Notes

1. Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire, 19. Toward the end of the introduction, Axelos states clearly an impasse: “Y aurait-il des nouveautés possibles, plus ou moins radicales? Pour le moment, aucun prophétisme, aucune rêverie et aucune utopie ne parviennent à dépasser cet état mouvant des choses. Ils restent muets et creux” (42). Axelos thinks that we are perhaps marching toward a planetary thinking that will be a retake (reprise) of the past and a preparation of the future.

2. For Heidegger, writing in the 1930s, planetarization implies a planetary lack of sense-making (Besinnungslosigkeit), which is not limited to Europe but is also, for example, applicable to the United States and Japan. This lack of sense-making is even more obvious today. Even if European philosophy completely reinvents itself, disruptive technologies will continue throughout the globe; see Heidegger, GA66 Besinnung (1938/39), 74.

3. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, 114.

4. Bruno Latour’s effort is the most remarkable in the past decade. Latour achieved this not only via writings but also through exhibitions and workshops.

5. Among all the outstanding works, just to mention a few, see Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life; Connolly, Facing the Planetary; Mickey, Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence; Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

6. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1, 188.

7. Arendt, The Human Condition, 1.

8. Caygill, “Heidegger and the Automatic Earth Image.”

9. McLuhan, “At the Moment of Sputnik,” 49.

10. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. 2, 286–87; also quoted by Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 8, footnote 28.

11. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

12. The film, on the one hand, has a strong emphasis on national pride and, on the other hand, sets a cosmopolitan mission to save the whole of humanity.

13. United Nations, “UN Climate Report: It’s ‘Now or Never’ to Limit Global Warming to 1.5 Degrees,” https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1115452.

14. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 59.

15. For elaboration on thermodynamic ideology and its relation to the postmodern discourse, see Hui, “Lyotard after Us,” 125–37.

16. Before the synchronization in modern logistics, we saw already the synchronizing effect of clocks used in production. As Marx correctly observed in a letter to Engels, “the clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purpose; the whole theory of production and regular motion was developed through it,” quoted by Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1, 286.

17. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 70.

18. Soulier, André Leroi-Gourhan, 287–88.

19. Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art.

20. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech.

21. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 159. “Neglecting the crucial nature of these questions, Leroi-Gourhan reintroduces the very metaphysical notion of Homo faber, in a movement that can be found again, for example, in George Bataille . . . a notion opposed to that of Homo sapiens. This opposition between technicity and intellect is, however, contradicted by the role given later to writing, as technics, in the constitution of thought.”

22. Kant, Political Writings, 106.

23. Bruno Latour with his team worked on this project for many years until his death in 2022. I had the occasion to participate in Latour’s project in Shanghai in 2018, and to act as an advisor to the Taipei Biennale 2020, which Latour curated.

24. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 1. In a very different vein, Axelos also considers Hegel as the philosopher who systematized and historicized the becoming thinking of the world and the becoming world of thinking in the nineteenth century, therefore Axelos declares that Hegel’s thinking remains unsurpassed, “sa logique n’est pas même comprise et sa philosophie de l’historie qui en découle n’aura qu’à se radicaliser et se généraliser advantage.” See Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire, 35.

25. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 220.

26. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 224.

27. See Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, 82.

28. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right.

29. Hegel, “The German Constitution,” in Political Writings.

30. This concept of the “organic machine” is taken from Claude Bernard, who distinguishes a mechanical machine from an organic machine that is animal, See Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, 86. This imaginary organic machine could also be identified in Adam Smith’s concept of the market and its invisible hand. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner compared Adam Smith’s invisible hand with Hegel’s cunning of reason, but it might be more appropriate to say that they were both influenced by the political epistemology of organism. For Kittsteiner’s comment, see Listen der Vernunft.

31. Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, 302.

32. Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsrechts,” 206.

33. Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen.

34. For a summary of these statements and criticism of them, see Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” 26–46.

35. Negri, The End of Sovereignty, 79.

36. Negri, The End of Sovereignty, 72; this summary was pronounced by Roberto Esposito and not Negri himself.

37. Esposito responds by saying “My impression is that the processes triggered in America, Europe, and Asia in the early years of the new century have been going in the opposite direction, as all the latest events have shown most manifestly.” Negri, The End of Sovereignty, 72.

38. Negri, The End of Sovereignty, 73.

39. Negri, The End of Sovereignty, 83.

40. Lane, “Why Donald Trump Was the Ultimate Anarchist.”

41. Schmitt, Die drei Arten rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens, 46–47.

42. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.

43. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 99.

44. See Strauss, Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy.

45. Heidegger, On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 186.

46. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 351–55.

47. Schmitt, “Raum und Großraum im Völkerrecht,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 235–36.

48. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan. “Climate Leviathan is a direct descendant from Hobbes’ original to Schmitt’s sovereign: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide and is constituted precisely in the act of decision. It expresses a desire for, and the recognition of, the necessity of a planetary sovereign to seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to the Earth, all in the name of saving life.” This also seems to be something that preoccupies Axelos and which remains problematic if not overstated, when he says in Vers la pensée planétaire, 302, that “la souveraineté n’est plus celle d’une cité, d’un empire, d’une nation, d’une classe: la souveraineté atteint son caractère suprême, sa pleine puissance, en cessant d’être souveraineté particulière et en devenant puissance et autorité suprême, pouvoir mondial déferlant sur les—plus qu’échouant aux—citoyens du cosmos dans leur totalité. Aucune personne et aucune institution ne portent plus ce pouvoir.”

49. See Nail, Theory of the Earth.

50. See Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, chapter 4, where Stengers considers the naming of Gaia as a continuation of the legacy of the twentieth century, especially the work of Lovelock and Margulis, as well as a refusal of the sheer rationality that undermines the figure of Gaia as irrationality. Along the same line, I distinguish rational, irrational, and nonrational in Recursivity and Contingency (2019) and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), where the nonrational cannot be equated with either rational or irrational. A true rationalism is not that which excludes the nonrational, but one that rationalizes the nonrational. This distinction is applied in this book for what concerns the question of reason, since reason, when it proceeds toward the absolute (or the true universal), is not only pursuing the rational and eliminating the irrational but will also have to incorporate the nonrational.

51. Mann and Wainwright in their Climate Leviathan followed Karatani’s approach and gave us a quadratic scheme of a “Climate Leviathan,” “Climate Mao,” “Climate Behemoth,” and a “Climate X.” The “Climate X,” like the Mode D, is undetermined.

52. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 305; what Karatani writes about Schmitt is rather confusing: while Schmitt claims that the world state only means the end of the political state, since it means unity and homogeneity, i.e. consumerism, Karatani commented that Schmitt means the state could be abolished via exchange.

53. Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life; the trajectory of a general organology from Bergson to Canguilhem, Simondon, and Stiegler is further pursued in Recursivity and Contingency, chapters 3 and 4.

54. Bergson, Creative Evolution.

55. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 119.

56. Hui, “For a Planetary Thinking.”

1. Carl Schmitt reproached historians such as Arnold Toynbee for offering only historical truth, see Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 531.

2. H. S. Harris’s word, cited by De Laurentiis, Hegel’s Anthropology, 11

3. Kapp, Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit, 85. “Je mechanischer ein Staat regie wird, desto despotischer wird er regiert, je organischer ein Staat sich regiert, des freier ist er. Also Mechanismus gleich Despotismus, Organismus gleich Freiheit”; also cited by Hans-Martin Sass, “Die philosophische Erdkunde des Hegelianers Ernst Kapp,” 168–69n2.

4. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government, 30.

5. Ross, On Mechanism in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy, 3.

6. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 266–67. “The very term ‘organic unity’ cannot be used by him in the same sense as it was used by Schelling, the real philosopher of romanticism. Hegel’s unity is a dialectical unity, a unity of contraries. It not only allows but even requires forceful tensions and oppositions. From this point of view, Hegel had to reject the aesthetic ideals of Schelling and Novalis. Novalis had spoken of the state as a ‘beautiful individual.’ In his essay on Christianity or Europe, Novalis dreamed of a unity of all Christian nations under [266] the guidance and authority of a universal, a real ‘catholic’ church. This ideal of political and religious peace was not that of Hegel’s. According to him, it is necessary to introduce into political thought what he calls ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.’”

7. Ross, On Mechanism in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy, 15.

8. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History of a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, 50.

9. Strauss, On Hegel, 303.

10. Kant, Political Writings, 201–36.

11. Strauss, On Hegel, 305.

12. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §64, “organization” is my italicization.

13. See Sedgwick, “The State as Organism,” 172. In Kant, “explanatory notes,” Critique of Judgment, 361, the editor notes, “It is unclear whether Kant is alluding here to the American Revolution of 1776–83 or revolutionary developments that had begun in France in 1789.”

14. Sedgwick, “The State as Organism,” 173.

15. In the Science of Logic, “Doctrine of Essence,” chapter 2 “Actuality,” Hegel shows how to understand the necessity of contingency in three movements: formal necessity, real necessity, and absolute necessity. I examined Hegel’s argument in Recursivity and Contingency, 99–101; please refer there for a more detailed account of this argument.

