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, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” from Telos 157 (Winter 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini’s article “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” is a discursive piece seeking to provide groundwork on the conception of the event and its theological and political dimensions. He coins this term “ongoing founding events” as a type of poetic gesture toward the movement of temporality to which events are founded, and which as a consequence of their founding then continue to contaminate the space around them. Bussolini claims that for Schmitt the event of decision generates sovereignty, and that within this basic movement, whether it be mythical or concrete reality at this point is unsure, becomes the generating and maintaining of political order.
