Schmitt's Concept Research Articles

How is the coming generation to go on living? Bonhoeffer's preservation orders for the ‘sixth extinction’

AbstractThis essay adapts Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ‘orders of preservation’ to address the sharp rise in species extinctions due to human causes. I argue that Bonhoeffer's creative use of preservation orders to build an international alliance provides the scope required to meet the present biodiversity crisis while pre-empting Karl Barth's criticism of static regionalism and avoiding problematic elements in Carl Schmitt's concept of the ‘restraining force’. Drawing on Bonhoeffer's 1932 address, ‘On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance’, I present three convictions to guide the task of preservation today, which include the formation of alliances between ecclesial and scientific communities in order to properly specify God's commandment.

Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen Ashwin Bajaj SORENSEN, ELI PARK. Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political. New York: Routledge, 2021. 204 pp. $160.00 hardback; $48.95 paperback; $48.95 e-book. Eli Park Sorensen opens his new book, Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (2021), with the damning assessment that postcolonial studies emerged at an historical moment in which the "specifically political" in much of the West had become "anachronistic, irrelevant, dangerous, [and] politically incorrect" (4). As he elaborates in the book's first chapter, the enfeebled political horizon surrounding the rise of postcolonial literary studies—which, in Sorensen's view, the field has not vigorously challenged—meant that the radical political ambitions of a genre such as literary realism were either ignored in toto or dismissed as literary mouthpieces for a reified and politically defunct nationalism. Within the field, the failure of the political aspirations of nationalism led invariably to the conclusion that realism too was a thoroughly compromised genre. At best, this twin disillusionment with nationalism and realism was dispelled by postcolonial studies by recourse to "textual strategies of dismantling, subverting, disconnecting, and deconstructing" (7) and an avowal of tropes of plurality, hybridity, parody, carnival, and pastiche. Sorensen attributes the field's "anti-realist" impulse to its tendency to conflate the critique of representation with what Neil Lazarus calls postcolonialism's "struggle against representation itself." Lazarus's formulation signals how the critique of both colonialist (mis-)representation and the nationalist evasion of internal difference gradually devolved within the field into a blanket suspicion of any kind of representational practice, be it political or literary. As the latest counter-point to this field-wide equation of radical politics with anti-realism, Sorensen's book argues that postcolonial studies had actually failed to appreciate the political nuance of realist literature and even goes as far as to suggest that this deep-seated trend has inadvertently ensured the field's "exclusion of an engagement with the specifically political" (15). In his attempt to rescue literary realism from its marginalization within postcolonial studies, Sorensen traces its political impulse back to Lukács's account of the form's heyday [End Page 122] in nineteenth-century Europe amidst the revolutions of 1848. Chapter Three affirms the genre's significance by returning to the Hungarian Marxist's contentious though oft-cited theorizations and suggests that, for Lukács, realism is "a literary style that appears in those moments during which the political is at stake in a very fundamental sense, [and] when the discourse of the national has not yet been fully consolidated" (109). The return to Lukács rests on a complex move made in the preceding chapter wherein Sorensen invokes Foucault's concept of "historico-political discourse" to explicate the key elements which for him constitute the political stakes of the genre. For Sorensen, Foucault's coinage mobilizes both Carl Schmitt's concept of the specifically political, based on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy, as well as Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined community. The historico-political discourse serves to establish "a direct connection between force and truth, and...interprets force as a way of articulating a one-sided notion of truth, or a correction of the enemy's alleged falsifications of history" (63). According to Sorensen's reading of Foucault, the historico-political discourse enjoins us to think terms such as "I" or "we" as "perspectival voice[s]" not as neutral or reified but as open-ended and always-already in a process of being defined (63). Foucault's coinage is relevant since Sorensen proposes that the realist novel is able to put the historico-political discourse into literary practice. As a result, this literary form finds particularly fertile ground in worlds whose "ontological coordinates have not yet been fixed" (117). In this sense, Sorensen's study could be read as a contrastive parallel to Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism (2013) insofar as the latter claims that classical European realism is often said to have "a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of [bourgeois] social reality" (5). However, if we are...

The 'Will of the People': The Populist Challenge to Democracy in the Name of Popular Sovereignty.

This article analyses how right-wing populist actors claim to represent the "voice of the people" and express "popular sovereignty" as a mode of challenging the traditional constitutional foundation of liberal democracy. This hypothesis is illustrated by an investigation into the political discourse of the Alternative for Germany considering how this populist actor has developed a political strategy claiming to speak for the "people" in an authentic and immediate fashion. The analysis of this actor's political mobilization shows how the championed direct democratic representation is couched in a sovereigntist discourse that relies on divisive identity markers rather than genuine democratic participation. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, the article interprets right-wing populism as invoking a permanent "state of exception" that employs an emotionally charged friend-enemy distinction whose logic of representing the people has the potential of triggering radical political change as well as undermining the integrity of rule-based democracy.

Lexical metaphors in Westlife's selected song lyrics

The study aims to discover lexical metaphors in Westlife's selected song lyrics. Specifically, it was to reveal the types and source domains of the metaphors. Swear It Again, If I Let You Go, Flying Without Wings, I Have a Dream, and Fool Again, which are the legendary boy band's most popular songs according to TraxFM (2017), were selected as the data sources. The study applied the qualitative descriptive method, the study focused on exploring the nature of the study object as proposed by Kothari (2004). Since the phenomena investigated are metaphors in song lyrics, the study adapted Schmitt's (2005) concept of metaphor analysis. The study's data are all metaphors in the five songs of Westlife (Swear it Again, If I Let You Go, Flying Without Wings, I Have a Dream, and Fool Again), which TraxFM (2017) considers as the boy band's best songs ever. The data MIP-Praglejazz was employed to identify the metaphors in those selected song lyrics. The study found: (1) the selected song lyrics contained 15 structural, 24 ontological, and only two orientational metaphors; (2) Most of the metaphors have a concrete thing as their source domain, such as living thing, traveler, place, flame, sunrise, container, bird, and object. It can be inferred that: (1) the song lyrics are dominated by ontological and structural metaphors, and (2) the metaphors are mainly constructed of concrete concepts, which humankind are so familiar with in their daily life. Detailed findings will be presented, and their implications will be discussed.

The JewishVerfassung, the Israelinomos: the constitutional situation of the beginnings of the State of Israel in the context of Carl Schmitt's political and legal philosophy

AbstractThe paper is an attempt to examine how Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory can be useful to analyse the Constitution of the State of Israel designed in the late 1940s – the impact of which Jacob Taubes once certified. The author analyses three projects created then by Leo Kohn through the prism of Schmitt's concept ofVerfassungandVerfassungsgesetz. He also reads in the context of Schmitt's philosophy (fromConstitutional TheoryandTheNomosof the Earth) the constitutional situation of Israel as a country where, first, the Constitution has not been passed and the basic matter of its legal system is regulated by the Basic Laws; second, citizens of Arab origin are excluded from the national community; and third, the borders of the state remain fluid and change due to the constant partition of the land.

