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CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 10, Number 2, Fall 2010,
pp. 27-72 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2010.0024
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v010/10.2.sitze.html
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A Farewell to Schmitt
Notes on the Work of Carlo Galli
Adam Sitze
Amherst College
1.
Theodor Adorno once defined the task of immanent critique as the

reliquification, in repetition, of the “thought movement” congealed in
reified philosophic concepts (1973 [1966], 97). A repetition of just this sort
is the aim of Carlo Galli’s monumental 936-page 1996 book Genealogia della
politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Genealogy of
Politics: Carl Schmitt and the Crisis of Modern Political Thought), which
has been called, with good reason, “the most complete, comprehensive,
and insightful account of Schmitt’s thought ever published” (Zarmanian
2006, 41). In this book, as in his writings on Schmitt more generally, Galli
argues that Schmitt’s accomplishment was to have opened himself to, in
order to radicalize, the crises that together constitute the origin of the mod-
ern epoch. Schmitt is, on Galli’s read, a specifically genealogical critic of
modernity: his single-minded focus, according to Galli, was to understand
this origin’s curiously double-sided energy—the way in which it undermines
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 27–72, issn 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
● 27
28 ● A Fa r e w e l l t o S c h m i t t
the very institutions and practices it simultaneously founds, deforms the

same political forms it produces, disorders the very systems of thought to
which it gives rise. By fixing his gaze on this origin, Galli explains, Schmitt
realized that modern political thought (and consequently too the liberal
democratic institutions and practices whose modes of self-justification it
grounds and sustains) is divided against itself in a nondialectical manner.
At the same time that it emerges from and even implicitly feeds upon a
crisis it is incapable of resolving, modern political thought also accounts
for this incapacity by suppressing the symptoms of the crisis, compensat-
ing for its own incoherence with ever more moralistic reaffirmations of the
unquestionable necessity of its own explicit goals. Th e core problematic of
Schmittian thought, Galli will consequently argue, cannot then be reduced
to any one of the themes of Schmitt’s various texts (the distinction between
exception and norm, theology and politics, decision and discussion, friend
and enemy, constituting power and constituted power, land and sea, limited
and unlimited warfare, play and tragedy, and so on). It is Schmitt’s discovery
that all modern political forms share a common trait, a birthmark that, in
turn, attests to their common origin in crisis: despite the many and various
differences between modern political thinkers—indeed as the silent but
generative core of those differences—the epochal unity of modern political
thought derives from its distinctive doubleness, its simultaneous impos-
sibility and necessity, or, in short, its tragicity (Galli 1986b, 146 n.4; 1996, 10;
2000a, 156 n.7; 2008a, 9, 11).1
Although, as the reader will have gathered, Galli understands Schmitt
to be more than merely a Nazi ideologue or polemicist, this does not mean
that Galli’s reading of Schmitt is somehow therefore an apology for Schmitt
designed to defend or redeem his name. Nor, however, does Galli seek to
eliminate Schmitt’s name from the domain of polite discourse by polemiciz-
ing against him as a public enemy of liberal democracy. Nor, finally, is Galli
interested in a supposedly neutral, instrumentalist use of Schmitt as a lens
for a more precise or adequate diagnosis of contemporary politics. Galli’s
work on Schmitt is instead a sustained attempt to critique Schmitt’s political
thought on its own terms, which is to say, with self-conscious reference to the
hermeneutic horizon within which Schmitt understood his own writings. It
Adam Sitze ● 29
is the work, as Galli has recently put it, of a “non-Schmittian Schmittologist”

(2010, x).
It would be difficult to overstate the systematic character of this work.
Written with a tireless analytic rigor that reminded at least one reader of
“the august tradition of the great philological monographs of the classics”
(Preterossi 1997, 574), Galli’s Genealogia engages in a “historico-critical . . .
reconstruction of the internal logic of Schmittian argumentation” that ac-
counts for every text in Schmitt’s oeuvre, and that has as its aim a claim
on the essence and basis of Schmittian thought as such (Galli 1996, xix–xx,
xxii). But because (as we shall soon see) it is impossible to read Schmitt on
his own terms without first grasping the political and historical crises to
which Schmittian criticism is internal, Galli also undertakes an “external
contextualization” of Schmittian thought, offering a symptomal reading of
Schmitt’s oeuvre that interprets its contradictory form as the trace of the
specific events Schmitt attempted to think (Galli 1996, xx). Galli’s contex-
tualization of Schmitt is, however, neither historicist nor biographical. It is
epochal. In the last analysis, Galli claims, the event Schmitt attempts to think
is the crisis at the origin of modernity itself. To verify this claim, Galli com-
mits to a third massive inquiry: he situates Schmitt in the history of modern
political philosophy, explaining how Schmitt’s political thought inherits a set
of aporias in philosophical mediation that were first formulated by Hegel and
Marx, reached a point of crisis in Kierkegaard and Weber, and came to ruin in
Nietzsche (Galli 1996, 3–175). To support these three inquiries, Galli exhausts
the secondary literature on Schmitt in German, Italian, Spanish, French, and
English. Galli’s footnotes in Genealogia, which take up nearly three hundred
pages of his book, are not merely informational. They contain substantial
critiques and analyses, in effect constituting a second book altogether, a
symptomal reading of Schmitt commentary worldwide.
This truly extraordinary labor gives Galli a standpoint that is unique
among Schmitt commentators. Galli is able to demonstrate that, on Schmitt’s
own terms, Schmitt’s many and various concepts amount to a combined
and prolonged response to a question that, in turn, is not only marked by
but also limited to the very epoch of which it is also the most troubling
critical expression. As such, Galli’s reconstruction of Schmittian thought is
precisely also the premise for a fierce deconstruction of that same thought.
In the books he has written since publishing his landmark 1996 study, Galli
has repeated (in the Adornian sense) the gesture that is the generative core
of Schmittian criticism, but now in relation to a crisis—which, for lack of a
better word, we may call “globalization”—that is incommensurable with the
horizon to which Schmitt’s concepts owe their substance and intelligibility.
With this repetition, Galli is able to turn his epochal claim about Schmitt and
the modern into the basis for an equally epochal claim about Schmitt and the
global age. Galli conceives the global age in terms that are at once specifically
Schmittian and completely non-Schmittian. The global age, as Galli defines it,
is that epoch in which all of Schmitt’s key distinctions ( friend and enemy,
norm and exception, military and police force, and so on) have, in the do-
main of concrete experience, entered into indistinction and confusion. It is
that epoch in which Schmitt’s concepts, understood on Schmitt’s own terms,
no longer have any critical grasp of the most serious philosophical and politi-
cal crises of the day. It is that epoch, in short, that is defined by the complete
and irreversible desuetude of Schmittian thought (Galli 2000b, 1617; 2001a,
9–10; 2001b, 477; 2002, 79–84; 2007, 8; 2008a, 12–13, 166–72). As with Adorno’s
immanent critique of Heidegger, Galli dissolves Schmitt’s political thought
not by censuring it or rejecting it from the outside, but by taking it on “in its
own structure—turning its own force against it” (Adorno 1973 [1966], 97). The
purpose of the present essay is to outline that turn.
2.
Carlo Galli is professore ordinario in the Department of Historical Disciplines

at the University of Bologna, where his primary pedagogical duty is to teach
the history of political doctrines. Galli’s approach to the history of political
thought is influenced by the “immanent critique” of the Frankfurt School
(Galli 1973; 1997) and, to a lesser extent, the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart
Koselleck (Chignola 2002, 531–32, 534–36). In all of his writings on modern
political philosophers (which range from Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas
Hobbes to Martha Nussbaum, Paul Gilroy, and Jean-Luc Nancy, from Carl
Schmitt and Ernst Jünger to Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor
Adam Sitze ● 31
Adorno, and Max Horkheimer), Galli seeks to illuminate the contingen-

