Law and Critique

, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 53–72 | Cite as

The Event and the Subject: The (IM)Possible Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt

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Abstract

The subject is the bearer of the sovereign decision, according to C. Schmitt. This decision grounds on certain situational pragmatics, yet mainly is born out of a ‘null’; as the decision forms the political normalcy that follows after, it displays its nature as an ‘event’. This subject is simultaneously a legal and a political one; it is the founder of the Nomos. This founding subject has been eclipsed in alignment with its post-modernly acclaimed ‘death’. The subject is deemed to have been inherently divided, as long as its identity steadily postpones itself, is incessantly ‘differing’, according to the deconstructionist approach; or it is considered as fundamentally ‘passive’, meaning not so much ‘weak’, but rather dethroning the Western preoccupation with the active autonomous individual; or, it is maintained but intrinsically reversed, now held either as part of a fundamental ontological order and indirectly of the nature (Agamben), or, opposite to Kantian assumptions, as primarily captured in a radical heteronomy, which constitutes it as a proper ethical subject (Levinas). Crucial is how to develop a concept taking into account the eventfulness of the constitution of the subject, without effacing the political character of such constitution by reducing it to non-political discourses, i.e., to metaphysics, morals or economics; how to conceive of Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as political event, namely both as secular act and in the same time as referring to extramundane fundaments (to a ‘political theology’?); how to go beyond the linearity of the liberalist ideology by equating the political event with a messianic miracle ‘without messianism’; how to ‘salute’ democracy?

Keywords

Conflict Contingency Ethics Event Ontology Passivity Politics/political Schmitt Subjectivity Theology 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This is an elaborated version of a paper presented at the Critical Legal Conference held in Glasgow, 5–7 September 2008 with the general theme ‘Critical Legal Strategies’. The paper was a contribution to the specific Conference stream on ‘critical legal subjectivity’. My best thanks to Professor Costas Douzinas for his important remarks and to Mrs Valerie Kelley for having perfectly overseen the manuscript; for eventual shortcomings in the text the author is solely responsible.

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of LawUniversity of CyprusNicosiaCyprus

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