ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth (2006a) is famous for its abundance of physical inscriptions, its earth/soil/land metaphors, and its images and terms derived from the idea of a natural material rootedness of human existence. Schmitt’s thought about order and humanity has been described as ‘telluric’ (Dean 2007: 246). For Schmitt, the Greek word nomos refers first and fore - most to a ‘concrete enclosed location (Ortung) on the surface of the earth’ (Ojakangas 2009: 35). Commentators have written that ‘Schmitt time and again stresses that the true law has an intimate relationship with soil (Boden) and land (Land). It is always bound to the earth (Erde)’ (Ojakangas 2009: 35). The inscription of a concrete order into the earth and the derivation of human law from the soil explain why delineation (of terrains, territories and fields, or what topography really amounts to for Schmitt) and appropriation (of uncultivated lands, states and resources, or what one might suggest political geography should be for Schmitt) are two crucial concepts. In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt affirms that ‘[s]oil that is cleared and worked by human hands manifests firm lines, whereby definite divisions become apparent’ (2006a: 42). He adds that ‘land-appropriation precedes the order that follows from it. It constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law’ (2006a: 48). Thus, it appears that there can be little doubt that Schmitt wants to insist on the fundamentally geophysical character of legal order and political organisation. What could be called (with Mika Ojakangas’s assistance) Schmitt’s mode of geopolitical ‘primevalism’ determines (grounds and bounds) anything, any object, any condition of possibility, any life and any meaning that come next.
