Sitze’s Introduction to Galli’s Janus Gaze on Schmitt. (Alberto Moreiras)

I think Adam Sitze`s introduction, which I post here with his permission (the book will be published by Duke UP, but it will take quite a few months), is a tour de force in terms of accounting for and critiquing sixty or seventy years of reception of Carl Schmitt´s work in Anglophone countries.  In the process, Sitze gives us one of the best rationales I have ever seen as to why it is still necessary to read strong thinkers even if contaminated by their connections to the Nazi regime. What goes for Schmitt could go for Heidegger as well, or for Jünger.

But Sitze also provides a summary introduction to Galli’s position vis-à-vis Schmitt well beyond the book under study.   This is extraordinarily useful for English-language readers and the scholarly community in general, particularly because Galli`s position is strongly revisionist not just in terms of Schmittiana but also regarding the status of political theory today.   One of the things that comes to mind, for instance, reading Sitze reading Galli reading Schmitt, is whether such an influential thinker as Giorgio Agamben, himself strongly influenced by the German theorist, would agree.   My impression is, he would not, which opens the field to a fascinating engagement with the importance of Schmitt’s work for contemporary discussions.

Sitze’s explanations regarding the founding conflict in Schmitt`s work on political modernity rank among the best I have seen, not simply in terms of Schmitt’s exegesis, but also because they enable us to understand what it is that is meant when a number of political philosophers and cultural critics today expound upon the terminal crisis in the architectonics of modern political thought, which is no longer useful except residually.   Sitze retroactively connects such a crisis to the thought of community in the Middle Ages, that is, the Catholic community as manifested in the Corpus Mysticum, and establishes how the break away from Christian complexio opppositorum set modern political thought helplessly on its way to accomplished nihilism.

Carl Schmitt, An Improper Name