Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
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Riccardo Baldissone
Riccardo Baldissone is currently Honorary Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and adjunct researcher at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. His last major completed project was an attempt to rethink both human rights and modern theoretical discourses, which he construed as a family of related fundamentalisms. Among his most recent publications, “Beyond the Modern Synecdoche: Towards a Non Fundamentalist Framework for Human Rights Discourse” inActivating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts , eds. Rob Garbutt, Bee Chen Goh and Baden Offord (London: Ashgate Press, 2012); “The Multiplicity of Nothingness: A Contribution to a Non-Reductionist Reading of Stirner” inMax Stirner , ed. Saul Newman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Abstract
Schmitt's definition of sovereignty is also an attempt to read against the grain Western legal and political history. And yet, this highly unorthodox reconstruction not only reveals the boundaries of Western medieval and modern thought, but also hides them again behind new transhistorical principles. I construct Schmitt's ambivalent gesture by turning his short text into a series of quasisymptoms, which hint to his own historical context, as well as to more general features of Western thought. In particular, I propose reading the association of sovereignty with the state of exception as a rationalization of the catastrophe of the First World War, and I suggest an analogy with Freud's post-war invention of the death drive. Though Schmitt rightly emphasizes the contextual determination of past politico-legal conceptualizations, he puts forth a narrative that transcends these very historical determinations. Hence, whilst Schmitt underlines the theological roots of Western juridico-political discourse, he still operates within the decontextualized conceptual space produced by medieval theological speculation, and re-enacted by modern naturalism. From within this claustrophobic theoretical space, even the exception is recaptured as a principle. On the contrary, a genealogical understanding of sovereignty both discloses the latter's metaphysical underpinnings and undermines its foreverness.
About the author
Riccardo Baldissone is currently Honorary Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and adjunct researcher at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. His last major completed project was an attempt to rethink both human rights and modern theoretical discourses, which he construed as a family of related fundamentalisms. Among his most recent publications, “Beyond the Modern Synecdoche: Towards a Non Fundamentalist Framework for Human Rights Discourse” in Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts, eds. Rob Garbutt, Bee Chen Goh and Baden Offord (London: Ashgate Press, 2012); “The Multiplicity of Nothingness: A Contribution to a Non-Reductionist Reading of Stirner” in Max Stirner, ed. Saul Newman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