cies—the impasses and aporias, the confusions and compromises—that
are internal to the basic concepts of modern political thought, and traces
the ways those contingencies have manifested themselves in the crises of
the institutions that seek to use those concepts to explain and justify their
practices (2009a, v–viii). This is, to be sure, a teaching about the incoher-
ence of modern political thought, for in his writings Galli emphasizes that
the political institutions and theories we inherit are neither necessary nor
inevitable, and above all are not up to the tasks of emancipatory politics
demanded of us by our present. But Galli’s is also, and for this same reason,
a teaching about the need today for the power of imagination (in the phe-
nomenological, not romantic, sense of the word). In Galli’s view, our most
important contemporary task is to create new schemata and new Gestalts,
new patterns for thought that enable thought once again to gather its forces,
to rediscover its courage, and to renew its work in the face of the bewildering
and sobering crises that are specific to the global age (2002, 97–101; 2007, 9;
2008b, 84–85; 2009a, viii).
Like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Koselleck, Galli has pursued this schol-
arly project not only in the form of books of which he is the sole author, but
also through a set of intellectual works that are cooperative in character.
With Roberto Esposito, for example, Galli is coeditor of the Enciclopedia
del pensiero politico: Autori, concetti, dottrine (Encyclopedia of Political
Thought: Authors, Concepts, Doctrines), which was first published in 2000
and reissued in 2005 (with newly updated entries for biopolitics, conflict,
disobedience, fundamentalism, globalization, war, multitude, and terror-
ism). At 933 pages, the Enciclopedia may be described as a more concise but
also—because it includes entries on authors ranging from Símon Bólivar,
Judith Butler, and Frantz Fanon to Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and
François Touissant L’Ouverture—more contemporary and global iteration
of the eight-volume 1972–1977 tome whose publication Koselleck supervised
(Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Lan-
guage in Germany [on which see Richter and Richter 2006]). With Esposito
and Giuseppe Duso, meanwhile, Galli is also editor of the journal Filosofia
politica, which is housed at the University of Bologna, and which, since its
inception in 1986, has served as an important forum for rethinking the “ep-
ochality of the modern” outside of the explanatory paradigms and herme-
neutic horizons according to which the modern proposes to evaluate itself
(Galli 2007, 4). In its pages, Galli and his colleagues have published many of
the same political thinkers who contributed articles to Galli and Esposito’s
Enciclopedia, and who today already have or are increasingly beginning to
find readerships in the Anglophone academe (such as Simona Forti, Adriana
Cavarero, Sandro Chignola, Pasquale Pasquino, Filippo del Lucchese, and
Laura Bazzicalupo).
As Danilo Zolo has observed, Galli’s 1996 book on Schmitt is of a piece
with Galli’s teaching and writing more generally: the Genealogia is an at-
tempt at an epochal analysis of the concepts of modern political thought,
with the aim of deciphering in those concepts the genesis and basis of the
institutional crises of liberal democracy (Zolo 1997, 577). The simplest way to
enter into the internal argumentation of Galli’s Genealogia is to understand
it as a recapitulation of the criticism of Schmitt offered by Karl Löwith (writ-
ing under the pseudonym “Hugo Fiala”) in his 1935 essay “The Occasional
Decisionism of Carl Schmitt.” As Galli explained in his first article on Schmitt
(a 1979 symptomal reading detailing the entire reception of Schmitt in Italy),
Löwith’s essay has a special significance within the history of Italian political
thought. As distinct from commentators who saw in Schmitt nothing more
than a talented polemicist or a technically skilled jurist, Löwith engaged with
Schmitt as a political thinker who posed serious philosophical problems and
who required a serious political response (Galli 1979, 88–89, 107). Löwith’s ap-
proach to Schmitt remained the unifying element of Italian work on Schmitt
well into the 1970s (Galli 1979, 143, cf. 83–84, 88, 96), the decade in which
Galli’s work on Schmitt originated.
The 1970s in Italy, of course, were years in which a failure of political
representation (the “Historic Compromise” between the Italian Communist
Party and the Christian Democrats left significant portions of the Italian
left without meaningful Parliamentary representation at the very moment
when a global crisis in capitalism made concerted political action more im-
portant than ever) was compounded by the emergence of an anomic form
of political violence (beginning with the “strategy of tension” orchestrated
Adam Sitze ● 33
by the neofascist right, but soon moving on to the left-wing violence of the
Red Brigades and others) (Ginsborg 1990, 348–405; Negri 1998; Agamben
1998a; Colombo 2002). In response to this situation, some on the Italian
left turned to Schmitt as a thinker whose concepts (such as the so-called
autonomy of the political) could be appropriated for the purpose of liberat-
ing Marxist theory and practice from the assumption (held by Communist
Parliamentarians and antistate terrorists alike) that the state was the only
site for meaningful political action (Galli 1979, 128, 139; cf. Galli 1996, 55–56).
Galli’s 1979 essay on Schmitt announced, among other things, a critique of
this turn. The problem with the use of Schmitt by the “post-workerist” left,
Galli argued, is not so much its immoral flirtation with political evil (and in
this Galli differs quite markedly from Jürgen Habermas, who in 1989 would
write that to use Schmitt to compensate for the absence of a democratic
theory in Marx is to “drive out the Devil with Beelzebub” [138]), as the subtle
but decisive way in which it remains marked by and constrained by the en-
gagement with Schmitt Löwith inaugurated in 1935. To truly appropriate or
deconstruct Schmittian thought—or more modestly, even simply to come
to terms with the “problematic presence” of Schmitt within Italian political
thought—it would be necessary, Galli argued, to rethink the terms on which
Löwith posed Schmitt’s writings as a problem for philosophy.
Among the enduring claims of Löwith’s 1935 text was his argument that
Schmitt’s decisionism had a philosophic provenance, namely, that it was de-
rived from the work of Marx and Kierkegaard (Löwith 1998 [1935], 141, 157).
But, Löwith noted, whereas both Marx and Kierkegaard attempted to justify
their decisionism in the name of some transcendent being or higher “court
of appeal” (history for Marx, God for Kierkegaard), Schmitt’s decisionism
attempts no such justification: it is a “decision for decision’s sake,” Löwith
observed, that affirms no transcendent being at all (141, 146). As such, Löwith
argued, Schmitt’s thought is destined to fail to accomplish its own aim. The
point of Schmitt’s decisionism, Löwith argues, is to counteract the age of
“neutralization and depoliticization” inaugurated by liberal individualism
and humanitarianism by retrieving criteria (such as the friend-enemy dis-
tinction) that could give measure and form to politics (138, 142). But, Löwith
observed, Schmitt’s decisionism in fact could not but receive its measure and
form from politics. In the absence of a commitment to any norm but decision
itself, Löwith argued, Schmitt’s decisionism is incapable of giving form or
measure to anything, and the content of any given decision must necessar-
ily remain dependent on whatever accidental political situation happens to
prevail at a given moment (142–43, 158). Even though Schmitt might then
polemicize against the “endless dialogue” of the political romantic, Löwith
concluded, Schmitt’s decisionism thus nevertheless shares with political ro-
manticism a foundation in nihilistic “occasionalism.” Exactly like the political
romanticism to which it opposes itself, Löwith stated, Schmitt’s decisionism
derives its innermost substance from nothing more than accident, opportun-
ism, and caprice (144).
For Löwith, this explains why Schmittian thought could veer so wildly
from topic to topic: Because of its occasionalism, Schmitt’s work was inca-
pable of not only rational self-justification but also (and indeed relatedly)
internal self-consistency. It moreover explains why Schmitt’s thought could
have assumed no other form but polemic: in the absence of any higher norm,
Löwith argues, Schmitt is constrained to derive the “correctness” of his argu-
ments from the enemy he happens to be attacking (1998 [1935], 137). And it
finally explains why Schmitt was obliged to abandon even, especially, the
most distinctive hallmark of his own thought: in a situation where (as in 1935)
the disorder presupposed by his decisionist thought would undermine not
an enemy (liberalism) but now a friend (Nazism), Schmitt would abandon
not only decisionism but also polemic itself, no longer writing as a critic of
the state but now as its main apologist, a Kronjurist whose specific bureau-
cratic function is, in the worst Hegelian tradition, to explain the rationality
of the real and so to justify the irrationality of domination (158–59). Given the
occasionalism underwriting all of these shifts and inconsistencies, Löwith
was thus entirely consistent to have written his own essay on Schmitt in
the form of a polemic. Because Schmitt’s thought does not subscribe to
any standard—because Schmitt’s text does not even subscribe to the law of
noncontradiction, but indeed appears to embrace openly its own contradic-
toriness—Schmitt ultimately cannot be refuted; he can only be fought. The
noncontradictory conclusion of approaching Schmitt’s work philosophically
is therefore to enter into conflict with him—it is to engage in what Galli, in
Adam Sitze ● 35
his reconstruction of Löwith’s argumentation, calls an “attack” of rationalism

against irrationalism (Galli 1979, 90, 92).
This attack, however, is not as radical as it could or perhaps even should
be. It is constrained by an acute dialectical irony. In the gesture of adopting
polemic as the mode of our political opposition to Schmitt’s thought, we can-
not avoid confirming with the form of our rhetoric the truth of the Schmit-
tian claim we want to deny with our critique. This undialectical hostility
against Schmitt—this unselfconscious adoption of Schmittian categories as
the premise for the critique of Schmittian thought, this surrender in advance
to an Aufhebung of the Schmittian teaching—is not, of course, limited to
Löwith. In Anglophone Schmitt scholarship too, there is a widespread and
symptomatic tendency to take up Schmitt as a problem for thought only after
first naming him as an “enemy.”2 And nowhere is the lure of undialectical hos-
tility against Schmitt more pronounced (or indeed, more excruciating) than
in the “agreement, hate, and suspicion” that Benjamin attached to Schmitt’s
name and that, at least according to Horst Bredekamp, snared Benjamin
in the categories of Schmittian thought (1999, 265–66). Hate, in a classical
sense that Schmitt perhaps understood, is a division that binds (Loraux 2002
[1997], 121–22), and to polemicize against Schmitt as a hated enemy of rea-
son—as if no other mode of political engagement with Schmittian thought
were possible or imaginable—is not only to capitulate to Schmitt’s concept
of the political; it is also to find ourselves at war with ourselves, to bind our
thought in its form to the very concept of the political we attack. Because, in
other words, the mode of our relation to Schmitt’s writings is a central part of
the problem Schmitt’s writings poses for contemporary thought, no critic of
Schmitt can escape a simple but serious hermeneutic question: how, if at all,
can we enter into conflict with Schmitt’s political thought in a way that does
not also confirm the emphasis on conflict in Schmitt’s political thought?
3.
To trace the way that Galli escapes this double-bind, we need to consider a
second dialectical irony in Löwith’s criticism of Schmitt. Löwith’s 1935 essay,
like his 1949 book Meaning and History, is centered on a claim about the
insufficiency of modern criticism in relation to its own present. Criticism

that lacks a measure outside of history by which to criticize the course and
events of history will also lack any grounds for resisting or opposing politi-
cal evil in its present. Modern political thought, however, is grounded in a
philosophy of history that not only secularizes Christian eschatology, but
also abandons any notion of an otherworldly basis for judging good and evil
in worldly events. As such, there is in modern political thought in general
(and not only in Schmittian political thought in particular) a disquieting in-
ability to object meaningfully to the emergence of political nihilism. What’s
odd about this argument, we should note, is that Löwith does not apply his
own secularization thesis to the concept of criticism itself. Löwith does not,
that is to say, consider the possibility that the very premise for his critique
of modern nihilism—the very notion that the responsibility of the critic can
and should be to stand outside of history in order to pass judgment on it—
might owe its own genealogy to the same “immanentization of the eschaton”
(as Galli sums up Löwith’s secularization thesis [2006a, xxv]) that Löwith
otherwise traces so assiduously.
If Galli’s immanent critique of Schmitt may be considered a recapitula-
tion of Löwith’s 1935 essay on Schmitt—if it is, in other words, a repetition
of Löwith’s criticism that recuperates its unactualized potential and thus
also redoubles its force—it is because Galli’s point of departure implies an
immanent critique of Löwith on precisely the question of “criticism” itself.3
Turning to the genealogy of modern criticism set forth by Reinhart Koselleck
in his 1959 book Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society, Galli argues that Schmitt’s occasionalism is not the sign that
Schmitt lacked a philosophy of history, but the mark of Schmitt’s retrieval of a
theological experience of criticism that had been secularized by the modern
philosophy of history. According to Galli, the occasio that is at the root of
Schmitt’s occasionalism is both the precursor for and incommensurable with
the concept of the “event” in the modern philosophy of history. Unlike the
modern concept of “event,” however, the occasio in Schmittian thought is
an opportunity in the grand sense of the word. It is not merely one among
many interesting or significant happenings; it is an ecstatic experience—an
experience of kairós (Galli 1981, xxvii; 1996, 215–16)—in which the infinite
Adam Sitze ● 37
irrupts within the order of the finite. This irruption not only throws into
question the coherence and self-evidence of sequential temporal order (the
mathematized and static time of chronos, which is the primary measure and
indispensable condition for the modern philosophy of history), but also, and
in that same gesture, establishes a space within which it becomes possible
to relate to historical time on terms, and in a mode, that do not owe their
intelligibility to historical time.
The experience of the occasio is not then (as Löwith argued) a surrender
to the immediate demands of a given historically determined moment or
situation; it is not a version of Hegel’s “real is rational.” In the form it assumes
in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (for example), the occasio is instead a
nondialectical relation between the finite and the infinite, an ecstatically
absolute movement in which the infinite fully presents its infinitude internal
to the finite itself, exceeding and enveloping the finite from within (see, for
example, Kierkegaard 1985 [1844], 9–36, esp. 24–25). Implicit in this experi-
ence of the occasio is a much different relationship between thinking and
being than the relationship between critic and history Löwith finds lacking
in Schmitt. The critic at issue here is not the one who strives to stand out-
side of history in order to render a juridical or moral verdict on it. This, as
Koselleck shows, amounts precisely to a repression of “the political” in the
strictly Schmittian sense of the word (1988 [1959], 174). The critic is rather
the one who remains so completely open to the experience of crisis—of the
irruption within the order of historical time of that which historical time
cannot contain—that he comes to occupy a position of interior exteriority
with respect to historical time. The “exteriority” that irrupts in a crisis of this
sort is an either-or: it is a need for decision that is so exigent, so stark, and
so demanding that it exposes a representational deficit in the hermeneutic
horizons that, taken together, would ordinarily allow for the possibility of
comprehending a judgment as a “rational” or “judicious” act.
Understood in this sense, criticism is not an act of rendering “impartial
judgment” upon this or that crisis; it is not the work of an historian who
stands outside of this or that event in order to mediate and evaluate it with
reference to the equally transcendent schemata of the particular and the uni-
versal. It is an immanence of the critic within the crisis that is so complete
and so extreme that it therefore—because and by virtue of this immanence—

