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, Juan Carlos Donado looks at Carl Schmitt’s “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” from Telos 96 (Summer 1993).
Perhaps Carl Schmitt would agree: more than ever before, we live today immersed within the spirit of technicity. Coined by Schmitt, the notion of the spirit of technicity serves the analytical purpose of allowing him to distinguish between the belief in technology and technology itself. Whereas technology signals the factual development of mechanistic progress and its link to natural science, the spirit of technicity, in Schmitt’s own words, is “perhaps an evil and demonic spirit, but not one which can be dismissed as mechanistic and attributed to technology” (141).
