Bruno Bosteels

The Obscure Subject:

Sovereignty and Geopolitics in Carl Schmitt’s
The Nomos of the Earth

Writing with the bold pathos that no doubt

comes from his experience in captivity after
World War II, Carl Schmitt in his autobiographi-
cal Ex captivitate salus claims to be standing on a
threshold, as the guardian of a world order that
is about to be drowned out in forced silence:
‘‘I am the last conscious representative of the
jus publicum europaeum, its last theoretician and
investigator in an existential sense, and I experi-
ence its end just as Benito Cereno experienced
the voyage of the pirate ship. This is the time
and place of silence. We should not be afraid
in this regard.’’ 1 Like Herman Melville’s fictive
Spaniard, Schmitt presents himself as an invol-
untary witness to the threatening decline of a
great world order. Even more so than Don Benito
Cereno, though, perhaps it is a character from
a story by Jorge Luis Borges, first published in
February 1946, who provides a more accurate
analogy to Schmitt’s existential and scholarly
situation in the summer of that same year. Thus,
writing from his prison cell in an attempt, if not
to justify, then at least unabashedly to proclaim
his role at the head of a Nazi concentration
camp, Otto Dietrich zur Linde, the narrator of
‘‘Deutsches Requiem,’’ concludes his would-be
testament as follows:
The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2005.
Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.
296 Bruno Bosteels

Many things must be destroyed in order to build the new order; now
we know that Germany is one of those things. We have given some-
thing more than our lives, we have sacrificed the fate of our beloved
country. Let others curse and cry; to me it gives great pleasure that our
gift should be orbicular and perfect. An unforgiving era now closes in
on the world. We have created this era, we who already are its victims.
What does it matter that England is the hammer and we, the anvil? The
important thing is that violence reign all-powerful, and not the servile
shynesses of Christianity. If victory and injustice and happiness are not
for Germany, may they befall other nations. May heaven exist, even if
our place is hell.2
Even if those great sea powers, England or the United States of America,
are the hammer, and Germany the anvil, at least a new spatial order already
has been forged, and a new era already has begun. Beyond the visible defeat
of the Third Reich there lies a secret world-historical victory. Ruled by vio-
lence, a new global order—a new nomos of the earth—already has been
marked out, one that is both perfect and orbicular, to use Borges’s apt
neologism.
Perhaps, though, this arcane victory is not unavoidable. Perhaps the alter-
native between victory and defeat is even a false one. Perhaps we are con-
ceding already too much as soon as we accept the logic behind the argument
for any nomos of the earth at all, whether old or new. For a critique of The
Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum,
the issue cannot be limited to inverting the respective places of hammer
and anvil, not even in order to add a sickle; rather, it is a question of inter-
rupting the very logic of the nomos before we become its unwitting victims,
even while claiming to be its noblest opponents. My aim therefore is not to
correct or amend the concrete findings and potentially useful, even vision-
ary, data in Schmitt’s book, but to debunk its most stubborn theoretical
presuppositions.
A treatise on the rise and fall of European international law, a contorted
but never reluctant imperialist doctrine parading in the guise of a scien-
tific history of the principle of territoriality, an essay on what might as well
have been called the concept of the geopolitical: whatever else Schmitt’s
The Nomos of the Earth legitimately can purport to be, it is also, at least
implicitly, a grand theory of the event—of land appropriation as the origi-
nary event of all human history. Quoting Kant, Schmitt writes: ‘‘This ‘law
of mine and thine that distributes the land to each man,’ as he puts it, is
 The Obscure Subject 297

