ABSTRACT
Germane to our purposes here, Bachelard was talking about one of the four elements, fire. For Carl Schmitt, world orders can be described in terms of the relation between such elements.
Indeed, I want to suggest that the study of the poetics and mythology of world order is central to the study of world order itself, but not as a study of the history of errors we must break with to constitute forms of true knowledge, but because they make the world thinkable and actionable in specific ways. In other words, poetics and mythology render possible certain kinds of global political action and decisive authority. Even Schmitt, the thinker who did the most to advance a philosophically consistent and ‘objective’ concept of world order, could not avoid mythology and poetry and indeed the philologist’s fascination with the derivation of words which, for Bachelard, ‘are made for singing and enchanting, [and] rarely make contact with thought’ (1968: 1).
