Carl Schmitt

all aspects of life by coercive measures. The idea behind the concept is that states would hold complete authority and total control over everything that happens in their society. One of the first to develop this idea was the German born, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt published his work which tried to show the legality of states and countries to be all powerful. Totalitarian states want to control everything whether it is public or private. Most leaders of totalitarian states had private policemen who terrified

hand-in-hand, because it belongs to the nation and supervises the state and maintain its order, and this order sometimes has been accomplished by violent means. Moreover, Schmitt and Arendt offer different accounts on what Sovereignty means in political theory, and the procedures by which it is applied on the daily basis. Schmitt argues that the political entity must always be sovereign because it decides what to do when an exception occurs, contrary to Arendt that states that such sovereignty from

implementation was as a result of a one-time governmental error. However, Carl Schmitt argues that a country’s positive laws simply hide the actuality of sovereignty, since the sovereign is “he who decides the exception.” This paper will argue that the extensive authority granted to the police during the G20 reveals the fundamental reality of the inherent need for violence in the preservation of national sovereignty as contended by Carl Schmitt. The first part of this essay will discuss the necessity and justification

All that considered, I believe that Marx insists that the freedom of religion the liberal society certainly provides headway, or as Marx puts it: `a big step forward’ (Marx, 1978) towards freedom for Jewish believers and other non-Christian congregations. Similarly with other rights that liberalism considers to be of importance, ‘such as the rights to equality, property, security, and the legal institutions that embody them.’ (Sayers, 2003) Even though these are traits of the bourgeois society, they

The United States is in a perpetual state of national emergency. A state of emergency, is a situation of national danger or disaster, in which a government suspends normal constitutional procedures in order to regain control. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terror attacks, Congress adopted a resolution on September 14, 2001, stipulating: “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized

What I’m interested in exploring with the series of work Apparatus of Sovereign Power as Mechanisms of Control, are the functions of biopower (a term devised by French philosopher Michel Foucault which applies to the concept of controlling populations and managing people1), the political mechanisms through which biopower operates, and the effects on identity and the physical self. In this small body of work, I have created four drawings in charcoal that make an attempt to mock scenarios in which

In this modern era, the value of life is what makes sacrifice meaningful. In Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life he discusses the concept of homo sacer, which is “ a body that can be killed but not sacrificed.” He also talks about the state of exception and how “the sovereign exception (as zone of in distinction between nature and right) is the presupposition of the juridical reference in the form of its suspension.” (Agamben 21) This concept can be related to the issues involving

A commonly shared, almost universal moral is that one should learn to “forgive” any transgressors and “forget” the transgressions which they have committed. In this example, forgiveness can be awarded by any given “body,” whether it be an individual or an institution, to any guilty party. According to philosopher Jacques Derrida, however, this definition is much too far-reaching and allows for a misuse of the word “forgiveness” and of the concept of forgiveness itself. Derrida argues that forgiveness

James Berger is a senior lecturer for American and English Studies at Yale University (Berger). His article “Zombies and the End of Society” contains three sections, namely 'Where are the Dead?', 'Revelations and Deferrals', and 'Zombies and the End of Society'. The last one, which also gave the article its name, is the most important one for this paper, since its arguments and claims concern the justification of violence in zombie movies. In the following, Berger's argumentation will be summarized

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is a very complex text presented in three detailed sections. The first section is an analysis of sovereignty, introducing it through Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as being the one who decides on the exception. The second section is a survey of the idea of Homo Sacer: the person who cannot be sacrificed, but who can be killed. The final section then illustrates the role of the Auschwitz camp, which is known for its brutal murders and