Schmitt Quotes

“Един мъж няма да заобича по-малко своята спътница или своя партньор, след като е правил любов другаде. Сърце и тяло са две отделни неща.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Invisible Love

“The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs, and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law - in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it - as pure violence - an existence outside of law.
For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the 'battle of giants concerning being', that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the 'thing' of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being the meshes of the logos.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“Schmitt begins his book Political Theology by saying “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” and what he means here is that the key feature of sovereignty is deciding when the law doesn’t apply. This means standing above the law, and in e ect, to be the law. America claims the right to override the internal decision of countries in the Western Hemisphere—the so-called Monroe Doctrine—and it has repeatedly overridden it by toppling regimes in Latin America. Russia claims the same power over Ukraine, and the war in Ukraine is being fought not over Ukraine’s self-determination, but over who decides the exception in Ukraine: America or Russia. This war, like all wars, is being waged over sovereignty. War is not “politics by other means”, 16 but war is the essence of politics. There is always a sovereign, which is another way of saying that absolutism is the only form that politics can ever take. This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for us who have been raised to believe in liberal democracy. And yet, the mature, realistic, and consistent view is that the essential feature of governance is dictatorship, or as Schmitt puts it, the state is “in the decisive case the ultimate authority”, because if it’s not, then whatever is the ultimate authority is de facto the state. [...] Sometimes diferences are just too deep to be resolved by words, by negotiation, by parliaments, by debate. At this point the question arises, quis interpretabitur —who interprets? Your constitution is worth no more than the man interpreting it. Serious disagreement requires dictatorship. When actual lives are on the line Rome creates a dictator, America invokes the national security exception, Napoleon declares “I am the revolution” — even the most limp-wristed HR managerialism, when pushed to justify itself, takes refuge in the paradox of tolerance. [...] Even liberalism stands and falls on this basic foundation, however much it pretends otherwise. The dictator is the protector; without the protector, no Lord Protector; without the Lord Protector, no liberalism. He is always lurking in the background.”
― Mike Maxwell, The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought