ABSTRACT

Jan-Werner Müller has noted that for Schmitt ‘clarity is an appropriate distri - bution of light and shadow’ (Müller 2003: 9).1 This seems an appropriate description of Schmitt’s own work that appears to offer startlingly sharp conceptual insights but leaves them cloaked in ambiguity, concealing as much as they reveal. As Müller argues, Schmitt’s writing ‘freely mixes supposedly crystal-clear definitions and distinctions with images, metaphors and myths’ (Müller 2003: 9). If this rich aesthetic and analytic brew is partly what makes Schmitt’s work so engaging it is also arguably the source of its dangerously seductive power. The Nomos of the Earth is not an exception to this rule but rather amplifies it, taking Schmitt’s thought into extremely suggestive if uncertain territories in a tangled thicket of philosophical analysis, political polemic and mythological allusion that seems at once mired in apologist inconsistency and pregnant with world-historical insight. Despite entering murkier waters the book follows an odyssey familiar from his earlier work, where order, cast adrift on an unsteady ontological sea, seeks to return to the firm land of authentic legitimacy. If such a ‘ground’ for order was sought in a ‘groundless’ sovereign decisionism in Political Theology or antagonistic relations with the enemy in The Concept of the Political, in The Nomos of the Earth it is identified all too literally with the geopolitical ordering of space. A geopolitical vision that firmly fixes order to space may be appealing at a time when the ‘markers of certainty’ are dissolving but we should steadfastly steer clear of this reactionary siren call. But it is precisely Schmitt’s vision of a multipolar global order fixed to a number of ‘Big Spaces’ that a number of critical leftist thinkers have adopted from his book. Chantal Mouffe, Fabio Petito and Danilo Zolo are among those that have directly appropriated Schmitt’s geopolitical thought in appealing for a new multipolar order of the Earth. I argue that these calls for a new multipolar world order replicate the worst of Schmitt’s understanding of the relationship between space and political order and adopt his regressive understanding of political pluralism contained within a set of large-scale spatial units. These multipolar arguments of the

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philosophical project it is possible to develop an alternative reading that locates constituent power in relation to the production of space. Such a reading allows the relationship between space and politics to be rearticulated in radically democratic terms that resist the rocky lure of ‘Big Space’ geopolitics.