From the Body of Christ to Racial Homogeneity: Carl Schmitt's Mobilization of a??Lifea?? against a??the Spirit of Technicitya??

摘要

This article traces the semantics of a??lifea?? and a??vitalitya?? in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern a??spirit of technicitya?? in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a v??lkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern a??spirit of technicity,a?? Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2011.640189