Laws, Exceptions, Norms: Kierkegaard, Schmitt, and Benjamin on the Exception

Rebecca Gould 

Yale-NUS College; University of Iowa
February 2, 2013

Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Politics, Philosophy, Critical Theory, Culture, and the Arts 162 (2013): 1-19 
Abstract:      
The concept of the exception has heavily shaped modern political theory. Kierkegaard first propounded the exception as a facilitator of metaphysical transcendence. Merging Kierkegaard’s metaphysical exception with Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, Carl Schmitt introduced sovereignty to metaphysics and made this category usable in a post-metaphysical world. This essay carries Schmitt’s appropriation one step further. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s replacement of transcendental metaphysics with contingent creaturehood, it reintroduces the anti-foundationalist repetition that was implicit in Kierkegaard’s paradigm but which was not made lucid until Benjamin crafted from the Schmittian exception a vision of the political grounded in creaturely existence.


Full text available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2211016