leaves the critic without any immunity to the representational deficit that is
the core of any crisis worthy of the name. Immanence of the critic within the
crisis, excess of the crisis within the critic: the more the critic enters into the
crisis, the more the crisis enters into the critic, the more the crisis exceeds,
from within, what Kant would call our “schemata” — the “rules” or “mea-
sures” in accordance with which we are able to imagine general concepts,
and which, as such, allow us to judge, classify, evaluate, and otherwise make
sense of our experience. Criticism is here not an act at all; it is an experience
of passivity. It is an openness to the element of unameability that is intrinsic
to any true event; it is a vulnerability to the irruption of a certain sort of
epochal lack into one’s capacities for judging, speaking, and acting. The more
complete this passivity, the more fully this epochal lack will irrupt into and
disrupt from within the schemata that would ordinarily be available for the
purposes of judging, speaking, and acting. “Criticism” is here a name for the
difficult task of giving voice to this experience of irruption, and “critic” a
name for the one who suffers to undertake that task.
To read Schmitt’s criticisms of modernity on their own terms—for, as
Galli has noted, Koselleck’s book on crisis and critique originates in Schmitt’s
1938 book on Leviathan (1996 [1938]; Galli 2008a, 121)—is to understand
Schmitt as a critic of this sort. On Galli’s read, Schmitt is exterior to his time
because and to the exact degree that Schmitt internalized his time’s most
definitive and radical crisis (Galli 1979, 150, 154; cf. 1987b 16; 2008a, 48). It
follows that the task of reading Schmitt on his own terms is also therefore
the task of understanding the crisis that confronted Schmitt. For Galli, it is
thus quite significant that Schmitt thought at a moment in European politics
in which inside and outside, peace and war, civil and military, enemy and
criminal were entering into the grey of a twilight, and in which a certain
warlike conflictuality (or, as Galli calls it, “polemicity” [polemicità]) was con-
sequently emerging as the normal mode of being for political institutions
and practices, the explicit and definitive aspiration of which was reasonable
discussion, transparent representation, and rational mediation (Galli 2001a,
117; 2004, xxv).
In Galli’s view, Schmitt’s contribution was to have attempted to interpret
Adam Sitze ● 39
this crisis of representation not from modernity’s own various privileged

points of internal self-understanding (the state, the subject, society, or rea-
son), but instead critically and genealogically, by leaving his thought perma-
nently open to the catastrophic crisis in and through which modernity itself
came into being, namely, the dissolution of the specifically Roman Catholic
form of representation that governed political order in medieval Europe
(Galli 2008a, 123). To give a name to this lost form of representation—this
peculiar and specifically imperial ability to embrace any and all antitheses
(life and death, heaven and earth, God and Man, past and future, time and
eternity, good and power, beginning and end, reason and nonreason, and
so on) in order to absorb them into a single, unified form—Schmitt took a
term from the medieval Catholic thinker Nicholas de Cusa: complexio op-
positorum. According to Galli, Schmitt understood the complexio neither as
a dialectical synthesis (a simple coincidence of opposites), nor as an eclectic
relativism (an ensemble of plural and variegated qualities), but rather as “a
form in which life and reason coexist without forcing,” a single hierarchy the
integrity of which derives, above all, from the “glorious form” of Christ’s Per-
son (Galli 1996, 239–40, 245; cf. Galli 1986c, 13–14). For Schmitt, Galli argues,
the genealogical significance of the complexio is not theological but political:
Schmitt is interested in it because of the way in which its mode of repre-
sentation—the extreme publicity and visibility through which all opposites
coincided in the immediate mediacy of Christ’s Person—in turn called into
being a relatively stable and enduring political order (Galli 1996, 242, 245).
It is on the basis of this capacity for a mode of representation to con-
stitute a political order (or what Galli calls “morphogenetic power”) that
Schmitt understands the modern. With the events that together opened the
modern epoch (such as the Copernican Revolution, the Wars of Reforma-
tion, and the conquest of America), the complexio and the order of being it
sustained could no longer be treated as a self-evident “given” that could be
presupposed by political thought. In the absence of a coherent and integra-
tive Idea in which opposites could coincide without conflict—indeed, under
the unprecedented conditions of theological civil war in which the Person of
Christ was no longer the basis of European peace but was now precisely both
a source of and a stake in European conflict—political and juridical Power
became disconnected from theological and moral Good, and the question
of how to mediate opposing forces and qualities through representation
suddenly emerged as an anxious and explicit question for political thought
(Galli 1996, 4–5).
According to Galli, Schmitt understands modern mediation to originate
as an unwitting, precarious, and partial response both to this question and
to the epochal catastrophe that occasions it. Modern mediation marks the
attempt, on the part of a European subject who suddenly finds himself alone
in the universe, to accomplish a set of morphogenetic tasks bequeathed to
him by the complexio—such as the creation of order, the reconciliation of
opposites, and the accomplishment of peace on earth—but now without the
support of a Gestalt in which everything, however opposed, had its place—
now, in other words, only through an ad hoc use of his own immanent pow-
ers (Galli 1996, 11; cf. 1988, 8). In modernity, in short, the European subject
is faced with the task of producing ex nihilio the political form, peace, and
reconciliation it once could presuppose in the complexio. It pursues these
aims, on the one hand, through instrumental reason (the mathematization
and technical mastery of nature, up to and including human nature) and,
on the other, through a new form of representation that seeks to mediate
contradictions between opposing forces. At the same time, it also recognizes
without fully realizing why, that its attempts at mediation are somehow al-
ready destined, in advance, to failure. The reconciliation of opposites the
complexio achieved felicitously with reference to the Person of Christ is now
the work of an unhappy consciousness, a person in the juridical sense who is
capable of peace, reconciliation, and order only at the cost of a ceaseless and
restless reflection on division and disorder (Galli 1991, 113–20).
The state is modernity’s solution to this predicament. In the place once
occupied by the hierarchical complexio of the Catholic Church’s “glorious
form,” Hobbesian political philosophy proposes the egalitarian simplicity of
a new beginning—a revolutionary tabula rasa that articulates the rational
necessity of peace and establishes the impersonal laws of the state through a
manifestly geometrical deduction (Galli 1986c, 13). But the impersonal laws of
the state can only produce political form and exercise morphogenetic power
in an ungrounded manner, by presupposing the complete separation of
Adam Sitze ● 41
Power from the Good. Indeed, the strength of impersonal law (its principled
insistence on the formal equality of all persons before the law) is predicated
on a displacement of the morphogenetic power of the complexio (a hierarchy
centered upon the Person of Christ). In the absence of a felicitous use of
morphogenetic power, the state finds that law alone is insufficient for ac-
complishing the aims it inherits from the complexio, and discovers itself to be
in need of supplements to its impersonal law. The state discovers this supple-
ment by placing instrumental reason (which is to say, the neutralization of
conflict through dispositifs of discipline, governmentality, and security, but
also, if necessary, through the use of military and, later, police forces) at the
service of repeated sovereign decisions that reproduce a semblance of the
unity and integrity of Roman Catholic visibility and publicity. It sets aside
the impersonality of law (with its insistence on formal equality) in order
to fabricate a public enemy, whose Gestalt can then serve (via a detour of
ressentiment that is all too familiar today) as the point of reference for the
formation of the unity and integrity of a newly secular public (Galli 1986c, 24).
In short, the state achieves the aims bequeathed to it by the complexio only
to the extent that it now includes exclusion (Galli 1996, 254).
Both of these techniques, however, repeatedly undermine the end at
which they aim. The state’s attempt to create political form and maintain
order through the use of force results in an “armed peace” that, in the
concrete, amounts to a constant preparation for the next war, even as its
attempt to produce and maintain public unity and integrity through deci-
sions on a public enemy constantly reintroduces into the internal space of
the state a trace of the same unlimited hostility the suppression of which is
(as in Hobbes’s elimination of the bellum omnium contra omnes) the main
justification for state’s existence in the first place (Galli 2000b, 1598, 1608–9,
1611; 2001b, 465). The means for resolving conflict within Christian Europe
turn out to be plagued by a similar infelicity, only now acted out on a global
scale: Europe attempts to expunge and expel the trace of unlimited hostility
by instituting the jus publicum europaeum, which creates an order of limited
hostility (formalized warfare) within Europe only by justifying and demand-
ing an order of unlimited hostility toward Europe’s exterior (in the form of
colonial conquest and genocide).
In every case, in other words, modern political order discovers that it

must aim at, but cannot attain, a set of goals—peace on earth, mediation
and reconciliation between opposites, the production of political form—that
have been set for it, and indeed bequeathed to it, by the very form of medi-
eval representation it also aggressively displaces. Modern political media-
tion therefore finds itself in a position where it can only fully legitimate its
existence with reference to a set of inherited concepts to which it is also
especially vulnerable. It discovers that it is fated to attempt a task (the ex
nihilio “creation” of political form, of peace, and reconciliation) that is both
necessary (because the complexio is gone, because opposing forces remain,
and because the peace and order are the raison d’être of the modern state)
and impossible (because, above all, in the thoroughly secularized modern
epoch, there is no equivalent to the theological concept of “creation”: there
is only making, fabrication, production, and instrumental reason, the work of
homo faber) (Galli 2001b, 469, 473). To even approximate the realization of its
inner aims—which are, to repeat, not its “own,” but those it inherits from the
complexio—modern mediation seeks to forget the medieval origin that is at
once indispensable for it and unsettling to it, and to that exact degree leaves
itself vulnerable to destabilization by a genealogy written from a Catholic
standpoint.
But though Schmittian thought is thus, for Galli, a Catholic genealogy of
the modern (1987a, 21–23), Galli also cautions that Schmitt’s relation to Ca-
tholicism not be misunderstood as one of religious belief or even nostalgia.
When Schmitt thinks the emergence of modern mediation with reference to
its secularization of the complexio, he does not suppose that a return to the
complexio is either desirable or possible (Galli 2000b, 1599). Nor, on Galli’s
read, does Schmitt really even mourn the passing of the complexio. Schmitt’s
achievement is rather to have occupied that standpoint from which a thor-
oughly secularized modern mediation genealogically derives its innermost
aims, through which a thoroughly secularized modern mediation refuses to
understand itself, and to which all of its institutions and practices are thus
especially vulnerable (Galli 2000b, 1604; 2001b, 463–64). Schmitt’s idiosyn-
cratic reading of the complexio is, in other words, a way to think the “origin of
politics” outside of the standard points of self-understanding that modernity
Adam Sitze ● 43
privileges in its own self-justifying historical narratives of its emergence. It

is an attempt to name a crisis in which the old order (the complexio) has
irreversibly dissolved and in which the new order (the modern state-form)
cannot accomplish the goals it inherits from the complexio (reconciliation
and peace) (Galli 2001b, 467, 470). Schmitt does not then analyze modernity
from the standpoint of a fully intact Catholic faith or ideology; nor does
he really even presuppose that his account of complexio is accurate (which
is why empirical or historicist refutations of Schmitt miss the mark). The
complexio is simply the blindspot of modern mediation, that concept which
enables us to grasp in genealogical terms the reconciliation at which modern
mediation must aim but cannot achieve.
Here indeed, because of the manifestly tragic character of the crisis
Schmitt thinks, we need to clarify the limits of our earlier comparison of
Kierkegaard’s occasio to Schmitt’s. For Schmitt the crisis that the occasio
imposes upon the thought and being of the critic is not the plentitude of
an infinity. It is the poverty of a Nothing. It is the utter privation of order, an
unsayable opacity internal to the critic’s knowledge that is not a trauma in
the psychoanalytic sense, but simply an absence of form-giving speech, the
lack of any language that can resolve or even merely describe the unprec-
edented crises of the modern, a vacuum that then serves as the inexhaustible
resource for the prolixity of the critic’s criticism.4 And although it would be
tempting to make sense of this epochal crisis-event by calling it an interreg-
num, Galli does not, to my knowledge, do so in any of his writings, perhaps
because this would be to use a juridical concept for, and to give juridical form
to, an experience and an event that, to the contrary, mark the failure of all
juridical forms, both modern and medieval, and that consequently would be
more properly characterized as an epochal anomie or, as Galli would later
write, chaos (2008a, 7).
4.
The true crux of all Schmitt interpretation, Roberto Racinaro has argued,
is the question of Schmitt’s occasionalism (1997, 130), and by recapitulating
Löwith’s criticism of Schmitt on this point, Galli’s reading of Schmitt indeed
opened up a space for rethinking Löwith’s interpretation of Schmitt as a

