By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Tuesday, April 3, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” from Telos 157 (Winter 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini’s article “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” is a discursive piece seeking to provide groundwork on the conception of the event and its theological and political dimensions. He coins this term “ongoing founding events” as a type of poetic gesture toward the movement of temporality to which events are founded, and which as a consequence of their founding then continue to contaminate the space around them. Bussolini claims that for Schmitt the event of decision generates sovereignty, and that within this basic movement, whether it be mythical or concrete reality at this point is unsure, becomes the generating and maintaining of political order.
Continue reading →
By Kellan Anfinson · Thursday, February 22, 2018 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.
Continue reading →
By Joshua Lawrence · Thursday, February 16, 2017 Although a frustrating incalculable for the engineers of government, religion must be acknowledged as that without which the techniques and technologies of human subjectivity would not exist. I am not here arguing for the adoption of certain religious practices or beliefs, but simply qualifying the centrality of the political by insisting on the necessity of the religious. I maintain that the asymmetry characteristic of all civilizations stems from ruptures that I describe as religious, or evental—terms that I maintain are equivalent. To probe the intricacies of asymmetrical warfare in the twenty-first century is to ask, “Whence and whither the Event?”
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Friday, May 20, 2016 In or Out? Debating Britain’s EU Membership
3rd Seminar: National Security & Global Influence
In association with the James Madison Charitable Trust, the Centre for Federal Studies at the University of Kent is organising a series of three seminars entitled “In or Out? Informing the political debate and popular opinion on UK’s EU membership.” These seminars will take place in the run-up to the referendum and focus respectively on the economy, politics, and security.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Monday, March 7, 2016 A panel on Renzo De Felice’s The Jews in Fascist Italy: An Historical Appraisal was held at the Calandra Institute on January 28, 2016. The panel included Frank Adler, Telos Editorial Associate and editor of Telos 164 (Fall 2013): Italian Jews and Fascism. Copies of Telos 164 can be purchased in our online store. Panelists explored the genesis of De Felice’s book and its place in contemporary historiography. Commissioned by the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities and published in 1961, it was the first study of the anti-Jewish persecution in Italy to reach a general audience. It was also a young historian’s first book on the Fascist era. This glance into a chapter of national history, that Italy had been quick to bury, set De Felice on a path to become one of the leading and most controversial scholars of Fascism. How was his attempt to capture an unsettling past received at the time of the book’s publication? What place does this book have in the current scholarship when many of its conclusions have been overturned after five decades of research on Italian state-sponsored anti-Semitism? And to which degree have the studies of Fascism and of the persecution of the Jews shed light on one another?
Continue reading →
|
|
