From the Body of Christ to Racial Homogeneity
Carl Schmitt's Mobilization of 'Life' against 'the Spirit of Technicity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3970976 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kathrin Braun (0000-0002-2015-3149, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-17 |
| Publication date | 2012-02-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2011.640189 |
| OpenAlex | W2103408686 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 2 |
This article traces the semantics of “life” and “vitality” in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern “spirit of technicity” in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a völkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern “spirit of technicity,” Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed
Epistemology · Executive order · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Relativism · Theology · Vitality · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |