REOCCUPYING SECULARIZATION: SCHMITT AND KOSELLECK ON BLUMENBERG'S CHALLENGE

This article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg's philosophy to Carl Schmitt's political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political‐theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension‐ridden elements at play in Koselleck's theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg's criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,”“reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt's famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck's understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg's criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion's initial critical function in Blumenberg's theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck's reserved attitude toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap.     

Containment and intensification in political war: Carl Schmitt and the Clausewitzian heritage

This article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse the other. Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and intensification arguments chronologically from the mid-1920s to the 1960s. Despite sometimes nominally rejecting Clausewitz’s famous thesis of war as the continuation of politics, Schmitt nevertheless affirmed the idea of war’s political nature. I conclude that Schmitt’s view can be read as a radicalized version of the Clausewitzian political theory of war rather than a strict deviation from it. This becomes evident as soon as we place Schmitt’s partly incoherent observations on Clausewitz in their argumentative contexts.     

Schmitt and the Sovereignty of Roman Dictators: From the Actualisation of the Past to the Recycling of Symbols

The aim of this article is to analyse the complex roots of Carl Schmitt's theory on dictatorship in the classical world through the lens of classical receptions. It argues that Schmitt was deeply engaged with the classical tradition in formulating his theory on dictatorship. Knowingly or unknowingly, Schmitt legitimates his theory through a foundation in both the Roman idealisation of the virtuous dictators of the early Republic as well as the long tradition of the narrative of the enlightened sovereign as a guarantor of law, present in both Greek and Roman antiquity and in the subsequent European tradition. Schmitt skilfully repurposed the Roman historical tradition on dictators but glossed over the traditional antipathy of Roman republicanism towards sovereign rule. The claim that this article is presenting is that even though it has been overlooked by earlier scholars, Schmitt was both directly and indirectly influenced by the classical tradition of dictatorship and utilised their mythical and symbolic dimensions in the later Roman and the subsequent European legal and political traditions. The reason for this omission was that Schmitt, like his contemporaries, belonged to one of the last generations to be groomed in the classical tradition of literature.     

1. CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH

Carl Schmitt's work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.     

On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition: The ‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt,Leo Strauss,and Hannah Arendt

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic.     

Shakespeare as a method. Carl Schmitt’s reading of Othello and Hamlet

While in the 1960s Allan Bloom suggested to read William Shakespeare’s works through the prism of political philosophy, a decade earlier Carl Schmitt used the works of English poet in a reverse way: he read political philosophy and history through Shakespeare. Deprived – under the influence of Leo Strauss – from the possibility of considering Thomas Hobbes a decisionist thinker, Schmitt in his ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ used Shakespeare’s most famous work to interpret origins of disappearance of the state of emergency from English soil. Shakespeare was seen by Schmitt as a writer who captured the Sixteenth and seventeenth century changes in thinking about sovereignty and the state. Interestingly, Schmitt did not use Shakespeare as method for the first time: in first decades of twentieth century, in his diary, he made ‘Othello’ a prism through which he read his love life. Because the author of ‘The Concept of the Political’ is one of the less methodologically cohesive writers of twentieth century, his usage of Shakespeare twice, in different circumstances, is interesting. In an article, author links ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ with Schmitt’s geopolitical works and presents Shakespeare’s works as the coherent method of interpretation in Schmitt’s philosophy of decisionism.     

On Political Theology: The Hidden Dialogue between C. Schmitt and Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies

In recent years, Ernst H. Kantorowicz's work The King's Two Bodies (1957) has been the object of both historical and philosophical research. Kantorowicz decided to subtitle his book ‘A Study in Medieval Political Theology’, but few scholars have actually recognised his work as research in ‘political theology’. The aim of this article, then, is to uncover the sense(s) in which his book might be considered a work of ‘political theology’, especially in the sense coined by Carl Schmitt in 1922. Such a discussion ultimately aims to contribute to the foundation of political-theology research, a subject that has been widespread among European intellectuals in the twentieth century and which continues to be a focus of interest. This article argues that Kantorowicz's book can be interpreted as a practice of—and also an enriching addition to—Schmitt's thesis on political theology, even if it does not mention Schmitt's name. Such a conclusion is only possible by accepting that there was a heated dialogue between Kantorowicz and Schmitt through Erik Peterson's work. The article further discusses its approach with other scholars that, even though they are based on similar hypotheses, make different conclusions.     

“The Lord Your God is God of Gods and Lord of Lords”: Is Monotheism a Political Problem in the Hebrew Bible?

Erik Peterson's famous monograph on “Monotheism as a Political Problem” argued that some pre-Cappadocian Christian theology was at risk of correlating too closely the universal rule of God and the apparently universal rule of Caesar. Peterson claimed that Cappadocian trinitarian theology and Augustinian eschatology ruled out such dangerous political-theological analogies for future Christian thought, thereby undermining the type of political theology that engaged Carl Schmitt. Peterson overlooked key resources for his argument, however, by neglecting the development of monotheism in the Hebrew Bible. Israelite religion, in fact, does not exhibit a correlation between monotheism and theological legitimation of political order, but the reverse. “Political theology” in the Hebrew Bible begins to fade precisely as a more transcendent and universal monotheism emerges in the biblical literature of the exilic and post-exilic periods. This implies that Peterson was mistaken to claim monotheism itself as the primary source of the political-theological problem he identifies.     