whole. Galli’s rethinking of the occasio in Schmitt first of all enabled him to put
forward a new interpretation of the “contradictoriness” that Löwith so easily
(perhaps too easily) demonstrated in his critique of Schmitt. Arguing that “the
dual value of Schmittian concepts has been accepted only in part” by Italian
readers of Schmitt (Galli 1979, 154), Galli concluded his 1979 essay with a call
for a newly systematic reading of Schmitt—one that, in particular, would take
account of Schmitt’s contradictoriness by refusing the clear and distinct divi-
sions (between science and ideology, politology and polemology, thought and
propaganda) that had come to govern Italian Schmitt scholarship, and that
were permitting Schmitt scholars to divvy up Schmitt’s oeuvre with reference
to a simplistic distinction between thoughtless polemical works on the one
hand and works of political thought on other (Galli 1979, 92, 96, 101–2).
In the case of the reading of Schmitt advanced by the post-workerist left,
this amounted to a very direct criticism: there is no way, Galli warned, to
extract from Schmitt’s text the ostensible “acceptable” (because of its status
as political thought or even political science) concept of the “autonomy of
the political” without also dragging along the “unacceptable” (because of its
status as propaganda and ideology) concept of the sovereign’s designation
and exclusion of the public enemy (Galli 1979, 150, 154). These two concepts
are inseparable: they are two parts of a single insight into the double-sided
origin of the political. The purpose of Galli’s claim about the indistinction of
politology and polemology in Schmittian thought was not then to urge rela-
tivistic indifference to these distinctions. Rather, it was to reveal the sense
in which the equivocal content of Schmitt’s political thought—that, precisely
as Löwith put it, there is for Schmitt no political relation that is not rooted
in some warlike intensity or potentiality (1998 [1935], 147, 154)—was also the
hermeneutic key to understanding the equivocal form of Schmitt’s oeuvre as
a whole. But whereas Löwith attributed the polemical quality of Schmitt’s
thought to an occasionalism that amounted to a lack of a philosophy of his-
tory, Galli attributes it to the occasionalism of a critic who is internal to the
crisis of his time. For if, as Galli argues, Schmitt’s occasionalism implies a
critic who enters into a specifically unmediated and immediate relation with
the crisis he thinks, such that the subject of thought by definition reproduces
Adam Sitze ● 45
in his thought the specific either-or that confronts him in that crisis (Galli
1987a, 15), then the critic who thinks the epochal crisis of modernity—its
inability to achieve felicitously the desiradata (peace and reconciliation) it
inherits from the complexio—will remain troubled by a trace of the same
latent polemicity that troubles modernity as a whole. Any and all truly politi-
cal thought will, on these grounds, retain the potential to revert to polemic.
On this basis, Galli was also able to interpret Schmitt’s Nazism in a way
that departed from Löwith. To the prevailing reading of Schmitt’s Nazism
(which pivots on the question of how to “periodize” Schmitt’s Nazism, and
more often than not dissolves into microscopic bickering over historicist
and biographical details), Galli offers a simple but bold hermeneutic alterna-
tive: there is only a single synchronic caesura that runs throughout Schmitt’s
entire oeuvre, a single “immanent risk” that marks all “phases” of Schmittian
thought (Galli 1979, 155). Galli draws out the dialectics of this risk by seizing
upon a remark Schmitt makes in the preface to the second Italian translation
of the second edition of Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischens (which appeared
in 1972, and which, according to Galli, marked the “return” of Schmitt within
Italian political thought after three decades of silence [1979, 120]). There, after
a short précis of his theses on the criterion of the political, Schmitt addresses
the question of the hermeneutic horizon within which his theses ought
to be interpreted. The impulse of his theses, Schmitt insisted, is scientific
(scientifico), in the sense that “they do not make any move to situate them-
selves in the right and to push their adversaries into non-right.” On the other
hand, Schmitt then adds (writing now in English), “science is but a small
power” such that (writing again in German), “in the ambit of the political
the freedom of independent thought always entails a supplementary risk”
(Schmitt 1972, 25–26).
To grasp Galli’s reading of this passage, it is essential to understand
that even though, on Schmitt’s own terms, this “supplementary risk” is an-
tithetical to scientific thought as Schmitt understands it, it is nevertheless
impossible to fully immunize scientific thought against it. The inconsistency
of Schmittian science with itself—its permanent and constitutive openness
to polemic, ideology, and propaganda—is utterly consistent with science in
the Schmittian sense: it is the manifestation, in Schmitt’s own criticism of
modernity, of the crisis Schmitt thinks in and through his genealogy of the
political, of his discovery that modern political institutions are radically and
originarily incomplete in relation to their own attempts at peace, security,
and reconciliation. “The objectivity of conflict,” as Galli pithily put it in 1986,
“implies the non-objectivity (in a substantial sense) of science” (1986b, 150).
Or, as Galli has put it in his most recent book on Schmitt:
Schmitt’s intellectual presentation is born in, and is characterized by, a po-

lemical impulse, a positioning that is existentially oriented and militant: it is
thanks to this impulse and this positioning—and not despite it—that Schmitt
is capable of a radical analysis of politics. . . . Ideology is the porta Inferi [the
“gate of Hell”] that leads Schmitt to knowledge of the “political,” and it is the
dramatic and irritating condition thanks to which Schmitt is not only an
ideologue but also an important thinker. (2008a, 10)
If Schmittian “political science” is science not despite but because of

its polemical and ideological character, then political science that is not
plagued by the risk (and perhaps temptation) of its own “polemicity” will
not be political thought at all: it will be thought that, to the contrary, sup-
presses the political, that stands outside the crisis it criticizes, that seeks to
immunize itself from the crisis it thinks. On the other hand, however, all
real political thought will also share with the modern its susceptibility for
dissolution from within: it will reproduce, in the mode of thought, the con-
stitutive risk that troubles modern all political institutions, namely, that they
cannot accomplish their aims in the absence of a supplement that threatens
to undermine those aims from within. But just as political thought that fully
suppresses its polemicity is not truly political thought, so too is political
thought that fully succumbs to this immanent risk not thought, either. By
Schmitt’s own account, it becomes something else, “an attempt to push its
adversary into non-right”—or, put simply, the very warfare against an unjust
enemy that Schmitt regarded as a plague upon the house of the modern.
On these hermeneutic grounds, the task of reading Schmitt is not to
quarantine his Nazism to the period 1933–1936 for the purpose of liberating
the rest of his work for neutral analytic use or even for leftist reappropriation.
Adam Sitze ● 47
Nor is it, on the basis of a deeply ambivalent logic of taboo, to treat the whole
of Schmittian thought as if were tainted, as though Schmitt’s racism were
somehow so powerful and mysterious in its ways that it is akin to a conta-
gious disease, an incurable disease against which the only possible safeguard
is complete and total immunization. It is, rather, to understand Schmitt’s
Nazism as the manifestation of a risk, or actualization of a potential, that
is the mark of the innermost singularity—indeed, the very signature—of
Schmittian thought (Galli 1981, xxviii). Th e immanent risk of Schmittian
thought, Galli wrote in 1979, is “the risk of transforming scientific exposition
into propaganda, of surrendering to the polemicity (polemicità) implicit in
the discovery of the political in order to support, historically, a contingent
political practice” (1979, 153). That, according to Galli, “Schmitt fell into this
risk precisely when he ‘used’ the general form of the ‘political’ in a pro-nazi
sense” (1979, 153) does not, however, mean that this development of Schmitt’s
thought was either necessary or inevitable. Parting ways with Löwith on this
point, Galli argues that
if it is true that Schmitt’s Nazi phase fully realized all of the risks inherent
in the structure of Schmittian thought, it is also true that this realization is
ultimately a betrayal—both theoretical and practical—that does not occur
necessarily or automatically, but that instead requires a conscious personal
will, dictated primarily by opportunism, and academic and political ambi-
tion. (1996, 848)
Here, where Galli’s understanding of Schmitt seems to be at its most

“forgiving” (for having abstained from polemic), it is, in fact, at its most
damning. Phrased in its sharpest possible terms, Galli’s point is not only that
Schmitt is personally responsible for his Nazism (he was not, in other words,
held “hostage” by the Nazis), but also that Schmitt’s evil was banal in the
Arendtian sense of the word: it was an evil not of the exception but of the
norm, the evil latent in a paterfamilias who limits his care and concern to his
career, his security, and the security of his family (Arendt 1994b [1945], 128). It
follows that Schmitt’s evil is not to be sought in his thought, but rather in his
thoughtlessness (Arendt 1978, 4–5, 13, 179–80) or, better, in the specific mode
of thoughtlessness that is immanent in his thought, the thoughtlessness to

which his thought was, because of its singularity, singularly susceptible.
What thoughtlessness is that? Galli interprets Schmitt’s Nazism by
claiming that Schmitt personally willed a relation to his own thought that
was not only repulsive but also unnecessary: there is nothing inherent in
the immanent risk of Schmittian thought that required Schmitt the person
to actualize that risk in the way that he did, namely, by offering it up for use
by the forces of racism (Galli 1979, 153; 1996, 848). The truth of Galli’s claim
may be confirmed with reference to a complementary claim, one that is
implicit in Galli’s own distinction between “thought” and “person.” As Galli’s
work on Schmitt shows, Schmitt’s thought was nothing if not a genealogy
of the institutions, practices, and theories grounded in the concept of the
person.5 From the Person of Christ (whose mystical capacity to reconcile
opposites is the center of the complexio) to the Sovereign Person (whose
capacity for unified representation is, in Hobbes political philosophy, the
very pivot-point by which the chaotic multitude becomes an orderly civitas)
to the Juristic Person (whose individual rights were the self-justification for
legal liberalism and industrial capitalism alike), the iteration of the “person”
is one of the red threads that binds together Schmitt’s genealogy of modern
mediation.
This genealogy, remember, is a genealogy of conflict and decline, of suc-
cessive crises and increasing disintegration: Hobbes’s Sovereign Person not
only displaces the Person who is at the center of the complexio but also (in
the simplicity of its unity) fails to achieve fully the tasks it inherits from the
complexio, while the Juristic Person of legal liberalism eventually discovers
that its liberty and property are threatened by the Hobbesian Sovereign Per-
son whose provision of security enabled the individual to assert liberty and
property rights in the first place. Given the entropy that is at work in Schmitt’s
genealogy, given its tragic and conservative narrative of increasing decline
and disorder, of the free-fall and disintegration of the Person of Christ, it is
therefore all the more interesting that Schmitt brings its innermost move-
ment—its centrifugal force—to a halt in the case of his own person.6 That
Schmitt’s conduct during the 1930s and 1940s took the form of a careerist
and opportunistic commitment to his own proper name—to the promotion
Adam Sitze ● 49
and publication of writing associated with his person, to the achievement

