The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

14 Nomos
Word and myth
Mitchell Dean
For various important reasons considered throughout this book, the topic of
world order is once again on the agenda. To make something a topic, however,
is not to provide a concept of it. What we have is a surplus of discourse and a
deficit of systematic thinking about the object of that discourse. I am hence
tempted to quote Gaston Bachelard:
We are going to study a problem that no one has managed to approach
objectively, one in which the initial charm of the object is so strong that it
still has the power to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep
bringing them back to the poetic fold in which dreams replace thought and
poems conceal theorems.
(1968: 2)
Germane to our purposes here, Bachelard was talking about one of the four elements,
fire. For Carl Schmitt, world orders can be described in terms of the relation
between such elements.
Indeed, I want to suggest that the study of the poetics and mythology of
world order is central to the study of world order itself, but not as a study of the
history of errors we must break with to constitute forms of true knowledge, but
because they make the world thinkable and actionable in specific ways. In other
words, poetics and mythology render possible certain kinds of global political
action and decisive authority. Even Schmitt, the thinker who did the most to
advance a philosophically consistent and ‘objective’ concept of world order,
could not avoid mythology and poetry and indeed the philologist’s fascination
with the derivation of words which, for Bachelard, ‘are made for singing and
enchanting, [and] rarely make contact with thought’ (1968: 1).
I want to suggest that there are several ways we can approach the problem of
world order with the requisite self-critical irony that Bachelard recommended. All
of them are found in Schmitt. They are: from the perspective of words, that is, from
conceptual history and philology; from the study of myths of the earth: of what
could be called, ‘geo-mythography’ (Connery 2001); from that of the spatiality and
materiality of power relations, that is, from a geo-politics; and from a historical
jurisprudence of international law and consequent concepts of war and peace.