By Arthur Bradley · Wednesday, April 1, 2020 Arthur Bradley’s “Terrors of Theory: Critical Theory of Terror from Kojève to Žižek” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. 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 seeks to offer a new genealogy of contemporary critical theory of terror from Alexandre Kojève to Slavoj Žižek. It is clear that critical theory’s response to the volatile post-9/11 geopolitical landscape takes many forms, but one of its most controversial tasks has been a reclamation of the fatal signifier “terror” itself for the radical Left. According to thinkers such as Žižek and Alain Badiou, we must redeem the emancipatory core of the Jacobin Terror from its “Thermodorean” betrayal by two centuries of political and economic liberalism. Yet my claim is that this critical attempt to recuperate terrorism can only be understood in the context of a much longer debate about the meaning of “terror” within twentieth-century European philosophy, which stretches back to Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s. This essay tracks the evolution of critical theory of terror from Kojève’s political ontology of terror in his (famously or notoriously) idiosyncratic interpretation of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic to its contemporary conclusion in Žižek’s embrace of Jacobin terror. If Kojève’s lectures effectively introduced Hegel into twentieth-century European philosophy, I will argue that they were also the platform for a wave of neo-Hegelian reflections on the historical, political, and philosophical stakes of terror including, most importantly, Emmanuel Lévinas’s Time and the Other (1947) and Maurice Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” (1949). In conclusion, I contend that Žižek’s neo-Hegelian defense of the Jacobin leader Robespierre in recent works like In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) might, for better or worse, be read as the latest manifestation of this Kojèvean terrorist legacy.
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By Martin J. Sklar · Wednesday, May 25, 2016 This is the fourth in a series of posts that introduce the thought of historian Martin J. Sklar, as a prelude to a print symposium on his life and work in a future issue of Telos. Earlier excerpts of Sklar’s writing appear in the first, second, and third posts. For a fuller introduction, refer to the head note to the first TELOSscope post. As a researcher, Sklar was a historian of the United States, including its role in the world, particularly (from the late nineteenth century) as a promoter and guarantor (on balance) of a global system of expanding economic and political freedom. As a reader and informed commentator on international affairs, he was also deeply interested in broader issues in world history, particularly insofar as they shaped contemporary global conflicts. (Among the several dozen of Sklar’s books that I inherited are heavily marked and annotated copies of the following: John Yoo, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror; Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent; Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of 2,000 Years; and Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.) The following excerpts from a letter to John Yoo reflect Sklar’s evolving understanding of what he understood as an ongoing U.S. (and Western) war against Islamic imperialism. Of particular interest is his conceptualization of various sectarian, and even nominally secular, movements as sometimes-competing branches of an expansive, totalitarian movement.
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By Michael Allan · Friday, December 11, 2015 For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission glimmers like a shiny lure. The storyline contains the sorts of details that appeal to an easy and seductive journalistic gloss. The year is 2022. A charismatic Muslim prime minister is elected in France, and an almost caricatured series of events follows: men and women are separated; the university president converts to Islam and weds a young wife; professors are coerced to convert or retire early; and so on. Add to the plot Houellebecq’s professed Islamophobia and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and you have the ingredients of a newsworthy book to be addressed by critics, journalists, and readers across the world. Like a number of reviewers, I initially found myself lured to consider religion, secularism, and contemporary French politics against the backdrop of the newly published English translation. But as I began reading, I was confronted with a challenge of a different sort.
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By Giuseppe Tassone · Thursday, April 24, 2014 Giuseppe Tassone’s “Wicked Men, Evil World: Evil between Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism” appears in Telos 166 (Spring 2014). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton have recently deployed the neo-Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s notion of radical evil in favor of an emancipatory politics of terror. For Žižek, there is a “progressive” passion for the Real that is aimed at universal justice. Similarly, Eagleton insists that there is a “good” will to nothingness that, if embodied by the wretched of the earth—that is, the victims of global capitalism—can lead to a radical transformation of society. In this article, I argue that Žižek’s and Eagleton’s accounts of terror are problematic as long as they are based on the assumption that there is a fundamental ontological flaw in human will to which the most intractable horrors of history are to be traced down. Following Adorno, I contend that evil is a social category or, in Adornian terms, an expression of the oppressive totality of which individuals as such are not responsible, and that, in the rationalized society of late capitalism, evil individuals such as Iago and Richard III have become impossible.
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By Telos Press · Monday, November 4, 2013 We’re pleased to announce that Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 is now available for purchase as a Kindle eBook. To purchase the eBook, visit the Amazon.com product page or buy it from within your Kindle reader or mobile Kindle app.
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