not positive law in the sense of later state codifications, or of the system of
legality in subsequent state constitutions; it is and remains the real kernel
of an entirely concrete, historical and political event [eines ganz konkreten,
geschichtlichen und politischen Ereignissen], namely the appropriation of the
land.’’ 3 The status of this event, however, remains ambiguous throughout
the book and, rather than avoiding this ambiguity, the repeated emphasis
on the historically authentic nature of the act of land appropriation only
highlights, as if through a symptomatic excess of speech, the problems that
beset the logic of the nomos as a whole.
Briefly put, land appropriation is an act or event that can be found at the
beginning of every community, people, or empire; and yet, it should not be
confused with a purely hypothetical origin or an empty theoretical fiction of
the kind found in normativist and contractualist theories. Schmitt, in order
to preempt this confusion, is at pains to bring out the historical substance
behind the originary acts of appropriation. He refers to the Greek sea appro-
priations as ‘‘world-historical events of revolutionary significance,’’ just as
the ‘‘legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world,’’ which marks the
onset of the modern nomos or jus publicum Europaeum, appears as ‘‘an unre-
peatable historical event’’ for which we today can imagine only ‘‘fantastic
parallels’’ (44/15, 39/6). Ultimately, though, the aim is not just to sketch in
a historiography of such rare and unrepeatable events but rather, on a much
more profound level, to reach out for the radical ground of all social, legal,
cultural, and political order.
Land appropriation, as the founding act behind every true nomos of the
earth, appears as the ultimate answer in Schmitt’s lifelong quest for the
authentic principle of legitimacy beyond mere legality. In fact, we know that
to translate nomos as ‘‘law,’’ as a mere ‘‘ought’’ in opposition to the ‘‘is’’ of
physis or ‘‘nature,’’ is seen as already a sign of decadent, positivistic times.
Schmitt claims, moreover, that this reductive translation is not supported
by etymology, even though he himself admits to a certain disdain for philo-
logical precision: ‘‘In its original sense, however, nomos is precisely the full
immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a constitutive his-
torical event—an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law is first
made meaningful’’ (73/42). As an act of legitimacy, the historical event of
land appropriation is what creates the most radical title and the primary
criterion that determines all subsequent criteria:
Land-appropriation thus is the archetype of a constitutive legal pro-
cess externally (vis-à-vis other peoples) and internally (for the order-
298 Bruno Bosteels

ing of land and property within a country). It creates the most radical
legal title, in the full and comprehensive sense of the term radical title.
(47/17)
All subsequent legal relations to the soil, originally divided among the
appropriating tribe or people, and all institutions of the walled city or of
a new colony are determined by this primary criterion. Every ontono-
mous and ontological judgment derives from the land. For this reason,
we will begin with land-appropriation as the primeval act in founding
law. (45/16)
In passages such as these, the act of land appropriation, far from being
a historical event that still somehow could be placed in a specific time and
space, gradually turns into an obscure origin that is receding before our very
own eyes, furrowing its way deeper and deeper into the order of the earth.
‘‘I want to restore to the word nomos its energy and majesty,’’ Schmitt com-
ments, arguing for the interpretation of nomos as an Urwort, or ‘‘primeval
word’’ (67/36, 70/39). Schmitt is actually relentless in his predilection for
all words with Ur- as the German prefix for the originary or primeval. Nomos
would be the lasting source of a people’s Urverfassung and Ur-Maß, that is,
its ‘‘originary constitution’’ and ‘‘primary measure,’’ with land appropriation
being the ‘‘archetype’’ or Ur-Typus of a rechtsbegründende Ur-Akt, a ‘‘prime-
val act in founding law,’’ which establishes the bodenhafte Urgrund, the ‘‘ter-
restrial fundament,’’ in which all law is rooted and which in turn enables
a seinsgerechte Urteil, meaning not only a ‘‘judgment’’ but also a ‘‘primary
division in accord with the just nature of being’’ (45–47/16–17). Since the
original meaning of the word nomos has been distorted by latter-day posi-
tivism and sophistic legalism, however, perhaps only ancient poetic invoca-
tions can provide us with a hint of its numinous power. Schmitt, we know,
is particularly fond of quoting Heraclitus and Pindar:
Thus, in some form, the constitutive process of a land-appropriation is
found at the beginning [Anfang] of the history of every settled people,
every commonwealth, every empire. This is true as well for the begin-
ning of every historical epoch. Not only logically, but also historically,
land-appropriation precedes the order that follows from it. It consti-
tutes the original spatial order [raumhafte Anfangsordnung], the source
[Ursprung] of all further concrete order and all further law. It is the
reproductive root in the normative order of history. All further prop-
erty relations . . . are derived from this radical title. All subsequent
 The Obscure Subject 299

