Schmitt and Strauss are often discussed in literature as if their conceptions of political had nothing in common. But, as the author shows, Heinrich Meier careful study of the relation between Schmitt and Strauss tells us that the three editions of Schmitt’s «Concept of political» and Strauss’s «Comments» on it may be seen as largely overlooked «hidden dialogue», in the course of which Strauss’s 1932 critique had significant if unacknowledged impact on Schmitt and political and theological foundations of his thought.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and services (...) including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification. (shrink)

Derrida’s recently published Life Death seminars have again highlighted the importance of values within the ongoing philosophical conversation about overcoming metaphysics. The seminars further indirectly raise a matter of great importance for constitutional theory. Values have become central to constitutional discourse since the mid-twentieth century despite critique due to their supposedly subjective nature, the potential conflict between them, and the legal uncertainty that they bring about. This essay enquires into the origin, logic, structure, and operation of (constitutional) values. It does (...) so through a close reading of the texts of Heidegger and Derrida in which Nietzsche’s call for a revaluation of values takes on a central role, along with a reflection on the relation between life and Being, as well as between life and death. A close reading of these texts in turn makes possible an unorthodox reading of Schmitt’s newly translated text on constitutional values in The Tyranny of Values, which finally opens the possibility of a move beyond such values and thus beyond metaphysics. (shrink)

Dans Politiques de l’amitié (1994), Jacques Derrida déconstruit l’opposition entre amis et ennemis que Carl Schmitt présuppose au fondement de sa conception polémique de la politique en 1932. La déstabilisation des distinctions de l’axiomatique schmittienne (public / privé, guerre / révolution, extérieur / intérieur) permet de contester l’existence prétendument objective d’un ennemi purement politique. Derrida éludant la démarcation schmittienne entre ennemis effectif et absolu, il faudra montrer le caractère fictif de cette ultime stratégie de Schmitt pour justifier en 1963 sa (...) politique d’hostilité. (shrink)

This article, originally a preface to the French edition of Carl Schmitt’s book The Leviathan in the State theory of Thomas Hobbes, displays a critical analysis that not only puts the above work in context, but also raises a question about Schmitt’s appropriation of Hobbes, an author who was considered a beacon of light by the former during his whole lifetime. Thus, the article undertakes a reconstitution of Schmitt´s relevance for Political Theory and Philosophy in recent years, and then develops (...) the way Hobbes was analysed in Schmitt´s essay. The interpretation of the Jurist is not innocent at all, and the propinquity to the English author in some issues could have allowed the former to reinforce his own arguments by using the latter as a mere strategic tool. The key question the article tries to elucidate is whether this re-appropriation was successful or not. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

Reading the work of Max Stirner usually it is found conditioned by the critique of Marx and Engels. His texts are however rich in theoretical subtleties and nuances. One of the guidelines developed by Stirner and not sufficiently discussed by the authors of La ideología alemana is its conceptualization around love as a key to understand the political association of Men. As part of a conceptual constellation in which notions such as interest or property play a fundamental role, love appears (...) in El Único y su propiedad as a key passion from which different types of relationships between them are explained. Stirner attempts to answer why men alienate their individuality in their own creations from an approach to the sensitive materiality of the desire of men distancing from each other. In this paper I propose to take up this dimension of analysis of Max Stirner in order to highlight the importance of a political reading of his work beyond Marx’s and Engel’s critique. (shrink)

Pese a los enormes esfuerzos que han hecho renombrados filósofos políticos e historiadores intelectuales por estigmatizar el estudio de la obra de Carl Schmitt, el interés por el razonamiento político-jurídico schmittiano ha logrado resistir a un punto tal que, hoy en día, cualquier interesado por la filosofía política o jurídica difícilmente pueda resistir la tentación o la necesidad de explorar la obra y el pensamiento schmittiano. Frente a este panorama, en esta ocasión me gustaría ofrecer algunas razones para sostener que (...) la célebre y breve implicación política de Schmitt con el nacionalsocialismo (1933-1936), desde cierto punto de vista, debería quedar al margen o, en el mejor de los casos, considerarse una cuestión incidental para aquellos que se sientan interesados por el razonamiento político o jurídico schmittiano en _stricto sensu_. A tal efecto, luego de llevar adelante unas breves consideraciones sobre la trayectoria de la reputación de Carl Schmitt, quisiera ofrecer cuatro ejemplos que ilustran algunas buenas razones para creer que la teoría política y jurídica de Schmitt corre por un carril paralelo a las consideraciones biográficas y, por lo tanto, quisiera tratar de contrarrestar la idea según la cual existe una conexión directa o necesaria entre sus desacertados compromisos políticos y el valor que, eventualmente, puede llegar a tener su razonamiento político y jurídico. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

The subject is the bearer of the sovereign decision, according to C. Schmitt. This decision grounds on certain situational pragmatics, yet mainly is born out of a ‘null’; as the decision forms the political normalcy that follows after, it displays its nature as an ‘event’. This subject is simultaneously a legal and a political one; it is the founder of the Nomos. This founding subject has been eclipsed in alignment with its post-modernly acclaimed ‘death’. The subject is deemed to have (...) been inherently divided, as long as its identity steadily postpones itself, is incessantly ‘differing’, according to the deconstructionist approach; or it is considered as fundamentally ‘passive’, meaning not so much ‘weak’, but rather dethroning the Western preoccupation with the active autonomous individual; or, it is maintained but intrinsically reversed, now held either as part of a fundamental ontological order and indirectly of the nature, or, opposite to Kantian assumptions, as primarily captured in a radical heteronomy, which constitutes it as a proper ethical subject. Crucial is how to develop a concept taking into account the eventfulness of the constitution of the subject, without effacing the political character of such constitution by reducing it to non-political discourses, i.e., to metaphysics, morals or economics; how to conceive of Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as political event, namely both as secular act and in the same time as referring to extramundane fundaments ; how to go beyond the linearity of the liberalist ideology by equating the political event with a messianic miracle ‘without messianism’; how to ‘salute’ democracy? (shrink)