Modernist life-writing and early cinema in Carl Schmitt's The Buribunks

Owen, Joseph (2022) Modernist life-writing and early cinema in Carl Schmitt's The Buribunks. In, Carl Schmitt and The Buribunks: Technology, Law, Literature. (Technology, Law, Literature) Routledge, pp. 180-204.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This chapter reads Carl Schmitt’s The Buribunks as both a serious literary attempt at modernist expression and an exuberant satire of its techniques and forms. Modernist perspectives on biography, autobiography and diary constitute what is often termed life-writing, and pertain to early artistic developments in cinema. These ideas illuminate Schmitt’s text, which provides an early intellectual foundation for his theoretical corpus. The central subject is a group of compulsive labourers, the physically malformed diary-keepers Schmitt calls the Buribunks. These bizarre figurations must perpetually document the present so as to record all events in history as they occur to them. This chapter argues that Schmitt uses tropes and genres of life-writing to bring into relief modernist representations of selfhood in the age of early twentieth-century technological modernity. This period posed many questions about the nature of representation and authority that haunted Schmitt in his lifelong discussions of sovereignty. Considering a variety of examples from literary and cinematic modernism – Virginia Woolf’s parody of biography, Orlando (1928), Gertrude Stein’s thinking on literary portraiture and poetics, and silent films from Robert J. Flaherty and Carl Theodor Dreyer – this chapter suggests the persisting influence of modernist aesthetics on Schmitt’s major philosophical works. The Buribunks anticipates ideas and convictions systematically elaborated on in Schmitt’s political theses. The specifically literary and inherently modernist character of his language, found particularly in his use of metaphor, inform his later doctrinal statements and critique of Hamlet. The importance of his stylistic encounter with the modernist revolution in literary and cinematic expression cannot be overstated. By summarising Schmitt’s parody of biographical, autobiographical and diaristic forms, this chapter seeks intersections in his approach and contemporary modernist attitudes. The Buribunks has a bearing on discussions about the modernist investigation into the nature of fictionality, which recognises fiction as a method of discovering truths otherwise inaccessible through scientific inquiry, realistic representation and statistical analysis.

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