law and everything promulgated and enacted thereafter as decrees

and commands are nourished, to use Heraclitus’ word, by this source
[Ursprung]. (48/19)
Poetic speech and organic metaphors here serve to bring forth the mys-
terious origin that is said to support all further enactments of order and
law. Language, thus, still knows the secret origin. ‘‘Language knows it still,’’
Schmitt quotes a philosopher of language as saying: ‘‘In this way, language
traces the effective and successive constituting processes and events, even
when men have forgotten them’’ (346). In terms of the organicity of lan-
guage and the doubtful use of etymology, Schmitt is obviously close to Hei-
degger. Even the decisive shift from time to space is consistent with certain
later writings from the author of Being and Time. ‘‘The attempt in Being and
Time, section 70, to derive human spatiality from temporality is untenable,’’
Heidegger admits in his lecture ‘‘Time and Being,’’ after opening up a new
path of thinking that is strikingly similar to Schmitt’s: ‘‘Since time as well as
being can only be thought from appropriation as the gifts of appropriation,
the relation of space to appropriation must also be considered in an analo-
gous way. We can admittedly succeed in this only when we have previously
gained insight into the origin of space in the properties peculiar to site and
have thought them adequately.’’ 4 Thus, whether the relation between the
event of appropriation, spatiality, and language is put in juridico-historical
or in strictly philosophical terms, after the decisionistic aspects they may
have shared earlier, a similar problematic also brings together some of the
interests behind the later works by Schmitt and Heidegger.
With Schmitt’s land appropriation, in any case, we find ourselves in the
midst of the search for an origin in the strong metaphysical sense of the Ger-
man word Ursprung, as diagnosed by Michel Foucault in ‘‘Nietzsche, Gene-
alogy, History’’: ‘‘This search is directed to ‘that which was already there,’
the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature, and it necessi-
tates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity.’’ 5
The origin always precedes and, at the same time, grounds the particular
occurrences that mark the destiny of its unfolding. However, for Schmitt,
as is also the case for Heidegger, who seems to be the real target of Fou-
cault’s criticism, this origin is always a lost origin, due to the long history of
its oblivion and decline. What is more, to restore the energy and majesty to
the primeval origin of all concrete order involves an impossible act, which
may well obscure the very thing that it claims to bring to light: ‘‘From the
vantage point of an absolute distance, free from the restraints of positive
300 Bruno Bosteels

knowledge, the origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function

is to recover it, but always in a false recognition due to the excesses of its
own speech. The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point where the
truth of things corresponded to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleeting
articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.’’ 6
Schmitt will do everything humanly possible to stamp out the traces of
this inevitable misrecognition. The Nomos of the Earth is a book about the
loss and return of origin, that is, of the legitimate origin of all subsequent
legal power and positive juridical knowledge. Its fleeting articulation, how-
ever, involves not only a seemingly infinite regress to the primeval origin
but also something that I can describe only as a double operation of sutur-
ing: first, of earth and law, of being and right, or of space and justice into
the unified concept of an authentic geopolitical (or geojuridical) ontology,
and, second, the further suturing of this always-prior ontological order onto
the concrete history of European (or Western Hemispheric) international
law.
Schmitt first of all presupposes an immediate connection between being
and spatiality. ‘‘Where there is space, there is being,’’ he is fond of quoting
Nietzsche as saying, and he himself asserts with even greater clarity: ‘‘The
essence of being is to be spatial, position, space and power; it is not a tem-
poral succession, it is presence, that is to say, space.’’ 7 All being, moreover,
at the same time as it is spatial and concrete, also contains an inner mea-
sure; all being is oriented in accord with an immanent principle of justice
and right: ‘‘Right is the rightfulness of being that is given at the origin.’’ 8
The earth itself, of course, is the primary site for this powerful suturing of
being, space, and law as right. It is here that we find the threefold root of
law and justice:
In this way, the earth is bound to law in three ways. She contains law
within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself, as
fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of
order. Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth. This is what
the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima
tellus. (42/13)
In reality, the words of Heraclitus and Pindar mean only that all sub-
sequent regulations of a written or unwritten kind derive their power
from the inner measure of an original, constitutive act of spatial order-
ing. This original act is nomos. (78/47)
 The Obscure Subject 301

