Schwimmendes Staatsgebiet

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-120
Author(s):  
Fabian Thunemann
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
State Of Tension

During his life, Carl Schmitt dealt with mystical figures. As dazzling apparitions, they are in a state of tension that requires explanation in relation to his supposedly unambiguous style. Herman Melville’s ‚Benito Cereno‘ was one of these figures that Schmitt discovered for himself in early 1941 and in whom he saw his life and work reflected. Schmitt chose this literary figure in order to explain his own presence to himself and others as well as his involvement in the Nazi regime. By interpreting his temporarily unambiguous positioning in the light of Melville’s narrative, he sought to break this unambiguity and justify life and work.

Carl Schmitt und seine Schuld

Der Staat ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Klaus-Michael Kodalle
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Benito Cereno

Carl Schmitt hat sich einer öffentlichen Klärung seiner Haltung in der NS-Zeit verweigert. Allerdings unternahm Schmitt nach 1945 eine Art indirekter Beichte in Form eines Berichts, gerichtet an den prominenten Jesuiten Przywara: Spiegelung des eigenen Selbst in der Rolle eines Kapitäns, auf dessen Schiff das Kommando in Wahrheit längst von den meuternden Sklaven übernommen worden ist (nach Melville, Benito Cereno). Annäherungsversuche an das katholische intellektuelle Milieu blieben ohne Resonanz. Der Briefwechsel mit Rudolf Smend dokumentiert die Hochachtung für Schmitts wissenschaftliche Leistungen bei gleichzeitiger Reserviertheit hinsichtlich der von Schmitt eingenommenen politischen Rolle. Von den eigenen Schülern gedrängt, geht Smend widerwillig schließlich stärker auf Distanz zu Schmitt. Der Sündenbockmythos wurde im Laufe der Zeit immer kompakter. Walter Benjamins Dankbarkeit für Schmitts Anregungen wird in der linken Szene zunächst als peinlich übergangen. Fasziniert von der starken eschatologischen Dimension im Werk Schmitts hat der jüdische Philosoph Jakob Taubes, Exponent einer linken Eschatologie „von unten“, den Kontakt zu Schmitt gesucht. Taubes, der die erheblichen Differenzen mit Schmitt nicht verschleiert, beruft sich ausdrücklich auf die höhere ethische Dignität von Verzeihung und Nachsicht. In diesem Horizont werde es möglich, die Stärken der Theorie Schmitts zu würdigen und ihre dunklen Seiten auszuhalten.

Carl Schmitt’s Literary Criticism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Benito Cereno

As early as 1916, Carl Schmitt underscored the centrality of myth and religion in his analysis of the expressionist Theodor Däubler. He celebrated Däubler as a Christian poet and radical critic of modernity. This critique of modernity was then articulated in more systematic terms his 1919 essay Political Romanticism, which opposed the Romantic approach to life and art as ironic escapism and relativism. During the 1920s and 1930s, a personal search for new ground led Schmitt to the Catholic author Konrad Weiss, and subsequently to Herman Melville’s story Benito Cereno as a private allegory of Carl Schmitt as persecuted intellectual. His late literary criticism focused on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His interpretation emphasizes the tragic nature of the play, explicitly taking issue with Walter Benjamin’s reading of Hamlet as a Christian Trauerspiel (mourning play). For Schmitt, the central issue is the presence of contemporary history as a force that deeply impacts the drama. This argument is directed against the notion of play and the idea of aesthetic autonomy. Instead, for Schmitt, the older concept of representation defines the place and relevance of art and the aesthetic within a broader cultural and religious configuration.

“An Unquestionable Source?”

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-179
Author(s):  
John Cyril Barton
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Old World ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Town ◽  
Parallel Action

This essay is the first to examine Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick [1851]) in relation to W. B. Stevenson’s then-popular-but-now-forgotten British travel narrative, Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825). Drawing from suggestive circumstances and parallel action unfolding in each, I make a case for the English sailor’s encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Lima as important source material for the Limanian setting that frames Melville’s tale. In bringing to light a new source for Moby-Dick, I argue that Melville refracts Stevenson’s actual encounter with the Inquisition in Lima to produce a symbolic, mock confrontation with Old-World authority represented in the inquisitorial Dons and the overall context of the story. Thus, the purpose of the essay is twofold: first, to recover an elusive source for understanding the allusive framework of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a setting that has perplexed some of Melville’s best critics; and second, to illuminate Melville’s use of Lima and the Inquisition as tropes crucial for understanding a larger symbolic confrontation between the modern citizen (or subject) and despotic authority that plays out not only in Moby-Dick but also in other works such as Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), “Benito Cereno” (1855), Clarel (1876), and The Confidence-Man (1857), wherein the last of which the author wrote on the frontispiece of a personal copy, “Dedicated to Victims of Auto da Fe.”

Jacob Taubes - Carl Schmitt

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Taubes ◽  
Tanaquil Taubes ◽  
Florian Meinel
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt

Divine Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
The Public Sphere

The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Brodie
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Restrictive Measures ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Catholic Church

The centrality of co-existence and negotiation to the relationship between the Catholic Church and Nazi regime was already in evidence during the period 1933–9. Although in 1932 the Catholic episcopate had banned the faithful from wearing Nazi uniforms to mass, and had extended this to a general ban on membership of the NSDAP, it swiftly rescinded these restrictive measures following Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’ in January 1933....

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