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Re: more Carl Schmitt

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Jeff Rubard

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May 3, 2004, 8:41:45 PM5/3/04
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The Other wrote:

> Remember Alan Wolfe's brain-damaged article on Carl Schmitt in _The
> Chronicle of Higher Education_ a while back? It included a gratuitous
> smear of Paul Gottfried. Gottfried's response is now online.
>
> Interestingly, it turns out that Wolfe had earlier reviewed one of
> Gottfried's books for the _New Republic_ -- not Gottfried's
> intellectual biography of Schmitt, but nevertheless a book which
> included a critical discussion of Schmitt's work.
>
> Anyway, the _Chronicle_ didn't print Gottfried's letter, but it's at
>
> http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried58.html
>
> I was going to cut and paste excerpts, but the letter's only five
> paragraphs long, so just read it if you're interested in Carl Schmitt.
> Comments welcome, of course.

Well, try this: as usual when discussing Schmitt, everything is packed
but the squeal -- that is, Schmitt's *intended* audience (the Catholic
intelligentsia) are excused from considering his anti-liberalism as a
threatening political development. This is left to figures who use him
as a means for gainsaying with respect to new *geopolitical* dynamics,
an extremely problematic audience not easily characterized using the
right-left dichotomy. If we add complicity with centuries of
recrudescent modernity "for the nonce", considering the substance of his
work not directly utilized by the Nazi regime becomes extremely
difficult: as a professor of *Verfassungslehre* he truly is every bit to
be respected, and very little of his work draws upon pre-existing
cultural understandings not quite worthy of the name "ethnomethodology":
he was intimately acquainted with the structure of the Caesarist
republic and this is not without its uses, as *Junge Freiheit*'s
appropriation perhaps most clearly suggests -- but this can also be seen
in the relatively "deprivileged" status of his American admirers *Telos*
and his appeal for the ultra-right of the Fifth Republic.

But if we bypass the uses of Schmitt's texts for political education,
this recent material distinguishes itself as resolutely *highbrow*: that
is to say, the tendency of these criticisms of Schmitt is neither to
work the removal of Schmittians from the scene *nor* to militate for a
more principled republicanism, but to pose a "demarcation thesis"
concerning Nazism and fascism which leaves such elements as are
attracted to Schmitt the status of "excluded third" as regards
totalitarian political movements. In such sentiments we have a rather
pointedly Lacanian frame of mind, which is content to say "there is no
international socialist movement" and let nature take its course as
regards the degrees of freedom enjoyed within a given polity: that is to
say, we have a movement towards prising him off Strauss and
"postmodernizing" the latter, such that he serves as the bearer of a
principle embodying an "uneconomic" attitude towards political life, the
impossibility of political conflict having the mortal stakes Schmitt
veritably eroticized -- but perhaps entirely too much happens in the
political sphere for "politics without tears" to supplant *Kant avec
Sade* as the *obiter dictum* of a psychological politics of resignation.

---
Jeff Rubard
opensentence.tripod.com
Your guess is as good as mine

Jeff Rubard

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May 4, 2004, 6:06:29 PM5/4/04
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By contrast, alternatives to a "genuine illiberalism" abide in just
those features of political discourse which escape judgments of taste.
Resignation as regards the "empirical" character of the psychological
characterized Lacan's "return to Freud" in *refounding* psychological
research in para-political discourse -- the blessings and curses of the
modern age -- rather than escaping those properly political dynamics in
mindedness by means of recourse to "exact description". The highbrow
object of derision, the "life of the seminar", that radix of
intellection as provided through the feueilleton and other public
amusements, this itself is not without its bearings upon the object of
Lacan's allegory: European leftism *nach Auchwitz*, the lessons learned
through sympathetic observation of "crazes" and rights reserved unto
posterity as regards that fabric without discord within a grotesque of
evanescence, which those of us without superlative vision have every
right to expect from social life, and very few manage to do without.


--

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 2, 2022, 2:43:01 AM1/2/22
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"William Rasch?"

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 2, 2022, 10:48:00 PM1/2/22
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I've heard of her!

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 3, 2022, 11:58:33 AM1/3/22
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(No, Carl Schmitt was a guy. Someone who used to write about Schmitt.)

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 4, 2022, 2:54:39 AM1/4/22
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Postscript: Maybe Talcott Parsons more than Kelsen? Maybe the United
States more than your psychopathic dreamscape?

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 4, 2022, 2:48:58 PM1/4/22
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...then haters wouldn't give me salty looks about "lawry"!
(You only call it that if you're rich, I think.)

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 11, 2022, 7:45:34 PM1/11/22
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2022 Update: Less Carl Schmitt? Not sure. (Can you, like, not attack the US Capitol again?)

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 13, 2022, 9:35:07 AM1/13/22
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There just is something to *Ordnung* and *Ortung*, like W3 thinks. However, Schmitt may have been just too "butterfingered" with the concepts of democratic politics.

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 16, 2022, 9:19:17 AM1/16/22
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*Political Romanticism* was a pretty telling book, too.

Jeffrey Rubard

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Jan 18, 2022, 9:40:16 AM1/18/22
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2022 Update: John Calvin was not a political philosopher. (Why do phrases like "That is all." signify as they do?)
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