This is the second in a series of five blog entries aimed at understanding the current political crisis in the European Union through a Schmittian lens. (Read part 1 here.) In this post, Michael Marder suggests that a profound source of the problem is that the EU is not rooted in the collective existence of its citizens. In place of a political constituting subject, we find nothing but crass economic interests, covered over with a thin rhetorical veil. For a more extensive discussion of Schmitt, see Michael Marder’s Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt.
Europe’s Existential De-Constitution
The “absolute concept of the constitution” refers to the constitution as a whole,[1] united not by virtue of an external system of basic laws but thanks to the pre-constitutional source from which these laws emanate and derive their legitimacy. Schmitt notes that “constitution in the absolute sense can mean, to begin with, the concrete manner of existence that is given with every political unity,”[2] whereby the “state does not have a constitution” but “is constitution, in other words, an actually present condition, a status of unity and order.”[3] In light of the already mentioned political existential vacuum at the core of the European Union, combined with the fact that it is neither a state nor a confederation of states, we may surmise that it is not a constitution, even though it claims the right to determine the conditions of its unity and order. Since there is no “concrete manner of existence” to draw upon, the status of the EU is equivalent to the formal guidelines, to which potential member states must adhere if they are to gain the right of admission. The deficit of actual unity is remedied by the imposition of ideal unity, procedural at worst and metaphysical at best. Instead of strengthening the status of the EU, this imposition makes it ever more precarious: it sets the stage for a violent standoff between the emergent realities of political existence and the idealities of an alien form foisted upon them.
Perhaps Carl Schmitt would agree: more than ever before, we live today immersed within the spirit of technicity. Coined by Schmitt, the notion of the spirit of technicity serves the analytical purpose of allowing him to distinguish between the belief in technology and technology itself. Whereas technology signals the factual development of mechanistic progress and its link to natural science, the spirit of technicity, in Schmitt’s own words, is “perhaps an evil and demonic spirit, but not one which can be dismissed as mechanistic and attributed to technology” (141). 
The present note aims to suggest a tragic reading of Carl Schmitt’s thought within a post-metaphysical perspective. The argument is divided into two parts. In the first—the meaning of the tragic dimension—I deal with Schmitt as a theorist of the tragic, that is, with the concept of tragedy that can be induced from Schmitt’s philosophy as a unitary whole. In the second part—the actuality of the tragic era—I will consider Schmitt as a pathologist of the tragic, by summarizing the diagnosis of the modernity he explicitly points out in his major works. The first thesis states that any normative and/or political order constitutively depends on a fundamental set of factual pre-conditions, whose actual enforcement in turn depends on a contextual and epochal contingency, beyond human control. If so, the range of human agency is determined by a super-human contextual contingency, to such an extent that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide everything. The second thesis states that the contemporary era is irretrievably characterized by a set of factual pre-conditions that makes any ultimate decision and political order unfeasible. If so, late modernity’s contingency is determined by the lack of any ordering principle and foundational reality, with the consequence that we have to abandon the illusion of being able to decide something. The awareness of the vital necessity of something lacking, and still impossible to restore, marks the tragic character of Schmitt’s thought considered in its consistent whole. 
Since the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty in the West has been imagined in terms of the nation-state and its ability to provide a universal basis for political relations both within state boundaries and in relations with other similarly organized entities. On the one hand, the nation-state originates as a means of overcoming the religious civil wars, and its establishment coincides with the attempt to relegate theological disputes to a private sphere that does not threaten the structure of the state. In this way, the state as opposed to the church becomes the primary form for defining the political. On the other hand, the development and stability of the nation-state system seems to have been inextricably linked to the dynamic of colonialism. As Carl Schmitt lays out in 
This essay traces the apocalyptic re-emergence of political theology in late modernity in the work of the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Johann Baptist Metz. Broadly speaking, the intellectual fault line between these two German Catholics can be provisionally drawn with reference to Hegel. On the one hand, Schmitt¹s lineage can be traced back through the conservative Catholic political philosophers of the counterrevolution (Bonald, de Maistre, and Cortés) to what amounts to, in very broad strokes, a political theology of the Hegelian Right. On the other hand, Metz¹s sympathies in his development of the new political theology clearly lie with the revisionary Marxists of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, and Bloch), which binds his intellectual heritage, again in very broad strokes, to the Hegelian Left. This way of putting the matter quite easily lends itself to interpretations that argue the relationship between Schmitt and Metz is straightforwardly oppositional. While perhaps conceptually useful, I argue that any easy conservative/critical dichotomy here obscures as much as it illuminates because it proffers too undifferentiated an account of the interrelationship between Schmitt and Metz. Alternatively, I suggest that the apocalyptic tone that infuses their respective accounts of political theology is the most adequate key for understanding how they function as different expressions of what I call an architectonics of hope; a reconfiguration of political theology that is structural in nature, animated by a thoroughly negative theological anthropology and that tragically acquiesces to the ongoing necessity of violence. In the end, then, Schmitt and Metz stand much closer to each other than currently realized. 
