Simile for the Devil: Paradise Regained and the Secularization of Satan

PMLA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-245
Author(s):  
Raphael Magarik
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
Religious Narrative ◽  
The Devil

AbstractA central, secularizing plot of John Milton's Paradise Regained is the dissolution of Satan. As the Son passes from scriptural figure to reality, Satan is gradually reduced from mythological character to metaphor. While both the demythologization of evil and the explanation of religious concepts as metaphor have long histories as central examples of secularization and of the liberalization of religion, theorists from the political-theological right (e.g., Carl Schmitt) and postsecularist left (e.g., Talal Asad) have called attention to the analogies that can be drawn between apparently secular concepts and stories and earlier, religious doctrines and myths, claiming that such analogies call into question the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the secular. Against those critiques, I argue that secularization stories can be distinguished from religious narrative, albeit not for their naturalism, their liberalism, their rationalism, or other doctrinal content. Rather, they force us to face their own constructed, literary qualities.

Interlinking the Domestic with the International: Carl Schmitt on Democracy and International Relations

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH BURCHARD
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Just War ◽  
State System ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Just War Tradition

Carl Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde allows us to rethink his interlinked proposals for the organization of the Weimar Republic, namely his theory of ‘democratic dictatorship’ and the ‘concept of the political’. Connecting the domestic homogeneity of an empowered people with the pluralism of the Westphalian state system, Schmitt seeks to humanize war; he objects to the renaissance of the ‘just war’ tradition, which is premised on a discriminating concept of war. Schmitt's objections are valid today, yet their Eurocentric foundations are also partially outdated. We are thus to argue with Schmitt against Schmitt to reflect on possibilities for the humanization of war.

Scatter 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The One ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

Philosophy for Millions and Millions of Philosophers

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Alexander Rubtsov
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Closed Type ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Internal Speech

In the article, the relationship between the highest professional specialization of philosophy and its involvement in the realities of everyday life consciousness, collective and individual, are considered. Karl Jaspers defines philosophy precisely through the natural need and ability of human being as such, from the piercing questions of children to the revelations of anomalous geniuses. Great philosophers only concentrate this sleeping ability in a person to see the world directly and every time anew. Rightly considered the most closed type of intellectual activity, philosophy at the same time provides examples of live communication and direct appeal to people and society.  The fact that each of us is the bearer of philosophical ideas (whether we are aware of it or not) leads to the problem of ideology. By analogy with the constitution of the political by Carl Schmitt through the opposition "friend — enemy", ideology is constituted by the opposition of "faith — knowledge" in a single continuum between the poles of "almost religion" and "almost philosophy". If ideology asserts the non-obvious as obvious, then the mission of philosophy is a systematic criticism of the obvious.  This conflict manifests itself both in society and in the consciousness of an individual.  The classic understanding of ideology as a purely external manipulation (“consciousness for the Other”) is challenged by the presence in the consciousness of the individual subject of “internal dialogue” and “internal speech” with the effects of ideological work and ideological struggle with oneself (the individual as a micromodel of society and the state).  Postmodern all the more accentuates the non-professional dimension of philosophy by rejecting the schemes of progress and hierarchy, the logic of binary oppositions, including high and low, center and marginal, specialized and amateur.  The ability to reflect is the most important feature of a sovereign personality in its resistance to the "penetrating" ideology and new mythology, degrading to intellectual barbarism and political savagery.

Freund-Feind-Denken

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
State Theory ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
German Armed Forces ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

Carl Schmitt emphasised the crucial importance of the friend–enemy dichotomy for the political sphere. Is the connection between the concept of the enemy and politics still relevant today? Or does the political sphere need to be defined quite differently, on the one hand, and does the problem of enmity need to be dealt with beyond the political sphere, on the other? Since the publication of this book’s 1st edition, the issue of ‘enmity’ has by no means been settled, as recent terrorist attacks have shown. On the contrary, hatred of those who think differently seems to be on the increase, and they are then demonised as ‘enemies’. This development is explored in the contributions to the book’s 2nd edition. Rüdiger Voigt, professor emeritus of administrative science at the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich, is the author and editor of numerous books on state theory and state practice.

Beyond Weimar: The Long Crisis of Liberalism, the Political Economy of the Interwar Conjuncture and the Foundations of Neo-liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Michael A. Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Polanyi ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Crisis Of Liberalism

<Online Only>This chapter examines authoritarian liberalism as a more general phenomenon ‘beyond Weimar’. It looks outside Weimar Germany and takes a longer historical perspective, revealing deeper tensions in liberalism itself, specifically its inability to respond to the issue of socio-economic inequality in a mass democracy. The major Weimar constitutional theorists—Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hermann Heller—had no answer to the social question as a matter of constitutional self-defence. The chapter then discusses the political economy of the various crises across Europe—in Italy, France, and Austria—revealing a similar quandary. As Karl Polanyi argued, in these contexts, the turn to authoritarian liberalism fatally weakened political democracy and left it disarmed when faced with the fascist countermovement. Later in the interwar period, proposals for neo-liberalism would be introduced, symbolized by the organization of the Walter Lippman Colloquium in 1938.</Online Only>

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