Perché Schmitt

Abstract

The essay connects the revival of Schmitt in the Italian culture of the ‘70s and ‘80s to the theoretical and political need to find conceptual tools to assess the limits and aporias of Modernity and of the related rationalist and dialectic “theoriticization” of politics. The root of Schmitt’s conceptual power lies in the capacity to assume the groundlessness of Modernity and the disconnection between reason and reality not as a surrender, but rather as the origin of the creative and con flicting energy crisscrossing politics. While it was able to lend a refreshed intellectual freedom versus worn-out intellectual models, Schmitt’s thought can neither be annexed to a post-Gramscian Marxism, nor disconnected from the category of sovereignty. Epimetheus more than Prometheus, Schmitt remains within the horizon of Modernity, grasping it in its decline: he conceptualizes the explosion of the State, but not its alternative. As for the relation to the present, without surrendering to easy resonances between the current crisis of liberal-democracies and Schmitt’s critique of Modernity, it is more fruitful to assess the persistence of the “intermediate phase” that Schmitt recognized in the ‘30s and use the powerful conceptual devices he provided to fabricate new ones.