The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
“Russia and the West” is a topic that never seems to be exhausted, and as a question, one that can never be answered satisfactorily. People and intellectuals use a staggering number of criteria to determine Russia’s suitability (or lack thereof) to be counted “Western,” ranging from the geographic and the linguistic to the political and institutional. For centuries, Russians have wondered if they are part of “Europe.” It is evident that geographically and culturally they are “Eurasians.” In any case, about three-quarters of the Russian population live west of the Urals, in what has always been considered a part of Europe. Russia has been connected to Europe for centuries. All the important movements, relevant things that Russia has made in history, have been through its connection to Europe. Russia has really been and remains an important part of Europe. But Russia is not only Europe.
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). 
The present note aims to suggest a tragic reading of Carl Schmitt’s thought within a post-metaphysical perspective. The argument is divided into two parts. In the first—the meaning of the tragic dimension—I deal with Schmitt as a theorist of the tragic, that is, with the concept of tragedy that can be induced from Schmitt’s philosophy as a unitary whole. In the second part—the actuality of the tragic era—I will consider Schmitt as a pathologist of the tragic, by summarizing the diagnosis of the modernity he explicitly points out in his major works. The first thesis states that any normative and/or political order constitutively depends on a fundamental set of factual pre-conditions, whose actual enforcement in turn depends on a contextual and epochal contingency, beyond human control. If so, the range of human agency is determined by a super-human contextual contingency, to such an extent that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide everything. The second thesis states that the contemporary era is irretrievably characterized by a set of factual pre-conditions that makes any ultimate decision and political order unfeasible. If so, late modernity’s contingency is determined by the lack of any ordering principle and foundational reality, with the consequence that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide something. The awareness of the vital necessity of something lacking, and still impossible to restore, marks the tragic character of Schmitt’s thought considered in its consistent whole. 
The category of “everyday life” is a relatively new addition to the critical framework of Marxism. Since it was formally introduced by the French theorist Henri Lefèbvre (Critique de la vie quotidienne I, 1947; The Critique of Everyday Life, 1991), the critique of everyday life emerged in the post-1945 period as a response to the continuing stability of late capitalism and the integration of formerly radical elements of society within its logic of containment. From within the orbit of “actually existing socialism,” Agnes Heller’s critical anthropology of everyday life illuminates the integrative tendencies of both “great systems” during the Cold War via the prism of the alienated personality. While “The Marxist Theory of Revolution and the Revolution of Everyday Life” touches on numerous practical issues confronting the radical political movements on the late-1960s—including analysis of the ideological relevance of Che Guevara and the role of the sexual liberation movement in the formation non-alienated communities—its greatest and most enduring aspect is Heller’s focused and concise delineation of the phenomenology of personhood in the world-historical epoch of alienation. 
