[FRA:] Russell Berman finds God

[Ralph Dumain]

TELOS 134:
Special Issue on Politics and Religion
by Russell Berman
March 10, 2006

http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=9

>The dialectic of enlightenment traces an 
>important line between mandatory secularization and respectful tolerance.

If this were true, it would be the severest 
indictment of Dialectic of Enlightenment to 
date.  I've never cared for this work, but Berman 
has taken the dialectic out of it, in the service of Counter-Enlightenment.

>When TELOS began a systematic engagement with 
>questions of religion and liturgy ten years ago, 
>some of our intellectual neighbors found it 
>shocking. Today it is apparent to all how much 
>contemporary politics overlaps with religion. 
>Moreover, the philosophical problems inherent in 
>religion have been central to this journal for 
>decades: the phenomenological goal as infinite 
>and unattainable and subject to perpetual 
>reformulation; the specificity of traditions as 
>a source of irreducibly particular identities; 
>and the critique of a flattening reification 
>inher­ent in certain strands of the 
>Enlightenment legacy. This special issue on 
>religion and politics is therefore both a 
>response to the current state of affairs in the 
>world around us, as well as a continuation of a 
>long-established mission of TELOS. This issue 
>commences with a clear and programmatic 
>statement of the politics of radi­cal orthodoxy, 
>John Milbank's argument against neo-liberalism 
>on the basis of the sacred and the gift. This 
>critique of reification via religion is, in 
>effect, a Christian socialism. It is a 
>compelling vision, but one that Alain de Benoist 
>exposes to an Enlightenment skepticism. Can one, 
>in contemporary Europe, sin­cerely put forward 
>Saint Paul as a basis for social policy? Yet 
>Benoist's critique goes further, pointing out, 
>in a Nietzschean manner, how the critique of the 
>law always implies a distance from the polis and 
>therefore an incapacity for politics. The next 
>essay, by Raymond Dennehy, turns the tables once 
>again, with a force­ful interrogation of 
>contemporary liberalism via John Paul II's 
>condemnation of the "culture of death." The 
>philosophical twist is ironic, since this was 
>precisely the accusation that Nietzsche leveled 
>against Christianity; yet here it is Christian 
>religion that picks up the banner of life 
>against a liberal movement towards deg­radation. 
>Philip Goodchild's inquiry into "Truth and 
>Utopia" may seem to bypass the explicitly 
>theological concerns of the other essays, but 
>his recovery of utopian moments in truth should 
>be seen as a de facto surpassing of the reduced 
>facticity of liberal reason in order to regain 
>an unconstrained excess in all truth. Aryeh 
>Botwinick follows a parallel line of negative 
>theological thought in his two pieces. His 
>commentary on Ben Zoma, in particular, spells 
>out the emancipatory agenda in monotheism as 
>well as its anti-representationalism­ 
>suggesting, in a subterranean resonance with the 
>critique of the Danish cartoons, that depicting 
>divinity can only reduce humanity. . . .

This is too sickening for words.  And thus ends 
my survey of Telos blog entries, where they began.

Telos, guilty as charged.  And this Russell Berman, what a pig.