ABSTRACT
The name Carl Schmitt evokes controversy, anger, and both silent and expressed admiration from diverse and contrasting political and critical thinkers. A large bulk of his writings have not been translated into English, and throughout the last eighty
1 Georg Trakl, “Limbo”/ “Vorhölle” (1915), in Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose, trans. by Alexander Stillmark, London: Libris 2001, p. 89: “By autumnal walls, there shadows seek / Resonant gold by the hill, / Pasturing evening clouds / In the peace of desiccated planes. / This age breathes darker tears, / Damnation, when the dreamer’s heart / Overflows with purple sunset, / With the melancholy of the smoking town; / A golden chill wafts after the stroller, The stranger, from the graveyard, / Like a gentle corpse that follows in the shadows.” 2 Jorge Luis Borges, “Deutsches Requiem,” in his Labyrinths, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1984, p. 174. 3 In a letter to Ernst Jünger 1947, see Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl
years, he has been censored, vilified, viewed as a relic of a particular period, in some circles glorified as the modern political thinker par excellence, and in other countries virtually unknown. He remains an interesting political thinker; he gives provocative and detailed political analyses; his critique of liberalism still needs to be answered where democracy negates liberalism and liberalism negates democracy; he reiterates the political idea of “totality,” and most famously he both declares that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception and presents the friend/enemy distinction as the foundation of all politics. In the last twenty years interest in Carl Schmitt has increased with each year. Celebrated philosophers and critical theorists such as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949), Georgio Agamben (b. 1942), Jacob Taubes (1923-87), Chantal Mouffee (b. 1943), and Antonio Negri (b. 1933) have all referred to him at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.4 This could be due to two primary factors: the changing political climate around the world, not least the rise (and fall) of the neo-conservative movement in the United States of America, which can be traced back to Carl Schmitt and his rigorous thought,5 and the disappearance of the reluctance of the political and academic environment to approach and appropriate Schmitt who was both an antiSemite and Nazi for a time.
