This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability (...) and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy. (shrink)

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)

The concept of sovereignty is one of the central concepts of modern political philosophy. However, faced with processes of economic globalization as well as legal and political universalism, contemporary political theory struggles to account for the exercise of state power in terms of the traditional understanding of sovereignty. This survey article reviews the most influential conceptualizations of sovereignty in contemporary continental political philosophy. These include Schmitt’s defense of sovereignty and Agamben’s rejection of sovereign politics as well as a number of (...) theoretical attempts to account for the complexities of sovereignty and its adaptation to new political circumstances. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the pre-eminent place the issue of interstate relations occupies in Carl Schmitt’s political thinking between the early 1920s and early 1940s. First, I discuss how Schmitt...

This article turns to the issue of political representation that I argue is central to all forms of political thought and practice of the modern period. Taking political representation as its object, I argue that its crisis—that comes to a head in the travails of the Weimar Republic—provided the opportunity for forms of neoliberal representation to displace political representation with purportedly “neutral”, non-partisan and thus “fair” representational tools. In contrast, I seek to develop the idea of “self-representation” with a discussion (...) of paths not chosen at Weimar and via Italianoperaismo’s reflections on “class composition”, which combines collective self-representation with political organization. Representing each member of a collective to another as it develops epistemic and cartographic tools, it constructs group solidarity, organization and the capacity to act as it reclaims the collectivity alienated in modern political forms of representation and excluded from neoliberal ones. (shrink)

ExcerptHoratio is rarely thought of as a sovereign character in Hamlet. In fact, some Shakespearean commentators regard Horatio as a “nobody” or a “non-entity,” a poorly developed figure whose role in the play could have been replaced by other, more significant characters.1 However, reading Hamlet with Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba allows Horatio to emerge as a pivotal figure inextricably bound to issues of sovereignty, succession, and representation. Contrary to many interpretations of Hamlet, which hastily designate Prince Fortinbras as the (...) sovereign of Denmark at the end of the play, it is actually Horatio who ends up as the most…. (shrink)

The resignation of pope Benedict XVI may be somewhat framed into a context by retracing the successive steps that have led to such an unexpected decision. The paper goes through the various stages that lead to this event before attempting an « exegesis » of its significance and meaning.

Carl Schmitt, an increasingly influential German law professor, developed a provocative and historically oriented model of “political theology” with specific relevance to legal scholarship and the authorship of constitutional texts. His “political theology” is best understood neither as an expressly theological discourse within constitutional law, nor as a uniquely legal discourse shaped by a hidden theological agenda. Instead, it addresses the possibility of the continual resurfacing of theological ideas and beliefs within legal discourses of, for instance, sovereignty, the force of (...) law and states of emergency (or “exception”) that present themselves as relentlessly secular, even—in the case of Kelsenian jurisprudence—”scientific”. This article illustrates and then critically evaluates Schmitt’s theory in terms of the authorship of constitutional texts in particular. It includes two case studies—genocidal colonial land appropriation and Kelsenian positivism in order to illustrate aspects of his political theology. Whilst Schmitt is defended against reductionist interpretations, I show that there remains considerable unfinished business before a Schmittian approach to legal theory merits full acceptance. (shrink)

Straipsnio tikslas – Carlo Schmitto politinės teologijos statuso analizė. Siekiama įrodyti, kad Schmitto pristatyta koncepcija negali būti suprasta kaip teisės sąvokų sociologija, kaip ją kai kuriuose darbuose apibūdino pats autorius. Ji taip pat negali būti aiškinama kaip teologijos dalis, kaip tai daro daugelis dabartinių interpretuotojų. Schmittas „politinės teologijos“ vardu pavadino politikos teorijai priskirtiną projektą, pagrįstą teologinių prielaidų įvedimu į filosofiją. Tai primena XIX a. katalikų reakcio­nierių Josepho de Maistre’o, Louiso de Bonaldo ir Juano Donoso Corteso politinę filosofiją.