of security and safety for the family who bears his name—is not, after all,
a “merely” personal fact the interpretation of which is the provenance of
biographers and historians. It is instead a problem for Schmittian thought in
the strict sense of the word: the “personalism” of Schmitt’s Nazism is a question
that demands to be thought within the horizon of Schmitt’s own genealogy of the
crisis of modern mediation.
On the terms of immanent critique, in other words, what’s decisive about
Schmitt’s careerism and opportunism is that, in it, we witness the genea-
logical critic of the person fail to carry through with the task of genealogical
criticism as he otherwise practiced it. Schmitt’s personalism, on this read, is
a betrayal of what was most forceful and alive in Schmitt’s own thought: it is
a failure to take the crisis of the person to its extreme, a failure to open his
thought to that crisis in an immediate and unmediated manner, a failure to
come to terms with the possibility that the disintegration of the person he ex-
posed in and through his own thought could (and perhaps could not but) pro-
nounce itself in his own person. This is, among other things, a confirmation
of Galli’s claim that Schmitt’s careerism and opportunism are betrayals of
his thought: by turning his thought into the servant of his person, Schmitt
in effect arrested his own thought, saving his proper name by suspending the
very “thought movement” that constituted the most forceful punch of his
genealogical criticism of the modern. The personal basis of Schmitt’s Nazism
cannot then be interpreted merely as material for biography or history. It
constitutes a very precise and even central problem for immanent critique:
it is the mode of thoughtlessness—the misology7—that is singular to Schmittian
thought.
Curiously, the thoughtlessness at the core of Schmittian thought has a
counterpart in a certain style of Schmitt scholarship. To an unusual degree,
contemporary Schmitt scholarship (whether apologetic, critical, or merely
“instrumentalist”) is predicated on the assumption that Schmitt’s own per-
son can and perhaps should function as the horizon for the interpretation
of Schmitt’s writings. Whether in the form of moral and juridical judgments
about Schmitt’s personal guilt, apologetic pleas for readers to “get beyond”
Schmitt’s complicated person so they can reflect upon or use Schmitt’s
concepts (Freund 1978, 7–8, 38), or attempts to systematize and arrange

Schmitt’s contradictory thought with reference to the simple biographical
unit of the “lifetime,” some or another iteration of the concept of the person
has governed the interpretation of Schmitt’s oeuvre. The fact that this schol-
arship has by and large failed to ask what it means to accept this concept as
the definitive framework for the interpretation of Schmittian writings is not
simply another instance of the “transferential” relation that is arguably the
indispensable condition for all careful reading. It is, rather, a deeply question-
able and symptomatic attempt to render Schmitt’s texts intelligible within a
hermeneutic horizon that presumes the stability and coherence of a category
the disintegration of which is not only one of the central crises Schmitt at-
tempted to think through in his genealogy of the political, but also the site
at which Schmitt betrayed his own thought, capitulated to his own singular
thoughtlessness, and bodied forth his own specific misology.
5.
What reading of Schmittian thought would we generate were we to follow the

lead of Galli’s immanent critique and attempt to complete the genealogical
crisis of the person that Schmitt both could not but and could not confront?
Let us respond to this question with a brief reading of Schmitt’s 1938 book The
Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1996 [1938]). Published two
years after he “officially” left the Nazi Party, Schmitt’s book is written with a
vicious anti-Semitism that Galli calls “one of the worst moments of Schmitt’s
political and intellectual biography” (2008a, 118). In light of Schmitt’s 1972
remarks on the “freedom of independent thought,” the portion of the text
that most exigently recommends itself to our attention is Chapter V, where
Schmitt takes up the question of the origins of the modern concept of the
freedom of thought. That Schmitt exercises this very freedom, even as he
polemically exposes it as a bastard child of Jewish origin, is the crux of the
hermeneutic problem that confronts us—and not only in this text, but also in
Schmittian thought as such. Nowhere more than here is it clear that Schmitt’s
genealogy of the political is essentially and constitutively linked to the pos-
sibility of a political genealogy—a genealogy in the Nazi sense of the word, the
Adam Sitze ● 51
political theoretical equivalent of a secret police inquiry into hidden Jewish

origins. Nowhere more than here does Schmitt’s attempt to think the origin
of politics become precisely a politics of the origin—a genealogical ideology, a
racist organicism (Galli 1996, xvii, 847–48).
Schmitt’s Chapter V opens with a discussion of the miracle that is a curi-
ously neglected sequel to his more familiar 1922 analogy of the exception to
the miracle (1985 [1922], 36). Schmitt clarifies that, for Hobbes, the problem
of the miracle is less theological than political in character. It only becomes
a concern for the commonwealth at that threshold where theological dispute
over the truth of miracles threatens or challenges the sovereign’s most con-
crete duty: to create and preserve peace between warring Christian factions.
When the sovereign makes a decision about which miracles do and do not
merit his subjects’ belief, he or she therefore does so not with a view to the
subtleties of theological disputations, but merely as the “personation” of the
subjects’ own public reason—which is to say, as the rational and necessary
step taken by any multitude which fears violent death in and through the
fratricidal violence of theological civil war. Because the Sovereign Person
both represents and institutes our desire for self-preservation (which desire
is not only, in Hobbes, a natural right but also a natural law), so too is the
sovereign’s legislation of the subject’s belief in miracles not merely arbitrary,
capricious, or whimsical: whatever the sovereign concludes about miracles
will have been not only reasonable, but also authorized and authoritative,
so long as it has the effect of maintaining the conditions of peace that, in
turn, enable the multitude to preserve itself in the form of an ordered civitas.
Authority, not truth, makes law (53–56).
Spinoza, by contrast, views the state’s regulation of religion from the
standpoint of someone who is excluded from the Christian state altogether—
or, in Schmitt’s words, a standpoint emanating from “Jewish existence [der
jüdischen Existenz],” from “the restless spirit of the Jew [der rastlose Geist
des Juden]” (1985 [1922], 58, 60). This internal exclusion enables Spinoza to
invert Hobbes’s account of miracles, for it permits Spinoza to understand
state-endorsed religion as an artificial and arbitrary constraint on inner
belief. Worse, Schmitt continues, Spinoza then proceeds to radicalize the
possibility of autonomous inner belief by turning it into the paradigm for
the freedom of thought in general (57–58). The result of this radicalization

is the extreme political position that it is not up to the sovereign to decide
whether or not a given miracle is true, that this decision is instead up to
me alone in my capacity as a reasoning and (possibly) pious being. From
this standpoint, the Sovereign Person is no longer the representation of the
multitude’s inner natural reason; on the contrary, the sovereign is now an
external and artificial threat to that same reason as it comes to be exercised
by individual persons (58–59).
The mask of personation here falls away. In its absence, the sovereign
is no longer basileus but now tyrannos. From a position above humanity (a
“mortal god”), he descends to a status that is beneath humanity, reverting to
his precontractual status as a wolf, an essentially predatory being, an enemy
of humanity that cannot be assimilated, but only exterminated. Hobbes’s
writings on the sovereign power to decide the miracle, which in one sense
mark the very zenith of sovereign power, thus also turn out to host the
potential for its nadir: the destruction of the sovereign power’s capacity to
create political form, order, and unity through representation. To actualize
this potential, it would only take a Jewish philosopher—an outsider both to
the Christian state and to Christian stasis (the fratricide of Catholics and
Protestants)—to think the problem of the miracle in an essentially Jewish
way. From that point on, the sovereign’s power to define miracles would no
longer mark the provision of individual liberty in and through the authority
of the Sovereign Person; it would now mark the division of individual liberty
against the authority of the Sovereign Person (61). For Schmitt, Spinoza’s
writings on miracles are therefore the beginning of the end for the Leviathan:
Spinoza is, in his view, the most radical and originary internal enemy of the
modern state (Galli 2008a, 117–18).
Now, on the terms that Galli proposes, “the freedom of independent
thought” to which Schmitt refers in 1972 is not at all part of a different “phase”
of Schmitt’s oeuvre than the “freedom of thought” that, in 1938, Schmitt both
exercised and polemically categorized as ruinous and Jewish. To the con-
trary, the reiteration of the latter in the former marks the “immanent risk”
to which Schmittian thought is subject as such and in general. What’s more,
in the interval that opens up between Schmitt’s 1938 and 1972 remarks, we
Adam Sitze ● 53
can see this risk manifest itself in terms and in a direction that exceed, from
within, the basic categories of political thought as Schmitt defines it. We can
see that, to survive the war he also thematized as an object for thought, the
political thinker of 1938 surrendered his thought wholly to the aims of that
war, freely adopting the Nazi’s official “internal enemy” as the main criterion
for his genealogy of the freedom of thought within modern politics. But we
can also see that, on the terms set forth by the writer of 1972, any political
thought that fully becomes polemic ceases thereby to be political thought.
Political thought that survives the war by internalizing war for its innermost
form does not then, in other words, survive at all. The politico who is left
unchecked by thought, as Galli puts it, drags the thinker into polemical
propaganda (1979, 155). Schmitt’s 1938 text is thus the exemplary instance of
Schmitt’s personal capitulation to the immanent risk of his thought.
Schmitt’s Leviathan also, however, provides us with the exemplary in-
stance of Schmitt’s failure to complete his own genealogy of the crisis of the
person. In June 1945 (a month after Berlin fell to the Soviets), Schmitt wrote
Verlag (the publisher of his 1938 Leviathan) and asked that all future edi-
tions of his book be prefaced with a short blurb cautioning the reader, “in all
friendship,” that his “Leviathan book” was an esoteric work that the reader
should keep his hands off of. Schmitt signed the blurb with the salutation,
“Sincerely your good friend, Benito Cereno” (1995, 38–39). Schmitt’s substitu-
tion of his own signature with that of the namesake of Herman Melville’s 1856
short story “Benito Cereno” was not limited to the printed page (cf. Jünger
[1949, 57] and Freund [1978, 37]). It was part of a postwar advertising blitz
in which the now ex-Kronjurist began to broadcast to anyone who cared
to read or listen the sense in which he, like Cereno, was a silently suffering
knight of faith.8 It is almost impossible to overstate the profound confusion,
self-delusion, and self-righteousness implicit in Schmitt’s decision to “play
the part” of Cereno. It not only positions him as an “internal exile” of the
Nazi regime (Freund 1978, 31) rather than its Kronjurist, and construes him
as a hostage of a group of Nazi pirates—a veritable Schwarze Korps—who,
Schmitt wants us to know, are every bit as despicable and barbaric as a
group of freed African slaves (thus in effect protesting Nazi racism on racist
grounds). It is also an allegory of reading. Melville’s “Benito Cereno” is, after
all, a narrative about an American, Delano, who concludes by narrative’s

