By Michael Marder · Wednesday, February 13, 2013 Michael Marder’s “After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself (or else gets exhausted, tired, fatigued with itself) in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying, inextinguishable. How to find one’s bearings among the cinders and ashes of what the flames consumed? How to make sense—if make sense we must—of the burnt and smoldering remains, the traces of catastrophes, as much as of hopes and revolutionary desires, littering the horizons of the political today?
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By Adrian Pabst · Thursday, January 31, 2013 Adrian Pabst’s “The Politics of Paradox: Metaphysics beyond ‘Political Ontology'” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
Since the onset of the Enlightenment, much of modern thought has celebrated the end of metaphysics and the death of God. The project of “political ontology,” which combines post-metaphysical with post-theistic thinking, underpins the scientific rationalism that pervades contemporary philosophy and politics. Faced with the secular slide into skepticism, relativism, and nihilism, this essay argues that the only genuine alternative to “political ontology” is a metaphysical politics of paradox. Philosophically, modernity and postmodernity invented and intensified the onto-theological science of transcendental ontology that can be traced to Scotus, Ockham, Machiavelli, and Suárez. They bequeathed three currents—possibilism, transcendentalism, and absolutism—that flow through figures such as Descartes, Wolff, and Clauberg to Kant, Hegel, and Comte.
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By Andrea Salvatore · Monday, January 21, 2013 Andrea Salvatore’s “The Tragic Theory of Carl Schmitt” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
The present note aims to suggest a tragic reading of Carl Schmitt’s thought within a post-metaphysical perspective. The argument is divided into two parts. In the first—the meaning of the tragic dimension—I deal with Schmitt as a theorist of the tragic, that is, with the concept of tragedy that can be induced from Schmitt’s philosophy as a unitary whole. In the second part—the actuality of the tragic era—I will consider Schmitt as a pathologist of the tragic, by summarizing the diagnosis of the modernity he explicitly points out in his major works. The first thesis states that any normative and/or political order constitutively depends on a fundamental set of factual pre-conditions, whose actual enforcement in turn depends on a contextual and epochal contingency, beyond human control. If so, the range of human agency is determined by a super-human contextual contingency, to such an extent that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide everything. The second thesis states that the contemporary era is irretrievably characterized by a set of factual pre-conditions that makes any ultimate decision and political order unfeasible. If so, late modernity’s contingency is determined by the lack of any ordering principle and foundational reality, with the consequence that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide something. The awareness of the vital necessity of something lacking, and still impossible to restore, marks the tragic character of Schmitt’s thought considered in its consistent whole.
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By Aryeh Botwinick · Friday, January 11, 2013 Aryeh Botwinick’s “Liberal Democracy, Negative Theory, and Circularity: Plato and Rawls” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
This paper argues that the best kind of philosophical defense of democracy is one that is worked out within the framework of negative theory. The phrase “negative theory” is being used on analogy with the term negative theology. Just as negative theology argues that we can only indefinitely say what God is not but cannot pinpoint in a positive sense what He is, so, too, negative theory advocates that we can only ceaselessly explore and highlight the limitations of reason, without being able to arrive at a positive content that is incontrovertible and uncontestable.
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By Paul Rekret · Thursday, January 3, 2013 Paul Rekret’s “The Impasse of Post-Metaphysical Political Theory: On Derrida and Foucault ” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
The debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault over the status of Descartes’ Meditations can be read to indicate some profound implications for the ways by which we conceive of a post-metaphysical political theory. This article documents the way in which the terms of the debate suggest that in conceiving politics after metaphysics in terms of competing accounts of the contingency of Being or, in Stephen White’s words, as weak ontologies, we are lead towards a profound paradox and impasse. To suggest that there is broad agreement in post-metaphysical political thought regarding the instability of ontology and the consequent theoretical task of questioning the grounds or foundations of particular political concepts or institutions is to overlook a fundamental paradox. What the debate between Derrida and Foucault in fact indicates is that these differing weak ontologies are in fact incommensurable with one another.
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