ABSTRACT
As the contemporary discourse on ethics is ever more suffused with answers to the question of what makes a decision or an action ethical, it appears timely to engage with the ethical thought of a philosopher who infamously affirmed the autonomy of the decision from any ‘ethical criteria’. In contrast to numerous contemporary studies that take Carl Schmitt’s political realism as the object of criticism in the name of a variably construed ‘political ethics’, in this chapter we shall venture to recast the most controversial or even scandalous aspects of Schmitt’s thought as ethical in their own right.1 Our contention is that rather than serving as an easy target of deconstructionist or genealogical criticism, a Schmittian political ontology functions as an irreducible limit of this criticism, serving as the ‘undeconstructible’ remainder of political realism. The argument of this chapter is that this remainder also marks a locus for an ethical discourse that is both commensurable with the ethical drive of current poststructuralist criticism and able to transcend its limitations.