16. To my knowledge, Bernard Mabille seems to be the only scholar who uses ontogenesis and autogenesis to describe the individuation of the spirit; see Mabille, Hegel, 306: “fonde la nécessité de l’Absolu. La genèse est une ontogenèse et l’ontogenèse une autogenèse.” Concerning whether Hegel’s ontogenesis is a preformism, an idea that was popular during Hegel’s time, Hegel refused it, arguing that preformism implies that there is no development. Ontogenesis or autogenesis reintroduces contingency into its development. For a more detailed discussion see Harris, “How Final Is Hegel’s Rejection of Evolution?” and Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, 92–93.

17. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §387. The three main forms of the subject spirit are soul, consciousness, and Spirit as such. The soul is not yet spirit, as Hegel explains in the following paragraph §388: “Spirit that has become has . . . the meaning that nature self-sublates over against itself [an ihr selbst] as the untrue, so that spirit presupposes itself as this universality, yet no longer a self-external one of bodily singularity, but one that is, in its concreteness and totality, simple universality in which spirit is soul, not yet spirit.” (The Encyclopaedia Logic §388) The German original: “Der gewordene Geist hat daher den Sinn, daß die Natur an ihr selbst als das Unwahre sich aufhebt und der Geist so sich als diese nicht mehr in leiblicher Einzelheit außer sich seiende, sondern in ihrer Konkretion und Totalität einfache Allgemeinheit voraussetzt, in welcher er Seele, noch nicht Geist ist.”

18. Witt, “Dialectic, Motion, and Perception: De Anima Book 1,” 177.

19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 994b10–15.

20. See Aubenque, “Hegel et Aristote,” 103–4. The Hegel passages are in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, 163–64; also quoted by Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 43–44: “We may be astonished that Hegel, translating ἐνέργεια by Tätigkeit and assimilating activity to movement, misunderstands several Aristotelian texts, beginning with those which define movement as an ‘incomplete act’ (thus prohibiting any assimilation of the pure Act to movement in general), and also those in which Aristotle clarifies the divine act as an act of immobility (ἐνέργεια ἀκινησίας). If Hegel considers himself authorized to posit the identity of the divine act and that of movement, it is because he interprets the immobility expressly attributed by Aristotle to the Prime Mover as ‘self-generating motion’ (Selbstbewegung) or circular motion (Kreisbewegung).”

21. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 143–44; Vorlesungenüber die Geschichte der Philosophie II, 158–59; also cited by Malabou, Future of Hegel, 52.

22. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 53, quoting Dominique Janicaud, we might also find a similar interpretation in Derrida’s reading of Aristotle where God, the prime mover is considered as a circular movement; see Derrida, Rogues, 15: “Neither moving itself nor being itself moved, the actuality of this pure energy sets everything in motion, a motion of return to self, a circular motion, Aristotle specifies, because the first motion is always cyclical. And what induces or inspires this is a desire. God, the pure actuality of the Prime Mover, is at once erogenous and thinkable.”

23. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 17.

24. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 18–19; see Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, “this profound unity of his [Spinoza’s] philosophy such as it is expressed in Europe, his manifestation of Spirit, the identity of the infinite and the finite in God, a God that does not appear as a Third, is an echo of the Orient.”

25. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 28. Throughout the book, Macherey plays the role of a Spinozist, who against Hegel, shows how Hegel, in fact, misread Spinoza precisely without knowing that Spinozism already contains the elements of his own dialectics.

26. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 487; also quoted by Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1–2.

27. In this sense we can talk about the end of history, meaning when the Spirit overcomes what motivates it; it doesn’t mean there is no longer any contingency, but rather that these contingent events no longer have their previous roles. For example, the end of history does not mean there are no human beings, but rather human beings are no longer different from animals. This end also means no end, because it assumes that individuation has exhausted itself.

28. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492.

29. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 22.

30. See Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza.

31. Kojève also recognized that in order to understand the absolute, one has to develop a nuanced understanding of the circular movement, namely, a spiral movement. Kojève was forced to justify Stalin succeeding Napoleon as the world soul. This possibility is only granted when the circular movement doesn’t finish in itself, but rather its completion only leads to another beginning. In a note from Kojève we read: “Marx : travail /lutte, c’est-à-dire Befriedung (= satisfaction) en Napoléon/Philosophie hégélienne, mais Staline/moi, c’est-à-dire non pas, mais –〉 (Geist ist Zeit),” which he explained further, “à la fin de la Phénoménologie, Geist retourne à Begierde. Mais en fait, non pas à la Begierde de IV Int. (désir naturel en général) mais comme la Begierde réele, c’est-à-dire comme une nouvelle action. Ce n’est pas le Welt-Geist mais le Geist qui retourne à cette Begierde de IV Introduction. Le Welt-Geist va à la Begierde d’où naît Staline.” See Auffret, Alexandre Kojève, 246.

32. De Laurentiis, Hegel’s Anthropology, 11. These words are borrowed from H. S. Harris.

33. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §199, 201.

34. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 27.

35. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 36.

36. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 37. “Hegel s’est efforcé de décrire cette conscience malheureuse qu’est l’âme chrétienne et romantique (Rosenkranz, p. 88), puisque le Juif n’a pas le privilège du malheur ou qu’il le partage avec l’âme qui s’oppose le plus complètement à lui.”

37. For the remark on Rousseau, see Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 12.

38. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 44.

39. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 17; see also Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsrechts,” 285.

40. Hui, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of the Neo-reactionaries.”

41. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 207.

42. The famous quote from Hegel toward the end of the introduction to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, “Was vernünftig ist, ist wirklich, was wirklich ist, ist vernünftig.”

43. Here we might want to associate Wirklichkeit with energeia, in the sense that energeia means both actualization and production, i.e., it brings out [en]ergon; see Marder, Hegel’s Energy, 12.

44. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 12.

45. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §32.

46. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §221.

47. Menke, Autonomie und Befreiung, 45–47.

48. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §262.

49. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §385, 22.

50. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §554, 257. Translation modified; Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III (Werke 10), 366, “Der absolute Geist ist ebenso ewig in sich seiende als in sich zurückkehrende und zurückgekehrte Identität; die eine und allgemeine Substanz als geistige, das Urteil in sich und in ein Wissen, fürwelches sie als solche ist.”

51. Mabille, Hegel, 291.

52. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, 27.

53. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 181; cited also by Ahlers, “The Dialectic in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” 160.

54. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 118, italics mine.

55. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 367.

56. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 121.

57. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §393, 42.

58. It would be hyperbolic and even ironic to say, as some authors did, that Hegel rescued the East from its marginality. See Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 223: “For Hegel, history starts in the East; not in the conventional Eastern Mediterranean, but in China and India. Hegel is one of the first European thinkers to incorporate the Asian world into his scheme of history and emancipate the non-European world from its historiosophical marginality” (italics mine). This is not to discredit Avineri’s book, which is beyond admirable.

59. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §391: “The universal soul as world-soul must not be labeled at once as a subject because it is only universal substance, which only has its actual truth as singularity, subjectivity.”

60. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §340, 315.

61. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 104.

62. Lapouge, “‘Les philosophes ne m’intéressent pas, je cherche des sages,’ une conversation avec Alexandre Kojève,” Le Grand Continent, December 25, 2020, https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2020/12/25/conversation-alexandre-kojeve/.“La fin de l’histoire, ce n’était pas Napoléon, c’était Staline et c’était moi qui serais chargé de l’annoncer avec la différence que je n’aurais pas la chance de voir passer Staline à cheval sous mes fenêtres, mais enfin.”

63. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 34.

64. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §392, 36.

65. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 63.

66. Oreskes and Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization.

67. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.

68. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 149.

69. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Vol. 1, 218.

70. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–26, Vol. 1.

71. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, 188.

72. Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsrechts,” 205.

73. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, 20.

74. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, 62–63.

75. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a18–23.

76. Plato, Republic, especially see 345a, 374a, and 397e.

77. Plato, Republic, 434a.

78. Aristotle, Politics, 1278a8.

79. Aristotle, Politics, 1275a19.

80. Readers can refer to C. D. C. Reeve’s introduction to his new translation of Aristotle’s Politics; since Reeve also translated the Nicomachean Ethics, the introduction presents some comparisons on the subject. See also, Angier, Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics.

81. Ritter, “Das Bürgerliche Leben zur aristotelischen Theorie des Glücks,” in Metaphysik und Politik, 60; Angier, Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics, 74.

82. Aristotle, Politics, 1332a38.

83. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, 45–47.

84. Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy, 36–37.

85. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, 60–61. See also Schaefer, Probleme der Alten Geschichte. Aristotle would most likely not agree with this statement, as he said that Solon “refrained from abolishing them” (i.e., the council of the Areopagus and the election of office holders); what Solon did was introduce democracy to the law courts, which also leads to the accusation that Solon “destroyed the other elements by making these popular law courts, with their members appointed by lot, supreme in every case.” See Aristotle, Politics, 1273b35–40.

86. Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy, 38.

87. Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet, Clisthéne l’Athénien, 32, cited also by Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, 66.

88. Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy, 37.

