ABSTRACT
This chapter reads The Buribunks as an act of political enmity. It will be argued that by writing and publishing this early satirical essay, Schmitt intensified his disagreement with positivist self-enclosedness and depoliticisation. The Buribunks represents a step towards the theoretical position of Schmitt’s later writings and an early – indirect – version of his concept of the political from the 1920s. By focusing on the general role of fictionality in Schmitt, extending well beyond the text of The Buribunks, the chapter argues that the satirical critique of positivism points to the unavoidable undoing of any system claiming self-enclosedness. By analysing how The Buribunks is related to Schmitt’s earlier legal theoretical works, the contemporaneous Political Romanticism and his political theory from the 1920s, it will be highlighted how Schmitt as the external author undermines delusive buribunkological perfection by inserting two anti-buribunkological moments that would displace any political order without the possibility of sovereign intervention. Substantiating the role of conflict in Schmitt’s political theory, members of the imagined society of the diary-keeping Buribunks constitute not merely political enmity, but the enemies of the political.
