By Dafna Zur · Friday, November 16, 2018 Dafna Zur’s “You Can’t Write ‘Pak’ on Television: Language as Power in Hebrew K-pop Fandom” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. 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.
Korean popular culture first arrived in Israel with the airing of Sweet Samsoon in 2007. What began as a cable channel’s cautious experiment with the tastes of a fan base accustomed to South American telenovelas turned into an unpredictably successful venture. Korean dramas have since appeared regularly both on cable TV and through fansub sites, delivering romantic comedies, action-packed adventures, and historical dramas to their fans. The reception of Korean pop culture in Israel challenges a traditional understanding of its reception around the world since Israel falls neither within the region that has facilitated Korean pop culture’s transnational circulation, nor have Israel and Korea enjoyed an extended political or economic exchange that would facilitate the reception of Korean cultural products.
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By Peter Yoonsuk Paik · Tuesday, November 6, 2018 Peter Yoonsuk Paik’s “The Korean Wave and the Impasse of Theory” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. 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.
South Korean popular culture has achieved startling success across much of the globe during the past decade. The first transnational form of popular culture that is not the legacy of an imperial project, the efforts to understand the significance of the “Korean wave” have been hampered by dominant scholarly approaches in the humanities that are not capable of grasping both its emergence and its appeal. This article argues that a key reason for the appeal of South Korean television and film is the fact that they explore the clash between tradition and modernity. South Korean media resonates with peoples across the world who are living out the conflicts between tradition and modernity and are thus eager for models for negotiating the competing demands of the two.
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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 Haerin Shin · Monday, September 24, 2018 Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store.
 While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
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By Fabrice Balanche · Friday, September 14, 2018 With the re-establishment of Bashar al-Assad’s power in Syria, the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and finally the political and military victory of pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, it is clear that an Iranian axis now prevails in the Levant. The strength of this geopolitical axis is reinforced by the territorial continuity between Tehran and Beirut via Damascus and Baghdad: “the Iranian land bridge” or “Iranian corridor,” controlled by Iranian troops directly and by proxies. Since the Shia militias joined the Syrian-Iraqi border in May 2017, the Iranian land bridge has continued to expand, despite the U.S. troop presence on both sides, in the al-Tanef pocket and in northeastern Syria. Until spring 2017, the West seemed incredulous about this reality. However, at that time, it was already too late to block the Shiite militias in eastern Syria, and the Iranian land bridge became a reality.
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