Reflecting on the fact of pluralism and the extent to which Christianity appeared to be fragmenting in the wake of the Second Vatican Council , the French Jesuit Michel de Certeau wrote that “in the past, everything that was not in agreement with the teaching of the magisterium was classed as ‘ignorance,’ ‘superstition,’ or even as ‘heresy.’ This state of absolute certainty is now wavering. An unknown world stands before us, which calls itself Christian and yet is quite unlike our (...) picture of what Christian is: ‘another country,’ one that is huge and many-sided beneath the forms of expression (whether…. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s radio broadcast ‘Hegel and Marx’, aired on 13 November 1931, and newly translated here, recapitulates the account of Marxism that Schmitt started to develop in the 1920s. Beginning from Schmitt’s early theory of adjudication inLaw and Judgement, the concepts of decision, representation and the friend/enemy distinction are analysed, connected, and shown to structure Schmitt’s critique of Marxism, both in the broadcast, and in his other writings during this period. Some concluding remarks are offered on the substantive issues Schmitt’s (...) critique raises for Marx’s political theory. (shrink)

ExcerptExisting analyses of Carl Schmitt's account of representation tend to treat together Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), which is concerned with the Catholic Church's “representation,” and Constitutional Theory (1928), which touches on representation vis-à-vis more traditional political questions.1 Such treatments typically lean heavily on a particular passage from the later text to explicate the earlier: To represent means to make an invisible being visible and present through a publicly present one. The dialectic of the concept is that the invisible (...) is presupposed as absent and nevertheless is simultaneously made present. That is not possible with just…. (shrink)

This article traces the semantics of ?life? and ?vitality? in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern ?spirit of technicity? in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a (...) quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a völkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern ?spirit of technicity,? Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

In this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundations of political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of the political theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Rae contributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically those relating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theological, the political, and the ethical, as well as those questioning the existence of ahistoric metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological foundations. While the theological is often associated with belief in a (...) fixed foundation such as God or the truth of a religion, Rae identifies another sense rooted in epistemology. On this understanding, the ontological limitations of human cognition mean that, ultimately, human truth is based in faith and so can never be certain. The argument developed suggests that Levinas’ conception of the political is grounded in theology in the sense of religion, particularly the revelations of Judaism. For this reason, Levinas claims that the political decision is based on how to implement a prior religiously-inspired norm: justice. Schmitt, in contrast, develops a conception of the political rooted in epistemic faith to claim that the political decision is normless. While sympathetic to Schmitt’s conception of theology and its relationship to the political, Rae concludes by arguing that the emphasis Levinas places on responsibility is crucial to understanding the implications of this. The continuing relevance of Schmitt’s and Levinas’ political theologies is that they teach us that, while the political decision is ultimately normless, we bear an infinite responsibility for the consequences of this normless decision. (shrink)

…I see my list on political theology functioning like Wittgenstein’s ladder metaphor in his Tractatus. Once graduate students read and grasp these important texts, they should “throw away the ladder”, so to speak, and deconstruct all they have learned about political theology to illuminate contemporary problems on their own. Once they reach the top, they can throw away the ladder.

The purpose of this article is to investigate one of the most interesting and debated issues within the philosophical dis-cussion about politics: the metaphor of the body politic and its relation with the theory of sovereignty in contemporary political theory. After an opening section, which proposes a brief sketch about the origin of the body politic within phi-losophy (especially in Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions), the article provides a theoretical insight of such a theory, by dealing with three of its definitions: (...) Kantorowicz’s “king’s two bodies”; Hobbes’ Leviathan and Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. The article aims at presenting some arguments to de-fine these three perspectives, by examining – in the last sec-tion – how this paradigm has evolved into the more complex and articulated theory of the rule of law in contemporary democratic societies. (shrink)

Straipsnio tikslas – politikos filosofijos požiūriu pažvelgti į Motiejaus Valančiaus veiklą. Pripažindami, kad Valančius sukūrė atskirą Lietuvos istorijos epochą, istorikai neatskleidė jos savitumą apibrėžiančio turinio. Šiam uždaviniui įgyvendinti gali padėti politikos filosofija. Remiantis istorikų atliktais tyrinėjimais, būtina rasti naujas Valančiaus veiklą aiškinančias sąvokas. Straipsnyje bandoma pagrįsti mintį, kad Valančiaus vadovaujama Žemaičių vyskupija buvo pirmoji moderniosios lietuvių tautos politinio gyvenimo forma, tarpinis darinys tarp Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės ir tautinės valstybės. Valančius valdė politinę prasmę turėjusią instituciją ir sukūrė atskirą šalies politinės istorijos (...) laikotarpį, kuriam gali būti pritaikyta interregnum sąvoka. (shrink)