archive : s0metim3s

Erik M. Vogt, in “Schmittian Traces in Žižek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters)” (diacritics 36.1), writes:

the (Christian) miracle of incarnation functions, for Žižek, as the elementary matrix for the act out of which a politics of true universality is to be generated. However, does the mutilated body of Christ really suffice as a bearer for a universalist position of defense against globalized cyberspace, against the mediatization of the miracle? As far as I can tell, Žižek never considers the possibility and actual ubiquity of a mediatized incarnation. Could it be because this would require the admission of “a certain artificiality and technicity, rendering the miracle as what de Vries calls “special effect” [“In Media Res” 25]? And if one grants the possibility of this interface between Christianity on the one hand, and the medium and mediatic on the other hand, would one not have to reposition Christianity — no longer along the lines of a politicizing logic of universality, but rather along the lines of a depoliticizing logic of globalization or “globalatinization,” that is, in terms of a “strange treaty between Christianity as experience of the death of god and the tele-techno-scientific capitalism”?

Discussions of Schmitt’s concept of the political (das politische) prompted a whole series of explorations that turned around the difference between politics and the political or, as rendered in French and Italian, respectively: le politique and la politique, il politico and la politica. I’ll add πολιτικον, πολιτικa - though I’m not sure of how or whether this has traveled or might be read back (and wonder whether I have the tenacity required) through Plato and Aristotle.

Whether the concept of the political can be ascribed to Arendt as well as Schmitt has been a matter of debate, but it’s become more or less accepted that Arendt did indeed write of the political. ( Contrariwise, see eg, Though, if anyone has access to John Ely’s “The Polis and ‘the Political’,” Thesis 11, 46, 1996, I’d be glad of a read.)

Following on from the often interesting, but sometimes bewilderingly conservative, discussion on Carl Schmitt at Long Sunday, four things I would like to archive – or, if not quite archive and certainly not summarise, then perhaps simply four things about Schmitt I would like to return to, think on.

The final paragraph of Alberto Moreiras’ “A God Without Sovereignty - Political Jouissance - The Passive Decision”, CR, 4.3, 2004:

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering. Xposted to the Long Sunday symposium, which continues for the rest of the week, and likely to have more sustained engagements with Schmitt than offered here.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.

The week-long symposium on Carl Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan” kicks off today at Long Sunday. Craig, aside from coordinating the reading, has again kindly provided a copy of the relevant essay - the pdf here.

(It might easily turn into a symposium on Magneto.)

Apropos the upcoming Long Sunday symposium on Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan” - which at present I find difficult to not read as a theory of ‘third world national-populism armed’ - I thought that I would make an extended, prefatory reference to Grant Farred’s “The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality” (SAQ, 103:4).