89. In “The Birth of Greek Individualism: A Turning-Point in the History of Political Thought,” Isaiah Berlin commented on the birth of individualism in the fifth century BC, which one could find in both Greek tragedy and comedy, the institutionalized life of the polis was naturalized in the writing of Herodotus and Thucydides. One could speculate that the birth of individualism already appeared earlier, expressed in the birth of monumental sculpture, whose realism demonstrates the pursuit of a perfect individuality and personality; the fifth century BC was the moment when both affirmation and negation of individualism took place; see Berlin, Liberty.

90. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §185, 184: “Plato wished to exclude particularity from his state, but this is no help, since help on these lines would contravene the infinite right of the Idea to allow freedom to the particular.”

91. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 63.

92. We might want to pay attention to Hannah Arendt’s analysis on the history of freedom: according to her, before Augustine, there was a “conscious attempt to divorce the notion of freedom from politics,” and this is the prioritization of the vita contemplativa over vita activa. Since the stoics (Arendt gives Epictetus as an example), there has been a strong discourse on inner freedom, according to which “one may be a slave in the world and still be free.” See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future, 147.

93. Ritter, “Hegel und die französische Revolution,” in Metaphysik und Politik. On this point, we might also be able to read Auguste Comte and Hegel in parallel; though Comte declares positivism as what succeeds theology and metaphysics, Hegel did not see positivism as sufficient. We will see this in chapter 3, regarding Georgescu-Roegen’s reading of Hegel.

94. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 122.

95. Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsrechts,” 256.

96. See Strauss, On Hegel, 238.

97. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §302; see also Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition. Arendt pointed out how the condition of politics in ancient Greece, namely, the separation between the public and private life in the polis, and during the modern time, the search for intimacy in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics, both emphasize individual autonomy as resistance against the conformity of the social. We might want to compare it with what Berlin calls “negative freedom.”

98. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §408, 121.

99. Karatani, The Structure of World History, xvi.

100. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A833, B861.

101. Kojève, Kant, 59–61.

102. Sedgwick, “The State as Organism,” 184.

103. In Autonomie und Befreiung, 22–23, Menke highlights a significant difference between Rousseau and Kant. For Rousseau, autonomy means self-legislation, or more precisely “obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself,” while Kant, remarks Menke, though he almost “repeats Rousseau word by word,” doesn’t use the word “self” (selbst) but rather eigen (to make it one’s own): “Kant redet nicht von Selbstgesetzgebung, sondern von der ‘eigenen Gesetzgebung.’” This difference can be read as Kant’s new interpretation of autonomy, which, continues Menke, “Kant ergänzt nicht nur die Idee der Selbsgesetzgebung durch den Anspruch, daß sie aus einem guten Grund efolgen muß; er stellt vielmehr die Definition von Autonomie als Selbstgesetzgebung als solche in Frage” (23).

104. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A445, B473.

105. This is also the argument that I put forward in Recursivity and Contingency. The reflective operation of the categorical imperative and aesthetic judgment recursively negates the empirical inclinations in searching for the universal, and it must be strictly distinguished from empirical induction.

106. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §415, 144.

107. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §415, 145.

108. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 49.

109. “It may also be remarked that, as a result of his failure to study the antinomy in more depth, Kant brings forward only four antinomies. . . . The main point that has to be made is that antinomy is found not only in the four particular objects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts and ideas. To know this, and to be cognizant of this property of objects, belongs to what is essential in philosophical study; this is the property that constitutes what will determine itself in due course as the dialectical moment of logical thinking”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §48R, 92–93; also quoted by Allen Wood, “Antinomies of Pure Reason,” 247f3.

110. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §324, 306.

111. Mabille, Hegel, 132.

112. For this reason, Leo Strauss claimed that Hegel reconciles Spinoza and Kant, by identifying the subject as Spinozist substance and the Kantian thing-in-itself, see Strauss, On Hegel, 21–22.

113. See Hegel, Science of Logic, 554.

114. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §381, 16.

115. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §201, Addition.

116. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §324, 306.

117. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 58.

118. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, 293.

119. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, 298.

120. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, 299.

121. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 116.

1. The critique against mechanism is consistent from Hegel’s early writings such as “Die Positivität der christlichen Religion” (1795/1796), where positivity is another name for mechanism, to his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (1821); see also Weil, Hegel and the State.

2. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 262–63; also quoted by Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain, 27.

3. Hegel, “The German Constitution,” in Political Writings, 22.

4. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 48.

5. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 49.

6. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 257. My emphasis.

7. Ironically, when we look at some of the twentieth-century literature on Chinese thought, it has been considered organic: as Joseph Needham claims, “The philosophia perennis of China was an organic materialism. This can be illustrated by the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers of every epoch. The mechanical view of the world simply didn’t develop in Chinese thought, and the organicist view in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers,” see Needham, The Grand Titration, 21. For a prolonged discussion on this subject, see Hui, Recursivity and Contingency and Art and Cosmotechnics.

8. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, 50.

9. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §405, Addition.

10. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

11. Karatani’s critique of Marx is more sophisticated than what is stated in this sentence. For him, Marx put the capitalist economy as the base, while the state and the nation as ideological superstructures failed to grasp the unity of the capital-nation-state. Through the concept of exchange, he wants to show how the three concepts could be unified; see Karatani, The Structure of World History, 3: “Such claims for the relative autonomy of the superstructure led to the belief that state and nation were simply representations that had been created historically and that they could be dissolved through enlightenment.”

12. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 52.

13. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 119. “Since the entire contents of its natural consciousness have not been jeopardized, determinate being still in principle attaches to it; having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-will, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude.”

14. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie I, 233; also cited by Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 89.

15. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 53.

16. In Realphilosophie II, commenting on the general will, Hegel explictly says that “the individuals have to make themselves into a universal through negation of themselves, through externalization and education [Entäusserung und Bildung],” see Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie II, 244–45; also cited by Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 102.

17. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §349, italics mine.

18.Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. “Entäußerung ist (zusammen mit Entfremdung) die Übersetzung von lateinisch alienatio und seinen neusprachlichen Nachfolgern. In der römischen Rechtssprache etwa seit der Zeit Ciceros bedeutet alienatio die Übertragung von Eigentum. In dieser Bedeutung ist entäußern seit 1322 im Deutschen nachweisbar. Schon in römischer Zeit bildete sich ein reiches Spektrum metaphorischer Redeweisen aus, das sich bei der Übernahme in die neuen Sprachen erhielt, z.B. die Entäußerung der Menschlichkeit. . . . Ein neuerer Versuch der Abgrenzung von Entäußerung, Entfremdung und Vergegenständlichung findet sich bei GARAUDY, der Entäußerung (extériorisation) als wertneutral, Vergegenständlichung (objectivation) als positiv und Entfremdung (aliénation) als negativ ansieht.”

19. Sass, “Die philosophische Erdkunde des Hegelianers Ernst Kapp,” 172.

20.https://deutsche-schutzgebiete.de/wordpress/projekte/kaiserreich/koenigreich-preussen/.

21. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 166.

22. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §258, 157. “Ebenso ist aber das Selbstbewußtsein beschaffen, sich auf eine solche Weise von sich zu unterscheiden, worin zugleich kein Unterschied herauskommt.”

23. Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit, 85.

24. Honneth calls it a “kantianische, institutionenvergessene Gerechtigkeitstheorie,” see Das Recht der Freiheit, 16.

25. Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit, 116. “[Daß] die sittlichen Institutionen erst eine individuelle Autonomie ermöglichen, deren Betätigung dann wiederum zu einer Revision dieser Institutionen führen kann, dann läßt sich in der damit vorbestellen Spiralbewegung gar nicht mehr der Ruhepunkt finden, der in einem festgefügten System sittlicher Institutionen bestehen soll.”

26. Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit, 116.

27. Malabou, Au voleur!, 63.

28. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 264.

29. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §258, Addition.

30. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §269, Addition.

31. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 244. “Le corps politique, pris individuellement, peut être considéré comme un corps organisé, vivant, et semblable à celui de l’homme. Le pouvoir souverain représente la tête; les lois et les coutumes sont le cerveau, principe des nerfs et siège de 1’entendement, de la volonté et des sens, dont les juges et magistrats sont les organes; le commerce, l’industrie et l’agriculture, sont la bouche et l’estomac, qui préparent la substance commune; les finances publiques sont le sang, qu’une sage économie, en faisant les fonctions du cœur, renvoie distribuer par tout le corps la nourriture et la vie; les citoyens sont le corps et les membres qui font mouvoir, vivre et travailler la machine, et qu’on ne saurait blesser en aucune partie qu’aussitôt l’impression douloureuse ne s’en porte au cerveau, si l’animal est dans un état de santé.”

32. Marx, “Kritik,” 206.

33. Marx, “Kritik,” 212.

34. Marx, “Kritik,” 213.

35. Hyppolite, “La Conception Hégélienne de l’État et sa Critique,” 149.

36. The other work that is influenced by Hegel and important for the theory of a living form (Lebensform) of the state and geopolitics is Rudolf Kjellén’s, Der Staat als Lebensform (1917). Kjellén’s teacher Friedrich Ratzel, a geographer and political thinker who developed the concept of the organic space or living space (Lebensraum), like Kapp, was also influenced by Ernst Haeckel. The fact that we cannot extend our analysis to all thinkers of the organic theory of the state here doesn’t mean that their works are ignored. For the history along this line of geopolitical thinking, please see Kristof, “The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics.”

37. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 226.

38. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 244.

39. Kapp, Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit, 85.

40. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 234.

41. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 245.

42. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, §352. “As living universality, the animal organism is the concept which passes syllogistically through its three determinations . . . (a) as the individual idea, which is simply self-related in its process, and which inwardly coalesces with itself, i.e. shape (Gestalt); (b) as idea which relates itself to its other (ihrem Anderen), its inorganic nature, and posits the ideal nature of this other within itself, i.e. assimilation; (c) as the idea relating to an other which is itself a living individual, and thereby relating itself to itself in the other, i.e. the generic process.”

43. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §258, 157–58. My emphasis.

44. Marx, “Kritik,” 216.

45. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 225.

46. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §258, 157. “Ebenso ist aber das Selbstbewußtsein beschaffen, sich auf eine solche Weise von sich zu unterscheiden, worin zugleich kein Unterschied herauskommt.”

47. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, §248. Cited by Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 262.

48. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, §250, 215.

49. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 26.

50. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §381, 10. I changed “mind” back to “the Spirit.”

51. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §381, 10.

52. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 11.

53. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §392, 36.

54. This might also resonate with Marx’s critique of Hegel concerning the birth of the monarchy, Marx argued that “Hegel has shown that the monarchy must be born, which no one doubts, but he didn’t show, that birth brings about the monarchy,” which for Marx, carries as little metaphysical truth as the Immaculate Conception of Mary; see Marx, “Kritik,” 235.

55. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §272.

56. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §408.

57. Hyppolite, “La Conception Hégélienne de l’État et sa Critique,” 145.

58. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §273.

59. Marx, “Kritik,” 153–56.

60. Marx, “Kritik,” 272.

61. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 53, also quoted by Derrida, Rogues, 15.

62. Derrida, Rogues, 14.

63. The Chinese Room Experiment runs like this: a black box (the Chinese room) is presented as a Chinese speaker. However, we don’t know if there really is a Chinese person inside; now, when we feed input to the black box, the black box will respond to the input according to the written instructions; however, this person doesn’t have to know Chinese, he or she only needs to follow the instructions correctly.

64. See Vieweg, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit.

65. For the debate on Kant’s cosmopolitanism outlined in the perpetual peace during Kant’s time, including Fichte’s review of the essay, see Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, chapter 2.

66. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, 491.

67. Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, 328.

68. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, 106.

69. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, 106–7.

70. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 156.

71. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §340, 315.

72. See Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt, 143.

73. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54.

74. There is a similarity between Hegel’s critique of Kant’s perpetual peace and Schmitt’s critique of the League of Nations; see Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §324 and §333.

75. See Hayek, “Hegel and Comte,” in Counter-Revolution of Science.

76. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §331.

77. We will discuss this in chapter 5, concerning Schmitt’s criticism of American imperialism and his own attempt to “rescue” the Monroe doctrine.

78. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §339 Zusatz.

79. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 104.

80. Lapouge, “‘Les philosophes ne m’intéressent pas, je cherche des sages,’” “Moi, j’ai expliqué que Hegel l’avait dit et personne ne veut l’admettre, que l’histoire est close, personne ne le digère. À vrai dire, moi aussi, j’ai d’abord pensé que c’était une billevesée mais, ensuite, j’ai réfléchi et vu que c’était génial. Simplement, Hegel s’était trompé de cent cinquante ans. La fin de l’histoire, ce n’était pas Napoléon, c’était Staline et c’était moi qui serais chargé de l’annoncer avec la différence que je n’aurais pas la chance de voir passer Staline à cheval sous mes fenêtres, mais enfin . . . Après, il y a eu la guerre et j’ai compris. Non, Hegel ne s’était pas trompé, il avait bien donné la date juste de la fin de l’histoire, 1806. Depuis cette date, qu’est-ce qui se passe? Rien du tout, l’alignement des provinces.”

81. Lapouge, “‘Les philosophes ne m’intéressent pas, je cherche des sages,’” “La révolution chinoise n’est que l’introduction du Code Napoléon en Chine. La fameuse accélération de l’histoire dont on parle tant, avez-vous remarqué qu’en s’accélérant de plus en plus le mouvement historique avance de moins en moins?” Kojève said similar things to Schmitt in a communication dated May 16, 1955: “Now I believe that Hegel was completely right and that history was already over after the historical Napoleon. For, in the end, Hitler was only a ‘new enlarged and improved edition’ of Napoleon [“La Republique une et indivisible” {“The single and indivisible Republic”} = “Ein Land, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer” {“One country, one people, one leader”}]. Hitler committed the errors which you characterize so well on p. 166 (toward the middle): now, if Nap. in his time had done it as well as Hitler, it would certainly have been enough. But unfortunately Hitler did it 150 years too late! Thus the second world war brought nothing essentially new. And the first one was just an intermission.”

82. Mou, Philosophy of History, 457, “遠在二十年前, 弟讀黑格爾(歷史哲學)論及中國方面無「主觀自由」，無 個體性之自覺」，即悚然而驚。當時對於黑氏書自不能懂，即所觸及之此一點，當時亦不解其所以。心中頗不服。一方面覺其說的甚對，一方面亦覺其不甚對。”

83. Mou, Philosophy of History, 217, “國家必須通過各個體的自覺而重新組織起來成爲一個有機的統一體，才可以說是近代化的國家。中國以前的統一只是打天下打來的，個體並末起作用，所以不成一個國家單位。而那統一亦是虛浮不實的。國家是一個文化上的觀念，是由各個體通過自覺而成的一個理性上的產物。不是一個自然物，更不是武力所能硬打得來的。”

84. Zhao, A Possible World of All-Under-Heaven System, 130.

85. Zhao, A Possible World of All-Under-Heaven System, 2.

86. Mou, Philosophy of History, 216, “中國以往不是一個國家單位，而是一個文化單位，只有天下觀念，而無國家觀念。”

87. When we look at the new interpretation of tianxia, one will be surprised how it resembles such an organic structure, which Kant already systematically formulated. See Debray and Zhao, “Tianxia: All Under Heaven.”

88. In a letter from Kojève to Schmitt dated August 1, 1955, Kojève claims to add to the meaning of Nomos as “Nahme” “with Hegel” the sense of “privilege” when such “Nahme” is considered a political act. “And you will certainly agree, if I add, with Hegel, that taking is only political insofar as it takes place on the grounds of prestige and for prestigious ends. Otherwise, surely even animals could wage war and the slave capture in Africa in the 19th century was also a war? On the other hand, Athens certainly did not have much to ‘take’ from Sparta (and vice versa) except for ‘hegemony,’ i.e., precisely prestige.”

89. Mou, Philosophy of History, 417, “如是由神聖理念之「分離地存在於地球上」必須進一步超越各民族國家之齊頭並列而「整全地諧一地存在於地球上」，此即是「大同」一層之目標。此將如何而可能？”

90. This analysis is elaborated in Mou, Dao of Politics and Dao of Governance.

1. This was also Schmitt’s contest against Arnold Toynbee and other Anglo-Saxon historians since the latter are presented as the authority of an eternal truth.

2. See Marx, “Kritik,” 251–61.

3. Hölderlin, “Urtheil und Seyn”: “Urtheil ist im höchsten und strengsten Sinne die ursprüngliche Trennung des in der intellectualen Anschauung innigst vereinigten Objects und Subjects, diejenige Trennung, wodurch erst Object und Subject möglich wird, die Ur = Theilung.”

4. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §574, 275.

5. Rilke, Duino Elegies, 55.

6. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §388, 29; also cited by De Laurentiis, Hegel’s Anthropology, 32. I used the translation of Wallace and Miller, with modification from Laurentiis, who reproaches the former for having rendered “an ihr selbst” as “in ihr selbst.” However, this might be hair-splitting a bit, since nature will not sublate itself as being externalized, but rather it can only sublate itself in itself as being.

7. Here we can understand the three syllogisms concerning logic, nature, and spirit: (1) Logic-Nature-Spirit (syllogism of existence, Dasein) the logical becomes nature and nature become spirit; (2) Nature-Spirit-Logic (syllogism of reflection) presupposes nature and joins it with the logical; (3) Spirit-Logic-Nature (syllogism of necessity). This syllogism expresses the fact that nature or the Idea in-itself, and spirit or the Idea for-itself, are held together by “the logical” or, as it is called elsewhere, “the logical Idea” (Encyclopaedia Logic §187 Zusatz); see De Laurentiis, Hegel’s Anthropology, 53.

8. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §381 Zusatz, 15.

9. Cited by De Laurentiis, Hegel’s Anthropology, 50. Italics in original.

10. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 33.

11. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 48: “The human being maintains an inner relation with the artifacts belonging to the outside world that are produced in accord with the normative organs inside of him.”

12. See Maneschi, “The Filiation of Economic Ideas,” 105–25.

13. Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 4. “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

14. Grenivald, “Le sens bioéconomique du développement humain,” 63.

15. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 46.

16. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 15.

17. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 63, footnote 13.

18. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 46, footnote 27.

19. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 72, italics mine.

20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 160.

21. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 215. “Das wirkliche organische Wesen ist die Mitte, welche das Fürsichsein des Lebens mit dem Äußeren überhaupt oder dem Ansich sein zusammen-schließt.”

22. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 159.

23. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, 159; in the same paragraph, Georgescu-Roegen immediately states, “I have already pointed out, the equivalence of this third definition with the other two has not been established to the satisfaction of all.”

24. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths,” 64.

25. It may be effective here to remind that disorder does not mean lack of tidiness. Our everyday concept of order tells us that when the room is tidied up, it has order, and when a desk is messy it means disorder; in this case, the concept of order we use here is anti-intuitive: disorder means lack of the complexity of order, namely, becoming homogeneous.

26. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths,” 81.

27. Lotka, “The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle,” 188: “In place of slow adaptation of anatomical structure and physiological function in successive generations by selective survival, increased adaptation has been achieved by the incomparably more rapid development of ‘artificial’ aids to our native receptor–effector apparatus, in a process that might be termed exosomatic evolution.”

28. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economic Myths,” 25, 81.

29. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economy Myths,” 32.

30. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economy Myths,” 91.

31. Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and Economy Myths,” 92.

32. Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 46.

33. Georgescu-Roegen, “Entropy,” 146.

34. Georgescu-Roegen, “Entropy,” 146.

35. Mirowski, More Heat than Light.

36. It is already clearly stated in Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings,39: “The transfer of information cannot take place without a certain expenditure of energy, so that there is no sharp boundary between energetic coupling and informational coupling.”

37. Hayek, “Hegel and Comte,” in Counter-Revolution of Science, 203.

38. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 77–78.

39. Hayek, “Hegel and Comte,” in Counter-Revolution of Science, 203.

40. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, xviii.

41. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 158: “This foundation of modern civilization was first understood by Adam Smith in terms of the operation of feedback mechanism by which he anticipated what we now know as cybernetics.”

42. Wiener, Cybernetics, 44.

43. Simondon, Sur la Philosophie, 180. “Kant n’aurait pu traiter de la Cybernétique qu’en la situant dans la Critique du jugement.”

44. Quoted in Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body, 38.

45. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 26.

46. Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen, 95.

47. See Hui, Recursivity and Contingency.

48. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, 50–51.

49. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, 58.

50. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 111

51. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 155: “Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.”

52. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 115.

53. Teilhard’s noosphere was later rediscovered in the 1990s with the rise of the internet. Wired magazine in 1995 dedicated an article on Teilhard, praising an “obscure Jesuit priest . . . [who] set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago.” See Kreisberg, “A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain (June 1st 1995).”

54. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 194.

55. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 134.

56. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 163.

57. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 132

58. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, 290.

59. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 187.

60. Teilhard, The Future of Man, 235.

61. King’s Towards New Mysticism: Teilhard de Chardin and the Eastern Religions remains one of the best books to document Teilhard’s experience in the far East and his inspirations.

62. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 145.

63. Beer, “Recursion of Powers,” 13.

64. See Sagan, “James Lovelock, Gaia, and the Remembering of Biological Being (2023).” Sagan elaborated on the difference between Lovelock and Margulis’s conception of Gaia: “Whereas Lovelock characterized Gaia as an organism, Margulis differed, pointing to the datum that no organism consumes its own material wastes. Gaia is better characterized as planetary life form—a body, yes, but subtler than an organism, it produces waste mostly as heat, the end product of metabolism that cannot be used by any living organisms.”

65. Cited by King, Towards New Mysticism, 218. “I believe the mystical is less different, less separated from the rational than one says, but I also believe that the whole problem which the world, and we in particular, are presently facing is a problem of faith.”

66. Kreisberg, “A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain.”

67. 2045 Initiative, “Ray Kurzweil—Immortality by 2045,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f28LPwR8BdY; see also Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, which refers frequently to Teilhard de Chardin.

68. Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain, 14.

69. Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, 272.

70. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” 197–222

71. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2, 276.

72. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2, 278.

73. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2, 385.

74. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2, 398.

75. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2, 317.

76. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 407.

1. Novalis, Schriften, 587.

2. Bergson, The Meaning of the War.

3. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, 36.

4. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §323.

5. See Lefebvre, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, 73. “Does not the identification presupposed between the ardent life of a symphony, the animal life of an organism and the internal life of the state, abuse this metaphor?”

6. Lefebvre, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, 147.

7. Heller, Sovereignty, 91.

8. Heller, Sovereignty, 91.

9. See Deutsch, “Chapter 2. Some Classical Models in the History of Thought,” in The Nerves of Government. One could also find a similar discourse on international relations in Morgenthau’s magisterial work Politics amongNations (1967), where he spelled out the implication of mechanism to international relations in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century: “The idea of a balance among a number of nations for the purpose of preventing any one of them from becoming strong enough to threaten the independence of the others is a metaphor taken from the field of mechanics. It was appropriate to the way of thinking of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which liked to picture society and the whole universe as a gigantic mechanism, a machine or a clockwork, created and kept in motion by a divine watchmaker.” (167)

10. Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, 33.

11. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.

12. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 42.

13. Schmitt responded to Blumenberg in Political Theology II, where he accused Blumenberg of generalizing his notion of secularization with that of others, such as religion and eschatology, and gave rise to misunderstandings; see Political Theology II, 117. In an expanded version of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 98, Blumenberg acknowledged Schmitt’s reproach: “This reproach is justified. It was the second (1970) Politische Theologie’s working out of the conceptual difference in relation to ‘legitimacy’ that makes clear for the first time what had been the basis of the preference of the concept of secularization in the first (1922) Politische Theologie.”

14. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Part I, chapter 3.

15. Löwith, Meaning in History, 54: “This occidental conception of history, implying an irreversible direction toward a future goal, is not merely occidental. It is essentially a Hebrew and Christian assumption that history is directed toward an ultimate purpose and governed by the providence of a supreme insight and will—in Hegel’s terms, by spirit or reason as ‘the absolutely powerful essence.’”

16. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 27.

17. See Schmitt, “Drei Möglichkeiten eines christlichen Geschichtsbildes” 162. Whether Schmitt’s claim is valid would be another debate.

18. What is presented above is Blumenberg’s reading of Löwith; however, Jean-François Kervégan contested Blumenberg’s reading for several reasons. First, Löwith more often uses the word Verweltlichung instead of Secularisierung; second, what Löwith presents was far more complex (it is plurivocal or equivocal) than what Blumenberg and Schmitt read. See Kervégan, “Les ambiguïtés d’un théorème.”

19. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 28.

20. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 8.

21. See Blumenberg and Schmitt, Briefwechsel 1971–1978, 33.

22. See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 93, reflecting on Schmitt’s interpretation of De Maistre’s political philosophy as reduction of the state to the element of decision and his comparison of it with creatio ex nihilo, Blumenberg asks if “it is possible for men to use the gesture of a creatio ex nihilo ‘Romantically’ and in such a way as to establish historical continuity.”

23. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 94.

24. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 118.

25. Monod, “La sécularisation et ses limites.”

26. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 21.

27. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 63.

28. See Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 5: “Its defect is that, as a result of a dogmatic and moralistic abstraction, it fails to recognize the historical distinctiveness of the movement.”

29. Schmitt, Political Theology, 53.

30. Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, 6.

31. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, 207; this is also McCormick’s main thesis in the book, where he states on page 4, “My claim is that Schmitt’s critique of liberalism—particularly as it is directed at modern parlimentarism and constitutional law—is based on a broader criticism of modern thought that he sees as having been infiltrated by the technological, which he often equates with the economic and the positivistic.” Scheuerman criticized that Schmitt “too readily assumes that liberalism necessarily entails a commitment to legal formalism,” see Scheuerman, The End of Law, 9.

32. Scheuerman, The End of Law, 31.

33. In Schmitt’s Hobbes book, he refers to French professor of public law René Capitant’s characterization of Hobbes as a “mystic totalist”; see Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 77.

34. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 63.

35. McCormick’s book provides a very detailed and rich assessment of the question of technology in Schmitt’s criticism of liberalism; it also contextualizes Schmitt’s theory of technology in his time, namely, the opposition between Naturwissenschaft and Geistwissenschaft, and the triumph of the former over the latter. See McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, 104.

36. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 99.

37. Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.

38. In contrast to Hobbes, we find in Rousseau the comparison of power to the body instead of mechanics; see Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, 217: “The principle of political life is in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the heart of the State; the executive power is its brain, giving movement in all the parts. The brain might be paralyzed and yet the individual can still live. A man might be an imbecile but still live; but as soon as the heart stops, the animal died.” A similar (but more detailed) comparison can also be found in Rousseau’s earlier text Discours sur l’economie politique, published in the fifth volume of the Encyclopaedia in November 1755.

39. Voigt, Denken in Widersprüchen, 309: “Die Souveränität gibt dem Staat einen Halt und fügt ihn aus seinen verschiedenen Bestandteilen zusammen, wie die Seele den Körper, oder, wie er mit einem anderen Bild sagt, wie der Kiel das Schiff.”

40. Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 200.

41. Note that Richard Tuck and others pointed out that according to Bodin, princes are also civilly bounded by their contract; Tuck concluded that “Bodin is not treated as a theorist of ‘absolutism’ until well into the seventeenth century.” See Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 48.

42. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 32.

43. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, 54. If we understand Schmitt’s remark correctly, then, first, the sovereign in Hobbes cannot be reduced to one single image, but rather should be understood as a combination of these four beings; second, Bodin did not associate the state with mechanism, and neither did he take geometry into account in his political thought (which is closely associated with geometric reasoning), as did latecomers such as Grotius and Hobbes. In other words, the question of machine is fundamental in Hobbes’s theory of the state, and that is also central to his difference from Bodin.

44. See Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 2.

45. See Part IV of Discourse on Method, in Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, 126–30; as well as in the third Meditation of Meditations on First Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 24–36.

46. This also points to a materialism in Hobbes. For the reading of Hobbes as materialist, see Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker; see also Bardin, “Liberty and Representation in Hobbes: A Materialist Theory of Conatus.”

47. Hobbes, De motu, XII.4—see Hobbes, Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined; also cited by Andrea Bardin, Mechanicism as Science and Ideology, 124.

48. Hobbes, Elements of Law, XIX.7, in Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory, 202.

49. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.

50. Hobbes, Leviathan, 76.

51. Hobbes, Leviathan, 77.

52. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, “Book I: Of Law in General.”

53. Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, 82.

54. Ashcraft, “Hobbes’s Natural Man,” 1092.

55. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13, 77.

56. Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, “Such is, even at present, the degree of foresight in the Caribbean: he sells his cotton bed in the morning, and comes in the evening, with tears in his eyes, to buy it back, not having foreseen that he should want it again the next night,” 98; “The Caribbeans, the people in the world who have as yet deviated least from the state of nature, are to all intents and purposes the most peaceable in their amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though they live in a burning climate which seems always to add considerably to the activity of these passions,” 110; “What a spectacle must the painful and envied labors of a European minister of state form in the eyes of a Caribbean!” 137.

57. Already at the beginning of Rousseau’s second discourse, we read, “The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things, than to show their true origin.” See Rousseau, Second Discourse, in The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, 88.

58. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 168–69.

59. Strauss, positioning his interpretation as contra Cassirer’s reading of Hobbes, argues that it is not only his mechanism (including his dependence on euclidean geometry) but also his anthropology that defines his politics, see Pelluchon, Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism, 153; see also Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 10.

60. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 4.

61. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 27.

62. Hobbes, “Treatise ‘Of Liberty and Necessity,’” in Hobbes and Bramhall, Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, 24.

63. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter XVII, 106.

64. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter XVII, 108.

65. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 33.

66. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 67.

67. There is a rather interesting misreading that the postwar Schmitt turned against the prewar Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes. See Guilhot, “Automatic Leviathan,” 135: “Schmitt’s discussion of Hobbes now departed radically from his earlier interpretation. In 1938, he had faulted Hobbes for his choice of a mechanical symbol for the state and for the resulting failure to produce a political myth commanding obedience beyond mere rational argumentation. . . . In 1965, in a complete reversal, Schmitt saw in Hobbes a political theologian who saved the political by locating the soul of the state outside and above its technical, machine-like body.” The reason is, I believe, that the author didn’t really understand the question of mechanism in Hobbes and Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes.

68. Strauss’s main critique of Schmitt’s concept of the political is that it remains within the framework of liberalism, and Schmitt being a liberal moralist. Schmitt’s concept of the political targets liberalism for liberalism is the negation of the political. In so doing, Schmitt affirms a morality, which is opposed to pacifism—for him pacifism means reducing politics to entertainment. Schmitt’s affirmation of the political is also the affirmation of the state of nature, the affirmation of the individualistic liberal society; see Strauss, “Note on the Concept of the Political,” Note 30, 119. “Schmitt is tying himself to his opponents’ view of morality instead of questioning the claim of humanitarian-pacifist morals to be morals; he remains trapped in the view that he is attacking.”

69. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 58. Hobbes focused on public peace and the right of sovereign power; individual freedom of thought was an implicit right open only as long as it remained private. Now, it is the inverse: individual freedom of thought is the form-giving principle, the necessities of public peace as well as the right of the sovereign power having been transformed into mere processes.

70. Strauss, “Note on the Concept of the Political,” Note 14, 108. “If it is true that the final self-awareness of liberalism is the philosophy of culture, we may say in summary that liberalism, sheltered by and engrossed in a world of culture, forgets the foundation of culture, the state of nature, that is, human nature in its dangerousness and endangeredness. Schmitt returns, contrary to liberalism, to its author, Hobbes, in order to strike at the root of liberalism in Hobbes’s express negation of the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes in an unliberal world accomplishes the founding of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes the critique of liberalism.”

71. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 63.

72. Schmitt’s most explicit comment on the mechanism and organism opposition is to be found in a much later article “Der Gegensatz von Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,” 165–78.

73. Schmitt, “Der Gegensatz von Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,” 168.

74. Schmitt, Political Theology, 63.

75. Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, 95.

76. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 41.

77. Rasch, “The Emergence of Legal Norms,” 93–103.

78. Rasch, “The Emergence of Legal Norms,” 100: “The practicing judge, in other words, engages in a form of reflective judgment, ascending from the particular to the universal, or rather, constructing the universal in response to the particular, by means of a mechanism that bears, not surprisingly, a striking resemblance to aspects of Kantian aesthetic judgment.”

79. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19.

80. In “Der Gegensatz von Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,” 169–70, Schmitt listed seven meanings of the word organic: (1) not mechanical, (2) not from outside, (3) not from above, (4) not violent, (5) not atomic and not individualistic, (6) not particular, (7) opposite to all that is active and conscious.

81. Schmitt, Glossarium, 124–25: “Das ist das geheime Schlüsselwort meiner gesamten geistigen und publizistischen Existenz: das Ringen um die eigentlich katholische Verschärfung (gegen die Neutralisierer, die ästhetischen Schlaraffen, gegen Fruchtabtreiber, Leichenverbrenner und Pazifisten).”

82. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 9.

83. Schmitt, Glossarium, 159: “Es gibt in der ganzen Weltgeschichte nichts, was so frei von jedem Erlösungsbedürfnis wäre, so völlig immun gegen jede Anwandlung eines solchen Bedürfnisses wie Hegels Philosophie der Identität des Seins und des Nicht-Seins zu einer Verbindung, die nicht etwa nur Verbindung, complexio oder coincidentia oppositorum ist, sondern Verbindung der Verbindung und der Nicht-Verbindung, Identität der Identität und der Nicht-Identität, ewiger Prozeß, ewige Unruhe; wer das begreift, braucht keine Erlösung mehr.”

84. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 10.

85. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 11.

86. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 11.

87. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 18.

88. Marder, Groundless Existence, 149.

89. Stark, “Complexio Oppositorum: Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt,” 59.

90. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 15.

91. Marder, Groundless Existence, 159.

92. See Schmidgen, “The Life of Concepts,” 240, where Schmidgen also cited Canguilhem’s comment in La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIII siècles, 123: “Perhaps vitalism is merely the sentiment of an ontological, i.e., chronologically irreducible anticipation of life with respect to mechanical theory and technology, to intelligence and the simulation of life.”

93. See Hohendahl, Perilous Futures, 42.

94. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, 95.

95. See Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt.

96. Delacroix, “Schmitt’s Critique of Kelsenian Normativism,” 30.

97. Schmitt, “Diktatur und Belagerungszustand,” 157, quoted in Scheuerman, The End of Law, 32.

98. See UNESCO, “AI and the Rule of Law: Capacity Building for Judicial Systems,” https://www.unesco.org/en/artificial-intelligence/rule-law/mooc-judges.

99. Schmitt, “Neutralization,” in Concept of the Political, 94; also cited by Hooker, Carl Schmitt’s International Thought, 113.

100. Schmitt, “Neutralization,” 140; also cited by McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, 44.

101. See Falk, “The Modern Epimetheus,” 4

102. Schmitt, “Drei Möglichkeiten eines christlichen Geschichtsbildes,” 166. This reading of Epimetheus is contrary to Massimo Cacciari’s reading, to which we will return in chapter 7.

103. Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, 143.

104. Anter, “The State as Machine,” 209.

105. See Die Bibliothek Carl Schmitt, edited by the Carl-Schmitt-Gesellschaft, https://www.carl-schmitt.de/forschung/privatbibliothek-carl-schmitts/.

106. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 57.

107. One could also see its continuation in the liberal tradition, notably John Locke’s juxtaposition of the “Law of Opinion or Reputation” (or the Law of Private Censure) to “Devine and Civil Law” in his celebrated An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

108. Hooker, Carl Schmitt’s International Thought, 46.

109. Strauss, “Letter to Hoffman,” January 27, 1965, Strauss Archive, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, cited by Howse, Leo Strauss, 61.

110. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 34.

111. Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, 11.

112. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, 86: “If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domains—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.”

113. Schmitt, Dialogues on Power and New Space, 46.

114. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 64.

115. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 67.

116. Schmitt, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 44.

117. Schmitt, “Hegel and Marx,” 391.

118. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, 85.

119. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, 95.

120. AP News, “Putin: Leader in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule World,” https://apnews.com/article/bb5628f2a7424a10b3e38b07f4eb90d4.

121. Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State,” 395.

