ABSTRACT

Ever since the collapse of state-steered communist projects all over Central and Eastern Europe, communism has been slowly but steadily brought before the law. This chapter endeavours to disturb precisely the Apollonian dream, and to traverse the fantasy sustaining the peculiar selective reading of law's history by bringing the legal subject, that is the subject of the law, before the Real of its own history. It engages directly and at length with biographical details and the panoply of concepts that Schmitt's thought brings to the fore. The chapter deliberately eschews some of Schmitt's direct takes and reactions to communism and Marxist social theory which to examine further while discussing the secret dialogue between radical conservatism and revolutionary theory at the dawn of the October Revolution. Through the concept of the exception, the question of sovereignty irrupts and substantially changes Schmitt's previous assertions of the primacy of law within the law-state-individual triad.