The 'Revenge' of Political Theology. Notes on the margins of the processes of normalisation of the exception in the era of 'Global Democracy

Abstract

The text takes its cue from recent contributions which consider the topic of ‘political theology’ as newly relevant, owing to current historical turning points (September 11, global financialization, political and legal ‘globalization’). Moving from the views that Carl Schmitt first expressed in his 1922 Politische Theologie and further developed later, we try to show that critical analyses that tend to read a theologization of power and a secularizing drift into them, connected with the author’s adherence to the Nazi regime, are not hermeneutically convincing. We should rather acknowledge that Schmitt’s political theology is in fact constitutively a legal theory or, better, a theory of law. It allows us to understand how modern political-legal concepts, hinged on the sovereignty-representation binomial, are closely related to the concept, not formally structured, of decision. Basically, it is only by accepting Schmitt’s view that we can understand the implications of those concepts, besides their purely static and doctrinal dimension. This result is tested by comparing it with so-called Böckenförde’s theorem (the liberal, secularized state is nourished by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee) and with the topic of the normalization of exception in the global legal regime, with particular reference to recent constitutional debates on the introduction in member states constitutions of the rule of balanced budget required by the EU