122. See Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 49: “War, the readiness for death of fighting men, the physical annihilation of other men who stand on the side of the enemy, all that has no normative, rather an existential meaning, indeed, in the reality of a situation of real struggle against a real enemy, and not in whatever ideals, programs, or normative concepts.”

123. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.

124. Strauss, On Hegel, 356.

125. I want to thank Conor Heaney for pointing out to me, “Indeed, the development of the Courts of Equity in England and Wales are partially developed from this idea: that sometimes justice is only served via the suspension of the rule. This has developed into an entire body of law and doctrines to which English and Welsh courts have access to: doctrines which allow courts discretion to decide beyond the contours of certain ordinary rules precisely so that justice can be seen to be served. This sort of ‘routine’ form of exceptionalism (routine insofar as it is now built into the functioning of legal institutions) seems like an interesting form of exceptionalism which, at first glance, is not obviously grasped by the Schmittean exception: the exception can itself become a normalised part of institutional-administrative practice.” The above comment implies two questions: whether the power that makes exceptions is absolute, and if exceptionalism is necessary and under what condition. We will discuss these questions in chapter 5 by reading Derrida.

126. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19.

127. Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

128. Schmitt, “Reich, Staat, Bund,” in Positionen und Begriffe, 198.

129. Voigt, Denken in Widersprüchen, 50.

130. Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, 32.

131. Schmitt, State, Movement, People, 35.

132. Voigt, Denken in Widersprüchen, 46.

133. Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, 292. “Für Hegel aber ist schon dieser preußische Staat ein Reich, und zwar ein Reich der objektiven Vernunft und der Sittlichkeit, und es ist selbstverständlich, daß mit diesem Staat nicht ein beliebiges Gemeinwesen im Sinne des neutralen Staatsbegriffs einer allgemeinen Staatslehre, sondern der politisch-geschichtlich konkrete preußische Staat der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts gemeint ist.”

134. See Ottmann, “Hegel und Carl Schmitt,” 234. In State, Movement, People, Schmitt wrote “Was an Hegels mächtigem Geisterbau überzeitlich groß und deutsch ist, bleibt auch in der neuen Gestalt weiter wirksam.”

135. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §216, 203.

136. See Scheuerman, The End of Law, 40–41n21.

137. For a more elaborated account of the question of monism and pluralism of state ethics and Schmitt’s critique of William James’s pluralism, see Schmitt, “Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat (1930)” in Positionen und Begriffe.

138. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 20.

139. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 90–91.

140. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 30.

141. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 47; also cited by Hohendahl, Perilous Futures, 162.

142. Hohendahl, Perilous Futures, 128.

143. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 60.

144. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 77: “Only revolutionary war made him a key figure of world history. However, what is one to make of him in the age of atomic weapons of mass destruction? In a thoroughly organized technical world, the old, feudal-agrarian forms and concepts of combat, war, and enmity disappear. That is obvious. But do combat, war, and enmity thereby also disappear and become nothing more than harmless social conflicts?”

145. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 21n32. §243–46 of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is on civil society and poverty; Schmitt refers to Marxist interpretation, not Marx’s commentary on Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, because the commentaries that Marx left us only started from §261.

146. See Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 80.

147. Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian.”

1. Rousseau, Social Contract, 175.

2. Notably Carl von Savigny’s 1814 Concerning the Vocation of Legislation and Jurisprudence, where Savigny rejected the ahistorical validity of natural law regardless of time and nation; he also proposed to understand the nature of law in terms of historical deduction from Roman Law. See Ulmen, “The Sociology of the State,” 14–15.

3. Rasch, “The Emergence of Legal Norms,” 97. Rasch quoted the criticism of the neo-Kantian philosopher Emil Lask in his “Rechtsphilosophie” (1905): “The criterion of communal authority is thereby eliminated altogether, and in its place appears reason (Vernunft) as a higher formal source of law, from which ‘law’ emanates without and against human positing, so that law that is not in conformity with reason becomes formally nullified and no longer deserves to be called law, but rather only brutal arbitrariness and violence.”

4. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 91.

5. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 50.

6. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 119.

7. Bartelson, in his Sovereign as Symbolic Form, after exposing the multiple definitions of sovereignty, turns to Ernst Cassirer’s concept of the symbolic form for help. Cassirer’s symbolic form, in a broader sense, refers to various meaning systems where one can identify the symbol’s mythical, representative, and significative function; in a narrow sense, it refers to an organic whole (like in Gestalt theory) without which the meaning of the symbol cannot be fully understood. I am not very sure if Bartelson’s application of Cassirer’s symbolic form is a satisfactory way of elucidating the nature of the sovereignty.

8. Onuf, The Mightie Frame, 95.

9. Thanks to colleagues from the law school of the University of Kent for emphasizing this difference.

10. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.

11. Rasch, Carl Schmitt, 53–54.

12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A249, 312.

13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 308, 318: “Such an intuition—viz., intellectual intuition—lies absolutely outside our cognitive power, and hence the use of the categories can likewise in no way extend beyond the boundary containing the objects of experience.”

14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 170.

15. Quoted by Bartelson, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form, 22.

16. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.2.4., 33.

17. Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, 52. Italics in original.

18. Stiegler, Philosophising by Accident, 53.

19. Suganami, “Understanding Sovereignty through Kelsen/Schmitt,” 522.

20. Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” 45.

21. Rasch, Carl Schmitt, 56.

22. Schmitt, Glossarium, 388.

23. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 193.

24. Raz, The Authority of Law, 95; see also Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, 116: “To interpret these acts of human beings as legal acts and their products as binding norms, and that means to interpret the empirical material which presents itself as law as such, is possible only on the condition that the basic norm is presupposed as a valid norm. The basic norm is only the necessary presupposition of any positivistic interpretation of the legal material.”

25. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 202.

26. Heller, Sovereignty, 92.

27. Suganami, “Understanding Sovereignty through Kelsen/Schmitt,” 521: “But the whole intellectual enterprise of seeking the origins of positive legal norms in the so-called basic norm is doomed. All it achieves is a redundant circular reassurance.”

28. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, Part I §9.1, 64.

29. Schmitt, Political Theology, 21.

30. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, Part I §9.2, 64, translation modified; Eine Norm setzt niemals sich selbst, which literally means “a norm doesn’t posit itself,” is translated as “a norm doesn’t establish itself.” We may miss the meaning of Selbstsetzung (self-positing), which is the principle of organism; in this sense Schmitt’s criticism of positivism as merely mechanical is brought into problem by himself.

31. Derrida, Rogues, 154: “We did not have to wait for Schmitt to learn that the sovereign is the one who decides exceptionally and performatively about the exception, the one who keeps or grants himself the right to suspend rights or law; nor did we need him to know that this politico-juridical concept, like all the others, secularizes a theological heritage.”

32. Derrida, Rogues, 141.

33. Cacciari, Europe and Empire, 55.

34. Derrida, Rogues, 149. Italics in original.

35. Derrida, Rogues, 149.

36. See also Derrida, “The Force of Law,” 971.

37. Derrida, Rogues, 149.

38. It might be interesting to note that Stiegler’s rupture with Derrida can be seen as an effort to shift from the transcendental or the quasi-transcendental to an immanent historical analysis of technicity, inspired both by Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon. Despite the crucial role played by the supplement in Derrida’s work, Stiegler reproaches the philosopher of deconstruction for being unconcerned with its history; see Stiegler, “Discrétiser le temps,” footnote 6.

39. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, 29.

40. Howse, “Europe and the New World Order,” 101–2.

41. See Cacciari, Europe and Empire.

42. See Rasch, “A Just War or Just a War,?” 1683: “Schmitt the nationalist, might also be Schmitt, the international multiculturalist, who offers those who ‘obstinately’ wish to resist the ‘West’ a theoretical foothold.” The same thing could also be said about Herder.

43. Schmitt, “Über das Verhältnis der Begriffe Krieg und Feind,” in Positionen und Begriffe, 245.

44. Schmitt, “Wisdom of the Cell,” in Ex Captivitate Salus, 71.

45. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 85.

46. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §331: “It is no less essential that this legitimacy should be rendered complete through its recognition by other states, although this recognition requires a guarantee that where a state is to be recognized by others, it shall likewise recognize them, i.e. respect their independence; and so it comes about that they cannot be indifferent to each other’s internal affairs.”

47. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 94.

48. Derrida, Rogues, 101.

49. We recall that in Greek mythology, Epimetheus committed the fault for not giving the gift to the human being but only animals, and he also opened Pandora’s box; Schmitt compared Epimetheus with Abel in Glossarium, 180; Hjalmar Falk opposes Schmitt, the Christian Epimetheus, to the Christian Prometheanism, namely, the “anti-religion of technicity,” “the religion of technical progress,” “a religion of technical miracles,” etc. See Falk, “The Modern Epimetheus.”

50. Schmitt, “Raum und Großraum im Völkerrecht,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 239.

51. See Heaney, Rhythm.

52. Hooker’s emphasis on this relation between Ortung and Ordnung in his Carl Schmitt’s International Thought is significant, because it also points to the question of locality, the necessity to orient, to erörtern.

53. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 92.

