On January 13, 2022, news arrived from Washington, DC, about the contents of a U.S. Justice Department indictment. It accused Stewart Rhodes and ten other associates of “seditious conspiracy” for illegal actions before, and then during, the January 6, 2021, larger riotous assault on the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted the joint session of Congress convened ceremoniously to count the presidential ballots of the Electoral College certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory for the White House. Rhodes is the founder and current leader of the Oath Keepers, a large right-wing militia group popular among citizens with law enforcement, military, and security experience, whose name derives from their solemn oaths of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution.
{"title":"Three Decades of Civil War in the United States: “Don’t Tread on Me”","authors":"T. Luke","doi":"10.3817/0322198141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0322198141","url":null,"abstract":"On January 13, 2022, news arrived from Washington, DC, about the contents of a U.S. Justice Department indictment. It accused Stewart Rhodes and ten other associates of “seditious conspiracy” for illegal actions before, and then during, the January 6, 2021, larger riotous assault on the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted the joint session of Congress convened ceremoniously to count the presidential ballots of the Electoral College certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory for the White House. Rhodes is the founder and current leader of the Oath Keepers, a large right-wing militia group popular among citizens with law enforcement, military, and security experience, whose name derives from their solemn oaths of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution.","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89044822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How is it that we can reserve the cruelest hatred for those we love? When we do, can we find our way back to one another? And what does the appearance of that hatred tell us about the mark left by the twentieth century upon the culture of the United States? Seldom does a philosopher explore the cardinal categories of his thought within the intimate reaches of his family life; but this is the gift Paul Kahn offers us in Testimony.
{"title":"The Burdens of Love and Time","authors":"Paul Linden-Retek","doi":"10.3817/0322198162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0322198162","url":null,"abstract":"How is it that we can reserve the cruelest hatred for those we love? When we do, can we find our way back to one another? And what does the appearance of that hatred tell us about the mark left by the twentieth century upon the culture of the United States? Seldom does a philosopher explore the cardinal categories of his thought within the intimate reaches of his family life; but this is the gift Paul Kahn offers us in Testimony.","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89750501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There are a number of ways of considering the current crisis in Western universities and, in particular, their problems with ideas and practices about truth and truthfulness. One is to see it as a problem created by what is often termed “modernity,” which is to say the issues raised and the processes set in motion by the Enlightenment and the various reactions to it in the West. Going down this road invariably means invoking modern thinkers, ranging from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault, all of whom provide considerable insight into the way in which certain ideas in the West have…
{"title":"Universities: Truth, Reason, or Emotion?","authors":"G. Melleuish, Susanna G. Rizzo","doi":"10.3817/0922200044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0922200044","url":null,"abstract":"There are a number of ways of considering the current crisis in Western universities and, in particular, their problems with ideas and practices about truth and truthfulness. One is to see it as a problem created by what is often termed “modernity,” which is to say the issues raised and the processes set in motion by the Enlightenment and the various reactions to it in the West. Going down this road invariably means invoking modern thinkers, ranging from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault, all of whom provide considerable insight into the way in which certain ideas in the West have…","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87061015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The modern understanding of the public sphere is inseparable from criticism: the public is the space in which criticism can be articulated most effectively. The critical public emerged historically as a platform for individuals to call into question the decisions of state authority, especially when those decisions were taken outside the public view, as was typical for the premodern state—although the penchant for secrecy in government certainly lives on today. The public sphere stretches across multiple fields: individual discussion, journalistic reportage and evaluation, and deliberative parliamentary institutions, no matter how much current legislatures fail on that score. In a broad…
