“Economics, Politics, Imaginaries”系列讲座第三讲
主题： Carl Schmitt’s Book of Politics 卡尔·施密特的政治学著作
时间：2012年3月28日（周三）晚18:30—20:30
地点：逸夫馆9楼高研院报告厅
备注：英语演讲
Abstract:
For Foucault the age of Machiavelli and the questions of sovereignty is already a question of the pre-modern past. For Carl Schmitt – and for today
for Giorgio Agamben – the question of sovereignty is also the question of thepolitical. Schmitt’s political rejects the instrumentalism and
proceduralism of everyday institutional politics. Its basis instead is a fundamental political ontology. What kind of political ontology is at stake
here for Schmitt, Agamben and Hannah Arendt? In this humans differ from other animals in that we are political animals. And we humans for Schmitt are constituted as political by the decision of who is the friend and who is the enemy.
For Arendt this has to do with who is in and who is outside of the polis. The sovereign is he who decides this question of friend and enemy. But
how Western is Schmitt’s political? And by contrast what kind of political might be at stake in China? What sort of friend/enemy dichotomy - of who is
included and who is excluded - is implied by the filial relations of Confucian thought? What kind of political critique is possible in the context of Daoist disintegration of the actual of political institutions into the flow and flux, the jianghu (江湖) of the dao.
What kind of sovereignty is at stake when with Wang Hui, we think of the very non-Western overlap of nation and empire and Confucian space of civilization? International geo-politics has been based since 1648 and Westphalia on a contractual Hobbesian notion of treaty. The Chinese and Eastern tradition has instead featured not treaty but tribute. Treaty and tribute are in practice more or less unequal. Yet tribute is a question less of contract than of the gift and symbolic exchange.What are the implications of the rise of the East – of China and India – for international geo-politics? What kind sovereignty and what kind of political does thisentail?
