Comparative political thought has long been defined by a major project to widen the horizons of Western thought by attending to non-European and non-western speculative traditions. This chapter explores not only the implications and potentialities of such a move, but also its possible flows. It addresses some of the limits determining the idea of ‘non-Western’ thought across comparative projects, pointing to the internal tensions, accidental assumptions and integral betrayals through which the Western tradition has constituted itself. Our approach here is (...) to expose the contingent roots of the ‘Western referent’ in its problematic association with the idea of Europe, highlighting the way in which ‘orientation’ and ‘Orientalisation’ have helped to consolidate the normative ideal supplied by these two terms. We then proceed to examine a ‘minor tradition’ lying behind the unifying image of the Western canon, where an insight provided by Spinoza’s philosophy supports a critical transition from ‘comparative’ to ‘world’ thought. Functioning not as the synthetic sum of totalising local traditions but the constituent space of a nomadic thinking, ‘world’ thought embodies and valorises difference and production, opening up new possibilities for a synesthetic thought. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider both Schmitt’s polemical and his analytical claims in dealing with a concept which is central to his theory and yet strangely overlooked by the secondary literature: the concept of friendship. The essay proceeds in three steps; first it makes some textual claims about the meaning and role of friendship in Schmitt’s writings; secondly its puts forward an interpretation of the significance of friendship in Schmitt’s political thought; finally, it tries to disentangle polemics (...) from diagnostics in Schmitt’s discourse and draws some tentative conclusions. (shrink)

The idea of Mitteleuropa began to gain momentum in the German geopolitical science of the beginning of the twentieth century. German geopolitics, which became famous through the works of Karl Haushofer, had set out a geographical and political notion of Mitteleuropa that supported a political project based on German expansion. As such, Mitteleuropa developed as both a political and scientific concept, a project and a `reality'. With an analysis of the core elements defining the term Mitteleuropa one can begin to (...) appreciate the characteristics that differentiate it from other geographical concepts, as well as the features which some conservative authors have promoted following the geopolitical scientists. As a `geopolitical idea', Mitteleuropa can be shown to designate a way of understanding politics, nature and culture, or more specifically, their relationship. (shrink)

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in (...) modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic. (shrink)

El presente artículo ofrece una crítica de la interpretación decisionista de la doctrina de la soberanía postulada por C. Schmitt en Teología política. Partiendo de la teoría de la secularización del jurista alemán, se mostrará que la capacidad de decisión sobre el estado de excepción definitoria del soberano schmittiano no es absoluta sino que permanece determinada por un orden concreto inmanente cuya representación es tarea del Estado. Así, se pondrá en cuestión la raigambre hobbesiana de la teología política schmittiana, deudora (...) en mayor medida de la teoría hegeliana del Estado, y se presentará la razón jurídico- política de la desavenencia de Schmitt con el nacionalsocialismo. (shrink)