{"title":"Toward a Post-Critical Public Sphere in Germany and the United States","authors":"R. Berman","doi":"10.3817/0922200067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0922200067","url":null,"abstract":"The modern understanding of the public sphere is inseparable from criticism: the public is the space in which criticism can be articulated most effectively. The critical public emerged historically as a platform for individuals to call into question the decisions of state authority, especially when those decisions were taken outside the public view, as was typical for the premodern state—although the penchant for secrecy in government certainly lives on today. The public sphere stretches across multiple fields: individual discussion, journalistic reportage and evaluation, and deliberative parliamentary institutions, no matter how much current legislatures fail on that score. In a broad…","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82566254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When David Pan of the University of California, Irvine, invited me to participate in a colloquium series of multiple lectures on “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” in 2020–2021, I gladly accepted, in most part to learn of my colleagues’ newest ideas about comparison. Much new theorization has been done on comparison, including comparison as relation.1 However, I feel that the methodological emphasis on approaches to the comparison of China with the West may have distracted our attention from an equally important issue of locations of comparison.2 China scholars are located differently in terms of geography and language when comparing China with the West than their Western counterparts, who would prefer to compare China in the West, which boasts of a long tradition of elite intellectualism that granted a culture like China very little space for comparison vis-à-vis the West. More recently, issues of locations in comparison have surfaced in the ongoing debates surrounding world literature, which have generated great enthusiasm in the non-West and both enthusiasm and anxiety for the West, as I will illustrate below.3
{"title":"Locations of China in World Literature","authors":"Yingjin Zhang","doi":"10.3817/0622199075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0622199075","url":null,"abstract":"When David Pan of the University of California, Irvine, invited me to participate in a colloquium series of multiple lectures on “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” in 2020–2021, I gladly accepted, in most part to learn of my colleagues’ newest ideas about comparison. Much new theorization has been done on comparison, including comparison as relation.1 However, I feel that the methodological emphasis on approaches to the comparison of China with the West may have distracted our attention from an equally important issue of locations of comparison.2 China scholars are located differently in terms of geography and language when comparing China with the West than their Western counterparts, who would prefer to compare China in the West, which boasts of a long tradition of elite intellectualism that granted a culture like China very little space for comparison vis-à-vis the West. More recently, issues of locations in comparison have surfaced in the ongoing debates surrounding world literature, which have generated great enthusiasm in the non-West and both enthusiasm and anxiety for the West, as I will illustrate below.3","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87596084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
George David Schwab, Odyssey of a Child Survivor: From Latvia through the Camps to the United States, 2021. Pp. 299.*
乔治·大卫·施瓦布,《一个幸存儿童的奥德赛:从拉脱维亚穿越集中营到美国》,2021年。299页。*
{"title":"Courageous Confrontations with the Realities of the Lebenswelt","authors":"Joseph W. Bendersky","doi":"10.3817/0922200200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0922200200","url":null,"abstract":"George David Schwab, Odyssey of a Child Survivor: From Latvia through the Camps to the United States, 2021. Pp. 299.*","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77548618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
1. Introduction During the early twentieth century, the Eurocentric worldview was beginning to be challenged, initiating its apparent decentering.1 With the rise of Japan as a non-European power challenging the West by waging what the Japanese called “the Greater East Asia War” (大東亜戦争) (World War II), the Eurocentric worldview, for the first time, came under threat by a non-European power. Japan claimed to fight for Asia’s defense and preservation against the hegemony of Western imperialism in order to establish a new, pluralistic world order of Asian nations.2 During this time, a circle of philosophers, called the Kyoto School (京都学派),3 felt it their duty to philosophically contribute to what they believed to be the unfolding of a new world order.
{"title":"The Kyoto School’s Wartime Philosophy of a Multipolar World","authors":"J. Krummel","doi":"10.3817/1222201063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/1222201063","url":null,"abstract":"1. Introduction During the early twentieth century, the Eurocentric worldview was beginning to be challenged, initiating its apparent decentering.1 With the rise of Japan as a non-European power challenging the West by waging what the Japanese called “the Greater East Asia War” (大東亜戦争) (World War II), the Eurocentric worldview, for the first time, came under threat by a non-European power. Japan claimed to fight for Asia’s defense and preservation against the hegemony of Western imperialism in order to establish a new, pluralistic world order of Asian nations.2 During this time, a circle of philosophers, called the Kyoto School (京都学派),3 felt it their duty to philosophically contribute to what they believed to be the unfolding of a new world order.","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91087966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Introduction This essay is divided into two distinct parts. In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the “law of humanity” to the whole of the globe; a modern defense of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation-state; and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilizational landmass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In this third case, it is actually “empire“ that is covertly to the fore and supremely the Western land-based empire that had once been Christendom.
