By Andreas Pantazopoulos · Monday, July 6, 2020 The following essay was originally published in French as “La Grèce et la pandémie: Quelques réflexions,” in Revue Politique, June 30, 2020, and appears here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
 It is widely recognized that Greece survived the difficult test of COVID-19 well. The international press has been writing about the “little Greek miracle” for more than a month: a country ravaged by the economic crisis of the past years has been able to resist the public health challenge better than many other European countries. And it is right to emphasize this unexpected success as due primarily to the speed of the government’s decisions, the closing of the borders, the strict lockdown of about two months, but also the population’s obedience to special laws issued by the authorities, both in terms of health and politics. Every evening at 6:00 PM, the epidemiologist Professor Sotirios Tsiodras spoke to the public directly on television about the measures taken and the track of the pandemic, in a calm, humane, and confident tone, showing appropriate emotions when he spoke of the deaths, turning into the family doctor, a personality familiar to everyone.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, June 17, 2020 The following essay is part of a group of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that appear in Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral, which is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 As of this writing, the precise origin of the Chinese virus, SARS CoV-2, remains unclear. It is however known that cases predated the eruption in the “wet market” in Wuhan—which in the meantime has been reopened, suggesting at least that Chinese authorities do not believe it was the source of the pandemic. The alternative theory that the virus escaped from experiments in one of Wuhan’s virology laboratories therefore remains plausible. In any case, it is certain that Wuhan was the first epicenter and that state authorities used repressive power to delay alerting the world by possibly more than a month. With that additional time, the spread of the disease might have been contained, or its dissemination at least impeded, if China and the World Health Organization had acted with transparency and integrity. They did not.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 15, 2020 Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 While “going viral” has taken on a new meaning by recuperating an old one, it is the virtual experience that seems to be more enduring. Not only has the pandemic sped up the shifting of human activity onto virtual platforms, but the viral dynamics of social media seem set to outlast the microbial versions: it has turned out to be easier to lock down the Wuhan virus than President Trump’s Twitter feed. Yet in both cases, it is unclear whether it is the actual spread or the fear that is the greater danger. For this fear leads to the call for more authoritarian measures, whether this means censoring Twitter posts or locking down the population. But if viral spread leads to the reassertion of sovereignty, we also come to realize that the freedoms we have taken for granted are in fact the result of a curated space, in which the rules for interaction have always formed the hidden framework within which our lives have unfolded. As these framing conditions come into focus during the crisis, we have the opportunity to reimagine them in such a way as to retrieve sovereignty not as a kind of authoritarian reaction but as an understanding of how our values must inform the boundaries we set. This issue of Telos considers how the experience of going viral has come to dominate our political life as well as how our reflection on this process can free us to consider the alternatives.
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By Pamela Carralero · Friday, June 12, 2020 Pamela Carralero’s “Scientific Modeling and the Environment: Toward the Establishment of Michel Serres’s Natural Contract” 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.
 In the sciences, the hypotheses driving the exploration of the natural world are often investigated via analogical transfer, meaning that the crux of scientific activity resides in the use and interpretation of models as tools that facilitate an accurate description of natural laws. The exact status of the model’s role and its lasting importance, however, remains a controversial topic among scientists and philosophers. For some, the model is a way of reaching a conclusive theorem or systematic statement; for others, including French philosopher Michel Serres, the model is a multifaceted space of translation that asks its interpreters to meditate on the inaccessible nature of what it makes accessible via ideogrammatic transcription.
Placing Serres in conversation with Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, this article argues that Serres provides the tools to theorize models as mediums through which to acknowledge and interact with the environment as that which is innately inaccessible to human knowledge. This is a first step toward establishing what he calls a “natural contract,” a union of life-giving reciprocity between humans and nonhumans that offers new conceptualizations of knowledge and science as practices free from the totalizing codifications of human verdicts. More specifically, this article imagines models as gateways between the inaccessible and accessible, arguing their value as a setting for the construction and play of scientific interpretations. It concludes by examining the relationship between modern climate models and the inaccessible in order to propose a techno-scientific, intra-temporal mentality of uncertainty from which a natural contract can develop.
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By Andrew Reszitnyk · Thursday, May 21, 2020 Andrew Reszitnyk’s “The Descent into Disanthropy: Critical Theory and the Anthropocene” 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. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
This essay suggests that the widespread engagement in humanities scholarship with the concept of the Anthropocene—the proposed geologic epoch in which humans figure as a terrestrial force and the planet appears as a human artifact—has given rise to a strain of critical theory that renounces the imperative to engage in politics. I argue that the notion of the Anthropocene has inspired a turn toward what Greg Garrard calls “disanthropy,” the tendency to fantasize about a world in which living human bodies are absent and to render human life into an abstract concept. Through an analysis of the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, I contend that, insofar as they have become disanthropic, many contemporary critical theorists have relinquished the capacity to engage critically with the influential and pernicious politico-economic ideology of neoliberalism. Although many scholars argue that we should view the Anthropocene as a vital provocation that opens up new corridors for environmentalist scholarship, I propose that we remain skeptical about the value of positing the Anthropocene at the center of critical inquiry. I suggest that the growing reputation of the idea of the Anthropocene has caused a significant segment of humanistic scholarship to enter into a political and philosophical détente with neoliberalism, with the effect that critical theory is becoming less and less capable of responding to the questions posed by the world outside the university.
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By Ross Etherton · Wednesday, April 29, 2020 Ross Etherton’s “Reading against the Gun: The Machine Gun and Sturm” 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. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
This essay examines the role of the machine gun in Ernst Jünger’s 1923 serially published novella Sturm, arguing that an examination of the novella’s key technological actant is at least as beneficial as an examination of the text’s human protagonists. It posits that reading Sturm in light of the machine gun and in the context of the material and cultural conditions of its original serial publication allows for a different understanding of the novella’s treatment of reading and writing under the conditions of modern mechanized warfare. The essay not only links the technical process at the heart of the gun (continuity derived from explosive interruption) to the explosive interruptions within the novella; it also links this interruptive continuity to the arbitrary, irregular breaks in its original serial publication. This technical-literary approach connects the literary scholarship on Sturm (primarily by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and David Pan) with one indebted to philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who sought to redress humanity’s profound alienation from technology and technical objects. The essay first outlines its approach to Sturm, and then provides readers with an overview of Sturm‘s publication history, contextualizing it within Jünger’s early works. It then examines the explosively interruptive moments of the novella, tying them to the machine gun and to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific, philosophical, and poetological discourses. It closes by gesturing toward the importance that the gun and the concepts embedded in it would have for Jünger in the decade following Sturm.
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