Konturen: Vol 1 (2008)
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/23929
Political Theology: the Border in Question2024-03-29T07:10:34ZIntroduction: Political Theology and the Question of the Border
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/23962
Introduction: Political Theology and the Question of the Border
Librett, Jeffrey S.
15 pages
2008-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/23961
The Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception
McNulty, Tracey
This paper evaluates the status and function of the border in the two polemics that bookend the long history of political theology: Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law, and Carl Schmitt’s critique of constitutional liberalism. Paul and Schmitt both challenge spatial notions of law that establish a boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” by topologizing “inside” and “outside” as continuous: through the “fulfillment of the law” in Paul, and through the strategy of sovereign exception in Schmitt. Schmitt even describes sovereignty as a “border concept,” a Grenzbegriff: a concept that pertains to borderline cases, but perhaps at the same time a concept of the border, one that proposes a particular interpretation of the border and its logical function. The essay argues that Schmitt’s contribution to the logical problem of law as border is to claim that the border need not be written, and that the sovereign exception is not of the order of a writing, but a “miracle” that is by nature unwritten and unwritable.
The Hebraic tradition of law that is the object of Paul’s polemic offers another way of considering the border, as the function of the written law. It conceives of law not as a normative representation of an existing situation, but as the delimination of a space or gap that may not be transgressed. While the fulfillment of the law and the sovereign exception bypass the limit implied in the law, offering a topological interpretation of the border as what integrates “inside” and “outside” into a new whole, the Hebraic law aligns the border with the logical function of negation. The essay approaches these different accounts of the border by way of Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of law. The imaginary is the “incarnated” dimension of law, while the symbolic corresponds to the function of speech as a barrier or limit, and involves a spacing and negation, the introduction of a gap or emptiness that precludes anything like a “whole.”
26 pages
2008-01-01T00:00:00ZPolitical Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt's Postwar Reassessment
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/23960
Political Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt's Postwar Reassessment
Hohendahl, Peter U.
The essay examines the pronounced theological turn of the late Carl Schmitt, especially in his Politische
Theologie II (1970). He aim is to understand what Schmitt meant by a “Catholic intensification” in the
relationship between theology and political theory. The essay gives equal attention to Schmitt’s polemic
against the theologian Peterson, who denied the possibility of political theology, and the dialogue with
the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who had severely criticized Schmitt’s conception of secularization.
The essay shows that in both instances the opposition merely encouraged Schmitt to sharpen and clarify
his own theological position, which includes heretical Gnostic elements.
28 pages
2008-01-01T00:00:00ZSchmitt, Locke, and the Limits of Liberalism
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/23959
Schmitt, Locke, and the Limits of Liberalism
Feldman, Leonard C.
This article brings Carl Schmitt's Political Theology into conversation with John Locke's Second
Treatise of Government. Two fundamental issues are considered: the relationship between Locke's
theory of prerogative power and Schmitt's sovereign/commissarial distinction, and the place of the
theological—in particular the “miraculous” nature of the exception. While some have claimed that
Locke's theory of prerogative fits the model of “commissarial dictatorship” I argue that Locke actually
complicates the sovereign/commissarial distinction by maintaining the tensions between prerogative, law
and popular judgment. Schmitt, on the other hand, dissolves the tension by absorbing popular
sovereignty into sovereign exceptionalism. Concerning the miraculous nature of the exception, I argue
that Schmitt's claim should be understood as part of a broader effort to render politics serious and so I
situate his remarks in light of the complex relationship between the political and the moral in
his Concept of the Political. Because Locke's politics is “already” serious in the sense of being firmly
situated within natural law, exceptional circumstances do not perform the same redemptive function.
15 pages
2008-01-01T00:00:00Z