If we accept for a moment to enter this register of a mythopoetic ontology

that once again would highlight the proximity between Schmitt and Heideg-
ger, I am tempted to counter the often repeated quotes from Heraclitus and
Pindar with an expression from Samuel Beckett. For the author of Enough,
the earth is not ‘‘infinitely just’’ but ‘‘unjust,’’ or rather ‘‘ungrateful’’—indif-
ferent to the very question of justice and injustice: ‘‘Stony ground but not
entirely.’’ 9 The earth displays no inner measure, nor is being ordered by an
originary justice. In fact, when the gap between being and law, between
physis and nomos, or between ‘‘is’’ and ‘‘ought’’ is sutured, what is obliterated
is the notion that justice requires a supplement to the monotony of sheer
being. And this supplement, this ‘‘but not entirely,’’ which opens a breach
in the totality of being instead of rooting the linkage between being and
law in the earthy ground, raises the question of a subject that would not be
enthralled by the origin of a silent destiny. To use the words of Alain Badiou
in his reading of Beckett:
What is this breach in the totality of being and self ? What is to be
found in this breach that is simultaneously the not-all of the subject
and the grace of a supplement to the monotony of being? This is the
question of the event, of ‘‘what-comes-to-pass.’’ It is no longer a matter
of asking the question ‘‘What of being such as it is?’’, or ‘‘Can a subject
who is prey to language rejoin its silent identity?’’ Instead, one asks:
‘‘Does something happen?’’ And, more precisely: ‘‘Is there a name for
the surging up, for an incalculable advent that de-totalizes being and
tears the subject away from the predestination of its own identity?’’ 10
To ask the question of the event and subjectivity in the context of the debate
over sovereignty, we should first of all undo the suture that binds together
earth and law. Otherwise, the much-invoked event will never have been an
incalculable beginning but only a name for the obscure object of a meta-
physical desire for origins.
The second suture is even more violent in smoothing out the arbitrari-
ness of accident in the name of an underlying continuity. I am referring to
the way in which the complex of being, space, and law is related to Euro-
pean history. Let us even ignore the fact that nothing really allows us to
distinguish an authentic act of land appropriation from an inauthentic one.
Surely, though, no geopolitical question can be more timely today. All that
Schmitt has to offer by way of an answer, however, seems to be the suc-
cess and lasting force of actual fact, followed by a circular reassertion of
302 Bruno Bosteels

the premise behind his geopolitical ontology: ‘‘Not every invasion or tem-
porary occupation is a land appropriation that founds an order. In world
history, there have been many acts of force that have destroyed themselves
quickly. Thus, every seizure of land is not a nomos, although conversely,
nomos, understood in our sense of the term, always includes a land-based
order and orientation’’ (80/48). How long should a brutal use of force last,
one is tempted to ask, before it qualifies as a legitimate act of founding law?
The more important question, however, remains: Who is to say?
A few moments in the book suggest the tenuousness of the suture be-
tween the ontological and the historical. In one symptomatic instance, we
even find that the hesitation surrounding this procedure is displaced onto
a baffling duality in the use of historicity itself: ‘‘We must not think of land-
appropriation as a purely intellectual construct, but must consider it to be
a legal fact [eine rechtsgeschichtliche Tatsache], to be a great historical event
[großes historisches Ereignis], even if, historically [in der geschichtlichen Wirk-
lichkeit], land-appropriation proceeded rather tumultuously, and, at times,
the right to land arose from overflowing migrations of peoples and cam-
paigns of conquest and, at other times, from successful defense of a country
against foreigners’’ (46/17). On one hand, there is the level of appropria-
tion as a great legal-historical event in the ontological sense of the term; on
the other, there are the tumultuous sundry realities of conquests, colonial
wars, and migrations. Schmitt, by linking the two meanings of history—
one apparently originary and authentic and the other derivative and almost
secondary—always seems to rely on the ontological claim of an inner law
of the earth, as if to suggest that this immanent and primeval normativity
was actually destined to become exposed in the history of Western imperi-
alism. In its sheer arbitrariness, this retroactive linkage only highlights the
willfully ignored decision that lies at the heart of any nomos of the earth.
Schmitt’s thinking of the concrete order, rather than offering an alterna-
tive to decisionism and positivism, in fact still relies on the former while
opposing the latter, except that now this reliance is disguised behind the
mask of a distant measure that would have been immanent to Mother Earth
herself.
There is a strong sense in which this construct, which is not purely intel-
lectual so much as ideological, is also closer to myth than it is to history.
Plainly put, what this mytho-metaphysical way of thinking conceals is the
bloody nature of most world-historical inceptions. Historical thinking be-
comes mythical when this violent part of nonlaw behind the law is serenely
ignored in favor of the imposition of a primordial order.
 The Obscure Subject 303

