Among the discouraging quandaries that the European Union has had to face in recent years, no one could have imagined that the United Kingdom and the United States, our historical, crucial allies, would turn their back on the EU, thus leaving it exposed to the global influence to Russia, Turkey, and Iran, not exactly friends of our open societies and polity. It would have been equally impossible to predict that so many supposedly enlightened, tolerant, and democratic European citizens would rally around xenophobic and anti-Semitic political parties while reviving the most obtuse and primitive ethnocentrism. All these ills, and most of all of Brexit and its aftermath, were interpreted by many as a fatal blow to the EU, in combination with other indicators that seemed to point to a general design failure of its unifying project. Nevertheless, many reliable commentators have expressed faith that the EU, at long last, would react to this long-standing issue.
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Kellan Anfinson’s “Risk or Security: Carl Schmitt’s Ethos of the Event” 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. This article audits Schmitt’s theory of politics through the concept of the event, particularly the risk it entails. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “machine” to build on Michael Marder’s reading of the event in Schmitt, which envisions politics as unstable and open to transformation. Attending to flashpoints where Schmitt limits the potential of these transformations reveals two ways of orienting oneself toward political events: security or risk. Schmitt pushes decisions in the direction of security. But according to Schmitt’s argument that definitions of the political are also political, Schmitt’s attempt to limit the shape that political transformations take is polemical rather than analytical. Reading his theoretical analysis against such polemical interjections reveals the possibility of political partisanship as civil disobedience in which one gives up security and accepts the risk of placing oneself outside the legal order. 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. Telos 181 (Winter 2017): War and Civil War is now available for purchase in our store. The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow. For additional details about the conference as well as other upcoming events, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. This presentation compares two societies, which, although both claim to be “Western” as well as vibrant liberal democracies, are in many aspects quite different. Those societies have been shaped by their history and political culture to evolve in quite different directions. Nevertheless, they can both be seen as “post-revolutionary” societies. Poland has had a very checkered history, from being a Great Power, to disappearing from the map of Europe, which has contributed to a strongly “erotic” sense of belonging among the Poles. Poland after 1989—the so-called Third Republic—has been in the difficult process of attempting a restoration of a more traditional Polish society, whose organic evolution and development had been so cruelly interrupted since 1939. |
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