By Dianna Taylor · Thursday, May 5, 2011 Dianna Taylor ‘s “Countering Modernity: Foucault and Arendt on Race and Racism” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
 This article explores what the works of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt reveal about ways in which harm manifests itself within the context of modern societies, and about how the terrain of modernity might be negotiated such that harm is minimized and the practice of freedom is promoted. Focusing on the specific harm of racism, the article examines how Arendt’s account of the rise and function of Nazism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem reflects a concern with key aspects of the modern form of power that Foucault refers to as biopower. Two important points are derived from this analysis: First, Foucault and Arendt see racism, specifically as reflected in Nazism, as paradigmatic of the destructive potential of modernity. Second, Foucault’s and Arendt’s analyses of Nazi racism as a paradigmatic modern harm reflect a critical “counter-attitude” toward modernity. This counter-attitude provides valuable insight into the workings of and harms produced by modern power and thereby facilitates productive negotiation of the modern landscape.
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By Alice Ormiston · Friday, April 29, 2011 Alice Ormiston’s “A Tragic Desire: Rousseau and the Modern Democratic Project” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
This article begins by showing how the desire for justice in the modern democratic tradition is a manifestation of a deeper drive toward unity between nature and reason, as well as self and community. The bulk of the article explores Rousseau’s works as a demonstration that this drive towards unity is tragic in nature—it cannot be fully realized, and at the same time cannot be given up. Furthermore, Rousseau’s inability to accept this desire as tragic, his insistent attempts at creating a total unity between nature and reason, and self and community, leads to its own secondary set of tragedies in his works and his life. The tragic nature of the modern democratic orientation must be recognized and integrated, in order to avoid these secondary tragedies.
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By Marcelo Hoffman · Friday, April 22, 2011 Marcelo Hoffman’s “Containments of the Unpredictable in Arendt and Foucault” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
This article takes as its principal provocation Giorgio Agamben’s claim that Hannah Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism do not obtain a biopolitical perspective and that, conversely, Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics fall short of adequately addressing totalitarian states, thereby leaving us with mutually compatible absences. I offer an alternative to this dichotomous reading that ultimately develops into a critique of Arendt’s treatment of birth. I suggest that even as Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism and Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics express diverging arguments about transformations in Western political theory and practice, they nevertheless accentuate the production of predictable states of life. In light of this broad affinity, what stands out is Arendt’s identification of birth as a source of the disruption of predictable states of life whereas Foucault implicitly contests the disruptive potential of birth. This difference matters because it opens up a critical space wherein Arendt appears to fall back on a biological position that she eschews elsewhere and wherein Foucault provides a much-needed remedy to this position.
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By Rahul Govind · Tuesday, April 19, 2011 Rahul Govind’s “Equality, Right, and Identity: Rethinking the Contract through Hobbes and Marx” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
The following essay is an investigation into the nature of the contract, the way in which the contract indexes “right” and equality, and the textual and historical expressions—as well as echoes—that this has taken from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx. The opening set of conceptual remarks lead to a reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan and Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” arguing that both texts were concerned with theoretically explicating the relationship between right and equality, germane to which was the problematic of the “nation”/community, which was itself conceived via the “Jewish question.” The essay argues that only an attention to Marx’s reformulation of the older problematic, as found in Hobbes, will help us understand the significance of his critique of the (post–)French Revolutionary theory of abstract right, and thereby the need for the development and critique of the field of political economy. Through this exposition of the thread between the conceptualization of the political and political economy, it seeks to reconfigure the canonical texts of Hobbes and Marx in rethinking the interrelations between right, equality, and community within a historico-philosophical horizon.
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By David Randall · Friday, April 15, 2011 David Randall’s “Empiricism, the New Rhetoric, and the Public Sphere” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the early modern public sphere derived in good part from a Kantian epistemology and the corollary Kantian theory of communication. Yet we can, and should, instead conceive of the public sphere as rhetorical in nature, and therefore substitute a rhetorical epistemology and theory of communication for the Kantian equivalents that underpin Habermas’s account. But if rhetoric is to be substituted for Kantian reason in an account of the early modern public sphere, one must argue the existence of an intellectual tradition of rhetorical philosophy concurrent with and parallel to that of Habermas’s Kantian tradition, and equally able to claim itself both representative of the thought of the age and indicative of the thought and practice of the multitude. This historically situated rhetorical philosophy did exist. The empirical tradition itself, from Locke through Hume, preserved an astonishing amount of rhetorical thought. Secondly, the tradition of New Rhetoric, as exemplified by figures such as Adam Smith, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair, reconceived rhetoric around empirical epistemology. The intellectual tradition that leads from Locke, through Hume, to George Campbell has as much claim as the Kantian tradition to articulate, and represent, the practice of the early modern public sphere.
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By Alexandre Lefebvre · Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Alexandre Lefebvre’s “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.
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