Episode 149 -- Carl Schmitt, Part 1
[REMINDER: We're less than 10 days away from the In Bed with the Right Live Show in San Francisco: August 27, 7:30 pm Swedish American Hall. Tickets are going fast, but still available -- get yours here!]
This week, to prepare for Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here, take 20% off at checkout with "daub20"), Adrian takes Moira back to Germany just before 1933 to discuss the life, opinions and odious politics of Carl Schmitt -- one of those right wing thinkers that never seems to go really go away, and that is being brought back in our own day by sundry Silicon Valley creeps and their lickspittles. This episode focuses on Schmitt's early writings -- On Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political, among others -- and on Schmitt's strange and messy personal and religious life.
Comments (22)
I'm really excited for the denazification series! I'm sure Moira and Adrian are already thinking about it but I would love if part of that series also talks about Reconstruction, maybe with Jamelle Bouie or an academic who works in that space. Reconstruction is the closest thing US history has to denazification and I'm sure there's a lot relevant we can learn about it's successes and failures
Re: Moira's question about a sovereign's legitimacy around the 56 min. mark--it gets circular in Schmidt's reasoning, but I think it goes to the way the volk are by definition of one mind to elect/support the sovereign, allegedly. They are this way because they constitute a state, which, by definition, is made up of friends opposing the same enemies, and their avatar or savior is their sovereign, who embodies their will. If he didn't do this, he wouldn't have risen to sovereign. It's all entangled: the friend-enemy stuff with the sovereignty stuff.
It's interesting to me how Shmitt's talking points at first sound like arguments for anarchism. Oh, the sovereign is who gets to declare a state of exception? There's no way to avoid a state of exception under a liberal democratic constitution? This means liberal democracies don't do enough to avoid creating sovereigns and we have to even further dilute power... Right? And then he just veers off into the deep end.
I had to listen several times from about 1hr and I am still confused. Is there a definition of theology or religion in this context? I kept finding myself nodding along like "yes, in the grand scheme of human scholarship theology and secular politics are pretty intermingled" but then the next chain in the non-logic would be something totally baffling
Great episode! But I’d also like to suggest a more lowbrow episode on Gwyneth Paltrow. I just read that she’s hosting a dinner for Sam Altman, and I was thinking about all these female celebrities who were formerly associated with progressive thinking and feminism embracing AI and venture capitalism. Good were the days when they just had a perfume with their names on it and weren’t evil capitalists...
Carl Schmitt sounds like the kind of opportunistic intellectual who creates the hooligan’s justification for destruction and then stands back and says, “What have they done!”
@adrian you guys should do an episode with norman ohler on der totale rausch!!!
Love you guys. This is only tangentially related to this episode, and I know you’ve touched on it on other episodes, but could you do an episode on conservatives and sexual fetishes? Why are they such little freaks 😩
The live show advertisement came minutes after I texted my dad (former Silicon Valley programmer) about the AI safety sex cult nonsense and the reoccurring issue of orgies and sex cults in tech. I’m no longer in the area, but I passed along the information to him, so we’ll see if he goes.
I refuse to look up orgies and sex cults in tech but I would be delighted if we got an episode on it!
Feels like his friend/enemy distinction is cribbing a lot from Peter the Law Boy’s “good boy/bad boy” political theory.
Are you guys going to record the live show for your poor ol east coast listeners by any chance …….. I loved listening to the last live show!
Nietzsche “ a right wing freak” ? Yikes . Thats a highly contestable claim and goes against a French tradition that uses Nietzsche for a liberatory politics ( Deleuze , Foucault, Bataille, Klossowski, and many others )
They did two episodes on Nietzsche on the main feed a couple years ago. I'd recommend starting with those if you're interested in the hosts' thoughts on Nietzsche in more detail.
"Marriage swindler" = "gold digger" (I know, out of fashion and all, but still quite apt)
I get my Social Security $$ tomorrow and I will buy the new book and order the 1933 one!!
Wonderful episode as always! Its really taking me back. i wrote my thesis on states of emergency with Chantal Mouffe as my advisor
OMG that's incredible! Her "Democratic Paradox" as well as Mbembe's "Necropolitics" and Derrida's "Voyous" were the texts that really helped me understand Schmitt and what people have done with him!
Hearing Adrian in full professor mode pronounce Sauerland and Histoire des Mentalités perfectly in the same sentence is pure pleasure and reminds me why I love to listen to people smarter than I am. More knowledge, more ! (Less tech-browledge, less !)
Side note. I'm in the EU but ordering via the UK in British pounds means massive customs costs. Is the book available to order via my physical bookshop in Benelux?
🔥
Okay so I haven't had enough time to listen to the ep yet but I feel the need to THANK Adrian and Moira for this in advance. The rehabilitation of Schmitt in my graduate program (UChicago) over the last five years was so gross and one of the craziest, most cognitive-dissonance inducing parts of my PhD