Editor’s Introduction: Carl Schmitt: An Improper Name
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Published:November 2015
Adam Sitze’s introduction reviews Anglophone scholarship on Carl Schmitt and clarifies Carlo Galli’s contribution to that scholarship: Galli performs an “immanent critique” of Schmitt’s oeuvre that is until now lacking in English. Sitze then shows how Galli’s systematic reconstruction of Schmitt’s political thought doubles as a premise for Galli’s deconstruction of that same thought. Galli conceives the postmodern (or “global age”) in terms that are at once specifically Schmittian and completely non-Schmittian: it is that epoch in which Schmitt’s concepts have, on Schmitt’s own terms, lost their grasp on the historical and political crises in relation to which they emerged and in the absence of which they lack substance and intelligibility. The global age is, in short, that epoch defined by the complete and irreversible “inactuality” of Schmittian thought.