By Emily Zakin · Friday, February 10, 2012 Emily Zakin’s “The Image of the People: Freud and Schmitt’s Political Anti-Progressivism” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 The origin stories of Schmitt and Freud characterize “the people” as emerging and transmitted through processes of identification and embodied in an image. In both their views, the constitution of a body politic requires, logically and psychologically, a protective boundary that delimits inside and outside and a representation (however mythic or phantasmatic) of authority as the basis for preserving imaginary forms of identification and attachment that anchor bonds of association and provide the requisite boundaries for the unities of ego and nation to form. In this essay I develop the idea that the intensity of association that generates a people is not a metaphysical substance but a metaphysical image. I make use of the Freudian idea of a protective shield that enables an organism to withstand vulnerability and counter excitation with representation, in order to demonstrate that any image of the people is captive to tribal forms of affectivity. I conclude by discussing the danger of replacing the image of the people with the image of universal humanity, an appeal that Schmitt claims can only end in the transformation of cosmopolitanism into the terrifying violence of cosmopartisanship.
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By Jeffrey Bussolini · Friday, February 3, 2012 Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article considers ongoing founding events in the work of Carl Schmitt and its interpretation by Giorgio Agamben. The term refers to decisive “events” in Schmitt, which, although they may be exceptional (or perhaps because they are), play a continual role in generating and maintaining the political order. These events are not merely mythic or imaginary devices to describe politics, like the social contract and the veil of ignorance. These events are crucial, in Schmitt’s terms, for understanding “concrete reality.” His idea that the event of decision generates sovereignty, and the related formulation of the friend-enemy distinction founding the political order, are the initial and best-known examples of this argument, and they form a paradigm for considering other instances of this kind in his work and that of Agamben. The article contains five subsections considering events that have enduring effects on the political order. The term “ongoing founding events” calls attention to the persisting action and effect of these events, distinguishing them from historical turns or developments which don’t seem to have the same degree of internal necessity for contemporary politics. In addition to multiple interrelations between them, these five aspects share the evental structure of the exception as described by Schmitt and its special epistemological status for understanding concrete reality and the norm itself.
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By Ulrike Kistner · Tuesday, January 31, 2012 Ulrike Kistner’s “The Exception and the Rule: Fictive, Real, Critical” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, in the eighth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), that “the state of exception in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” has become as normalized as its proposition asserts. Yet it has given rise to different and contrasting understandings variously bounced around between Carl Schmitt, Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. Benjamin’s thesis could be read in correlation with Schmitt’s invocation of the state of exception to protect the Weimar Constitution from its own fragility. However, this would not explain the adjective “real” in “a real state of exception” of the task posed by the thesis. The term clearly points in the direction of the distinction between “fictive” and “real” states of exception, which in turn brings into focus the distinction and relation between sovereign and commissarial dictatorship, as outlined by Schmitt in his history of the concept of sovereignty. It is within the paradox of an impossible form of sovereign dictatorship that Schmitt indicates the possibility of constituent power in constitutional democracies. This idea can be connected with the ruptural power of divine violence of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921). While Agamben recognizes some of the lines of derivation of “state of siege” and “state of exception,” he does not realize the critical force of Schmitt’s paradox of sovereign dictatorship or Benjamin’s notion of pure violence. This blind spot is consequential: it eclipses the possibility of critique, along with the imagination figuring possibilities of the new.
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By Charles Kollmer · Thursday, January 19, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Charles Kollmer looks at Stephanie Frank’s “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” from Telos 153 (Winter 2010).
In “Re-imagining the Public Sphere: Malebranche, Schmitt’s Hamlet, and the Lost Theater of Sovereignty,” Stephanie Frank outlines a compelling approach to Carl Schmitt’s complex oeuvre. She sets out to rectify a common mistake made in existing treatments of Schmitt; in studies of Schmitt’s early work Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), scholars tend to rely on a later work, Constitutional Theory (1928), as an explanatory crutch. Both texts model representation, but a conflation of their respective models obscures how Schmitt’s project changes between the works. As a corrective, Frank traces the nuances of Roman Catholicism‘s model back to the influence of seventeenth-century theologian Malebranche, who in turn influenced the eighteenth-century revolutionary Abbé Sieyès. By grounding Roman Catholicism in this historical context, Frank not only sidesteps the circularity of her colleagues’ interpretations but also lays the groundwork for a persuasive reading of Schmitt’s turn to aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).
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By Jakob Norberg · Thursday, January 12, 2012 Jakob Norberg’s “Day-to-Day Politics: Carl Schmitt on the Diary” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Early on in his career, Carl Schmitt articulated a cultural critique of the diary. He saw the personal journal as a manifestation and reinforcement of the writing subject’s vanity and self-importance in a sterile modern world. The resulting record, moreover, offered up the diarist’s inner life to the gaze of dissecting readers, who tended to convert polemical arguments into psychological symptoms. Yet Schmitt also kept something like a daily journal and was thus forced to struggle against the diary from within the genre itself. His post-1945 notebooks, entitled Glossarium, constitute a cultural battlefield upon which this struggle takes place. By means of strategies such as scathing portraits of famous diarists and displays of sententious concision, Schmitt sought to expel the diary from his own notebooks, or stage a paradoxical day-to-day resistance to the pathologies of the age emblematized in the diary form itself. The study of Schmitt’s non-diary ultimately sheds light on his political understanding of writing. For him, genres are never neutral vehicles of ideas but rather inflect thought in ideologically relevant ways.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 19, 2011 Telos 157 (Winter 2011) is now available for purchase here.
The political disorder grows ever thicker. As of this writing, the European financial crisis seems as far away from resolution as ever, although the same complaint might have pertained three months ago nor is the diagnosis likely to lose its validity three months hence. The eurozone insists on tumbling toward an economic catastrophe that may drag the rest of the world down as well. Meanwhile prospects for a liberalizing democracy in the former Communist empire have largely vanished from living (or incarcerated) memory, and the trajectory of the Arab Spring poses more questions than answers. To be sure, things may still take a turn for the good, and the ignominious ends of some of the dictators merit celebration. Yet deserving candidates for violent overthrow and execution remain in power, in Damascus and Tehran, terrorizing their populations, amidst a larger civil war throughout the Middle East. Much of this disorder has profound local roots, stemming from competition among alternative religious traditions, political models, and economic agenda. But some of the instability results as well from the loss of ballast in the wake of the American retreat, itself a symptom of the chaos of American politics. The pre-primary period optimizes neither political virtue nor sober leadership, but even with that qualification, this lead-up to the 2012 electoral season stands out for its chilling hopelessness. It is hard to imagine a happy end to the story. The power of the state continues to expand, which undermines the integrity of individuals, but its capacity to influence the economy nonetheless diminishes. Disorder surrounds us, and the center gives way. Is there room for civic virtue?
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