By David Pan · Monday, March 24, 2025 Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Frustrating the hopes of cosmopolitans and globalists, state power is back. Rather than imagining a replacement of sovereignty with law, political debates now revolve around the particular forms that state sovereignty might take. Even Europe, long seeing itself as the place from which a new international legal order might expand its reach, is reinvesting in military power to protect its sovereignty from the threats posed by Russia, China, and, in some ways, the United States. Yet this realization about the continuing centrality of the state does not mean an abandonment of the moral imperatives and prejudices of the people. On the contrary, state power is being recognized as the instrument through which the people can exercise their will, even as the state places constraints on popular sovereignty. The essays in this issue of Telos consider the ways in which state power interacts with popular attitudes and social institutions in order to establish the basis for sovereignty and law.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, January 26, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Aryeh Botwinick about his article “Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. 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 192 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, December 1, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Mark G. E. Kelly about his article “Foucault and the Politics of Language Today,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. 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 David Pan · Friday, September 25, 2020 Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a strong temptation to oppose the idealism of truth to the realism of power in order to criticize and turn away from politics as a base pursuit. Science, facts, and ideals are cited as the objective truths that so often are ignored in favor of ideology, lies, and self-interest by those who wield power. Yet this opposition between truth and power can itself become a dubious tactic, as it is often the speaker who seeks to define an opinion as truth. This situation is complicated by the circumstance that there are three forms of truth that are often merged in such discussions.
First, there are natural scientific truths that even autocrats and totalitarians do not seek to deny, as they are the source of the technological tools that can support any attempt to maintain power. Here, there is certainly no conflict between truth and power. Not only does political power depend on technological achievement, but natural scientific facts cannot be covered up by lies and ideology for long. Consequently, political actors must pay attention to natural scientific and technical knowledge, even if they then instrumentalize it in different ways.
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By Erik Pomrenke · Wednesday, January 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, Erik Pomrenke looks at Andrew J. Mitchell’s “Entering the World of Pain: Heidegger” from Telos 150 (Spring 2010).
Heidegger’s thinking of pain allows for a positive revaluation of pain as openness, not closure, to the world. Andrew J. Mitchell contends in his “Entering the World of Pain: Heidegger,” that “pain is the surest sign that we wholly belong to this world; in fact, pain is nothing other than our contact with the world and our ‘openness’ to it.” Mitchell situates Heidegger against two popular accounts of pain: Freudian psychoanalysis and the humanist interpretation of pain as articulated by Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain. Both models oppose pain and openness to the world and therefore see pain as a withdrawal from meaning. Within psychoanalysis, this takes place in the disengagement of cathexis—divestment of libido from love objects. Within the broadly humanist account, world and body are opposed. When the body demands attention, it necessitates a withdrawal from and contraction of the world. Scarry’s thought is structured by such binary oppositions as pain and meaning, interiority and exteriority, and it will be the task of Heidegger’s thinking of pain to reconfigure these oppositions by holding up pain and language as co-original phenomena—a task that Mitchell illustrates by reading Trakl.
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By Devin Lefebvre · Thursday, June 8, 2017 For many today, Claude Lefort is a thinker known mainly by association, someone whose work emerges where others are asked to situate their projects relative to his thinking of the political. He is a prominent, if not central, figure for the more post-structuralist thinkers of radical democracy. Lefort’s sense of democracy—as that form of society where the place of power is empty—is vital to those projects that would likewise tie democracy to the symbolic character of power, and to the distinct workings of politics and the political. Interestingly, while debate over the correct translation of le or la politique seems to almost always return to Lefort, it remains the case that for his own part Lefort was never much interested in post-structuralism. For him, the post-structural turn, itself bound up with the legacies of May 1968 and the new knowledge, obfuscated almost as much as it made clear.
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