The spirit of the beehive: On Carl Schmitt's "the new Nomos of the Earth"

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 359-370

  Vilarós, Teresa M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950430462     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-2-359     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. Carl Schmitt, "Nomos-Nahme-Name," in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003), 346-47. Subsequent references to The Nomos of the Earth appear parenthetically in the text.
2. Schmitt was a very good friend of Manuel Fraga, who was in charge of the Ministerio de Información y Turismo 1962-1969. Fraga, an admirer of Schmitt's political writings, is one of the minds credited with the Spanish economic boom of the 1960s, which relied at its core on U.S. nuclear military technology and configured itself as a biopolitical postindustrial order. On the relevance of the capitalist strategy set up by the Spanish Francoist dictatorship within a worldwide biopolitical system, see my essay "The Lightness of Terror," Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 5.2 (2004): 165-86.
3. Carl Schmitt, El concepto de lo político, trans. Rafael Agapito (Madrid: Alianza editorial, 1987), 40.
4. Joe Flower, "Core Ideas," available at www.well.com/user/bbear/ definitions.html (accessed January 11, 2005).
5. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 249.
6. Mihail S. Roco and William S. Bainbridge, eds., Report on Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science, National Science Foundation, 2002, PDF report available at itri .Ioyola.edu/convergingtechnologies (accessed October 22, 2004).
7. For a follow-up on psychoanalysis and the colonial, see Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
8. Alberto Moreiras, "A Post-Theology of Praxis: Donoso Cortés and the Political," unpublished manuscript.
9. Schmitt stated that "biological life and its needs had become [in modernity] the politically decisive fact" (Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 122).
10. See Giorgio Agamben's Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
11. See Alberto Moreiras's essay "Preemptive Manhunt: A New Partisanship," forthcoming in positions.
12. Roco and Bainbridge, "Report on Converging Technologies," 22.
13. Kant starts his essay by referring to the name chosen by a Dutch innkeeper for his inn. He writes: "'A Perpetual Peace' a Dutch innkeeper once put this satirical inscription on his signboard, along with the picture of a graveyard." Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93.
14. This film by Erice (Spain, 1973, produced by Elias Querejeta) is the source of my essay's title. The movie is a quiet, poetic meditation on post-civil war Spain, and in a longer version of this essay ("El espíritu, la colmena y el nuevo nomos de la Tierra," in Crítica de la acumulación: Las encrucijadas teóricas del presente, ed. Oscar Cabezas and Alessandro Fornazzari [Santiago de Chile: LOM, forthcoming]) I propose that it should also be read as a meditation on the multitude.
15. It may be counterargued, however, that the bees, like the ants, may move and act in unpredictable ways. In the time of the posthuman, the bees still might unexpectedly leave the hive for unsought and unforeseen reasons, leaving preemptive action hanging in the air. In an unexpected turn of events, for instance, the people of Spain on March 13, 2004, turned their own postpolitical times into real politics, just as this seminar on Carl Schmitt was taking place. And maybe Grant Farred is right when he says that we should "never underestimate the capacity of the popular to elucidate the ideological," even in postideological, postpolitical times. But, then again, if so, would we still not, and, impossibly, reverse to a modern Name and a Nahme? (Grant Farred, What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.