ABSTRACT
The Buribunks by Carl Schmitt is a short Zukunftutopie that appeared in 1918 in Summa. it was astonishing for the peculiarity of its content and permeated by fluxes of refined sarcasm. This essay is entirely dedicated to exploring the implications and some of the collateral consequences of the autobiographical practice – here characterised as a subtle form of social control beyond its usual connotation as a literary style. In his text, Schmitt de-idealises the act of writing, still considered a public virtue by many modern authors. The mandatory description of life in the Buribunks’ society testifies to the inscription of a social norm that affects our being and covers the continuous reduction of every element of vitality with noble claims of scientific progress. In contrast to the traditional conceptions of self-writing, as both the means and end (to reflect on the self and influence civil progress), a new paradigm is displayed. Paradoxically, the subject of writing becomes completely depersonalised and dispossessed by the same activity that was supposed to lead him to his own subjectivity. Autobiography thus becomes autography. The interpretation proposed in this chapter argues that Schmitt anticipated phenomena such as automatisation, spectacularisation, self-referentiality and the mortification of the living, which all share a tendency to orient life coercively into the sphere of information – with the contrary effect of degrading it. Through a final parallel with a classic figure of power (Hobbes’s Leviathan), the narrative dispositif that affects new forms of social control becomes visible: a solipsistic mechanism of the hyper-production of traces for self-representation at the cost of annihilating the bíos that is supposed to speak.
