Sprachbilder moderner Staatlichkeit: Emanzipatorische Rhetorik und souveräne Politik

Abstract

In his article Dr. Laurin Mackowitz assumes that the inherent characteristics of language-based communication should be included in thinking about politics at the latest with the »Linguistic Turn«. Since then, there has been a fundamental skepticism about the notion that language is a transparent instrument for communicating reality. Instead, language is seen as an unavoidable constraint that structures all human searches for meaning and knowledge. Since reality cannot be perceived without language-dependent constraints, the focus of thought must be on language criticism. The author makes it clear that metaphors are more than mere descriptions, but seem to be actors in their own right, binding individual and collective subjects to language and leading people and peoples to see the world through their lenses. Dasein is to be understood as a "world-forming" and at the same time image-related being, which is why the imagination could be seen as decisive for the conditioning of social realities as power relations. The task that political philosophy faces as a result of the disenchantment of the world-forming dimension of language is to gain clarity about how the production and organization of knowledge, weapons and living space are given meaning by the linguistic images of modern statehood. The author continues to address the »state organism« (»body, sovereignty, fascism«). One of the dominant language images in modernity is the idea of the state as an organism. The body imagery that was already widespread in antiquity, which transferred the image of the living human body to inanimate things and above all to social structures, developed into an organism imagery. The »body metaphor« was already widespread in antiquity and fulfills many functions. The metaphor of the political body as a composite and self-sustaining organism finds a reconfiguration in modernity, which would find its most famous expression in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan on the title page. Using several examples, the author makes it clear that the metaphor of the modern political body would promise a rational organization of the complex social structure, a comprehensive presentation of the tasks and assigned social positions and decision-making power in a crisis.