end that he has misjudged Cereno, and who after realizing his mistake ap-
proaches Cereno to tell him that it was he, Delano, who was saved (Melville
1986 [1855], 256), placing Cereno in a position to forgive those who so repent.
Because Schmitt’s Cereno persona implies an invitation to the reader to act
as his Delano, it would be a mistake to interpret Schmitt’s adoption of this
persona as Schmitt’s attempt to exonerate himself for lending his thought
and name to genocide. Schmitt’s Cereno persona implies the exact opposite:
it indicates his own “magnanimous” willingness to forgive his American
judges for condemning him. Schmitt’s Cereno persona unquestionably en-
tails a fantasy of absolution, but prior even to its “magnanimity” toward its
judge, this fantasy is an absolution of the self by the self, an absolution that
has no way to stop itself from ratcheting itself up, an absolution that is, as
Vladimir Jankélévitch might put it, more lonely and impotent than it is mad,
more mad than it is lonely and impotent.
Galli will decline Schmitt’s invitation, but in a much different way than
Jürgen Habermas (1989, 133) or William Scheuerman (1999, 176–78). In the
manner of a true immanent critique, Galli will propose that we accept
Schmitt’s Cereno persona as the ultimate hermeneutic horizon for the inter-
pretation of the immanent risk that defines Schmitt’s oeuvre as a whole (1979,
155). The point of this exercise is not, of course, to take the bait of Schmitt’s
bombastic self-pity. It is to put a name to the singular way in which a certain
“non-identity of the identical” divides Schmitt’s thought from within, cleav-
ing it from itself in a manner that, in turn, opens up the possibility for a
non-Schmittian conflict with Schmittian thought. On Galli’s read, remember,
the innermost core of Schmittian thought is its “tragicity.” This is, to be clear,
Galli’s name for a relation in Schmitt’s writings that demands to be thought
(because, by Schmitt’s own account, the relation between the political and
the polemical is the very arche– of modern politics), yet that cannot be thought
on Schmitt’s own terms (because the relation between the political and the
polemic is itself neither political nor polemical).
Now, Schmitt himself no doubt intended his Cereno persona as part of his
more general construal of himself in “tragic” terms—as both scapegoat and
hero (Kahn 2003, 80–81). On Galli’s terms, however, Schmitt’s Cereno persona
Adam Sitze ● 55
is not a mark of Schmitt’s embodiment of this tragicity—as if his “playing the

part” or “donning the mask” of Cereno were an enactment or performance
of the same tragicity he thought. It is, to the contrary, Schmitt’s attempt to
immunize himself against this tragicity, to save himself from the nameless-
ness at its core, to protect himself from its entropic free-fall into impersonal-
ity, to openly invent a persona under conditions where his existing person
could no longer host the conflictuality to which he, in his service to the Nazi
regime, had bound it. And though some may be tempted to characterize this
invention as an act of imagination, nothing could be further from the truth:
Schmitt’s Cereno persona is, to the contrary, the mark of Schmitt’s epochal
failure to imagine a schema that could confer form and integrity upon the
unnameable relation and the unameable space he discovered between the
political and the polemicial. To be sure, Schmitt named only this relation,
named nothing other than this relation: his oeuvre is nothing if not a single
metonymic chain of names for precisely this relation. But when it suddenly
and uncannily irrupts in his own name, Schmitt refused to open himself to
it, preferring to openly mask his absence of thought rather than to openly think
the absence of the mask. Despite appearances, then, Schmitt’s Cereno persona
is not, in the end, a tragic gesture: it is a manifestly antitragic, even farcical
attempt to muffle the contradictoriness that Schmitt was otherwise intent
upon opening up.
Like the “personalism” of his Nazism, Schmitt’s use of his Cereno persona
is a question that demands to be thought within the horizon of Schmitt’s own
genealogy of the crisis of modern mediation. According to Galli, the crisis
in mediation that Schmitt inherited begins with Kierkegaard (Galli 1996,
12, 53–55). However, rather than claim that Schmitt misread Kierekgaard
(which is what Löwith argued [1998 {1935}, 142]), Galli traces the derivation
of Schmitt’s opposition of the aesthetic and the political (in works such as
Political Romanticism and Hamlet or Hecuba) from Kierkegaard’s opposition
of the aesthetic (the romantic for whom “everything is possible,” for whom
the world is merely interesting, merely an occasion for playful poetizing,
and to whom “either-or” signifies only indifference and indecision: anything
goes) and the ethical (the decisive, the paradox, in which “either-or” signifies
seriousness and the truly interesting: the inter-esse) (Galli 1996, 80–81).9 On
the terms of Galli’s genealogy, the problem of decisionism in Kierkegaard is

not, as Löwith claims, so easily wrested back from Schmitt on the grounds of
misreading alone. On Galli’s read, Schmitt’s decisionism is not then (as it is
for Löwith) a nihilistic version of a thought that is, in Kierkegaard, theologi-
cally grounded. Rather, Schmitt arrives at his decisionism by radicalizing and
reworking the same crisis of mediation that is at work in Kierkegaard: for
Schmitt as for Kierkegaard, albeit in a juridical rather than ethical mode,
decisionism emerges when and where the immediate (ethical silence in the
case of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, political conflict in the case of Schmitt’s
sovereign) cannot be reconciled with the mediate (Abraham’s ability to speak
with Sarah in the case of Kierkegaard, parliamentary discussion in the case
of Schmitt).
Kierkegaard clearly understood that this crisis in mediation was not
abstract but concrete, with very serious implications for the most elemental
concepts, practices, and institutions of modern existence. This, of course, is
one of the reasons Kierkegaard adopted his famous system of “indirect com-
munication,” in which he signed various of his writings with pseudonyms
that named nothing so much as those writings’ own internal dynamics. Yet,
as Hannah Arendt observed in a short 1932 essay, Kierkegaard’s own pseud-
onyms are the best sign that Kierkegaard was, in the end, unable to think
through to its completion the very crisis of mediation about which he tirelessly
wrote. If one decides not merely to play with the possibilities of the world,
but to accept the task of taking one’s possibilities seriously, Arendt argued,
one ultimately also must accept the necessity of turning oneself into a pure
incarnation of life’s most serious possibility—the unswerving and austere
logos—which, itself having no name, obliges one to embrace namelessness as
well. But, Arendt continues, to write about this most serious possibility, and
then to publish that writing, is to confront the impasse between mediation
and the immediacy in its most rudimentary form. Writing, Arendt continues,
is always the product of a specific person, of someone with a name, and if a

writer is to achieve the desired anonymity publicly and, so to speak, as witness
to his own namelessness, then his name has to hide behind a pseudonym.
But every pseudonym threatens to take the place of the author’s real name
Adam Sitze ● 57
and so to take possession of the author. And so it is [lest one pseudonym

become permanent and in so doing function as a replacement for the author’s
name, rather than as its obliteration—AS] that one pseudonym follows on the
heels of another and that hardly any two of Kierkegaard’s works appeared
under the same name. This changing of pseudonyms reveals, of course, an
aesthetic playing with possibility, that seductive possibility that Kierkegaard
himself, under the name “Victor Eremita,” presented in Either/Or. (Arendt
1994a [1932], 48)
The pseudonym in Arendt’s Kierkegaard, we could then say, fulfills a function

that is homologous to occasionalism in Löwith’s Schmitt: it is an aesthetic
dalliance to which “the serious” (ethical silence in Kierkegaard, the decision
in Schmitt) is by definition opposed, and yet which, by virtue of its incom-
plete grasp of its own internal logic, “the serious” cannot do without.
Whether or not Schmitt was aware of the “contradictoriness” of his writ-
ings, he was certainly aware of the problems posed by Kierkegaard’s pseud-
onyms. In 1913, Schmitt published a satire of bourgeois (read: Jewish) culture
under the manifestly Kierkegaardian pseudonym “Johannes Negelinus” (Vil-
linger 1995), whereas in Political Theology he was careful not to quote the
author of Repetition by name, referring neither to Søren Kierkegaard nor to
“Constantin Constantius” but only to “a Protestant theologian” (1985 [1922],
15). Most significantly, in 1957, Schmitt would criticize as a dangerous and
contradictory abstraction the modern notion that law can or should be
purely “impersonal.” Arguing that even the most impersonal law is always
already “personalized” (and why else, Schmitt asks, would moderns claim
to speak “in the name of the law”), Schmitt would support his claim by in-
venting an etymology according to which the Greek nomos could be linked,
essentially and intrinsically, to the power to give and receive names—and
thence too, implicitly at least, to the genealogy of the person and the shadow
of the secularized sovereign (such that there would be no nomos that is not
first nomos basileus, no impersonal law that is not first personalized) (2003
[1957], 338, 349]).
In short, not least because Schmitt was aware of the constellation of prob-
lems at work in the pseudonym, we may read Schmitt’s use of the pseudonym
“Benito Cereno” to sign his worst book (and on Galli’s terms, perhaps even
his most metatheoretical, the one that best exemplifies the immanent risk of
Schmittian thought as a whole) within the horizon of his own genealogy of
modern mediation. On these terms, it is a mark of Schmitt’s inability to carry
that genealogy through to its completion: despite the thrust and trajectory
of his own “thought movement,” Schmitt, like Kierkegaard before him, was
unable to come to terms with the impersonal on its own terms—which is to
say, without recourse to personalization. If despair is an inability to die to the
world (and so to gain the infinite) (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849], 17–21), Schmitt’s
pseudonym marks an inability to live the impersonal (and so to gain soli-
tude—the essential solitude of writing, but also the solitude of thought).10
To pursue the Gallian reading of Schmitt is, among other things, to be-
come able to seize upon this problematic as a point of entry for an immanent
critique of Schmitt’s oeuvre as a whole. In Schmitt’s inability to write in the
absence of a persona, we find an opacity that is as pronounced in the most
immanent interior of Schmittian thought (Schmitt’s specific misology, his in-
ability to think through to its completion the crisis of the person) as it is in
the outermost exterior of his writings (in Schmitt’s attempt to replace his name
with Cereno’s in his worst, but also his most metatheoretical, book). It is by
bringing to light this, the conflict that undoes Schmitt’s writings from within,
that Galli enables us to enter into conflict with Schmitt’s writings in a way that
does not also revive or resurrect Schmitt’s writings on conflict. “One must have
tradition in oneself to hate it properly,” Adorno once wrote (2002 [1951], 52).
The same goes for Galli’s painstaking reconstruction of Schmittian thought:
to read Galli is to learn how to hate Schmitt properly.
6.
There are, of course, other ways besides immanent critique to appropriate

Schmitt’s writings within the horizon of emancipatory thought. In what is
surely one of the most insightful texts in his own oeuvre, Slavoj Žižek’s 1999
essay “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics” covers many of the same
themes and problems that we have touched upon here (Schmitt’s relation
to Kierkegaard, the simultaneously abyssal and performative character of
Adam Sitze ● 59
the sovereign decision, the dialectical ironies of entering into conflict with
Schmitt, and place and function of the tragic in and for Schmitt’s concept of
the political). Although there is not sufficient space here to consider Žižek’s
claims in any sustained manner, it nevertheless will be instructive to con-
clude with a few words on his argument about Schmitt’s place and function
within contemporary Left thought. In its resemblance to, but ultimately also
difference from, Galli’s work, Žižek’s stance on Schmitt will throw Galli’s into
sharper relief.
The crux of Žižek’s argument is that, under “post-political” conditions
where capitalist domination reproduces itself through the “repressive toler-
ance” of pluralist consensus and negotiation, Schmitt is more pertinent than
ever. Under such conditions, Žižek claims,
[t]he reference to Schmitt is crucial in detecting the deadlocks of post-political

liberal tolerance: Schmittian ultra-politics—the radicalization of politics into
the open warfare of Us against Them discernible in different “fundamental-
isms” [and ultra-politics, as Žižek has argued earlier (29), is precisely also a
depoliticization, for it marks a complete subsumption of politics into war—
AS]—is the form in which the foreclosed political returns in the post-political
universe of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation. For that reason,
the way to counter-act this re-emerging ultra-politics is not more tolerance,
more compassion and multicultural understanding, but the return of the po-
litical proper, that is, the reassertion of the dimension of antagonism which,
far from denying universality, is cosubstantial with it. (1999a, 35, emphasis
in original)
For Žižek, Schmitt’s concept of the political can enable us to diagnose

