Carl Schmitt, sovereignty, modernism

Abstract

Carl Schmitt has recently become a popular figure in humanities scholarship. In this turn, contemporary culture has amplified Schmitt’s insights about sovereignty, states of emergency and political decisions. His ideas have particularly disturbed and excited literary theorists, who use his writings as a methodological resource for approaching 21st century literary fiction. This type of critical work does not fully take into account Schmitt’s own encounters with, and exercises in, literature, art and cultural criticism. Concomitantly, nor does it understand his relationship to the literary cultures of his time and the artistic context within which he wrote his major philosophical works. In Europe and America, Schmitt’s life as a writer, stretching from the 1910s to the 1970s, is dominated by the aesthetic revolution of modernism. Using this framing, my thesis asks: Does Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty— of ‘he who decides on the exception’—transform understandings of modernism? If so, how does this transformation attend to genres, forms and styles in ways that answer questions about sovereignty? How is sovereignty depicted in modernist literature? In response, this thesis analyses three works by definitive authors of literary modernism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (1939) and Samuel Beckett’s “Ping” (1967). It argues that these fictions respond to questions of sovereignty through their deployment of various, ironic aesthetic and representational techniques. Woolf’s mocking satire of melancholy ironizes sovereign authority as epoch-defining. Faulkner’s genresplicing, contrapuntal novel identifies failure as a contingent response to absolute sovereignty. Beckett’s prose short explores the relationship between anticipation and the human search for sovereign representation. The methods I am exercising in this thesis speak within continuing and ever more complicated debates about sovereignty.

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