{"title":"A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis","authors":"J. Milbank","doi":"10.3817/1222201127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/1222201127","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction This essay is divided into two distinct parts. In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the “law of humanity” to the whole of the globe; a modern defense of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation-state; and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilizational landmass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In this third case, it is actually “empire“ that is covertly to the fore and supremely the Western land-based empire that had once been Christendom.","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89006751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I The so-called enterprise or commercial-bureaucratic university has been with us for some time. To its advocates, it has set higher education on a rational footing and demystified the folkways of cosseted intellectuals. To its detractors, it galls the kibe. For observers and stakeholders alike, the age of the office has introduced a new way of thinking and speaking in campus boardrooms and action sessions. The idiom of markets and corporations—How competitive are we? What are the anticipated returns on investment? Where can payroll efficiencies be found?—frames an instrumental, quantifiable understanding of the vita academica. Corporate clients need to decide…
{"title":"Brand English and Its Discontents: Situating Truth and Value in the University Today","authors":"J. Elliott","doi":"10.3817/0922200131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0922200131","url":null,"abstract":"I The so-called enterprise or commercial-bureaucratic university has been with us for some time. To its advocates, it has set higher education on a rational footing and demystified the folkways of cosseted intellectuals. To its detractors, it galls the kibe. For observers and stakeholders alike, the age of the office has introduced a new way of thinking and speaking in campus boardrooms and action sessions. The idiom of markets and corporations—How competitive are we? What are the anticipated returns on investment? Where can payroll efficiencies be found?—frames an instrumental, quantifiable understanding of the vita academica. Corporate clients need to decide…","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78666248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As the organizers of the series “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” have rightly noted, there is abundant scholarship comparing the cultures of “China” and the “West,” or more specifically Han Chinese cultural production and that of Russia and certain Western European nations. A common approach to China–West comparison is examining cases of cross-cultural engagement, in the form of textual reception, translation, transculturation, travel logs, cultural assimilation, and related dynamics. One of the pitfalls of such comparison is that it frequently takes Western cultural production as the norm, the standard against which most everything else is measured. As Shu-mei Shih persuasively argues, “When we put two texts or entities side by side, we tend to privilege one over the other. The grounds are never level. … It is the more powerful entity that implicitly serves as … the presumed, usually Eurocentric, standard.”1 And as R. Radhakrishnan likewise declares, “Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”2 To be sure, Radhakrishnan cautions that centrisms can and do go in many directions; he speaks of “awareness of centrism, whether Euro-, logo-, Afro-, Sino-, Indo-, gyno-, or andro-.”3 But in comparative literature, as practiced in the United States and Europe, and even sometimes in China and other parts of the “non-West,” the presumed standard is all too frequently Euro-American.4
{"title":"Decentering the “West” and “China” in China–West Comparison","authors":"K. Thornber","doi":"10.3817/0622199065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3817/0622199065","url":null,"abstract":"As the organizers of the series “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” have rightly noted, there is abundant scholarship comparing the cultures of “China” and the “West,” or more specifically Han Chinese cultural production and that of Russia and certain Western European nations. A common approach to China–West comparison is examining cases of cross-cultural engagement, in the form of textual reception, translation, transculturation, travel logs, cultural assimilation, and related dynamics. One of the pitfalls of such comparison is that it frequently takes Western cultural production as the norm, the standard against which most everything else is measured. As Shu-mei Shih persuasively argues, “When we put two texts or entities side by side, we tend to privilege one over the other. The grounds are never level. … It is the more powerful entity that implicitly serves as … the presumed, usually Eurocentric, standard.”1 And as R. Radhakrishnan likewise declares, “Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”2 To be sure, Radhakrishnan cautions that centrisms can and do go in many directions; he speaks of “awareness of centrism, whether Euro-, logo-, Afro-, Sino-, Indo-, gyno-, or andro-.”3 But in comparative literature, as practiced in the United States and Europe, and even sometimes in China and other parts of the “non-West,” the presumed standard is all too frequently Euro-American.4","PeriodicalId":43573,"journal":{"name":"Telos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86371611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}