By Telos Press · Wednesday, March 23, 2016 Asymmetrical Warfare:
The Centrality of the Political to the Strategic
January 14–15, 2017
New York, NY
Unconventional, nontraditional, or more precisely asymmetrical warfare has become the pervasive reality for the modern world. All realistic prognoses compellingly suggest it will remain so throughout the twenty-first century. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino were no temporary aberration, or incidents of domestic political violence, but part of an increasingly normative pattern of asymmetrical warfare against the West. These events are inextricably related to the unconventional warfare and terrorism characterized by the conflicts extending from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Africa. Isis, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram have become the common coinage of political discourse and news cycles. The controversy over the very terminology of the “War on Terror,” like that over the Obama Administration’s determination to close Guantanamo, illustrate the domestic as well as foreign policy implications of such developments. Meanwhile, Europe likewise faces both overt actions and indirect consequences of asymmetrical warfare. Russia’s proxy war in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea, together with the massive Middle Eastern refugee influx, has thrust Europe into its own highly divisive disputes over its very cultural essence, political will, and future unity.
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By Simon Ravenscroft · Tuesday, March 22, 2016 This essay explores the theological and philosophical underpinnings of the work of the radical Catholic social theorist Ivan Illich (1926–2002), via a discussion of the changing meaning of charity in Western thought and practice. It is argued that Illich’s thought is animated by a traditional theological understanding of charity as anchored in local, personal bonds and networks of reciprocity, and that his critique of Western economic modernity has much to do with the gradual depersonalization and institutionalization of charity, theoretically and in society, linked to its transmogrification into “abstract” philanthropy. Drawing on debates around the nature of love and the gift in contemporary theology, philosophy, and social anthropology, the conceptual dynamics of Illich’s account of human sociality are made clear.
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By Éric Marty · Monday, March 21, 2016 The reader may recall observations made in 2013 by Professor Bruno Chaouat of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities regarding the strange quotation, or misquotation, of Emmanuel Levinas by Judith Butler. In one of her recent books, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Butler quotes Levinas as having said that Palestinians are “faceless.” Such a statement was obviously pure invention on her part and in no way figures in the text she claims it comes from: “Israël, éthique et politique.” Many of her epigones jumped to her defense, hardly allowing a serious debate on methods and ethics of scholarship.
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By Telos Press · Monday, March 14, 2016 An important report by Alex Chalmers on antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) has just appeared at Fathom. An excerpt:
In a way, the antisemitic incidents I witnessed in OULC are less troubling than the culture which allowed such behaviour to become normalised. It is common to encounter antisemitic individuals in all walks of life, but the mass turning of a blind eye that has come to characterise vast parts of the Left is chilling. As antisemites can double up as vocal critics of Israel, there is a marked tendency on the Left to view them as fellow travellers whose hearts are in the right place – so their rhetoric passes the test of social acceptability.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 14, 2016 Telos 174 (Spring 2016): Philosophy, Literature, Theory is now available for purchase in our store.
 In this issue, Telos turns to a diverse set of philosophers, contemporary and classical, and questions, concerning ethics and politics on the one hand, and literature and aesthetics on the other. More often than not, those distinctions turn out to be difficult to maintain. A case in point is the opening essay, which examines how statements by Levinas have been subjected to political readings in order to impute to him positions that he did not hold. What are the ethics of intentional misreadings? In their meticulously argued analysis, Oona Eisenstadt and Claire Elise Katz demonstrate how the philosopher’s comments in a 1982 radio interview, in the immediate aftermath of the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, have been subjected to increasing degrees of misrepresentation, culminating in false accusations that he justified the killings. These insinuations involved fabricating quotations to put words in his mouth. Eisenstadt and Katz expose the poor philology and tendentious politics implicit in such distortion.
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By Sean McMorrow · Tuesday, March 8, 2016
With the publication of “The Crisis of Western Societies” (1982), Cornelius Castoriadis returns to an early theme in his work by proposing that over the previous twenty years Western societies had begun to enter a new phase, one that could be considered to be a situation of crisis. In his earlier political thought—associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie—Castoriadis identified signs of a transition into this new phase, marked by a widespread bureaucratization of political decision-making that emerged alongside a general turn toward the privatization of social life. At the time of his revisitation of this theme, Castoriadis’s work had undergone what would be the first of two ontological turns: a turn that involved a radical rethinking of historicity, which understood the historical dimension of society as a socially contingent mode of creation that is central to the constitution of the world of a given society. This article reflects an articulation of his previous theme of crisis with regard to this broader rethinking of historicity throughout the 1970s, which extended political analysis into more foundational issues of social institution and cultural expression.
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