The notion of ideology and its critique have taken a remarkable about-turn in recent decades. While in classical Marxism, ideology used to be understood in terms of a distorted representation of real social divisions, recent authors such as Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau have argued that there is no standpoint outside language or representation, and they consider those representations as ideological that remain blind to their own political effects. However, a dimension that was crucial in the classical Marxist tradition has (...) been downplayed in their work, namely the importance of ideology critique for the process of emancipation or of a particular subject becoming political. To reintroduce this dimension in the recent debate on ideology, this article takes recourse to a selective and creative reading of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, it is argued, understands ideology critique as a crucial precondition for the process through which a subject becomes political. From a Schmittian perspective, ideology critique aims at unmasking depoliticisation and thus at making visible an intersubjective space of conflict, which is the inevitable condition for every democratic or emancipatory struggle. (shrink)

A recent spate of exposés about Mao Zedong's China, in English and Chinese, announces a finality to the tendency toward the temporal-spatial conflation of twentieth-century Chinese and global history. This sense was confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January 2006 that George W. Bush's recent bedtime reading had been Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story,1 or when, later in 2006, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europe's parliamentary (...) assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes’, linking them with Nazism.”2 The temporal-spatial conflation hence is,…. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the (...) chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics. (shrink)