The Event and the Subject: The (IM)Possible Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt

The subject is the bearer of the sovereign decision, according to C. Schmitt. This decision grounds on certain situational pragmatics, yet mainly is born out of a ‘null’; as the decision forms the political normalcy that follows after, it displays its nature as an ‘event’. This subject is simultaneously a legal and a political one; it is the founder of the Nomos. This founding subject has been eclipsed in alignment with its post-modernly acclaimed ‘death’. The subject is deemed to have been inherently divided, as long as its identity steadily postpones itself, is incessantly ‘differing’, according to the deconstructionist approach; or it is considered as fundamentally ‘passive’, meaning not so much ‘weak’, but rather dethroning the Western preoccupation with the active autonomous individual; or, it is maintained but intrinsically reversed, now held either as part of a fundamental ontological order and indirectly of the nature (Agamben), or, opposite to Kantian assumptions, as primarily captured in a radical heteronomy, which constitutes it as a proper ethical subject (Levinas). Crucial is how to develop a concept taking into account the eventfulness of the constitution of the subject, without effacing the political character of such constitution by reducing it to non-political discourses, i.e., to metaphysics, morals or economics; how to conceive of Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as political event, namely both as secular act and in the same time as referring to extramundane fundaments (to a ‘political theology’?); how to go beyond the linearity of the liberalist ideology by equating the political event with a messianic miracle ‘without messianism’; how to ‘salute’ democracy?