Abstract

In his introduction to the special Telos issue on the French New Right Paul Piccone locates the main thrust of the Frankfurt School's attack on modernity in its critique of identity logic. The violence of fascism in pre-war Europe and the failure of liberalism in today's US, he specifies, have a common origin in the “identity logic of Enlightenment ideology,” whose “abstract universalism … comes to dominate concrete particularity … The abstract concept redefines the concrete particular in its own image while delegitimating all that is left out of this exercise in conceptual engineering…” Modernity's violence is a legacy of failed enlightenment strategies of representation which attempt to articulate power, reason, and rights.