Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty

Abstract

Schmitt's definition of sovereignty is also an attempt to read against the grain Western legal and political history. And yet, this highly unorthodox reconstruction not only reveals the boundaries of Western medieval and modern thought, but also hides them again behind new transhistorical principles. I construct Schmitt's ambivalent gesture by turning his short text into a series of quasisymptoms, which hint to his own historical context, as well as to more general features of Western thought. In particular, I propose reading the association of sovereignty with the state of exception as a rationalization of the catastrophe of the First World War, and I suggest an analogy with Freud's post-war invention of the death drive. Though Schmitt rightly emphasizes the contextual determination of past politico-legal conceptualizations, he puts forth a narrative that transcends these very historical determinations. Hence, whilst Schmitt underlines the theological roots of Western juridico-political discourse, he still operates within the decontextualized conceptual space produced by medieval theological speculation, and re-enacted by modern naturalism. From within this claustrophobic theoretical space, even the exception is recaptured as a principle. On the contrary, a genealogical understanding of sovereignty both discloses the latter's metaphysical underpinnings and undermines its foreverness.