The Unevenness of Political Theology

ABSTRACT

Those who agree that Carl Schmitt was correct to prefer to political theology to liberalism nonetheless need to develop an account of how an authority structure can sustain itself without imposing an ideology on those over whom it rules. This article suggests that one possibility forward is found in the mystical political theology of Jacob Taubes's 1955 essay “On The Symbolic Order of Modern Democracy,” since that essay posits a political body in which sovereignty is distributed, without forcing that distribution in an arbitrary manner.     

Popular culture in seventeenth-century England

Carl Schmitt emphatically rejected intermediate formations between peace and war. Analysing Schmitt's oscillation between the domestic and the international, the article suggests that the notion of ‘intermediate state’ provides a vital route to the core of Schmitt's political theory. The concept emerges in Schmitt's analysis of the Rhineland crisis, recurs in his vehement critique of Weimar pluralism, and, finally, reappears in his theory of modern war from the Third Reich to the Cold War. ‘Intermediate state’ has both qualitative and temporal aspects; it connotes not only categorical confusion and impurity but also instability and limited duration. Despite his criticism, Schmitt himself utilised the ambiguity, polysemy, and normative ambivalence of the intermediate state in his argumentation, finally giving it an open theological reinterpretation in his later work. Schmitt's theory of political conflict, consequently, is problematically bound to the vague intermediate state of perpetual conflict that he sought to avoid, and to the metaphorical aspects of the notion of battle that he explicitly rejected.     

‘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.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.     

After the Exception: HIV/AIDS Beyond Salvation and Scarcity

Abstract: Access to treatment for HIV/AIDS became a flashpoint for global justice struggles in the late 1990s. An expanding international response, premised to a significant extent on the idea of HIV/AIDS as an exceptional global problem, has since delivered treatment, care and prevention to growing numbers of people. HIV/AIDS exceptionalism, however, has increasingly been questioned, many aspects of the response have been critiqued and donor funding has started to decline. I argue that, having been framed as an exceptional humanitarian emergency, the question of HIV/AIDS as a global problem is increasingly located within a discourse of scarcity. Tracking the growing entanglement of global HIV/AIDS relief with neoliberal governmentality and the emergence of something I term therapeutic neoliberalism, I argue that the shift from a rationality of salvation to one of administration poses new challenges for global health activism. Questioning the discourse of scarcity remains essential to an alternative global health agenda.     

Poetic Theology: Paul and Form

ABSTRACT

The article offers a reading of the letters of Paul in relation to their interpretation by a number of figures – Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. It traces the persistence of an economy of terms in Paul, in relation to the part and the whole, death and life, spirit and the flesh, and others, to argue that this economy morphs and transforms itself in the modern world, imparting and imposing a sociality of living and dying, a coercive distribution and withholding of violence in colonization, on a global scale. And this paper argues, at the same time, that the economy of terms Paul’s letters advance is interrupted, that it comes undone, and that, in this coming undone, the theological becomes poetic – that the letters if Paul teach us to read what may be called “poetic theology.”     

‘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 enemy as the unthinkable: a concretist reading of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political

This article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics.     

Political Theology,Democracy, and the Exception in the Egyptian Revolution

As the sixth anniversary of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square passes, those uprisings and the events that followed continue pose important challenges not only for students of Middle Eastern and North African politics, but also for students of political theory and political theology. While scholars debate the extent to which the “Arab Spring” has amounted to a truly revolutionary turn of events, it is commonly accepted that the protests that swept the region were exceptional in their unanticipated and profound disruption of ordinary affairs. Under the influence of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, “the exception” has become a key figure in contemporary reflections on political theology, but attention to events in Egypt suggests that the familiar figure of the exception has not yet been mined for all of its implications for democratic practice. Slipping below grand articulations of the exception as a moment of sovereign decision, or as the suspension of the law, this essay turns its attention to the minor, everyday, background patterns of exceptionality that accompany the emergence of democratic practices outside the purview of the sovereign state. I argue that there is an intimate connection between the forms of exceptionality produced by longstanding practices of Egyptian secularism, the forms of exceptionality peculiar to the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath, and the forms of exceptionality that both make and unmake democratic practices. My argument has three parts: first Egyptian secularism is a process that manages and transforms authorized forms of Islamic practice, while at the same time producing exceptional formations, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is a key example; second that revolutionary politics can be understood as a matter of opening and sustaining the kind of exceptional circumstances that attended the 2011 uprisings, and that this can be usefully framed as an open-ended process of conversion; third that democratic practice requires courting both kinds of exception, despite their challenges, ambivalences, and potential dangers.     

Protection — Evil

Abstract

This article is premised on Heinrich Meier's dichotomy between political theology and political philosophy, the latter of which stakes its claims on “human wisdom.” I will examine one of the most famous political allegories claimed on this ground: that of the Hobbesian social contract. Then I will unpack this allegory into a set of five propositions that make up something I call the ontopolitical set. My argument is that in order to stand up as political philosophy, make rational sense, one must believe in the truth of all the five propositions of the ontopolitical set. If at least one of them is not a candidate for belief, then the whole set will collapse and the legitimacy of the modern Leviathan does not measure up to human wisdom, because it cannot be rationally justified. If this should be the case, we are left with political theology.