Jan Molina

University of Warsaw

Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereignty and Nomos in the Light of his Diaries

The goal of the paper is to present Carl Schmitt’s diaries as an essential source for understanding his concept of sovereignty, including its relationship to the categories of space and nomos.

According to M. Tielke, Schmitt’s views were influenced by his reading of Julien Green’s psychoanalytical novels, including Schmitt’s favorite “The Leviathan”. The paper presents key concepts of Carl Schmitt as a spatial projection of his philosophical and theological preoccupations connected with embodiment and embodied desires as described in Schmitt’s diaries. The author of the paper claims that this interpretation can be established within the framework of Schmitt‘s own philosophical stance and may hold a key to a coherent interpretation of Schmitt’s multilayered legacy. Schmitt’s views on the relation between decision, nomos (in both meanings: nemein and basileus) and, as well as his ‘everyday practices’ and an important figure of the ‘melting floe’ present in his diary are interpreted in relation to his reading of Green’s novels supported by the analysis of Green’s own diary.

After pointing out the correlation between Schmitt’s decisionist theory of sovereignty and his diaries, the author confronts Schmitt’s theory with Mykolas Romeris’ fundamentally different concept of sovereignty and Romeris’ diaries.