The Event and the Subject: The Possible Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt

Law and Critique 21 (1):53-72 (2010)
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Abstract

The subject is the bearer of the sovereign decision, according to C. Schmitt. This decision grounds on certain situational pragmatics, yet mainly is born out of a ‘null’; as the decision forms the political normalcy that follows after, it displays its nature as an ‘event’. This subject is simultaneously a legal and a political one; it is the founder of the Nomos. This founding subject has been eclipsed in alignment with its post-modernly acclaimed ‘death’. The subject is deemed to have been inherently divided, as long as its identity steadily postpones itself, is incessantly ‘differing’, according to the deconstructionist approach; or it is considered as fundamentally ‘passive’, meaning not so much ‘weak’, but rather dethroning the Western preoccupation with the active autonomous individual; or, it is maintained but intrinsically reversed, now held either as part of a fundamental ontological order and indirectly of the nature, or, opposite to Kantian assumptions, as primarily captured in a radical heteronomy, which constitutes it as a proper ethical subject. Crucial is how to develop a concept taking into account the eventfulness of the constitution of the subject, without effacing the political character of such constitution by reducing it to non-political discourses, i.e., to metaphysics, morals or economics; how to conceive of Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as political event, namely both as secular act and in the same time as referring to extramundane fundaments ; how to go beyond the linearity of the liberalist ideology by equating the political event with a messianic miracle ‘without messianism’; how to ‘salute’ democracy?

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Homo sacer.Giorgio Agamben - 1998 - Problemi 1.
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason.Jacques Derrida - 2005 - Stanford University Press.
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.Emmanuel Levinas & Alphonso Lingis - 1981 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (4):245-246.
The Politics of Friendship.Jacques Derrida - 1988 - Journal of Philosophy 85 (11):632-644.

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