Reading Schmitt from the Sea: Tracing Constitutive Outsiders and Displacing the Conceptual Order (and Ordering) of the Political

Abstract

In this article, I offer a displacement of Carl Schmitt’s metaphysical image of a specific epoch and the way it forges a particular construction of the planet, which reveals architectonic traces of a normative framing which authorizes and legitimizes, a specific way of conceiving the appropriate form of the political organization of the world. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s work, I displace Schmitt’s traditional friend/enemy dualism towards the sea and the conceptual (post) structural limit-position of the pirate. Adopting a Derridean, deconstructionist strategy, I question the way Schmitt conceptually (self-) authorizes his conceptual order (and ordering), identifying some spaces, actions, and categories of subjects as unpolitical . Negatively, I argue, these non- political constructions, these constitutive outsiders , conceptually authorize the line which enables the conditions for conceptualizing and identifying the political. In reading Schmitt from the sea, I invite the reader to reimagine the boundaries of our cartographical political imagination, the limits of our normative conceptual language, and the ways in which the legitimation of exceptional forms of violence may be conceptually articulated, authorized, and legitimized.