Illiberalism and the Exception in George Eliot's Early Writing

Over the past two decades, studies of the Victorian novel have been enriched significantly by a growing body of scholarship looking to the literature and letters of the period to affirm for the twenty-first century the theoretical and practical value of liberal conceptualizations of critical detachment and communicative decision-making procedures. In the process, the works of George Eliot (1819–1880) have come to be understood not only as modeling forms of critical detachment and rational decision-making but also as important contributors to what Amanda Anderson has identified as “the emergence of the [Habermasian] public sphere in Enlightenment Europe, a historical condition in which critique, argument, and debate inform developing political practices and institutions,” which “helped to consolidate … the legitimating force of public opinion and the rule of law, the successor to now delegitimated forms of absolute sovereignty.” However, I will argue here that Eliot's early writing in particular demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the power of liberalism and its political procedures and that Eliot's early work in fact exposes the illiberal tendencies embedded in these procedures. Rather than asserting the authority of the public sphere, Eliot's important early novelsAdam Bede(1859) andThe Mill on the Floss(1860) consistently look beyond themselves, so to speak, to a providential authority that exceeds the tenets of realism in their efforts to resolve conflict and provide closure to the novels. For each novel, aesthetic coherence is secured not through “critique, argument, and debate” but through recourse to metaphysics and to extrasocial and/or extraprocedural decisions. In the following pages I align this phenomenon in Eliot's early writing with the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception in order to argue that, by appealing to the logic of providence to resolve their most intractable legal and ethical problems, these early novels in fact demonstrate Eliot's awareness of the practical limitations of proceduralism as a legitimate decision-making instrument.

“The God of This Lower World”: Leo Strauss's Critique of Historicism inNatural Right and History

AbstractThis paper offers a new account of Leo Strauss's critique of historicism inNatural Right and History. According to the general view of this critique, Strauss tries to show that historicism wrongly denies the possibility of knowledge of universal and unchangeable principles of right. I argue that this view only reflects Strauss's exoteric critique of historicism, and that, apart from it, he gives an esoteric critique. According to this esoteric critique, historicism ignores the necessity of prudence, in the sense of making “concrete decisions” which suspend universal and unchangeable principles of right. In this light, I also show that Strauss's critique of historicism depends on Carl Schmitt's concept of the “decision,” but that Strauss simultaneously critiques Schmitt inNatural Right and History.

5. GROSSRAUM AND GEOPOLITICS: RESITUATING SCHMITT IN AN ATLANTIC CONTEXT

Contemporary theorists of international relations and historians of empire have found utility in the spatial theory of “Grossraum,” or “great space,” that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1930s and 40s. This article asks whether Schmitt's concept of Grossraum can be fully disentangled from its German history—from the Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum in which it eventually culminated, but with which it is not identical either. I argue that Schmitt's Grossraum theory is neither merely a symptomatic reflection of the Third Reich's objectives, nor a free-floating theory with strong potential for critiquing imperialism, but is best approached as an important moment in the transatlantic conversation among empires that unfolded between 1890 and 1945 about the sources, methods, and prerogatives of global power. It compares Schmitt with other figures in German geopolitics such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer in order to establish a genealogy of the distinction between land and sea powers, arguing that Schmitt's writings on Grossraum modernize and transmit to the twentieth century the most influential theories of political geography and geopolitics developed in the Atlantic world between 1890 and 1930.

Pondering Schmitt's Concept of the Political for International Public Authority: Also a Reflection on Methods, Standards and Disciplinary Settings for Public Law Theory

This contribution analyses Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, one of the most influential pieces ever penned by a legal scholar. It engages with it to advance a contemporary theory of public law. Although Schmitt’s text has, as will be demonstrated, many fallacies, it also holds seminal innovations that are useful to contemporary thought. One such innovation is Schmitt’s way to reconceive the conceptual web that hitherto has been anchored in the state. However, this text will replace his concept of the political by the concept of public authority, advancing an idea of public law that enables, guides and frames the exercise of public authority, whether domestic, international, or supranational. Moreover, on the touchstone of Schmitt’s text, standards for assessing theories of public law are developed.

The Political Totalization of Carl Schmitt: Deciding on "the Absolutely Unpolitical"

Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1932) is notoriously regarded as the first major instance of theorizing “the political” (das Politische), and it is also a major early example of instituting the political as a totality that completely permeates human life. Traditionally, modern politics has been understood in conjunction with the notion of the state: an operation of institutions for the sake of mediation of human relations in the process of attainment of the common “good.” Schmitt's concept of the political is no longer determined by the state; on the contrary, the concept of the state now presupposes the…

From Ethical Exceptionalism to Ethical Exceptions: The Rule and exception Model and the Changing Meaning of Ethics In German Bioregulation.

