Carl Schmitt

From No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
Jump to: navigation, search



[1]


In The Concept of the Political (1932), Carl Schmitt writes: "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy."[2]


In his book Political Theology (1922), Schmitt presented a quite different, even contradictory logic of the political.

There the structural function of the exception - the sovereign's Godlike ability to declare a state of emergency and act outside the law - implies that the border between the law and lawlessness is permeable and, by extension, that hte realtionship of interiority and exteriority is unstable.

References

  1. Zizek. The Ticklish Subject. p. 113-116
  2. Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political, trans. Geroge Schwab. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.