ABSTRACT
The writings of Carl Schmitt are now indissociable from both an historical period and a twenty-first-century moment. He will forever be remembered for his association with the National Socialists of 1930s Germany, and as the figure whose writings on sovereignty, politics and the law provided justification for authoritarian, decisional states. Yet at the same time, the postSeptember 11th 2001 world is one in which a wide range of scholars have turned to Schmitt to understand the enmity of a new century of conflict characterised by the emergence of spaces of exception placed outside the law by and through the law and the wider contestations of a global American imperium through which such legal geographies owe their provenance. Such analyses have been applied to representatives of sovereignty at the centre of political hierarchies, such as Lord Falconer’s defence, above, of the decisionmaking power of the executive to decide on the use of force in concrete, material situations. George W. Bush and his advisors ape Schmitt’s doctrines to an extent that would be comic had their consequences not been so tragic: the friend-enemy distinction of warning Iran that ‘Our nation and our fight against terror will uphold the doctrine: either you’re with us or against us’3; the lawful yet exceptional spaces of Guantánamo Bay (Hussain, 2007); the empire-denying logic of America’s absent-presentism in Donald Rumsfeld’s
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work on sovereignty with Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the exception becomes the norm, to examine the ‘petty sovereigns’ (Butler, 2006, 56) of exception who divide, profile and insecure us in the spaces of the airport, the mall, the passport office or the Internet.