and criticize the “compromise formations” generated by the social forces of
late capitalism as part of their aspiration to hegemony because the “political
proper” amounts to a standpoint within history that interrupts history: like
the real in a Lacanian sense, the political is, in Žižek’s account, cosubstantial
with universality, and the duty of the Leftist, like the duty of the analyst in
Lacanian psychoanalysis, is to assume the place of the political (or even, as
Žižek said in his debate with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau, the place of
the exception [1999b, 326]). There is certainly a sense in which Galli’s read-
ing of Schmitt confirms the equivalence Žižek establishes. On Galli’s read,
Schmitt’s concept of the political indeed resembles what Lacan would call a
“cause”: the “political” is not a self-subsisting object, but simply a “synthetic
name” for a mode of polemicity that is generated in and by the origin of the
modern and that then manifests itself in the institutions of modern politics
as that origin’s trace, a trace which those institutions must but cannot render
transparent in their attempt to actualize their own innermost potential and
aims (Galli 1996, 736–39, 742; 1981, xviii). One can see why Žižek might be
tempted to establish a homology between this polemicity and the remainder
that, in Lacanian discourse, is generative of the “subject” and that is indeed
“in it more than it”: between these two theoretical formations there certainly
does appear to be something like a similarity in structure.
Yet despite the proximity of Žižek’s reading of Schmitt to Galli’s, there is
a subtle but decisive difference between the two that is worth spelling out
in detail. The equivalence Žižek establishes between the Lacanian “real”
and the Schmittian “political” implies that the latter’s polemicity will func-
tion, like the “real” in Žižek’s rendering, as something like the ahistorical
limit not only for any and all conceptualizations of politics but also, and
more importantly, for any and all attempts at political resignification. Galli,
by contrast, holds that Schmittian concepts are, on Schmitt’s own terms,
marked by and bound to the epoch in relation to which they were formed.
Schmittian thought is therefore, in Galli’s view, a “modern anti-modernity”
that positions itself at the extreme limit of the epoch it renounces, but that
also, and for this same reason, remains thoroughly contingent on that epoch
for its intelligibility (1996, 11). Once Schmitt’s thought is “decontextualised
with respect to the horizon of modernity,” Galli argues, it risks turning into
a series of theoretical banalities and commonplaces (2008a, 11). For Galli,
the question of whether Schmitt’s concepts retain some coherence in and
for the “ontology of the present” consequently requires consideration of
a question that is at once internal and external to Schmittian thought:
Do the crises of the global age remain, as they were for Schmitt, crises of
modern politics? Or, to the contrary, do they present us with a much differ-
ent problem, namely, the dissolution of the crises in response to which the
Adam Sitze ● 61
basic concepts and practices of modern politics formed, and from which
they receive their specific energy? If so, is not the task of the critic today
to think through an epoch in which the basic concepts and practices of
modern politics—and thus too Schmitt’s criticisms of those concepts and
practices—no longer refer to, or cohere around, any real crisis? In the de-
cade following the publication of the Genealogia, Galli has offered a very
definite response to this question:
Today’s horizon is toto coelo different from the statual order in which we
could find sense as much in the norm as in the “political,” as much in modern
institutions as in the exception and the decision. Today it is no longer pos-
sible to think about politics as dependent on a single strategic point, whether
the law or the decision[.] Our task is to adequately face a “political” that
is diffuse and non-decisive, an exception that is dilated into a normality, a
contingency that is not morphogenetic but . . . exploded, an unrepresentable
plurality and a representation that is exhausted and reduced to virtuality
or bad mythology, and a disconnection between politics and reason that is
not the very origin of order but simply random experience. Our task is to
think not only the end of politics, but also the end of the “political” in the
Schmittian sense, as that conflict which is put into form by a decision. (2007,
8; cf. 2000b, 1617; 2001a, 164).
At first glance, this passage would seem to allow us to draw a bright red
line between the Žižekian and Gallian readings of Schmitt: whereas Žižek
wants to use Schmittian logic to diagnose and to reject the “post-political,”
Galli wants to draw on Schmittian thought to embrace and to think the post-
political. In fact, the distinction is slightly different. Whereas Žižek assumes
that the post-political will entail a suppression of antagonisms (it is nothing
more than a “universe of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation”),
Galli understands the post-political as an explosion of antagonisms—as the
emergence of a mode of formless polemicity in relation to which the concept
of “the political” is, at best, inadequate and, at worst, falsely consoling. That
Galli wants to think the “end of the ‘political’” is not then a sign that his
thought simply “goes with the flow” of neoliberal globalization. It is rather a
sign of his commitment to a certain iteration of what Esposito has called “the
unpolitical” (which, as Esposito has not tired of clarifying, is not the same
as the apolitical, the nonpolitical, or the antipolitical, and which entails an
amplification, not an abandonment, of the problem of conflictuality [1999,
vii–xxxii]).
Nowhere is this more clear than in Galli’s writings on multiculturalism.
Galli, unlike Žižek, does not presume that multiculturalism is, by definition,
antagonistic to antagonism. For Galli, the multicultural humanity that is
emerging in the global age is, to the contrary, a new form of “exposure” of self
to other, one that is as distinct from the diversity of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment (in which, as in Hegel, various particular cultures are “put
in their place” by the mediations of a universal European mind [1971 {1830},
44–47]) as it is from the twentieth century diversity of “repressive tolerance”
(which Žižek seems to assume is the necessary form of any and all diversity).
It is a diversity in which the unmediated exposure of individuals and popula-
tions to one another is perilously conflictual, to be sure (because it is exterior
to “repressive tolerance”), but that does not, for this reason alone, need to
assume the decisionistic form of hostility between friend and enemy, and
which therefore—because and by virtue of this liberating lack of necessity—
may be described as unpolitical. For Galli, in other words, the diversity of the
global age is an occasio in the Schmittian sense of the word: it is a chance
to let a “representational deficit” or “epochal lack” dissolve, from within, the
relations of particular and universal that governed the concept of “human-
ity” in modern political rationality, in order to be able to give voice to a new
concept of “humanity” through the sometimes blind, often conflictual, and
always precarious work of translation (2006b, 9, 20–21; 2008b, 48–49, 79–81).
We need to underline here how different Galli’s occasio is from the
garden-variety antitheoretical historicism that happens to be fashionable
in the Anglophone humanities today ( Jameson 2008). Galli’s claim about
the “end of the ‘political’” is not grounded in a simple claim about historical
context. It derives from Galli’s attempt to leave his thought vulnerable to the
crisis produced by a new and worrisome mode of political mediation (the
“immediate mediacy” of economic globalization, in which we witness the
confusion of the distinctions—between inside and outside, and particular
Adam Sitze ● 63
and universal—that conferred shape and form upon the modern state [Galli
2001a, 148; 2002, 46]) and the emergent mode of borderless polemicity that
is its uncanny double (the “global war” that some readers will have already
encountered in Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s 2002 book Multitude
[3–95, 360 n.9], in which we witness the confusion of the juridical distinc-
tions—between criminal and enemy, military and police force, public au-
thority and private citizenry—that conferred shape and form upon modern
warfare [Galli, 2002, 41–94; Galli, Greblo, and Mezzadra, 2005, 256–7; 2009b
[2007], 215-217). Galli’s claim about the end of the “political” in the Schmittian
sense is not then reducible to a point about “changing contexts.” It is the
result of Galli’s fidelity to the Schmittian occasio in relation to a crisis that
is itself—in the formless excess of its specific irruption, as in its concrete
modes of conflictuality—no longer intelligible with reference to Schmittian
thought. Galli’s critique of Schmitt derives, in other words, from a repetition
of the Schmittian occasio—the immanence of the critic in the crisis—that
is so completely Schmittian—so loyal to the innermost spur of Schmittian
thought—that it therefore can be completely anti-Schmittian or, more to the
point, completely non-Schmittian.
From this standpoint, we can see more clearly the difference between
the Gallian and Žižekian readings of Schmitt. Galli’s achievement is precisely
to have “reliquified” the occasio that is the innermost core of Schmittian
thought and that risks being “reified” to the extent that we limit ourselves to
the instrumental application of Schmittian “logics.” This critique of Schmitt
implies, conversely, that there is a threshold at which fidelity to the use of
Schmittian “logic” (such as the friend-enemy distinction) no longer serves
as a diagnostic for or perhaps antidote to the symptoms of modern poli-
tics (as Žižek argues) but now itself begins to function as a certain sort of
“compromise formation,” a symptom of what Lacan would call a “passion
for ignorance.” To his credit, Žižek has acknowledged this threshold in his
own attempts to carry through with the diagnostic program he formulated
in 1999. In his 2002 response to the attacks of September 2001, for example,
Žižek tried to use the “reference to Schmitt” to detect the “deadlocks of post-
political liberal tolerance” in their specific post 9/11 inflection. In Welcome to
the Desert of the Real!, Žižek turns to Schmitt to show how Osama Bin Laden
has inherited the “schema” of the Enemy that liberal democracies once at-
tached to their Cold War foes. Žižek then argues:
Our pluralistic and tolerant democracies remain deeply “Schmittian”: they

