Re-thonologization of Politics: The Projection of "the Politics and the Exception " and the Manifestations of "Political Theology" according to Carl Schmitt's Theory

Abstract

Carl Schmitt, as a political and legal theorist, contends the political sphere, as the distinguishing line between friend and enemy, antecedes the state. This emanates from and confers autonomy upon the latent realms of the economic, the social, the moral, and the aesthetic spheres. He maintains that the modern state, despite its proclaimed rationalization, secularization, and the excision of the sacred from power, has ontologically not extricated itself from the hegemony of Catholic theology and its genealogical origins recede to religious monotheism.

 The postulation for the state's unconditional sovereign authority is predicated upon a metaphysical substratum to legitimize its ontic existence, which eschews reliance upon an objective fundament but is inextricably tethered to the transmuted central locus where the historical juncture coincides with collective cognition. and the state can abrogate its justificatory mechanisms and bestow legitimization upon itself and legitimization upon its edicts.

According to Schmitt's theoretical framework, the unilateral determination of the sovereign in a state of exception constitutes the quintessence of politics, which is devoid of normative and moral dimensions, and the state is the exclusive entity that delineates the enemy. This becomes the epistemic foundation of this thinker's critique of liberalism and the representative apparatus, which, instead of decisional action, elevates compromise and perpetual dialogue to the essence of politics and engenders depoliticization through economistic reduction.

Furthermore, contemporary manifestations of re-theologization in prevailing politics and the phenomenon of depoliticization manifest themselves in pivotal conceptualizations of the modern state, which comprise: First, electoralism as the vacuous simulacrum of democracy and the resurgence of divine will and suffrage commodification, and the evacuation of democracy of its substantive core, which is demos and the commonweal. This signifies apathy in the political sphere and the flourishing of the far-right marketplace for fragmenting identity and populace. Second, the universalist discourse of human rights, which is a juridical construct divested of politics and the state, which has become the rhetoric of the abstracted human in lieu of good and evil. Third, demonstrative praxis, which has transmogrified from an efficacious act influencing determinations into a ritual of conscience pacification and an apotheosized theology.