In psychoanalytical terms we might say that the logic of the nomos pre-
sents a terrorizing superego injunction as if it were the earth’s own call to
us. A true nomos is nothing but a call to order reduced to its bare root. It
confronts us with an impersonal superego whose face supposedly coincides
with the earth’s stony ground. Its primordial injunction is a peremptory
‘‘you must’’ that pretends to be derived without mediation from the ‘‘is’’ of
Mother Earth, as fascinating and ferocious as the native lay of the land. ‘‘The
superego has a certain rapport to the law, and at the same time it is a sense-
less law, which goes so far as being a misrecognition of the law,’’ Jacques
Lacan says in his first seminar:
The superego is both the law and its destruction. In this, it is the word
itself, the law’s commandment, insofar as only its root is left. The law is
entirely reduced to something that cannot even be expressed, like the
You must, which is a word deprived of all meaning. It is in this sense
that the superego ends up being identical to the most ravaging and fas-
cinating aspects in the primitive experiences of the subject. It ends up
being identical to what I call the ferocious figure, to the figures that we
can tie up with primitive traumatisms, whatever they be, suffered by
the child.11
What happens when this supralegal injunction hides behind the thought
of concrete order is that the obscene part of nonlaw at the root of all law,
which the ferocity of the superego injunction at least had the sinister virtue
of exposing, is allowed to sink back into the uniform nature of the earth’s
inner law.
No subject, other than an obscure or reactive figure, can be tied to this
order when the earth itself is said to be sovereign. Following Badiou’s views,
an obscure figure can be defined as one enraptured by the event as a radical
and unattainable origin that from times immemorial precedes and over-
whelms the laborious process of a specific truth in the present. Knowledge
of this origin, which always lies beyond language, is then merely imposed
as myth or religion. Instead of elaborating the event’s consequences for the
here and now, the result is an occultation of the present under the pressure
of an absolutely prior origin: ‘‘In fact, the obscure figure is the figure of the
denegation of the present because it approaches the event in a figure of tran-
scendence, as a full subject.’’ 12 The reactive figure, on the other hand, does
not turn the event into a mythical origin but rather negates that there actu-
ally was an event in the first place, while confirming the existing status quo.
Schmitt comes closest to this figure when he equates nomos with property:
304 Bruno Bosteels