Germany is an interesting case with respect to the governance of reprogenetics. It has a strong profile in the technosciences and high aims regarding the global bioeconomy, yet her regulation of human genetics, reproductive medicine and embryo research has for a long time been rather restrictive. German biopolitical exceptionalism has often been explained by reference to Catholicism and the legacy of the Nazi past. The Germans, so goes the common story, have learnt the lessons of history and translated them into unconditional respect for human dignity, which in turn translates into unconditional protection of human life, including the human embryo, and the firm repudiation of any eugenic distinction between 'life worth to live' and 'life not worth to live'. This, however, is not the whole story. Alongside deontological strictness we find another strand of governing body politics and reprogenetics in Germany, the rule-and-exception model, running from the mid-1970s abortion law via the 2002 Stem Cell Act to the 2011 regulation of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. In contrast to the former, that strongly draws on Kant and his concept of human dignity, the latter bears resemblances to Carl Schmitt's concept of state of exception. The article will show that the rule-and-exception model builds the exception into the rule and transforms the meaning and mandate of ethics, namely from safeguarding ethical standards to deciding about the exception. Given that the exception has now tended to become the rule, the question is whether the lessons of history will govern German reprogenetics for much longer.

Aristóteles y Carl Schmitt sobre el derecho natural

According to mostly known interpretations (e.g.: Hofman, Strauss, Lowith or Kuhn), the legal and political thought of Carl Schmitt keeps distance from Aristotle's. This article intends to show that Schmitt's concept of law, despite developed in a different context, holds significant likelihood with Aristotle's comprehension of law. With the Purpose of building this proximity, the notion of entirety present in the Aristotelic concept of polis implies that political unit is the main way to accomplish law.

Demolition Artists: Icono-Graphy, Tanks, and Scenarios of (Post-)Communist Subjectivity in Works by Neo Rauch, Heiner Müller, Durs Grünbein, and Uwe Tellkamp

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitt's 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription.

Politico-Theological Foundations of Universal Human Rights: The Case of Maritain

Today it has become nearly commonplace to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a new, positive basic law for global civil society. Yet this Kelsen- inspired, positivist understanding of the UDHR covers over both the theologico-political and the bio-political presuppositions of the doctrine of basic voiced through the UDHR. In order to bring to light these dimensions of universal human rights, this paper offers an interpretation of Jacques Maritain's understanding of human rights, both prior to and after the UDHR. The article shows that Maritain understood universal human rights as part and parcel of a new democratic Christian political theology centered on the critique of Schmitt's conception of sovereignty. Additionally, Maritain attempted to ground the universality of human rights on a theory of human nature which is strikingly biopolitical in character and closely related to emerging neoliberal critiques of sovereignty.

Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Border

The paper investigates the promise of Carl Schmitt's concept of ‘nomos’ for developing new spatial imaginaries apposite to the study of ‘the border’ in contemporary political life, as per the aims of the ‘Lines in the Sand’ research agenda. Schmitt introduced the idea of a ‘nomos of the earth’ to refer to the fundamental relation between space and political order. There have been various historical expressions of the nomos, from the Respublica Christiana, to the jus publicum Europaeum, to a post–World War II (dis)order yet to be adequately theorised. We aim to explore the relatively overlooked spatial ontology of Schmitt's work and suggest ways in which it might prompt alternative ways of thinking about borders and bordering practices as representative of broader dynamics in the relation between space and political order.

