Adam Sitze

Janus's Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt

First published in Italian in 2008 and appearing here in English for the first time, Januss Gaze is the culmination of Carlo Gallis ongoing critique of the work of Carl Schmitt. Galli argues that Schmitts main accomplishment, as well as the thread that unifies his oeuvre, is his construction of a genealogy of the modern that explains how modernitys compulsory drive to achieve order is both necessary and impossible. Galli addresses five key problems in Schmitts thought: his relation to the state, the significance of his concept of political theology, his readings of Machiavelli and Spinoza, his relation to Leo Strauss, and his relevance for contemporary political theory. Galli emphasizes the importance of passing through Schmitt’s thought—and, more important, beyond Schmitt’s thought—if we are to achieve insight into the problems of the global age. Adam Sitze provides an illuminating introduction to Schmitt and Gallis reading of him.

What is a Citation

Philippe Nonets “Antigones Law” raises interesting questions for the philosophy of law. Nonets text points to three problematics in particular: the relation of the unsayable to the unspeakable, the relation of law to its citations, and the relation of autonomy to heteronomy.

History and Desire

There’s no question that the publication of Premesh Lalu’s The Deaths of Hintsa is an event. A candidate for The Sunday Times’s 2010 Alan Paton Prize for non-fiction, and already the topic of two intelligent, critical, and unusually long scholarly book reviews, it is clear that Lalu’s book constitutes an original and important episode in a set of debates in South African historiography that, as one of Lalu’s critics notes, stretch back at least to the 1970s. Precisely what sort of event this book is, however, is another question altogether. The Deaths of Hintsa is a book, after all, that seeks to unsettle our most basic assumptions about what we mean when we use the word ‘‘event.’’ It wants nothing more, in fact, than to throw into question our preconceived notions about what does and does not qualify as an event. And this presents an intriguing perplexity. Ordinarily, it seems, the task of the reviewer is to provide the discerning reader with a balance sheet of pluses and minuses, so that the reader may determine whether the knowledge presented by a given text is sufficiently valuable to justify the time, money, and energy the reader will expend on the acquisition of that knowledge. But The Deaths of Hintsa is no ordinary text. It’s a text that asks us to think twice—both more searchingly and more responsively—about what it is exactly that we want to know, insofar as our intellectual curiosity takes the form of a demand for historical knowledge. It’s a text, in other words, whose inquiry extends to include an interrogation of the reader’s own ‘‘desire to know’’ (45). As such, no review of this text will be complete that limits itself to calculations of positives and negatives. We must go directly to the heart of the matter, to clarify the

The Question of Law Analysis

This paper is an inquiry into one of the juridical forms that is implied within psychoanalysis as a condition for the genesis of its theory and practice. It argues that, to the extent psychoanalysis leaves the problem of tyranny in silence, it also will misrecognize the juridical conditions for its own object of knowledge, namely, humanity as exemplified by Oedipus. It concludes by suggesting that the same theoretical problematic that enables psychoanalysis to resist fantasies of sovereign mastery also inhibits its capacity to expose the ontological structure of sovereign power to questioning.

That Curious Privilege of Immunity

This article offers a close reading of Nasser Hussain’s 1989 essay on Salman Rushdie’s 1983 novel Shame in order to propose some thoughts on the basic problematic guiding Hussain’s inquiries into post-colonial law.

Study and revolt

Abstract This essay is an inquiry into the forms of life and writing that emerge in the relation between study and revolt. After an initial sketch of the problem of “normal emergency” as it presents itself in post-apartheid South Africa, the essay then turns to a first reading of Richard Rive’s 1990 novel Emergency Continued in order to ask about the relations of study and revolt under conditions of a state of emergency. To deepen its reading of Rive, the essay makes a detour into the utopian theory of education set forth in 1972 by Richard Turner. The essay then turns to a second reading of Rive’s Emergency Continued in order to elucidate the unexpectedly utopian kernel of that text. The essay concludes with a reading of Zoë Wicomb’s short story “A Clearing in the Bush,” and a reflection on the relation between study and revolt under contemporary conditions.