A Solution in Hieroglyphic: Carl Schmitt, Herman Melville, and the Politics of Images
Excerpt
Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1
The enemy is our own question as a figure.
Theodor Däubler2
I In July 1941, as the Nazi government was committing genocidal atrocities, two of its most prominent right-wing intellectuals debated the merits of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. The first, Ernst Jünger, praised Poe's depiction of passive suffering in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), writing that “Poe is and will remain the greatest master, recording the ground-plan and inner mathematics of the dangerous world.”3 The second, Carl Schmitt, replied…
