The concept of the political in Carl Schmitt’s works is not only defined by the distinction between friend and enemy, but also by the criterion of breaching the rules in a normatively unbound act of decision. According to Schmitt, this decision is, however, not arbitrary, but provoked by the necessity of a historical situation. This aspect of necessity calls the freedom of the decision into question and leads to tensions within Schmitt’s theory of the political. More explicitly than in Schmitt’s political and legal writings, this conflict between freedom and necessity is exposed in his theory of tragedy. In a reading of his book Hamlet or Hecuba, published in 1956, I will show, in a first step, how the act of breaching the rules is not external to normativity, but occurs from within normativity itself. It is the act of self-breaching – of breaking the rules of its own genre – by which, according to Schmitt, modern tragedy is defined. This breach, however, is compelled by the necessity of a real, i. e. extraliterary, event. In a second step, I will expound on how this idea of self-breaching, which also characterises Schmitt’s understanding of the political, leads to a loss of decision which not only questions his idea of sovereignty, but also topples his concept of the political.
La revitalització de les grans religions: un repte per a l’autocomprensió secular de la modernitat?
(2014)
La vitalitat de la religió ha conduït a un qüestionament de la tesi que vincula la modernització i la secularització. Cal, doncs, repensar el mateix significat de la “modernitat” per tal d’adaptar-la a l’escala mundial. A l’hora de dur a terme un diàleg intercultural ja no es pot confiar en un suposat universalisme de la raó. La raó secular no pot pretendre establir els criteris de la racionalitat sense prendre en consideració també altres tradicions, com les que beuen de la religió. Es planteja, doncs, la pregunta si el pensament postmetafísic por aprendre alguna cosa de les tradicions religioses i si per fer-ho cal que s’hi relacioni de manera agnòstica.
L’autor sosté que el que caracteritza les societats liberals democràtiques és un cert grau d’intersubjectivitati cohesió. Segons ells, els liberals coincideixen amb els comunitaristes aconsiderar que aquestes característiques només poden aparèixer en la forma de «comunitat».Partint d’aquesta coincidència, argumenta, primer, presentant un concepte mínim de comunitaten el qual tots els comunitaristes estarien d’acord i que conté, com a nucli, el supòsitque l’autorealització humana va unida a una praxi vital comunitària. Aquesta autorealitzaciórau en l’estimació mútua entre els qui viuen en societat. La qüestió és establir relacionsde solidaritat de manera que les capacitats de l’altre puguin fer possible l’enriquimentde la pròpia vida. El concepte mínim de comunitat postradicional es definirà finalmentcom aquesta forma de solidaritat que implica estimació mútua i que, alhora, uneix amb elsupòsit de valors compartits.
This conference report comprises the contributions of European and American specialists in Fascism on the topic of networks, promises for the future and cultures of violence in Europe, 1922–1945. It was concluded that a much more in-depth examination of fascist networks, as well as their learning and acquisition processes is required, especially after 1939 and in the currently under-researched regions of Eastern and Southern-Eastern Europe. Secondly, the concept of a ‘New Man’ should be applied in more detailed studies on population and educational policies. Thirdly, there is a need to counter the frequently lamented asymmetrical state of research between Italian fascism and National Socialism.
This article argues that proliferation of prefixes like ‘neo’ and ‘post’ that adorn conventional ‘isms’ have cast a long shadow on the contemporary relevance of traditional political ideologies. Suggesting that there is, indeed, something new about today’s political belief systems, the essay draws on the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ to make sense of the changing nature of the contemporary ideological landscape. The core thesis presented here is that today’s ideologies are increasingly translating the rising global imaginary into competing political programs and agendas. But these subjective dynamics of denationalization at the heart of globalization have not yet dispensed with the declining national imaginary. The twenty-first century promises to be an ideational interregnum in which both the global and national stimulate people’s deep-seated understandings of community. Suggesting a new classification scheme dividing contemporary political ideologies into ‘market globalism’, ‘justice globalism’, and ‘jihadist globalism’, the article ends with a brief assessment of the main ideological features of justice globalism.
In the concentration on his text, the author Franz Kafka is often reduced to the phantom of a deadly sick and Oedipus-struck inventor of abstract labyrinths in an absurd bureaucratic universe. This talk intends to reintegrate him into the landscape of various conterts of modernicy at the beginriing of the 20Ih century such as: the movement of life-reform, intellectual debates, academic research in the field of industrial accidents, changing erotic relations and the enthusiasm for new technical products. As a result, the author claims that Kafka could well be imagined as a member of the pre-war-society described by Thomas Mann in the "Magic Mountain".