By J. E. Elliott · Thursday, August 1, 2019 J. E. Elliott’s “Insourcing Dissent: Brand English in the Entrepreneurial University” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 This essay addresses the emergence of dissent culture as a hallmark of teaching and research in English studies and the humanities more generally in the time and temper of the commercial-bureaucratic university. I argue that the most convincing explanation for the widespread adoption of a protest ethos in an institution ostensibly opposed to its prescriptions is not a paradigm shift from formalist to political approaches to texts and artifacts, much less principled opposition to late Western capitalism or technological reason, but a reproduction of the routines, scripts, norms, and values of American higher education as an entrepreneurial enterprise. Dissent, in other words, is an organizationally conservative force: it animates disciplinary alternatives to STEM and business curricula while articulating a remedial narrative of inclusiveness (“diversity”) that bears witness to American higher education’s residual commitments to political engagement and democracy building. This insourcing of protest has assured English studies’ viability in the corporate university by reconfiguring the discipline as an academic brand alongside Brand Science and Brand Business in the organizational field of the university. To the extent that the politics of advocating for the disempowered and marginalized is an in-house creation without demonstrable political or policy-related impact, however, dissent culture can also be read as a reflexive (and symptomatic) protest against its own institutional capture. The essay concludes with a discussion of prospective alterations to Brand English in light of recent developments in the digital humanities.
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By Qi Zheng · Wednesday, July 24, 2019 Qi Zheng’s “Carl Schmitt, Justice of War, and Individual Citizen’s Obligation” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 Carl Schmitt produced the original text of “The International Crime of the War of Aggression and the Principle ‘Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege‘” in 1945. The fundamental issue of the text concerns an individual citizen’s obligation in international law toward his national government in the event of an unjust war. Schmitt’s analysis of the issue is based on his perception of politics as the relationship between protection and obedience. However, his understanding of this relationship is not consistent with what he proposed in his other major works, i.e., that the relationship is a collective one. In order to support the argument in his 1945 text, Schmitt completely abandoned his collective understanding of the relationship and changed it to an individualistic understanding. This paper explores the subtle but important change in Schmitt’s argument.
This paper is divided into two sections. The first section reconstructs Schmitt’s arguments on an individual citizen’s right to resistance in international law. It focuses on two questions: whether an individual citizen has the right to judge the justice of war and whether individuals have an obligation in international law to disobey the government if they find that their government is conducting an unjust war. The second section examines Schmitt’s argument about the relationship between protection and obedience.
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By King-Ho Leung · Thursday, July 18, 2019 King-Ho Leung’s “Living Paradoxes: On Agamben, Taylor, and Human Subjectivity” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Over the last two decades, Giorgio Agamben and Charles Taylor have produced important and influential genealogical works on the philosophical and political conceptions of secularity. Yet in their recent work, both of these thinkers have respectively returned to a prominent theme in their earlier works: human life. This essay offers a parallel reading of Agamben and Taylor as post-Heideggerian critics of the modern conception of human subjectivity. Through examining these their respective characterizations of modern subjectivity—namely, Taylor’s account of the “disengaged self” and Agamben’s conception of the “excluded-included” bare life—this essay seeks to highlight not only the Heideggerian currents underlying the philosophical anthropologies of Agamben and Taylor, but also the ontological paradoxicalities they detect in the conception of human existence and subjectivity in politico-philosophical modernity. After reviewing the different aspects of Agamben’s and Taylor’s critiques of modern subjectivity as well as the traditional metaphysical conception of humans as “language animals,” this essay concludes by sketching a robust and affirmative “paradoxical” conception of human beings as “language animals” that simultaneously takes into account the insights from Taylor’s (post)analytic philosophical renewal of Aristotelianism and Agamben’s critical analysis of contemporary biopolitics in the continental philosophical tradition.
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Melayna Lamb and German E. Primera’s “Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
This paper both rejects the reading of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as a secularized katechon and rethinks anew the questions of sovereignty and politics in his thought. It does so by examining the eschatological character of his politico-theological understanding of the relation between the kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God. Indeed, through different contemporary readings of Hobbes’s theory of the state, this paper offers an insight into the concrete eschatology at operation in Hobbes’s thought and underscores its relevance for the understanding of government, biopolitics, and sovereignty. This is achieved through two different, albeit interconnected undertakings, which in turn allow us to agree but also to go beyond Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the state, in Hobbes, does not have a katechontic function. The first is an exposition of the a-teleological character of Hobbes’s eschatology and his metaphysics of motion. The second involves a consideration of the temporality and the nature of the relation between the ahistorical world of reason and the historical world of faith that underpins Hobbes’s theory of the state. Contrary to the contemporary interpretations in which Hobbes’s eschatology is presented as future regarding, we will highlight the chronological coincidence between the historical time of faith and the ahistorical time of the Leviathan, placing Hobbes within the political coordinates of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. By bringing this eschatological perspective to the fore, not only will the reading of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty that aligns him with liberalism be problematized, but also an analysis of the resources that Hobbes offers to imagine a different form of politics will be developed.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 17, 2019 Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.
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