By Jennifer Wang · Tuesday, November 9, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at John Hughes and Matthew Bullimore’s “What is Radical Orthodoxy?” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
 In “What is Radical Orthodoxy?” John Hughes and Matthew Bullimore provide a fascinating overview of Radical Orthodoxy’s intervention into a philosophical and theological climate that they considered stale. Rooted in the Cambridge theological tradition, this project also draws on thinkers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Alasdair MacIntyre in order to critique the violence of secular social theories. Currently, its three main figures are John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, who, in 1999, along with various supporters, issued a manifesto “proclaiming the bankruptcy of the secular and the urgent necessity to return to the theological afresh.” For them, the theological is able to account for the secular as a heretical deviation from orthodox Christianity (as found in the writings of the Church Fathers and Doctors like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), which alone is truly radical. This paradoxical position has attracted criticism from theologians both liberal and conservative, as well as from opposing camps on issues in philosophy and politics. Hughes and Bullimore, however, think that they are not striking a middling compromise:
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By Jennifer Wang · Tuesday, September 28, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s “Relationality: The Gift After Ontotheology,” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
The term ontotheology has come to mean the relegation of God to a being among beings, or, even further, the entrapment of God within Being. In “Relationality: The Gift After Ontotheology,” Mary-Jane Rubenstein asks whether we must discard Being as an improper name of God and adopt what she takes to be a unilateral concept of the gift in order to overcome ontotheology. Drawing on John Milbank, she proposes that we think of Being and the gift as conditioned on Trinitarian exchange, a conception that accentuates reciprocity rather than either self-abandonment, never-ending obligation, or perpetual uncertainty.
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By Jennifer Wang · Tuesday, September 7, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at Amos Morris-Reich’s “Simmel’s and Lacan’s Ethics of the Exception,” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
In “Simmel’s and Lacan’s Ethics of the Exception,” Amos Morris-Reich examines in parallel the theoretical proximity of Simmel and Lacan’s post-Kantian ethics of the exception. Historically, the Kantian universal rule met its end at the outbreak of World War I, the horrors of which opened up space for theories on the exception to the rule that did not consider such a structure oxymoronic. The theories of both Lacan and Simmel address the monstrosity of the twentieth century, but are not exclusive to it. They are shown to formulate a structure of rule and exception that takes for inputs life, death, and money. To the question posed by medieval robbers (“your life or your money?”), life is unanimously chosen but what’s of interest is the contradictory ethics grounding each decision.
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By Jennifer Wang · Tuesday, July 6, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at Dominic Moran’s “Decisions, Decisions: Derrida on Kierkegaard and Abraham,” from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).
In “Decisions, Decisions: Derrida on Kierkegaard and Abraham,” Dominic Moran attempts to use deconstructive critique on Derrida’s notion of decision as it is relevant to ethics, justice, and political responsibility. In particular, Moran’s is a critique of how practicable the sort of decision advanced by Derrida is, if at all. In the end, he concludes that it is not: a deconstructive ethics cannot even be considered paradoxical but rather is strictly contradictory in its relation of theory to practice. Moran sets Derrida’s engagement with politics in the aftermath of the de Man scandal and the ensuing criticism that deconstruction’s political possibilities tend toward nihilism and radical relativism. He is generous, however, in granting that Derrida is not entirely reactionary, for engagement with the political is the final stage in deconstruction’s development.
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By Michael Gorup · Tuesday, May 18, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Michael Gorup looks at Hans Sluga’s “The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt,” from Telos 142 (Spring 2008).
 The ostensibly simplest questions are always the most deceiving. Socrates, of course, knew this quite well. His childlike questioning, more often than not met with awestruck confusion, has continued to animate philosophical discourse for well over two millennia. The Socratic inheritance—mostly evidently exemplified by the “what is . . . ?” question structure—forms the implicit grounding for Hans Sluga’s comparative study of the political thought of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. The key question here, of course, is that of politics: namely, “What is politics?” The writings of Arendt and Schmitt form the two most significant twentieth-century corpuses that attempt to answer precisely this question. In Sluga’s account, the primary issue at hand in thinking the political is, for both Arendt and Schmitt, the question of pluralism (or in Arendt’s idiom, plurality). For both thinkers it is fundamental for politics that we are both many and different, though this ontological grounding plays out quite differently in either case.
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By Francisco Unger · Tuesday, March 23, 2010 On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Francisco Unger looks at John Milbank’s “Liberality versus Liberalism,” from Telos 134 (Spring 2006).
 John Milbank’s article “Liberality and Liberalism,” as evidenced by its suggestive title, pulls some of the conventional punches. There is a dichotomy between the values of the Enlightenment-affected liberal mindset and the real turnout of liberal institutions. Crass egotism in the market, chilled international relations, and a profaned life for the individual are the fruits of a social model that bases itself on supposedly “natural” conditions of humanity and utility. The unconventional part of Milbank’s critique rests precisely in his religious foundations. He wants a revival, or perhaps the birth, of radical social criticism based on Catholic theology. There is probably some ire to Milbank’s voice, because he is challenging a liberalism that thought it had put such religious dissidence to rest—therein the “liberality” of the marketplace, in which all are accommodated and all space is taken over. But Milbank believes post-Enlightenment efforts for reform based on secular grounds have mostly come to naught. Looking around in the present day, the reader is likely sympathetic. The entrance of divine grace into human life, the Christian guiding light of charity, and the notion of an exchange of gifts as the only fair exchange (non-exploitative), are all solutions to our unhappy liberal aporia. At least that is Milbank’s story.
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