54. Schmitt, “Die Einheit der Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 500: “Auch im Jus Publicum Europaeum gab es eine Einheit der Welt. Sie war europazentrisch, aber sie war nicht die zentrale Macht eines einzigen Herrn der Welt. Ihr Gefüge war pluralistisch und ermöglichte eine Koexistenz mehrerer politischer Größen, die sich gegenseitig nicht als Verbrecher, sondern als Träger autonomer Ordnungen betrachten konnten.”

55. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 126–27.

56. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 149.

57. Schmitt, “Raum und Großraum im Völkerrecht,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 235–36.

58. Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 271.

59. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 43.

60. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 49.

61. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 9–10.

62. Hooker, Carl Schmitt’s International Thought, 75.

63. Schmitt, “Welt großartigster Spannung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 514: “Durch die kleine Schrift Land und Meer gewann ich zum erstenmal einen Begriff von der Bedeutung der Elemente als Kräfte weltgeschichtlicher Auseinandersetzungen.”

64. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 53, italics are mine.

65. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 73, “In its original sense, however, nomos is precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a constitutive historical event—an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law first is made meaningful.”

66. Schmitt, “The New Nomos of the Earth,” in Nomo sof the Earth, 352.

67. Schmitt, “The New Nomos of the Earth,” in Nomos of the Earth, 352.

68. Schmitt, “The New Nomos of the Earth,” in Nomos of the Earth, 352.

69. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 293

70. Schmitt, “Großraum gegen Universalismus,” in Positionen und Begriffe, 295; “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 290.

71. Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 282

72. Schmitt, “Großraum gegen Universalismus,” 297.

73. Schmitt, “Großraum gegen Universalismus,” 299.

74. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 235.

75. It is not without interest to observe that the Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani made a similar analysis that resonates with Schmitt’s analysis of sea power. Nishitani analyzed three civilizations: Mediterranean (Roman world), Atlantic (Anglo-American world), and Pacific, and claimed that the Pacific has become a hegemonic center of the globe; he also saw that Japan, being on the edge of the Atlantic civilization, had the historical duty to explore the Pacific. See Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 107.

76. Schmitt, “Die Einheit der Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 503; see also Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 13.

77. Schmitt, “Die Einheit der Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 505: “Der Osten insbesondere hat sich der Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels nicht anders bemächtigt, wie er sich der Atombombe und anderer Erzeugnisse der westlichen Intelligenz bemächtigt hat, um die Einheit der Welt im Sinne seiner Planungen zu verwirklichen.”

78. Schmitt, “Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt-Gegensatzes von Ost und West,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 537: “Die heutige kommunistische Revolution des Ostens aber besteht darin, daß sich der Osten eine von der christlichen Religiosität abgelösten europäischen Technik bemächtigt.”

79. Schmitt, “Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 540, “Was sich gegen Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts abgelöst hat, ist also nicht, wie Arnold Toynbee meint, ein ‘technischer Splitter,’ sondern etwas anderes. Eine europäische Insel löste sich vom europäischen Kontinent ab und eine neue, von der Insel getragene maritime Welt stellte sich der Welt des festen Landes gegenüber.”

80. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man.

81. Derrida, Rogues, 158. A similar argument was made in Habermas and Derrida’s cosigned article on Europe’s responsibility and its autonomy against the U.S. unilateral policy in the wake of the United States’ war in Iraq and the European political leaders’ call for European unity with the United States. See Habermas and Derrida, “February 15.”

82. Schmitt, “Die Einheit der Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 501. “Nun ist diese Hegelsche Philosophie scheinbar idealistisch; sie erblickt das Ziel der Menschheit in der Einheit des zu sich selbst zurückkehrenden Geistes und der absoluten Idee, nicht in der materiellen Einheit einer elektrifizierten Erde.”

83. Schmitt, “Die Einheit der Welt,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 496.

84. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, 95.

85. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 178.

86. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 57. Land and Sea was published in 1942; in an earlier essay “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung” (republished in 1941 in Staat, Großraum, Nomos), Schmitt did not fail to disclose his disappointment of the “spatial consciousness” of air, which he expected to be analogical to that which is brought about by the sea. Instead Schmitt mocked, “im Gegenteil, der Gedanke der territorialen Souveränität des Staates im atmosphärischen Raum in besonders betonter Weise die Grundlage aller bisherigen vertraglichen und sonstigen Regelungen des internationalen Flug- und Funkwesens geworden. Vom technischen Standpunkt aus ist das sonderbar und geradezu grotesk, besondersbei territorial kleinen Staaten, wenn man bedenkt, wie viel ‘Souveränitäten’ ein modernes Flugzeug unterstehen soll, wenn es in wenigen Stunden über viele kleine Staaten hinwegfliegt, oder gar was aus den vielen Staatshoheiten über alle die elektrische Wellen wird, die ununterbrochen mit Sekundenschnelle durch den atmosphärischen Raum über den Erdball kreisen,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 304.

87. Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 308.

88. In “Grossraum gegen Universalismus” Schmitt discussed the Asian Monroe Doctrine and referred to a book by Johnson Long titled La Mandchourie et la doctrine de la porte ouverte (1933), in which the author outlined the problematic of the Asian Monroe Doctrine. Schmitt summarized this in three points; the third point says that Monroe Doctrine is obsolete due to the development of the modern transportation system. During Monroe’s time, the United States was isolated—that being the background of the doctrine, but in 1933 transportation technology had already created a globalized world. Schmitt criticized the author as being contradictory and wrote that it only shows that modern transportation technology allows American imperialism to intervene in others’ internal affairs more effectively.

89. Bratton, The Stack.

90. Arendt, The Human Condition, 1.

91. Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 309. “Das Reich ist nicht einfach ein vergrößerter Staat, so wenig wie der Großraum ein vergrößerter Kleinraum ist. Das Reich ist auch nicht identisch mit dem Großraum, aber jedes Reich hat einen Großraum und erhebt sich dadurch so wohl über den durch die Ausschließlichkeit seines Staatsgebietes räumlich gekennzeichneten Staat wie über den Volksboden eines einzelnen Volkes.”

92. Schmitt, “Der Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht,” in Positionen und Begriffen, 312. “In ihm [Begriff des Reiches] haben wir den Kern einer neuen völkerrechtlichen Denkweise, die vom Volksbegriff ausgeht und die im Staatsbegriff enthaltenen Ordnungselemente durchaus bestehen läßt, die aber zugleich den heutigen Raumvorstellungen und den wirklichen politischen Lebenskräften gerecht zu werden vermag; die ‘planetarisch,’ d. h. erdraumhaft sein kann, ohne die Völker und die Staaten zu vernichten und ohne, wie das imperialistische Völkerrecht der westlichen Demokratien, aus der unvermeidlichen Überwindung des alten Staatsbegriffs in ein universalistisch-imperialistisches Weltrecht zu steuern.”

93. Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung,” in Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 305.

94. Hooker, Carl Schmitt’s International Thought, 147.

95. See Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 211–13; the term Großraum is transcribed in katakana as グロース・ラウム and translated into kanji as 広域圈 (kōikiken, literally, “sphere of wide territories”), which is then identified as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

96. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 247. Nishitani claimed that “Moralische Energie is the essential ingredient of any such transformation. To restate the argument, the ethical foundations (konpon) of Greater East Asia are to be secured by the dissemination of Japanese moralische Energie to the various peoples of the region, and this process will help in a substantial way to enhance their respective levels of subjectivity.”

97. See Parsley, “Seasons in the Abyss.”

98. Kojève, “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” 117: “Marx and the Marxists really erred in only one way. They assumed that capitalists were exactly as naive and shortsighted, exactly as unwise and blind, as the bourgeois political economists and intellectuals generally, who believed themselves to have ‘refuted’ Marxist theory in books of varying thickness.”

99. Kojève, “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” 122: “Now, if such a country really invests the entire surplus value, or even more than that, in this way, one can, to be sure, no longer speak of colonialism in the conventional sense. For then one is certainly, de facto, no longer taking anything, and is even giving something. And when the country in question spends far more than is collected by it, then it must even really be called anticolonialist.”

100. Thiel, “The Straussian Moment,” 207: “The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

101. Crary, Scorched Earth.

102. Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy.

103. Glasze et al., “Contested Spatialities of Digital Sovereignty,” 6.

104. Glasze et al., “Contested Spatialities of Digital Sovereignty,” 14.

105. Bratton, The Stack, 35.

106. Reuters, “Majority Shareholders Vote in Favor of Delisting Didi from New York,” https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/majority-shareholders-vote-favor-delisting-didi-new-york-2022-05-23/.

107. Chris Rufo, “US House Energy and Commerce Committee Approves Bill that Would Force China-Based Company ByteDance to Sell TikTok,” https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/03/us-house-energy-and-commerce-committee-approves-bill-that-would-force-china-based-company-bytedance-to-sell-tiktok.

108. Probably only in this sense is it productive to talk about a politics of katechon, as a power of epoch making, which Massimo Cacciari explored in The Withholding Power. The imperial power considered as a katechontic one makes both a new epoch and an epoch of its own death, as Cacciari says, “Only this self-consciousness allows power to assume an eschatological character” (28); in a later passage, Cacciari also states that “by containing within itself the coming apostasy, even presaging it, the katechon works for its own death. Through the heterogenesis of ends he finds he has been ‘nurturing’ that seed that will sweep him away” (76).