Something to Die for. The Individual as Interruption of the Political in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political
Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 60 (2):311–325 (2016)
Abstract
This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt's concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt's anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt's framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt's writing.Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
Two Modes of Non-Thinking. On the Dialectic Stupidity-Thinking and the Public Duty to Think.Lavinia Marin - 2018 - Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 62 (1):65-80.
How to Think Critically about the Common Past? On the Feeling of Communism Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary Romania.Lavinia Marin - 2019 - The Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series 68 (2):57-71.
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References found in this work
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.Carl Schmitt & Tracy B. Strong - 2005 - University of Chicago Press.
The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government.Giorgio Agamben - 2011 - Stanford University Press.
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.Iris Marion Young - 1986 - Social Theory and Practice 12 (1):1-26.