By Telos Press · Monday, December 3, 2012 The following review of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios appeared in the November edition of The Midwest Book Review‘s Small Press Bookwatch.
 Psychology is the study of human thought and processes, and all around the world people have brought different perspectives together for a better and more complete understanding of it all. The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios is an English translation of the 1938 German psychological writer Ernst Jünger who wrote on his perspective of the mind and what we seek in life, touching on the nature of intuition. Revered throughout the literary and psychological international communities, The Adventurous Heart is a strong read for those who want a better understanding of the man who saw much in his time of turmoil.
Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart is available for purchase here.
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By Göran Dahl · Friday, October 12, 2012 Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, reviewed in this essay, is available for purchase here.
I cannot refrain from first saying that this is a must read-book. That goes for those who are critical of “multiculturalism”—whatever this means—and for those wanting to defend it.
 Let us begin the central concept in this book—multiculturalism. I have, when confronted with the word, been wondering if the one who utters it is referring to an ideological ideal or a state of affairs. The authors use a similar distinction: multiculturalism is confusing since it is often not clear what is meant. It can be either an existing condition or a coming condition. This kind of use is descriptive. Then we have the normative one: a necessary way to think and act in a society when we have different (most often) ethnically based communities with different ideas on what is right or wrong. Just remember the Danish Mohamed cartoons from some years ago, and now recently the short film ridiculing “the prophet” available on YouTube. All of this has led to a discussion of whether there should be limits on free speech that involves ironies, jokes, pictures, etc., that could make religious believers feel insulted. The objection of many others, including me, is that in a modern, western liberal democracy one can say or illustrate any religious matter in whatever way you want. The public sphere is totally secular, or at least it should be so.[1] If you feel insulted, this is a private reaction, outside the public sphere. The bottom line would then be very simple: the public sphere gives anyone the right to argue his or her opinion, while civil society is the sphere of emotions. As long as these emotions remain just emotions, there is no problem. But the reason why this is an important book is that we have seen the emergence of leaders in the west who have considered limitations regarding free speech so that no minority gets insulted. If we follow this logic to its conclusion, then cartoons illustrating stereotypes of men, for example, should also illegal. A related problem is self-censorship, which many modern writers and artists have admitted suffering from. So the problem starts to get very complicated.
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By David Ost · Tuesday, November 1, 2011 David Ost’s review of Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full review online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing is available for purchase here.
 In this powerful short book on the horrific Soviet massacre of over 20,000 Polish reserve officers in 1940, Victor Zaslavsky utilizes recently opened Moscow archives to lay out what happened, and then argues that it was the result of a committed effort to wipe out a class. Unfortunately, that claim is not fully developed. Zaslavsky never specifies the identity of this class, and passes over the key role played by nationality. The fact that Ukrainian and Belarusian elite officers arrested from the same lands were spared—lands the Soviets were about to transfer from Polish to Soviet sovereignty—shows that not all elites were targeted equally, and that destroying those loyal to the now-dismantled Polish state (which in the pre-war period did constitute a genuine threat) was the primary consideration. The author’s equation of “classism” with “racism,” as just two different kinds of “discrimination,” is also challenged, on grounds that persecution based on the ascriptive characteristic of race differs fundamentally from efforts of class-based economic redistribution that most countries carry out, and that communist categories of class tended to be more fungible than Zaslavsky here allows.
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By François Debrix · Wednesday, July 18, 2007 This is the final part of a review of Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty, recently published by Telos Press Publishing and available in our store. Part 1 of the review is here, and part 2 is here. The review will soon appear in full in the journal.
 There is much to be admired in Paye’s path-breaking reflection on the nature of a new normative order that comes to life after the implementation of a permanent state of exception. And he must be congratulated for taking seriously what so many others have only announced, imagined, or theorized, and for performing the painstaking “archeological” work of uncovering the basic rules of formation of the new political regime that hides behind legal exceptionality. Still, towards the end of Global War on Liberty, Paye’s inability to provide a more innovative and thought-provoking critical conclusion is disappointing. Instead, Paye needlessly insists on retrieving the ideas of dictatorship and totalitarianism, as if those concepts could provide a grand conceptual finale to his study. Closing with these obsolete political concepts and labels does not do justice to the originality of Paye’s contribution and potentially diminishes its value. But there are two other errors that become obvious at the end of Global War on Liberty, and they are hard to reconcile with the rest of Paye’s analysis.
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By François Debrix · Tuesday, July 17, 2007 This is the second part of a review of Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty, recently published by Telos Press Publishing and available in our store. Part 1 of the review is here, and part 3 is here. The review will soon appear in full in the journal.
Beyond the Suspension of the Law
Paye writes that “the rule of law becomes increasingly formal, not only because its content, the protection of private life and the defense of individual and public liberties, turns out to be very limited, but also by the practical possibility offered to the executive power to free itself completely from the last safeguards of legal order” (34). He adds: “The strengthening of the executive relative to the other powers makes possible the general and permanent suspension of the law. It is the instrument for setting up a state of exception” (34). For Paye, the state of legal/constitutional exception implemented in most Western democracies is not about a temporary suspension of the law, one that might guarantee a preservation of existing democratic principles in countries like the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, or the European Union in general (the cases that Paye spends his time detailing in Global War on Liberty). More importantly, it is also more than a suppression of democratic legal and judicial systems, and of the individual rights that these normally guarantee, that would become a new rule of permanence, a new long-lasting condition of suspension of the rule of law, whereby politics could become the product of a succession of ad hoc decisions made by government officials and bureaucrats (as Agamben and others have intimated).
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By François Debrix · Monday, July 16, 2007 The following review will soon appear in Telos, and we are presenting it here on the Telos Press blog in three installments. Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty is available in our store.
Jean-Claude Paye. Global War on Liberty. Trans. James H. Membrez. New York: Telos Press, 2007. Pp. 261.
The state of emergency exists for the long term. It emerges as a new type of political system, dedicated to defending democracy and human rights. . . . [T]he citizen must be willing to renounce his/her concrete freedoms for a lengthy period of time in order to maintain a self-proclaimed and abstract democratic order. [1]
Belgian sociologist Jean-Claude Paye has collected several of his recent essays about the suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 in a single volume, La fin de l’état de droit, now translated, updated, and published by Telos Press under the title Global War on Liberty. [2] Paye’s essays over the past five to six years have positioned him as one of the leading critical voices of the post-9/11 era. His critique of the so-called democratic state—from the United States to Europe—and of the transformation of liberal systems of constitutional governance into police, military and security orders actually had been initiated before 9/11. [3] Unfortunately most social, political, and legal theorists (particularly in the English-speaking world) paid little attention to Paye’s incisive reflections prior to the terrorist attacks in the United States. The recent translation of some of his texts into English has given Paye’s scholarship the visibility it deserves. With the publication of Global War on Liberty, Paye finds a place among the critical theorists who must be read if one is to make sense of, carefully reflect upon, and devise challenges to the contemporary condition of state abuse, imperial domination, and proliferation of daily insecurities.
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