The Treaty of Waitangi as an Exercise of Māori Constituent Power

This article analyses the Treaty of Waitangi in light of Carl Schmitt's concept of constituent power – the idea that in a democracy the people hold the power to make fundamental political decisions to determine their form of political existence. It finds that in 1840, Māori, as the holders of constituent power, made a fundamental political decision to share authority between themselves and the Crown. This fundamental political decision is a key element of the New Zealand constitution; limiting potential constitutional changes that would override the substance of the decision, and requiring changes to the current legal framework in order to comply with the decision to share authority. This article focuses solely on the conservative implications of characterising the Treaty as a fundamental political decision. It concludes that only a further exercise of constituent power by Māori can legitimately override or significantly change the fundamental political decision in the Treaty.

Chantal Mouffe vs. Carl Schmitt: The Political, Democracy, and the Question of Sovereignty

In this paper I compare political theories of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe in three important aspects - the conceptualization of the political, their attitude towards liberal democracy and the conception of political process - and point to significant discrepancies. Schmitt's concept of the political is deeply existential and essentially involves real possibility of death, whereas Mouffe's is more domesticated, centered around the struggle, not physical elimination. Schmitt sees liberal democracy as inherently contradictory, because it is grounded on contradictory principles: democratic equality and particularism, and liberal freedom and universalism. Mouffe perceives this contradiction as a locus of tension with emancipatory potential. I trace these differences to their different perception of history. Schmitt's vision of history is marked with ruptures created by the political emergencies, which correlates with his eventual, decisionistic conception of politics. Mouffe's processual conception of politics corresponds rather with the conception of the end of history.

Jan Assmann and the Theologization of the Political

This paper focuses in part on Jan Assmann's interpretation and refutation of Carl Schmitt's very well-known secularization theory that all significant modern concepts of the state are secularized theological notions. It will be demonstrated that Assmann attempts to counter Schmitt's conception of modern secularization by suggesting that Mosaic monotheism inaugurated a revolution by theologizing the political. By briefly exploring Assmann's interpretation of Egyptian religion, it will be argued that a conception of the political as distinct from the theological characterized the political form of ancient Egypt. This leads to a discussion of Assmann's argument that Schmitt's conception of the friend/enemy distinction should be understood as an aberration of the political form of ancient Egypt and therefore viewed as a category of political illegitimacy. In order to illustrate this, attention will first be drawn to Assmann's distinction between primary and secondary religion. This is followed by a discussion of Assmann's notion of the structural transform of the political by theology, which then moves specifically into his argument for the intellectual origins of Schmitt's concept of the political. It will be attempted throughout this paper to bring conceptual clarification to Assmann's notion of theologization by relating it to the question of political theology currently taking place in France and the English-speaking world. Towards the end I offer a number of criticisms of Assmann's notion of theologization.

‘Iustitiam non includo’: Carl Schmitt, Hugo Grotius and the Ius Publicum Europaeum

Through a discussion of Hugo Grotius’ conception of just war, this essay shows that within his critique of liberalism, Schmitt clashed with the very intellectual tradition he claimed to represent. Both historically and philosophically Schmitt's concept of the Ius Publicum Europaeum was a mirage. Indeed, his concept of the political was a rejection of the moral and civil philosophy that sees politics as the world of active citizens and commonwealths arguing with each other about fundamental questions of justice and equity.

The dissociative and polemical political: Chantal Mouffe and the intellectual heritage of Carl Schmitt

In her more recent work, Chantal Mouffe enters into what she calls a ‘dialogue’ with Carl Schmitt on the political. So far, interpretations of this dialogue suggest that Mouffe attempts to revise Schmitt's friend/enemy-distinction and carve out a theory of agonistic pluralism. An interpretation on these grounds, this article argues, reduces the dialogue to its analytical dimension and cannot comfortably be upheld. Mouffe indeed appropriates Schmitt's friend/enemy-distinction, but she also gets inspired by the metatheoretical facet of his intellectual heritage with the result that her theory becomes organically interwoven with a polemical dimension. Rather than aiming at a post-structuralist defanging of Schmitt's conception of the political, Mouffe recontextualizes and applies it to the current academic discourse, for this allows decontesting her radical pluralist cause by establishing a we/them opposition along a political/post-political divide.