continue to rely on the political Einbildungskraft [a reference to the Kantian
concept of the transcendental power of the imagination—AS] to provide
them with the appropriate figure which reveals the invisible Enemy. Far
from suspending the “binary” logic Friend/Enemy, the fact that this Enemy is
defined as the fundamentalist opponent of pluralistic tolerance simply adds
a reflexive twist to it. Of course, the price of this “renormalization” is that
the figure of the Enemy undergoes a fundamental change: it is no longer the
Evil Empire, that is, another territorial entity (a state or group of states), but
an illegal, secret—almost virtual—worldwide network in which lawlessness
(criminality) coincides with “fundamentalist” ethico-religious fanaticism—
and since this entity has no positive legal status, this new configuration
entails the end of the international law which—at least from the onset of
modernity—regulated relations between states. (2002, 110–11)
Vigilant dialectician that he is, Žižek here recognizes the distortion that
would follow were he to apply Schmittian thought to the polemicity of the
present (in the mode of what Kant would call a “determinant judgment”)
without also fundamentally altering Schmittian thought itself (in the mode
of what Kant would call a “reflective judgment”). The result, however, is an
application of Schmittian “logic” that torques Schmittian thought beyond
recognition. Žižek’s attempt to use the “binary logic” of friend and enemy for
an interpretation of post-9/11 politics ends up with his acknowledgement of
the complete collapse of the rest of the double-sided categories that allowed
Schmittian thought its singular purchase on modern politics (inside and out-
side, criminal and enemy, public authority and private individuals), as though
the use of Schmitt’s friend-enemy “logic” could be sustained today only at the
expense of Schmittian thought itself, as though one could repeat Schmittian
thought in the global age only at the cost of reducing it to a parody of itself.
The very form of Žižek’s own text bears witness to this collapse: as soon as
he tries to explain how the “reference to Schmitt” could make sense of the
Adam Sitze ● 65
borderless mode of polemicity that Galli has called “global war,” Žižek’s prose
suddenly capsizes into a flood of self-interrupting dashes and parentheses.
In Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, meanwhile, the disintegration
of Schmittian thought that was merely implicit in Welcome to the Desert of
the Real! becomes explicit. Žižek’s critique of liberal tolerance in this book
proceeds with his usual flair and insight, only now without any reference to
Schmitt whatsoever: the name “Schmitt” is completely absent from Žižek’s
volume on the financial crisis of October 2008 (which Žižek construes as
the “farcical” repetition of the “tragedy” of 9/11), and his various analyses on
“antagonism” and the “enemy” proceed instead on psychoanalytic and Marx-
ist terms (2009, 58–62, 120–22). This pronounced silence both completes and
retroactively confirms the dissolution of the reference to Schmitt that was al-
ready latent in Žižek’s response to the tragedy of September 2001. Žižek’s own
intellectual itinerary thus provides a forceful counterpoint to the qualified
endorsement of Schmitt he offered in 1999. Precisely in its clarity and intel-
ligence, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce implies that Schmittian thought is
unnecessary for an insightful critique of the deadlocks of the current crisis;
that it offers no special diagnostic claim upon the foreclosed “real” that
haunts our present; that it is not all that crucial for grasping or asserting the
antagonisms proper to contemporary politics; and that no serious dialecti-
cian would waste her time, or risk misleading her readers, by trying to parse
the deadlocks of the present with reference to Schmitt. In short, Žižek’s use
of Schmitt between 1999 and 2009 turns out to be less an alternative to what
Galli calls the “exhaustion of Schmittian thought” than a symptom of it.
Schmitt scholars, whether critical or affirmative, have sometimes referred
to Schmitt’s thought as a “challenge.” Galli’s reliquification of the Schmittian
occasio, however, issues a challenge of its own. Galli’s immanent critique of
Schmitt—not only in the degree of its breadth and depth, but also in the qual-
ity of its immanence—amounts to a test addressed to all of us who continue
to read Schmitt today. If Galli’s scholarship is any example, it would seem
that the fewer Schmittian texts we read (the more we constrain our reading
of Schmitt, say, to Concept of the Political or Political Theology), and the more
carelessly we read these texts (the more our hermeneutic encounter with
Schmitt’s texts is limited to the extraction of timeless and abstract “logics”
of norm and exception, friend and enemy, etc.), the more acutely we will
suffer from the illusion that Schmittian thought is adequate for the task of
naming our experience today, and the more we will be inclined to prolong
“Schmittian logic” past its own immanent expiration date. Conversely, the
more deeply and widely we read Schmitt’s writings, and the more loyal we re-
main to the kernel of the Schmittian occasio in our own thought, the more we
will realize just how pointless are Schmitt’s categories in an epoch in which
Schmitt’s contradictory oeuvre no longer sustains a relation to the crises
from which alone it coherence originates. The use of Schmittian categories
to interpret the global age not only betrays what was most alive in Schmitt’s
thought; it also allows us to comfort ourselves with the reassuring fantasy
that contemporary crises will so resemble those of modernity that the cri-
tique of the latter will retain purchase on the former as well. The challenge
of Carlo Galli—the challenge of a non-Schmittian Schmittology—is to read
Carl Schmitt so completely, so carefully, and so loyally, that we therefore close
the book on him, turning now to face a set of crises about which Schmitt has,
precisely, nothing to say.
notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at “New Paths in Political Philosophy,” a con-
ference sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the State
University of New York, Buffalo, March 28–30, 2008. I thank Andrew Werner, Chris Tullis, and
Christian Thorne for their comments on an earlier draft of this text, and I thank Elisabeth Fay for
reviewing my translations from the Italian. All mistakes and errors are my responsibility alone.
1. Reviewers of Galli’s Genealogia (1996) have not failed to note the book’s emphasis on
the tragic quality of Schmittian thought; see Dini (1997, 571, 574), Messina (1998, 498),
Racinaro (1997, 127), Zolo (1997, 577–78). This is not an emphasis one generally finds in
Anglophone scholarship on Schmitt; see Thornhill (2000) and Caldwell (2005).
2. For example, the Summer 1987 Special Issue of Telos that inaugurated that journal’s turn
to Schmitt was subtitled, “Carl Schmitt: Enemy or Foe?” See also Lilla (1997), Balakrish-
nan (2000), Müller (2003, ix), and Rasch (2004, 253).
3. My claim here, to be clear, is that Galli turns to Löwith’s later book on secularization to
illuminate the secularized notion of criticism that served as the premise for Löwith’s
Adam Sitze ● 67
early essay on Schmitt. That this immanent critique should take the explicit form of a
turn to Koselleck’s Schmittian genealogy of krisis may seem counterintuitive, but it is
consistent with Galli’s reading of Löwith’s criticism of Schmitt more generally, namely,
that Löwith’s polemic against Schmitt was closer to Schmitt than it realized.
4. On these terms, there is no longer any contradiction or inconsistency (as Löwith and
many after him have argued) between Schmitt’s criticism of political romanticism and
his affirmation of the exception. The same speechlessness—the same absence of mor-
phogenetic power—that the political romantic disavows with endless chatter is the
same “speechlessness” (or, in Kierkegaardian terms, the “inability to explain”) that con-
fronts reason each and every time it tries to think the exception. As Galli observes in his
1983 Introduction to the Italian translation of Schmitt’s “Hamlet or Hecuba,” Schmitt’s
interest in Prince Hamlet is simply an attempt to inquire into this same speechlessness
from the opposite side. In the silence of his indecisionism, Galli argues, “Hamlet is the
tragic counterpart to Romantic indecisionism.” See, variously, Galli (1979, 89; 1986a, 12,
19, 34; 1996, 212, 218; 2001b 468–69).
5. One of the hallmarks of the reading of Schmitt advanced by Galli and his colleague
Roberto Esposito is an emphasis on the continuity between Schmitt’s 1922 book on
decisionism and his 1923 book on the Roman Catholic doctrine of the majesty of Christ’s
“person” (Galli [1986c, 14–15, 18, 21]; Galli [1987a, 18; 2001b, 466, 475]; Esposito [1999,
27–33, 42–43, 82–83]; cf. Agamben [1998b {1996}, 184]). On this read, the tension be-
tween decision and law is always also (and, in genealogical terms, primarily) a tension
between the person and the impersonal. As Hans Blumenberg put it, the voluntarism
that grounds Schmitt’s decisionism “requires ‘persons,’ be they only ‘legal persons’” (a
declension of the concept of “person” that Blumenberg regards as “only metaphorical”)
(1976 [1985], 99–100). With significant exceptions (Kahn [2003]; Aravamudan [2005];
Rust and Lupton [2009]), this seems not to have been recognized in Anglophone schol-
arship, which has tended to reify the relation of decision and law, exception and rule,
into a “logic” or even “language game” that can somehow be understood independently
of the hermeneutic problems posed by Schmitt’s oeuvre, such as continuity between
texts that are chronologically contemporaneous but thematically discontinuous.
6. This, I take it, is the implication of Galli’s claim that Schmitt “exemplified in the first
person the complexio oppositorum” (Galli 1996, vii).
7. Because this term is largely absent from critical inquiry today (oddly, for renunciations
of “theory” by “former theorists” seem to be all the rage lately), a short digression is in
order to clarify its sense and provenance. “Misology,” as Hegel defined it, is “the hostility
of thought against itself ” (1975 [1830], 47, cf. 16). Although Hegel attributes this concept
to Plato (in his Republic [1961, 411d], Laches [188c], Phaedo [89d]), the more proximate
source is Kant. According to Kant, misology comes into being in those who believe that
the cultivation of reason should lead to enjoyment or happiness. When the cultivation of
reason brings only trouble, those who have spent time on this work begin to envy those
they understand to be without reason (1996 [1785], 51). Misology is not then the same
as anti-intellectualism, as it is sometimes understood (i.e., a hatred of intellectuals on
the part of the uneducated masses, a persecution of Socrates by the Athenian majority).
Misology is a hatred of thought that is immanent to thought—a hatred that is possible
only for those who strive to think, who work at thinking, who even love to think, but
who cannot live in the infinity of pure thought (which, as Arendt wrote, “only a god can
tolerate forever” [1978, 123–24]), and who thereby eventually come to resent the immor-
tality that thought at once promises and withholds. Though misology is not identical to
thoughtlessness in Arendt’s sense of the word, it is nevertheless surely one of its most
recurrent sources.
8. In the closing pages of his 1950 book Ex Captivitate Salus, which he wrote while im-
prisoned by American authorities in Germany, Schmitt wrote, “I am the last conscious
advocate of the jus publicum europaeum, its last teacher and researcher in an existential
sense, and I experience its end like Benito Cereno experienced the voyage of the pirate
ship. There is silence in this place and at this time. We do not need to be afraid of it. By
being silent, we reflect upon ourselves and upon our divine origin” (1950, 75).
9. Or, as Adorno put it, “Aesthetic deportment appears as an absence of decisiveness from
the perspective of the ‘ethical’” (1989 [1962], 15).
10. In his 1943 essay on (among other things) Kierkegaard, Blanchot describes the problem
of the pseudonym in terms that complement Arendt’s. The writer, he argues, “cannot
believe that by writing under a mask, by borrowing pseudonyms, by making himself
unknown, he is putting himself right with the solitude which he is fated to apprehend
in the very act of writing” (1999a [1943], 352). For both Arendt and Blanchot, the pseud-
onym amounts to an Aufhebung of the author: it is an incomplete negation of the person
who writes, a negation that not only preserves the essential content of the person—the
mask—but also swerves away from a confrontation with the true problem, which is to
say, the essential antinomy that exists between the juristic and theological apparatus
of the “person,” on the one hand, and the impersonal anonymity of writing (or what
Blanchot would later call the “third person” [1999b {1968}, 469 n.4), on the other. It
is also a swerve from the political: for Blanchot, we should not forget, “impersonality,
which is to say the exclusion of the proper name, constitutes not only the form but the
very content of the political act” (Esposito 2010, 131).
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Theodor Adorno once defined the task of immanent critique as the

the very institutions and practices it simultaneously founds, deforms the

is the work, as Galli has recently put it, of a “non-Schmittian Schmittologist”

Carlo Galli is professore ordinario in the Department of Historical Disciplines

Adorno, and Max Horkheimer), Galli seeks to illuminate the contingen-

his reconstruction of Löwith’s argumentation, calls an “attack” of rationalism

insufficiency of modern criticism in relation to its own present. Criticism

and so extreme that it therefore—because and by virtue of this immanence—

this crisis of representation not from modernity’s own various privileged

In every case, in other words, modern political order discovers that it

privileges in its own self-justifying historical narratives of its emergence. It

opened up a space for rethinking Löwith’s interpretation of Schmitt as a

Schmitt’s intellectual presentation is born in, and is characterized by, a po-

If Schmittian “political science” is science not despite but because of

Here, where Galli’s understanding of Schmitt seems to be at its most

of thoughtlessness that is immanent in his thought, the thoughtlessness to

and publication of writing associated with his person, to the achievement

concepts (Freund 1978, 7–8, 38), or attempts to systematize and arrange

What reading of Schmittian thought would we generate were we to follow the

political theoretical equivalent of a secret police inquiry into hidden Jewish

the freedom of thought in general (57–58). The result of this radicalization

all, a narrative about an American, Delano, who concludes by narrative’s

is not a mark of Schmitt’s embodiment of this tragicity—as if his “playing the

the terms of Galli’s genealogy, the problem of decisionism in Kierkegaard is

is always the product of a specific person, of someone with a name, and if a

and so to take possession of the author. And so it is [lest one pseudonym

The pseudonym in Arendt’s Kierkegaard, we could then say, fulfills a function

There are, of course, other ways besides immanent critique to appropriate

[t]he reference to Schmitt is crucial in detecting the deadlocks of post-political

For Žižek, Schmitt’s concept of the political can enable us to diagnose

Our pluralistic and tolerant democracies remain deeply “Schmittian”: they

Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 2: 227–36.

irrappresentabile. Il pensiero politico di Hannah Arendt, ed. Roberto Esposito, 15–28.

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