Constituent Power and Constitutive Exceptions: Carl Schmitt, Populism and the Consummation of Secularisation
Constituent Power and Constitutive Exceptions: Carl Schmitt, Populism and the Consummation of Secularisation
This chapter considers the role of the people in Carl Schmitt’s theorizing on democracy, and invokes the concept of constitutive boundaries as a way of understanding how communities are reproduced by way of territorial borders as well as criteria for membership and cultural markers, e.g. symbols, rituals, and holidays. The chapter suggests that the latter constitute instances of a larger logical space of constitutive exceptions, that, Schmitt implies, reproduce existing orders, but also threaten to replace them with new ones; thus, such exceptions may be surrounded by protective boundaries of the sacred, concretely as well as abstractly. Ultimately, we may visualize an entire topology of the exceptional, which is subject to fierce contestation, since it points to the possibility of new orders beyond existing ones, which may be interpreted in terms of different trajectories of highly ambiguous processes of secularization.
Keywords: Carl Schmitt, populism, constitutive exceptions, the sacred, secularization
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