By Lillian Hingley · Thursday, September 19, 2019 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Shannon Mariotti’s “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009).
 In her article “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy,” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009), Shannon Mariotti claims that Adorno’s Minima Moralia ultimately rejects psychoanalysis for reinforcing the reification that it was supposed to resist. She argues that Adorno is particularly concerned with an American psychodynamic therapy that empties psychoanalysis of its European “pessimism” and that instead seeks “happiness” rather than a mere “cure.” While some points in Mariotti’s argument and a more critical psychoanalysis are not incompatible, her cautious application of Adorno’s critique of psychoanalysis to a contemporary context suggests that Minima Moralia might provide a useful framework for interpreting modern American pharmaceutical psychology. In turn, this brief analysis adds context to Mariotti’s grant of practical space to mental illness in therapy rather than seeing it as something to be merely glossed over. Indeed, she gives today’s readers a blueprint for carefully applying Adorno’s thinking to contemporary American therapeutic practices.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Thursday, October 18, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” from Telos 4 (Fall 1969).
Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” (1928) continues his efforts at fusing a contemporary form of Marxism with the work of his doctoral supervisor Martin Heidegger and his phenomenological project in Sein und Zeit (1927). The central tenet that Marcuse uses to construct a thread between Marxism and phenomenology is the analysis of the concrete and the correctness of knowledge as a truth related to this concreteness. The significance of Marxism as a theory of analysis is its self-reflexivity, the means by which it reflects on the process of historicity itself and, in addition to this, the processes of becoming that it undergoes as a result of its historical analysis. The difference here is that phenomenology claims to investigate the essences of things but does not concern itself with its own method or with a dialectical approach between the abstract and concrete, which inevitably occur as one attempts to capture a representation of an object.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Wednesday, October 3, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Damien Booth’s “Hegel’s Philosophy of Physics and Kant’s Noumena” from Telos 179 (Summer 2017).
Damien Booth’s article “Hegel’s Philosophy of Physics and Kant’s Noumena” addresses Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the positing of the noumena, the realm beyond the sensible, which for Hegel results in entanglements and contradiction, Kantian antinomies that the dialectic could resolve. While the article appears to be an exposition of the contradiction of Kant’s noumena and its critique in Hegel, Booth turns to Adorno and Heidegger to accentuate the relevance of Kant’s modern project of philosophy and Hegel’s critique.
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By Lillian Hingley · Thursday, May 31, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Peter Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism” from Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91).
Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) is one of the landmark texts on aesthetic theory published in the twentieth century. One of the book’s significant claims is that modernism and the avant-garde should be defined as distinct aesthetic movements; specifically, he defines modernism as the less radical cousin of the avant-garde. This distinction is important to note because it is also the crux of Bürger’s thesis in a later article, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” a historicist critique of Adorno’s “modernist” aesthetic theory that was published in Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91). By acknowledging the pre-established position Bürger was bringing to this article, we can question how useful his distinction may be when constructing an Adornian aesthetic theory today.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Tuesday, April 3, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” from Telos 157 (Winter 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini’s article “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” is a discursive piece seeking to provide groundwork on the conception of the event and its theological and political dimensions. He coins this term “ongoing founding events” as a type of poetic gesture toward the movement of temporality to which events are founded, and which as a consequence of their founding then continue to contaminate the space around them. Bussolini claims that for Schmitt the event of decision generates sovereignty, and that within this basic movement, whether it be mythical or concrete reality at this point is unsure, becomes the generating and maintaining of political order.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Monday, March 12, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013).
It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects.
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