Status Updates From Carl Schmitt and The Buribu...

The irony is that, in prophesying the terrible fate of political romanticism in the twentieth century, Schmitt wrote his own epigraph.

Schmitt’s decisionist philosophy is nothing but the apotheosis of late romanticism. The Sovereign is simply the romantic ‘other’ – God or Nature or Spirit or Genius – in human guise. If Schmitt dismissed political romanticism as ‘the sovereignty of the ego’, he substituted for it the egotism of the sovereign.

Wit and contempt forever jostled for pre-eminence in his writing. A liberal Pontius Pilate would simply defer the choice between Christ and Barrabas to a committee, he suggested; the liberal dream of a war to end all wars was like ‘eating the last cannibal’. These literary manoeuvres are surprising, disorienting and confounding.