By Jesse Gelburd-Meyers · Monday, August 10, 2009 Michael Marder’s essay “From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics” appears in Telos 147 (Summer 2009), a special issue on “Carl Schmitt and the Event” for which he is the guest editor. Jesse Gelburd-Meyers follows up with some questions.
Jesse Gelburd-Meyers: In a world in which liberal doctrine informs the partitioning off of every segment of society so as to minimize the reach of the political sphere and give an ever privileged role to the economic realm, it is essential that we keep a proper perspective as to just how elusive the political truly is. If there is no autonomous political “sphere,” then what does a constitution constitute? What legitimates the sovereign’s decision to declare an entity an enemy if his sovereignty itself is not made by previously created rules that demarcate who can legally make such decisions? Isn’t it inevitable that a nation that is not ruled by the mere force of man, and which peacefully transfers the reins of power from regime to regime, will have some rules that, at the very least, establish the preconditions for the political event by declaring the type of sovereign who is permitted to make such decisions?
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By Jesse Gelburd-Meyers · Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Roy Ben-Shai’s article “Schmitt or Hamlet: The Unsovereign Event” appears in Telos 147 (Summer 2009). Jesse Gelburd-Meyers follows up with some questions.
Jesse Gelburd-Meyers: If the irruption of the “real” into the play both constitutes an event and leads to the transformation of the play into a tragedy, then does the irruption of the sovereign’s political decision into the flow of historical reality make that drama which takes place on the world stage into a tragedy? Under this framework, is the concept of the political one which is fundamentally tragic?
Roy Ben-Shai: On the one hand, yes. I think that if we apply the categories Schmitt develops here to his discussion on the political, then the political can be shown to be fundamentally “tragic.” On the other hand, my emphasis in this essay, which I take to be Schmitt’s own emphasis, is on the non-subjective nature of the tragic as such, and by implication perhaps, of the political. In other words, no less important than seeing the continuity of this essay with Schmitt’s earlier and more famous texts, is to see the revision it contains. What is being dropped out is the moment of decision as the ground (subiectum) of the tragic/political event. As far as individual characters go, the tragic is what befalls, not what is enacted or decided upon. But this feature is essential to the tragic as such. Here, in this modern tragedy, we identify no specific guiding force, neither an immanent nor a transcendent sovereign entity, but only an imbrication of human beings living through the impacts of a transitional and chiasmic period.
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