Telos 161 (Winter 2012): "Politics After Metaphysics" link HERE.
Some interesting articles, I can copy some of these in part from their blog, all rights are reserved to Telos for reproduction of web content, but definitely check out their site with the link above. Here are some of the more interesting articles.
In the lead article, Gianni Vattimo diagnoses the current inefficacy of democracy and hermeneutics as they are practiced in the twenty-first century. Their shared crisis has to do with their neutralization and, therefore, de-politicization, ultimately linked to the search for an objective truth. In opposition to this metaphysical appropriation of potentially destabilizing forces dormant in democracy and hermeneutics, Vattimo avows a non-neutral interpretative and political stance that takes sides with those most disadvantaged by the current status quo. As a result, hermeneutics will become “the ontology of revolution,” as he provocatively suggests in the conclusion to his article.
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Penelope Deutscher’s “Sacred Fecundity: Agamben, Sexual Difference, and Reproductive Life” articulates the image of fecundity as a national cause in Émile Zola’s work with Agamben’s concept of the sacred. Rather than criticize the Italian philosopher for overlooking femina sacra in his account of homo sacer, Deutscher develops a more nuanced Agambenian approach to sexual difference and reproduction, focusing on pre-political, politicized, and de-politicized reproductive life.David Pan’s “Political Theology for Democracy: Carl Schmitt and John Dewey on Aesthetics and Politics” illuminates the nature of sovereignty in Carl Schmitt. The decision precedes metaphysical justifications and is not as a command but as an instantiation of the popular will that always sanctions it, if only indirectly. Subsequently, Pan turns to the aesthetic theory of John Dewey, so as to fill in the gaps of Schmitt’s idea of the implicit representational character of sovereignty. The interpretation of an artwork as a nexus between the individual and the collective parallels the notion of the decision as a bridge between the deciding agent and the popular will that lends it legitimacy.Closely reading Heidegger on the question of metaphysics, Babette Babich reminds us what the term means: all of philosophy, the thinking of “beings as a whole.” Politics “after” metaphysics would, thus, spell out a politics “after” philosophy, having gotten over the thought of the totality of being. Or, more positively, it would be a politics that responds to the injunction to start thinking instead of philosophizing, with all the frictions this injunction causes when it comes across scientific, theological, and humanist modes of inquiry.Michael Marder in “After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes” scrutinizes the idea of “elemental politics” after metaphysics. If fire has been the organizing symbol of revolutionary political theory and practice, then upon the exhaustion of the metaphysical paradigm, it is the remnants of this dangerous element that stay with us: smoldering ruins, cinders, and ashes. Reconsidering the experience of victimhood, community, temporality, and phenomenality in the afterglow of the great fires of metaphysics and onto-theology, Marder attempts to find in the ashes a fragile figuration of contemporary politics.
