- David Campbell, “ ITN vs. Living Marxism, ” Independent Television News, August 7, 1992.
- Liquefaction and solidification overwrite and overwhelm one another, over and again. The introduction of the membrane-partition works against the capacity of sovereign movement, against its abilities, and the same holds true for walls internal to the city; inside its outer walls are inner walls, equally defeated. Does the suppression of violence support the civil society ostensibly protected from attack, or does it double in advance the attack, rendering the surface of the city in the image of its own projective violence, ceding to it in advance? The City to be governed can ’ t possibly know in advance whether and how the closing of a channel will work to stabilize or destabilize an intended civil equilibrium. If the content of the terrorist form is that there is no civilian space, then the content of counterterrorism is identical if inverted.
- I would argue this framework of “ the political ” as articulated by Schmitt and developed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, for example, is a stale and ineffective strategy for understanding the logics of power and design in our age of ecological precarity. Put differently, only a fool would tell you that the functional definition of the “ post-political ” looks like the Washington Consensus. As should be clear to the attentive reader, my rehearsal of Schmitt ’ s model in this chapter is in order to overwhelm it with catastrophic contradictions.
- See also Stuart Elden ’ s work on the history of the concept of territory, especially The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), as well as Elden, “ Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power, ” Political Geography 34 (May 2013): 35–51; Elden, “ The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth, “ in Law and Literature, 25: 2 (2013); and Elden, “ Chamayou ’ s Manhunts: From Territory to Space? ” for The Funambulist Papers: Volume 2 (Punctum Books, 2014).
- Stewart Elden: “ Schmitt reminds us that the Greek word nemein, from which nomos is derived, means both ‘ to divide ’ and ‘ to pasture ’ (1997 [1950]: 40; 2003 [1950]: 70). Hannah Arendt has similarly noted the relation between ‘ law and hedge in the word nomos’ , stressing the relation between law and boundary line or zone, and pointing out that ‘ the Greek word for law, nomos, derives from nemein, which means to distribute, to possess (what has been distributed) and to dwell ’ (1958: 63 n. 62). The legal is thus tied directly to the land. As Schmitt continues: ‘ Nomos is the measure by which the ground and soil of the earth [ Grund und Boden der Erde] in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process. Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity. (1997 [1950]: 40; 2003 [1950]: 70). ” See Elden, “ Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, Territory and Gro ß raum, ” in Spatiality, Sovereignty, and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, ed. Stephen Legg (New York: Routledge, 2011), 91 – 105.
Schmitt himself defines it in more than one way. “ The Greek noun nomos derives from the verb nemein, and like the latter, has three meanings. Firstly, nemein is the equivalent of the German nehmen, to take. Hence nomos means seizure. As the Greek legein-logos corresponds to the German spechen-Sprache, so too, the German nehmen-Nahme corresponds to the Greek nemein-nomos. At first, it meant the seizure of land, and later it also meant the appropriation of the sea, much of which is part of our historical review here. In the industrial sector, one speaks of the appropriation of the means of production. The second meaning is the division and distribution of what was seized. Hence also the second sense of nomos, the basic division and repartition of the soil and the resulting ownership order. The third meaning is to tend, that is, to use, exploit, and turn to good account the partitioned land, to produce and to consume. Seizingdividing-tending in that sequence are the three fundamental notions of every concrete order. More about the meaning of nomos can be found in my book The Nomos of the Earth (1950). ” See Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea (1942) (Washington: Plutarch Press, 1997), 37.
Notes
379