By Aryeh Botwinick · Friday, November 13, 2020 Aryeh Botwinick’s “Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” appears in Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 From a Machiavellian perspective, peace is war by other means. You can have a much greater watchful vigilance of your former (or future) opponent in times of peace than in a time of war. Israel as a sponsor (or co-sponsor) of a kind of Middle East Marshall Plan: Rebuilding your enemy so that he becomes your ally and friend. Enemies must learn to use each other’s weapons. The weakness of the Palestinians has to be matched by the deliberate, self-consciously generated weakness of the Israelis in the form of benevolence and generosity in order for both sides to emerge as triumphant. If this approach is pursued, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict harbors the prospect of turning into a sum-sum conflict, where both sides stand equally to gain by pursuing peace.
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By Mark G. E. Kelly · Tuesday, October 20, 2020 Mark G. E. Kelly’s “Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neoliberalism” appears in Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
In this article, I argue against the prevalent tendency, both in popular and scholarly discourse, to understand the Trump presidency as representing an incipient American fascism. I point out that Trump’s actual administration has shown no features distinctive of fascism, and that all alleged fascist policies of Trump are deeply in continuity with the pattern of liberal U.S. politics. I further argue that the most extraordinary aspect of Trump’s presidency, his strident rhetoric, while representing a deviation from U.S. politics as usual, is nonetheless not distinctively fascist. Lastly, I point out that, while Trump’s rhetoric and policies have drawn him support from literal fascists, he has little real connection with them and has largely disappointed rather than encouraged them. Instead, I suggest that Trump’s presidency represents the opposite of robust use of state power we associate with fascism, namely, a further decline in federal executive power in favor of the power of corporations. I conclude by suggesting that the increase of the censorious power of Big Tech in particular represents a far greater threat to democracy than Trump, and that the left’s monomaniacal focus on opposing Trump has allowed this tendency to go unchecked.
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By Jon Simons · Friday, October 16, 2020 Jon Simons’s “Divine Violence, Profane Peace: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Peace in Israel–Palestine” appears in Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
One of the reasons for disaffection toward peace among Jewish Israelis may be a “Judaic deficit” in the secular, liberal conceptions of peace implicit in both official peace processes and peace activism. I address this deficit by bringing the Judaically inflected but nonreligious work of Walter Benjamin into conversation with the thought and practice of Rabbis for Human Rights, who combine Judaism with liberal, universal rights. Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” counters the legally enforced violence of liberal peace with a conjugation of divine violence and nonviolent conflict resolution. Interpreting his essay with particular attention to his reading of the Biblical story of Korah leads to a theologico-political notion of peace as agonistic, human wrestling with divine violence and power. Rabbis for Human Rights embody such peace to some degree in their simultaneous interpretation of divine law and “small acts” of nonviolent opposition to Occupation.
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By Pamela Carralero · Friday, June 12, 2020 Pamela Carralero’s “Scientific Modeling and the Environment: Toward the Establishment of Michel Serres’s Natural Contract” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 In the sciences, the hypotheses driving the exploration of the natural world are often investigated via analogical transfer, meaning that the crux of scientific activity resides in the use and interpretation of models as tools that facilitate an accurate description of natural laws. The exact status of the model’s role and its lasting importance, however, remains a controversial topic among scientists and philosophers. For some, the model is a way of reaching a conclusive theorem or systematic statement; for others, including French philosopher Michel Serres, the model is a multifaceted space of translation that asks its interpreters to meditate on the inaccessible nature of what it makes accessible via ideogrammatic transcription.
Placing Serres in conversation with Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, this article argues that Serres provides the tools to theorize models as mediums through which to acknowledge and interact with the environment as that which is innately inaccessible to human knowledge. This is a first step toward establishing what he calls a “natural contract,” a union of life-giving reciprocity between humans and nonhumans that offers new conceptualizations of knowledge and science as practices free from the totalizing codifications of human verdicts. More specifically, this article imagines models as gateways between the inaccessible and accessible, arguing their value as a setting for the construction and play of scientific interpretations. It concludes by examining the relationship between modern climate models and the inaccessible in order to propose a techno-scientific, intra-temporal mentality of uncertainty from which a natural contract can develop.
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By Andrew Reszitnyk · Thursday, May 21, 2020 Andrew Reszitnyk’s “The Descent into Disanthropy: Critical Theory and the Anthropocene” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
This essay suggests that the widespread engagement in humanities scholarship with the concept of the Anthropocene—the proposed geologic epoch in which humans figure as a terrestrial force and the planet appears as a human artifact—has given rise to a strain of critical theory that renounces the imperative to engage in politics. I argue that the notion of the Anthropocene has inspired a turn toward what Greg Garrard calls “disanthropy,” the tendency to fantasize about a world in which living human bodies are absent and to render human life into an abstract concept. Through an analysis of the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, I contend that, insofar as they have become disanthropic, many contemporary critical theorists have relinquished the capacity to engage critically with the influential and pernicious politico-economic ideology of neoliberalism. Although many scholars argue that we should view the Anthropocene as a vital provocation that opens up new corridors for environmentalist scholarship, I propose that we remain skeptical about the value of positing the Anthropocene at the center of critical inquiry. I suggest that the growing reputation of the idea of the Anthropocene has caused a significant segment of humanistic scholarship to enter into a political and philosophical détente with neoliberalism, with the effect that critical theory is becoming less and less capable of responding to the questions posed by the world outside the university.
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By Ross Etherton · Wednesday, April 29, 2020 Ross Etherton’s “Reading against the Gun: The Machine Gun and Sturm” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
This essay examines the role of the machine gun in Ernst Jünger’s 1923 serially published novella Sturm, arguing that an examination of the novella’s key technological actant is at least as beneficial as an examination of the text’s human protagonists. It posits that reading Sturm in light of the machine gun and in the context of the material and cultural conditions of its original serial publication allows for a different understanding of the novella’s treatment of reading and writing under the conditions of modern mechanized warfare. The essay not only links the technical process at the heart of the gun (continuity derived from explosive interruption) to the explosive interruptions within the novella; it also links this interruptive continuity to the arbitrary, irregular breaks in its original serial publication. This technical-literary approach connects the literary scholarship on Sturm (primarily by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and David Pan) with one indebted to philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who sought to redress humanity’s profound alienation from technology and technical objects. The essay first outlines its approach to Sturm, and then provides readers with an overview of Sturm‘s publication history, contextualizing it within Jünger’s early works. It then examines the explosively interruptive moments of the novella, tying them to the machine gun and to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific, philosophical, and poetological discourses. It closes by gesturing toward the importance that the gun and the concepts embedded in it would have for Jünger in the decade following Sturm.
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