- The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt
- List of Contributors
- Carl Schmitt’s Life: A Chronology
- List of Carl Schmitt’s Writings
- “A Fanatic of Order in an Epoch of Confusing Turmoil”: The Political, Legal, and Cultural Thought of Carl Schmitt
- A “Catholic Layman of German Nationality and Citizenship”?: Carl Schmitt and the Religiosity of Life
- The “True Enemy”: Antisemitism in Carl Schmitt’s Life and Work
- Schmitt’s Diaries
- Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg
- Fearing the Disorder of Things: The Development of Carl Schmitt’s Institutional Theory, 1919–1942
- Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship
- The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt
- Teaching in Vain: Carl Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes, and the Theory of the Sovereign State
- Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-Century European Thought
- Carl Schmitt’s Defense of Democracy
- Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt’s Concepts of War: A Categorical Failure
- Carl Schmitt’s Concept of History
- What’s “Left” in Schmitt?: From Aversion to Appropriation in Contemporary Political Theory
- A Jurist Confronting Himself: Carl Schmitt’s Jurisprudential Thought
- Carl Schmitt and the Weimar Constitution
- The Concept of the Rule-of-Law State in Carl Schmitt’s <i>Verfassungslehre</i>
- Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt: Growing Discord, Culminating in the “Guardian” Controversy of 1931
- States of Emergency
- Politonomy
- Carl Schmitt and International Law
- Demystifying Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt and Modernity
- Is “the Political” a Romantic Concept?: Novalis’s Faith and Love or The King and Queen with Reference to Carl Schmitt
- Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt
- Legitimacy of the Modern Age?: Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt
- Tragedy as Exception in Carl Schmitt’s <i>Hamlet or Hecuba</i>
- At the Limits of Rhetoric: Authority, Commonplace, and the Role of Literature in Carl Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter shows why Carl Schmitt’s philosophical theories retained their fascination and conceptual force for young intellectuals in postwar Germany. Publication of a letter Walter Benjamin had written to Schmitt in 1930, which revealed his esteem for Schmitt, was a catalyst for philosophers such as Jacob Taubes, who had distanced himself from Schmitt. Taubes’s research into the two men’s relationship helped to overcome the postwar construction of a clear-cut distinction between good and bad, shedding new light on the work of both philosophers and the intellectual atmosphere of the Weimar period. Benjamin’s and Schmitt’s works convey a strong mutual influence, especially throughout the 1930s, implicitly revealed in Benjamin’s appropriation of Schmitt’s concept of the “state of exception.” The appeal of Schmitt’s theory for Benjamin lay in its suggestive force about the roles of aesthetics and avant-garde.
Keywords: Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Hobbes, political iconography of time, katechon, state of exception, avant-garde, Weimar, postwar German philosophy
Horst Bredekamp, Institut Für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität
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- The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt
- List of Contributors
- Carl Schmitt’s Life: A Chronology
- List of Carl Schmitt’s Writings
- “A Fanatic of Order in an Epoch of Confusing Turmoil”: The Political, Legal, and Cultural Thought of Carl Schmitt
- A “Catholic Layman of German Nationality and Citizenship”?: Carl Schmitt and the Religiosity of Life
- The “True Enemy”: Antisemitism in Carl Schmitt’s Life and Work
- Schmitt’s Diaries
- Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg
- Fearing the Disorder of Things: The Development of Carl Schmitt’s Institutional Theory, 1919–1942
- Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship
- The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt
- Teaching in Vain: Carl Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes, and the Theory of the Sovereign State
- Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-Century European Thought
- Carl Schmitt’s Defense of Democracy
- Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy: Levinas contra Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt’s Concepts of War: A Categorical Failure
- Carl Schmitt’s Concept of History
- What’s “Left” in Schmitt?: From Aversion to Appropriation in Contemporary Political Theory
- A Jurist Confronting Himself: Carl Schmitt’s Jurisprudential Thought
- Carl Schmitt and the Weimar Constitution
- The Concept of the Rule-of-Law State in Carl Schmitt’s <i>Verfassungslehre</i>
- Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt: Growing Discord, Culminating in the “Guardian” Controversy of 1931
- States of Emergency
- Politonomy
- Carl Schmitt and International Law
- Demystifying Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt and Modernity
- Is “the Political” a Romantic Concept?: Novalis’s Faith and Love or The King and Queen with Reference to Carl Schmitt
- Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt
- Legitimacy of the Modern Age?: Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt
- Tragedy as Exception in Carl Schmitt’s <i>Hamlet or Hecuba</i>
- At the Limits of Rhetoric: Authority, Commonplace, and the Role of Literature in Carl Schmitt
- Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric
- Index
