Telos

Telos got another # (142, Spring 2008, Culture and Politics in Carl Schmitt) All About Schmitt. Joseph Goebbels, June 1934: “If we had relied upon those suave cavaliers, Germany would have been lost. These circles sitting in armchairs in their exclusive clubs, smoking big cigars and discussing how to solve unemployment, always talking and never acting. If we stamp our feet, they will scurry to their holes like mice. We have the power and we will keep it.”

I was looking at some journals the other day, and mistook an issue of Thesis Eleven for an issue of Telos.

As you do.

Anyways, it gots me thinking. A Bat Outta the Hell of Bundoora, Thesis Eleven was established in 1980; Telos, New Yawk, in 1968.

Since 1968, the quarterly journal TELOS has provided an international forum for discussions of political, social, and cultural change. It has built a bridge between intellectual debates in Europe and the United States, exploring matters of contemporary concern to both sides of the Atlantic. Over its long history, TELOS has promoted the awareness of dissidence in Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, debated the state of US-European relations, and examined topics central to post-Communism and the Iraq Wars. TELOS offers an exciting exchange of ideas for anyone with an interest in the vital international issues of the day.

— versus —

Thesis Eleven was launched in 1980 to encourage the development of social theory in the broadest sense. The journal is international and interdisciplinary with a central focus on theories of society, socio-historical understanding, culture, politics and the understanding of modernity.

Thesis Eleven publishes theories and theorists, surveys, critiques, debates and interpretations. The journal also brings together articles on place, region, or problems in the world today, encouraging civilizational analysis and work on alternative modernities from fascism and communism to Japan and Southeast Asia. Marxist in origin, postmarxist by necessity, the journal is vitally concerned with change as well as with tradition.

Telos is also Marxist in origin, but is now (merely) “exciting”. It’s also notorious for helping to popularise — beginning, more or less, in 1987, with its dedication of an issue (#72) to the anti-Semitic scribbler’s work — the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, although its other, current preoccupations include the defence of Israel (in the name of anti-anti-Semitism). In addition, last year, Telos Press published versions of the papers Schmitt gave in 1962, in Francoist Spain, on the concept of the partisan; curiously, this was the same year that George Woodcock published his standard text on Anarchism, in which he declared that anarchism was dead. It was also during this period — the early 1960s — that many of the leading anarchist militants in the Spanish resistance to Franco were finally murdered by the state, which took great exception to their attempts to demolish its rule: Francisco Sabate Llopart (El Quico) in 1960, Ramón Vila Capdevila “Caracremada” (Caraquemada; Burnt-face) in 1963 and José Castro Veiga in 1965, being among the last to be killed. On the bright side, with the anarchist partisans having been liquidated, Mister Schmitt was able to deliver his papers on the Theory of the Partisan (Telos Press, 2007) in relative peace. As Frank Mintz remarked in his 1978 review of Woodcock’s history and the nature of ‘autonomous struggles’:

First, scholarly interest, not only in anarchism but also in socialism and in the marxist movement, dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, and the reason is readily understandable: it is the duty of the university to supply the State with the cultural and philosophical justification for smashing or corrupting anti-exploitation theories. In Italy, Lombroso discovered that all anarchists have a congenital, wicked tendency towards crime; in France, Victor Basch saw them as religious persons without a god. Lenin takes more or less the same line when he — and with him, all authoritarian marxists — makes a distinction between the lumpen, scum anarchists and the wise, intelligent anarchists, who are unconscious marxists.

The more things change…

See also:

Uses and abuses of Carl Schmitt, Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen, Telos, No.122, Winter 2002
Politics in Telos: an Exchange, Ernest Sternberg and Russell Berman, October 22, 2007
Carl Schmitt and Nuremberg, Joseph W. Bendersky, July 19, 2007
A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics, Alan Wolfe, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2, 2004
Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, 1999 (Chapter 8: Conservative Revolution)

And on la mano negra…