By Mark Chou · Friday, January 20, 2012 Mark Chou’s “Morgenthau, the Tragic: On Tragedy and the Transition from Scientific Man to Politics Among Nations” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 When Hans J. Morgenthau first penned Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, it was his scorn of modern science or “dogmatic scientism,” as he put it, that spoke most loudly. But with the publication of Politics Among Nations several years later, his concerns had shifted, as he set about to present a rational theory of international politics. In a matter of only two years, or so it seemed, Morgenthau’s tune had changed—from a clear denunciation of science to the espousal of a nascent science of International Relations. Why did Morgenthau so vehemently decry dogmatic scientism and all that it embodied in Scientific Man, only to establish a theory of international politics that would eventually inspire the “science” of International Relations? The answer, at least the one that this article entertains, was tragedy. Using the lens of tragedy, which Morgenthau first embraced in Scientific Man, this article offers a narrative of the seemingly paradoxical transition that occurs between Scientific Man and Politics Among Nations.
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By Wesley Phillips · Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Wesley Phillips’s “Melancholy Science? German Idealism and Critical Theory Reconsidered” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
What is the relationship between theory and praxis today? During the 1960s, Adorno’s melancholy science was reproached with the charge of resignation, echoes of which have continued up to the present day—whether in Agamben or in praxis-oriented radical thought. In what is the most substantial critique to date, Gillian Rose initially sympathized with Adorno only to reject his neo-Kantian Marxism—the problem being that the melancholy science would involve a masochistically infinite task concerned with the recovery of an irretrievable utopia, leading to a methodological detachment from the social object. Understood in this way, the question of finite social praxis becomes an immanently philosophical matter. While following Rose’s orientation toward German idealism—for its imagined critique of neo-Kantianism and theory-ism—this article argues that, due to his unsatisfactory treatment of historical suffering, a return to Hegel alone (albeit after Marx) is insufficient. Rather, a dialectic of Hegel and his adversary Schelling suggests a distinctive account of determinate activity that avoids Melancholia without rejoicing the actuality of world spirit. This is made possible by way of an affinity between conceptions of melancholy and history in Schelling and Benjamin, from whom Adorno develops his traurige Wissenschaft.
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By Jakob Norberg · Thursday, January 12, 2012 Jakob Norberg’s “Day-to-Day Politics: Carl Schmitt on the Diary” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Early on in his career, Carl Schmitt articulated a cultural critique of the diary. He saw the personal journal as a manifestation and reinforcement of the writing subject’s vanity and self-importance in a sterile modern world. The resulting record, moreover, offered up the diarist’s inner life to the gaze of dissecting readers, who tended to convert polemical arguments into psychological symptoms. Yet Schmitt also kept something like a daily journal and was thus forced to struggle against the diary from within the genre itself. His post-1945 notebooks, entitled Glossarium, constitute a cultural battlefield upon which this struggle takes place. By means of strategies such as scathing portraits of famous diarists and displays of sententious concision, Schmitt sought to expel the diary from his own notebooks, or stage a paradoxical day-to-day resistance to the pathologies of the age emblematized in the diary form itself. The study of Schmitt’s non-diary ultimately sheds light on his political understanding of writing. For him, genres are never neutral vehicles of ideas but rather inflect thought in ideologically relevant ways.
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By David Randall · Wednesday, January 11, 2012 David Randall’s “Humean Aesthetics and the Rhetorical Public Sphere” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article aims to locate in the writings of David Hume the rhetorical aesthetics and philosophy of judgment that, under the name of “the conversable world,” constituted, in its essentials, the discursive, political, and moral project of Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere. Here the idea of the public sphere was shorn of the Kantian imperative to reason. Instead, Hume’s “conversable world” registered rhetorical assumptions—the key words reflecting the influence of rhetoric, and departing from Kantian strictures, were “disposition,” “pleasure,” and “best manner.” The existence of this Humean rhetorical aesthetics, as capable as Kant’s rationalizing aesthetics to claim itself as representative of the bourgeois public sphere, allows for the displacement of Kant’s aesthetics, in its historical aspect, from the conception of the public sphere. Humean rhetorical aesthetics, in turn, provide the essential historical component for the various ahistorical rhetorical critiques and revisions of Habermas’s public sphere theory, and of his philosophy writ large. It also allows for the formulation of what we may call a Humean public sphere. In contradistinction to the Kantian public sphere, the rhetorical philosophy of Hume associated the public sphere with a very different standard of judgment, a very different aesthetics, and a very different approach to teleology.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 19, 2011 Telos 157 (Winter 2011) is now available for purchase here.
The political disorder grows ever thicker. As of this writing, the European financial crisis seems as far away from resolution as ever, although the same complaint might have pertained three months ago nor is the diagnosis likely to lose its validity three months hence. The eurozone insists on tumbling toward an economic catastrophe that may drag the rest of the world down as well. Meanwhile prospects for a liberalizing democracy in the former Communist empire have largely vanished from living (or incarcerated) memory, and the trajectory of the Arab Spring poses more questions than answers. To be sure, things may still take a turn for the good, and the ignominious ends of some of the dictators merit celebration. Yet deserving candidates for violent overthrow and execution remain in power, in Damascus and Tehran, terrorizing their populations, amidst a larger civil war throughout the Middle East. Much of this disorder has profound local roots, stemming from competition among alternative religious traditions, political models, and economic agenda. But some of the instability results as well from the loss of ballast in the wake of the American retreat, itself a symptom of the chaos of American politics. The pre-primary period optimizes neither political virtue nor sober leadership, but even with that qualification, this lead-up to the 2012 electoral season stands out for its chilling hopelessness. It is hard to imagine a happy end to the story. The power of the state continues to expand, which undermines the integrity of individuals, but its capacity to influence the economy nonetheless diminishes. Disorder surrounds us, and the center gives way. Is there room for civic virtue?
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