. It was an ideal start, since this book is a concise introduction to the worldview of the mature author. Ideally, all new readers would come to Jünger via this book—there are certainly worse ways, which are unfortunately also more common—i.e., through Der Arbeiter or Storms of Steel, or, worse still, through clichéd second-hand opinions.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 31, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Scott McNall about the influence of Telos and Paul Piccone on his intellectual outlook.
Maxwell Woods: Your article “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Retrospective on Telos” discussed Telos‘s development, from its beginnings in 1968 to its publicizing of Carl Schmitt, federalism, and populism. How did this article, and Telos more generally, fit into your intellectual world when you wrote the piece?
 Scott McNall: When I wrote the piece, I was focused on the collapse of the economy, climate change, and the continued destruction of the biosphere on which human life depends. I wondered what it would be like if the Telos “gang” were all together again, what they would make of our current situation. I’m sure it would be more than just “We told you so.” I very much wished I could have found out from Paul Piccone what he thought about our current economic and biological crises, not because I would necessarily have agreed with him, but because I would have almost certainly been forced to deal with new ways of thinking about the problems. In writing the piece I also needed to go back over years of the journal; it was a treat and an opportunity to remember the debates, the good ideas, those that were not so useful, and the emotion and intellectual energy that fueled the entire Telos project.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 24, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Robert D’Amico about his history with Telos and the journal’s influence on his intellectual outlook.
Maxwell Woods: How did your article “What is Federalism? On Piccone’s Late Political Philosophy” fit into your own intellectual outlook?
Robert D’Amico: I have always been interested in political philosophy in the widest sense of that term. Telos was born out of a focus on Marx and Marxism as political theories within European philosophy. Like the journal, I abandoned that framework in time, before the journal did I think, but it did me a lot of good to think through those issues and the journal made some of the more interesting work on it available. The focus on federalism and populism came late in Paul’s life. I can’t say that they are part of my thinking, but writing this piece gave me an opportunity to work through what Paul and I often talked about in the times I saw him in NYC before his death. Also I think that is what Paul would have liked, not a remembrance of him but an argument.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 17, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Robert Antonio about the influence of Paul Piccone and Telos on his intellectual development.
Maxwell Woods: In your article “Absolutizing Particularity,” you discuss Telos and Paul Piccone’s critique of liberalism. How do you view this article today? How did this piece fit into your intellectual world when you wrote it?
Robert Antonio: Every or nearly every participant at Telos and, probably, most of its serious readers have had serious objections, fears, or dissatisfaction with liberalism as we have known it from the start. However, there have always been different liberalisms, and, as Paul stressed, divergent positions toward them among the Telos circle and readership. When I started reading the journal, “social liberalism” (Keynsianism and the welfare state) was the dominant capitalist regime, but already riven with contradictions and in decay. Many of us split with the journal when “market liberalism,” or neoliberalism, was in ascendance and took different positions toward it. I rejected the Schmittian and populist turn and return to tradition and had more affirmative views about key facets of liberal political and legal institutions, civil society, and social liberalism. However, I don’t believe that liberalism and capitalism as we have known them are sustainable. We have a huge environmental wall ahead and fundamental problems with capitalism’s growth imperative, and we also face multiple deep crises related to finance, real economy joblessness, and inequality. I have always disagreed with Paul’s exhaustion thesis about the liberal-left, but I fear that the consequent crises are upon us and the political culture is not responding; there is a profound lack of political vision and political will. We are in trouble, but not in exactly the way that Paul expected. The crisis and future of liberalism and capitalism is for me the most central issue for social theory and politics today. Thus, I try to follow divergent views about this issue.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 10, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with co-editor Ben Agger about the influence Telos has had on his intellectual development.
Maxwell Woods: How do you view your article, “My Telos: A Journal of No Illusions,” and your relationship to Telos today?
Ben Agger: There has been such an explosion of publishing and publications since the late 60s, when Paul [Piccone] started Telos, that I just can’t keep up with journals and books. I used to pore over the latest issue of Telos as important intellectual sustenance, especially the latest intellectual news from Europe. Today there is less urgency about “keeping up” with publications, even though Telos remains a central part of my intellectual identity. As I say in my chapter, Telos helped formed me as I and others grappled with a humanist and phenomenological Marxism that helped explain America and the world during the 60s and 70s. Telos was a primer, although often a difficult one, for all of us on the New Left who were using Hegel, early Marx, Husserl, Sartre, et al. to understand civil rights, the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam—and our opposition to them. It is a sad commentary on the decline of discourse, as I term it, that books and journals matter less in our Internet age of instantaneity.
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By Maxwell Woods · Tuesday, January 4, 2011 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Maxwell Woods looks at David Pan’s “The Crisis of the Humanities and the End of the University,” from Telos 111 (Spring 1998).
 Acknowledged by the London Times as the center of one of the five greatest orchestras in the world (the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra), generating some of today’s most important musicians, and declared by the renowned conductor Simon Rattle as the “future of music,” a new educational force has penetrated the international music consciousness. Yet, the educational institution producing one of the world’s most significant orchestras is not the result of the traditional bastions of Western orchestral music; instead, it is the direct consequence of community education in the barrios of Venezuela. The youth music program, “El Sistema,” functions by organizing “nucleos,” educational centers started and maintained by local leaders for high-level orchestral music that are located in and run as part of the community. Instead of being sent off to the conservatory or university, children learn how to play orchestral music in their own neighborhood from instructors who are members of the locality.
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