By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Tuesday, April 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 Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” from Telos 157 (Winter 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini’s article “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” is a discursive piece seeking to provide groundwork on the conception of the event and its theological and political dimensions. He coins this term “ongoing founding events” as a type of poetic gesture toward the movement of temporality to which events are founded, and which as a consequence of their founding then continue to contaminate the space around them. Bussolini claims that for Schmitt the event of decision generates sovereignty, and that within this basic movement, whether it be mythical or concrete reality at this point is unsure, becomes the generating and maintaining of political order.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, March 28, 2018 The ethnic cleansing in Syria is hardly a secret, but it continues unabated. A Syrian refugee and a Holocaust survivor have collaborated on an appeal that includes the following crucial paragraph:
The starvation, the torture, the siege and the chemical attacks in Syria can be stopped. Assad’s military is far from invincible; the Israeli strikes on Syrian air defenses last month showed that. After years of appeasement-style diplomacy have yielded only more body bags by an emboldened Assad, grounding Assad’s air force is the last option left to stop the slaughter.
Please read the full text here.
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By Mitchell Dean · Tuesday, March 27, 2018 It is difficult to know what constitutes the latest social media “scandal” for the news organizations that promote it as such. Of course, it follows the seemingly unending political concerns around social and digital media since the election of President Trump and other cornerstone events such as the Brexit vote. It stands in the long line of concerns about email hacking, Russian “meddling,” “fake news,” undignified presidential tweeting, and bots, and the indictments of workers of a Russian internet agency. There is the more general, but somewhat vacuous, thesis that the “politics of truth” has been replaced by a “politics of untruth.” Within this framing, there is the sense that “democracy” is under attack through social media; that populists, the “alt-right,” shady billionaire donors, foreign authoritarians and nativist Svengalis have found secret pathways to sow discontent within Western democracies and tip elections and plebiscites to previously unconscionable leaders and unimaginable outcomes.
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By Kenneth D. Johnson · Monday, March 19, 2018 Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., is now available for purchase in our store.
 1968 was a tough year for the United States and for many around the world. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam started in January, and the My Lai massacre occurred there in March. In Paris, the student uprising started in May. The Prague Spring, during which Czechoslovakian activists sought a measure of greater freedom for their country from the Soviet Union, was crushed by Warsaw Pact military forces in August. Police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, beating student protestors indiscriminately in the streets. The Weather Underground emerged in October, and black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their gloved Black Power salute as a protest during the Mexico City Olympics that same month. Richard M. Nixon was elected as president in November. And, there were two pivotal deaths: Robert F. Kennedy in June, and Reverend King in April. After King’s assassination, many U.S. cities erupted in flames as their African American residents protested his killing and the moribund state of civil rights progress at the time of King’s death.
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By Telos Press · Sunday, March 18, 2018 In Azade Seyhan’s article “Erdoğan and the Intellectuals,” which appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017), the institutional affiliation of Prof. Nilüfer Göle was incorrectly reported. Her correct affiliation is the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
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By Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey · Monday, March 12, 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 Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013).
It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects.
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The Massacre in Syria: An Appeal for Support
The ethnic cleansing in Syria is hardly a secret, but it continues unabated. A Syrian refugee and a Holocaust survivor have collaborated on an appeal that includes the following crucial paragraph:
Please read the full text here.
Continue reading →