By Telos Press · Tuesday, January 18, 2022 The second Telos Student Seminar will pair an essay by Huimin Jin, “Cultural Self-Confidence and Constellated Community: An Extended Discussion of Some Speeches by Xi Jinping” (Telos 195, Summer 2021, pp. 93–113), with an excerpt from Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Crisis of Western Societies” (Telos 53, Fall 1982, pp. 17–28). Our virtual gathering will feature Prof. Jin, who will be joining us from China, as well as a scholar representing the views of Castoriadis.
Modeled on the study groups from which Telos first grew, yet reconceived for the digital age, the Telos Student Seminars (TSS) provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay, and one pertinent essay from our archives—to connect the past and present of the journal to its future. TSS also provides an opportunity for students to be published on TELOSscope.
We seek teachers and scholars from around the world under whose aegis TSS groups can meet and who can provide students with intellectual encouragement and support. An institutional library subscription is necessary. Would you like to join us? Contact tss@telospress.com.
For more information about the Telos Student Seminars, click here.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, November 24, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Murray Skees about his article “Grab Them by the Public: Trump, Twitter, and the Affective Politics of Our Fragmented Democracy,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, November 11, 2020 The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, delivered this speech on September 4, 2020. I discussed it in a TelosScope post here, putting it in dialogue with President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech of July 4. There has been interest on the part of some readers in a full translation of Macron’s text, so it is offered below.
The context: Macron is welcoming a group of newly naturalized citizens into the national community. Hence his double agenda: on the one hand, highlighting the diversity of France as an immigrant nation, while on the other insisting on the unity of French history, culture, language, and above all the Republic. This is a speech about the Republican values that Macron expects all French citizens to share and, what’s more, to uphold actively and vigorously. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” have a standing in French political culture similar to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from the American Declaration of Independence.
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By Ryan Holston · Friday, January 12, 2018 Ryan Holston’s “Deliberation in Context: Reexamining the Confrontation between the Discourse Ethics and Neo-Aristotelianism” appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017). 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 now available in both print and online formats.
Deliberative democrats continue to emphasize universal justification as the key criterion for establishing political legitimacy within pluralistic democracies. However, this essay argues that their refusal to acknowledge the limits to mutual appeal posed by the scale of the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is utopian. Moreover, the cost of such utopianism is the failure to acknowledge the vital role of a sensus communis for meaningful deliberation. Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, this essay aims to combat the abstraction that has characterized much of the recent debate over deliberation.
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By Flaminia Incecchi · Tuesday, January 31, 2017 In “A Tragic Desire: Rousseau and the Modern Democratic Project,” Alice Ormiston brings to the fore a figure often neglected in contemporary political theory and that, as the title foreshadows, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. First, Ormiston—animated by the task of the intellectual historian—traces to Rousseau the discovery of a fundamental clash at the heart of the modern subject, which is that between nature and abstract reason. Such tension, Ormiston claims, has influenced, or is present in, subsequent thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Rousseau identifies the clash between nature and reason, and eyeing man’s primitive condition with nostalgia and viewing his modern condition with contempt, he is seeking to resolve such contention in his works.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 28, 2016 Traveling in Paris, Judith Butler published a “letter” dated November 14, in English on the Verso blog and in French in Libération, the day after the ISIS attacks, entitled “Mourning becomes the Law.” The short text treats two phenomena and argues for a connection between them: the process of mourning the victims of the attacks and the expansion of counter-terrorist practices by the state. Butler’s thesis is that the shared grieving of the dead served exclusively as a vehicle to justify amplified police powers: in this sense, mourning becomes the law, or at least law enforcement. A close look at her claims, however, shows significant deficiencies in the account of mourning and an important misreading of the Parisian response.
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