Carlo Galli

Carl Schmitt and the Global Age

Schmitt’s thought is the deconstruction of modern political theory. Th is is true both in internal politics, for the exception/decision theory and for the theory of the “political” (Schmitt, 1972d), which is a genealogy of the Hobbesian rational state theory, and in international politics, for the theory of nomos and the theory of the partisan (which are genealogical complications of geopolitics and state-based international right). Th us, the conflictual element in Schmitt’s political thought—the enemy has an ineradicable role in the creation of order, both in the theory of the “political,” in the theory of decision of the secularized theologico-political matrix, as well as in the theory of constituent power—is not an apologia for absolute conflict, but serves the orientation of order and the political unity inherent in modern political theory, not to mention Schmittian thought. In Schmitt, this functionality is never completely instrumental to the conflict of order, nor completely subordinate to it. Rather, it is the perpetual disturbance of that order by originary,

Contaminations: Irruptions of the Void

Here we present, in broad terms, not a history of the Void, which Sergio Givone has covered with great authority, nor a history of nihilism, whose most important coordinates have already been mapped,1 but instead an essay on the irruptions of the void within the intellectual experience of the West. Our basic hypothesis is, first of all, that these irruptions presuppose that the void exerts a ceaseless labor—which is not, however, a productivity—that is capable of dis mantling the forms and norms that are established from time to time to curb it or at least to hide it. And secondly, that whenever we frantically try to neutralize the void, the void seizes us from its abyss with even greater violence, twisting our forms and violating our boundaries (which are so much more fragile than they claim to be in the face of its im pervious power). As such, he who fears and exorcises the void and its devastation is most exposed to them, and he who believes he gets the farthest away from them, is actually the nearest. Irruption is not, therefore, simply an experience, a deliberate attempt to trans gress the limits of the human, toward Good and toward Evil.2 It is rather an unforeseen and unwanted experience, a catastrophe we suffer. The sphere with which we are concerned is not theoretical but practical. Therefore the void is experienced as death, the absolute disorder, the annihilation of life—the very thing from which we wish to protect ourselves by creating the norm, law, and order to be gin with. In this practical sphere, the categorical imperative absolutely must be security, which is to say, the deferral, or humanization, of death. There are many strategies that, in various guises, have the objective of securing life by means of a productive relation with death, of creating orders that incorporate disorder, strategies that make coexistence with death the origin of social cohesion, of coexistence among men. So many human laws find their own innermost force by incorporating the law of death. And if, as Emanuele Severino asserts, all Western thought that believes in the reality of death is nihilistic, and if this thought strives to defend itself from death with metaphysics and ontology, then there exist sophisticated forms of nihilism that define themselves by their proximity to death, to the annihilation of living beings. We learn this from Rene Girard and his theory of the sacrifice of the scapegoat; from Hegel, who in Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates the power of death, that absolute