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The Political Given: Decisionism in Schmitt's Concept of the Political

This article explores Carl Schmitt's conception of the political from the position of the aggressed. I argue that beneath the apparently active, identifying decisionism of the Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt articulates the insight that ‘we’ enter our political being only under the threat of existential annihilation. In this way, the genesis of the political occurs when ‘we’ are perceived to be the political victim of an enemy aggressor. Schmitt's Concept of the Political motivates a theory of the genesis of the political as received from the other.

This article is divided into three sections. First, I examine the...