The Telos Press Podcast: Justin Neville Kaushall on Adorno's Aesthetic Category of the Shudder

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Justin Neville Kaushall about his article “Natural Spontaneity, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Category of the Shudder,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Lenka Ucnik on Hannah Arendt, Critical Thinking, and Political Action

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Lenka Ucnik about her article “Conscience, Morality, Judgment: The Bond between Thinking and Political Action in Hannah Arendt,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Takahiro Nakajima on Constitutional Problems in Japan

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Takahiro Nakajima about his article “Constitutionalism and Sovereignty: On Constitutional Problems in Japan,” from Telos 189 (Winter 2019). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 189 in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer

This essay appeared in Le Figaro on December 8, 2020, and this translation by Russell A. Berman is published with permission of the author. Hyperlinks are from the original, while footnotes have been added by the translator. Translator’s comments are here.

In the face of a very real Islamist threat that has led to violence and which the proposed law on “separatism” attempts to address, it is interesting to try to raise the level of the debate. It is necessary to inquire calmly into a question that worries those thinkers least inclined to emotional reactions. In contrast to a Christianity drained of its former ambitions, why is it that Islam has not given up its virulent proselytism and instead appears to pose a threat for the future?

This is a threat that de Gaulle already recognized in one of his extraordinary communications to Alain Peyrefitte, when he declared: “We are after all a European people of the white race, Greco-Latin culture, and the Christian religion.” And he considered Algerian independence necessary to prevent his village from being one day renamed “Colombey-the-two-Mosques”—which does not at all mean that he intended to exclude other “races” or religions. He understood France too well to endorse a narrow or xenophobic vision of it.

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Secularism, Islamism, and Christianity in France: Introduction to Jean-Marie Rouart

Jean-Marie Rouart, a prolific French author and, since 1997, a member of the French Academy, published “Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer,” in Le Figaro on December 8 and available in English translation here with the author’s permission. While the essay’s starting point is the challenge of Islamism in France and the efforts by the Macron government to address it, it explores a much wider matrix that includes the historical process of secularism, the status of Christianity in France (and, by extension, in the West more broadly), the role of tradition in national identity, and the imperative of the sacred in any culture. This complex array of ideas has implications far beyond France, yet it also indicates how today’s France has become ground zero for the cultural conflicts around secularization, Christianity, and Islam. To understand Rouart’s argument, one needs first to consider this specific context. What makes this topic urgent now?

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The Telos Press Podcast: Loren Goodman on the Japanese Constitution as a Poetic Text

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Loren Goodman about his article “Poetic Impositions: Japanese–U.S. Constitutional Problems of Peace and Tranquility,” from Telos 189 (Winter 2019). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 189 in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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