‘‘Abstractly speaking, nomos is law and property, i.e., the part or share of
goods. Concretely speaking, nomos is, for example, the chicken in every pot
that every peasant living under a good king has on Sunday, the parcel of land
every farmer cultivates as his property, and the car every American worker
has parked in his garage’’ (327). Compared to this chicken and this car, for
sure, one would almost understand the predilection for obscurantism.
In the end, not only is there no real place for the subject, but in a geo-
political ontology there is no space for sovereignty either. To the contrary,
the suturing of being, law, and space is meant to close the gap that con-
stitutes the fundamental site of the sovereign decision. Schmitt started his
lifelong investigation into the principle of legitimacy by positing such a gap.
In The Value of the State and the Meaning of the Individual, for example, he
asserts that nothing can overcome the hiatus between abstract norms and
concrete laws: ‘‘Between the concrete and the abstract, there lies an insuper-
able abyss that cannot be bridged in a progressive passage from one to the
other.’’ 13 Only the state, in a sovereign decision, can mediate between the
two and complete the chain between right, the state, and the individual so as
actually to enforce the law. The problem of sovereignty lies precisely in the
connection between law and the enforcement of law, between right and the
realization of right. As Schmitt writes in Political Theology: ‘‘The connection
of actual power with the legally highest power is the fundamental problem
of the concept of sovereignty.’’ 14 With the move toward thinking in terms of
concrete order, however, both the strong dualism of the earlier normativist
writings and the decisionist mediation by a sovereign power are somehow
made superfluous, or rather, they are enframed by the supposition of an
all-encompassing objective nomos of the earth. Perhaps the final paradox,
then, lies in the fact that any attempt to break with the obscure logic of the
nomos, particularly by reinstating the gaps, breaches, and disparities that its
deployment is meant to suture, is condemned to go back to the start with
the quest for sovereignty. This, too, might be a secret posthumous victory
for Schmitt. However that may be, my only hope is that, at the end of this
circular path, we do not have to find ourselves again in the middle of The
Nomos of the Earth.

Notes
1 Carl Schmitt, Ex captivitate salus. Expériences des années 1945–1947, ed. André Dore-
mus (Paris: Vrin, 2003), 161. My reading of Schmitt is deeply influenced by Montserrat
Herrero López’s study El nomos y lo político: La filosofía política de Carl Schmitt (Pamplona:
 The Obscure Subject 305

Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1997). This study has the virtue of placing The Nomos
of the Earth in the broadest possible context of Schmitt’s entire oeuvre.
2 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Deutsches requiem,’’ in El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), 103.
3 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Euro-
paeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003), 48. I will frequently rely on the Ger-
man edition, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne:
Greven Verlag, 1950), 18. Page numbers in the body of the text, separated by a slash, refer
to the English and the German editions.
4 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row,
1972), 23 (translation modified).
5 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in Language, Counter-memory, Prac-
tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 142. Whether or not he is justified in doing so for Nietzsche, Foucault
draws a sharp distinction between the metaphysical concept of origin (Ursprung) and the
genealogical concepts of provenance (Herkunft) and inception (Entstehung). Schmitt, as
we saw, uses both Ursprung and Anfang. Herrero López is partly mistaken in this regard
when she writes that he ‘‘pursues the Prinzip and not the Anfang, to use the well-known
Hegelian distinction’’ (El nomos y lo político, 67; see also 131).
6 Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ 143. See also the chapter ‘‘The Retreat and
Return of the Origin’’ in Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 328–35. Reiner Schürmann comments on the difference
between the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘originary’’ origin, and on the difference between Anfang
and Ursprung, in ‘‘The Origin Is Said in Many Ways,’’ in Heidegger on Being and Acting:
From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 97–151.
7 Schmitt, quoted respectively from Raum und Rom and Glossarium, in Herrero López,
El nomos y lo político, 55–56.
8 Peter Schneider, quoted in Herrero López, 164n133. The German original reads: ‘‘Recht
ist die im Ursprung gegeben Richtigkeit des Seins.’’
9 Samuel Beckett, ‘‘Enough,’’ in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontar-
ski (New York: Grove, 1995), 54. In French, the text reads: ‘‘Terre ingrate mais pas
totalement.’’
10 Alain Badiou, ‘‘The Writing of the Generic,’’ trans. Bruno Bosteels, in On Beckett, ed. Nina
Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003), 18.
11 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, vol. 1, Les écrits techniques de Freud, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(Paris: Seuil, 1975), 164–65.
12 Alain Badiou, Petite théorie (restreinte) du sujet, unpublished seminar from March 19,
1997.
13 Carl Schmitt, La valeur de l’État et la signification de l’individu, trans. and ed. Sandrine
Baume (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 78–79.
14 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 18. In German, the text reads:
‘‘Die Verbindung von faktisch und rechtlich höchster Macht ist das Grundproblem des
Souveranitätsbegriffes.’’