The Instance of the Sovereign in the Unconscious: The Primal Scenes of Political Theology

Abstract

Schmitt’s claim that European modernity (the modern state form, the construction of human subjects as potentially and actually political subjects) emerges with the secularization of theological concepts stands on a weak account of mediation. This essay shows how a fantasy of the immediate encounter between two seemingly consubstantial domains —politics, theology— shapes contemporary critical language, making particular forms of freedom and sovereignty unthinkable. Freud’s reading of Schiller, and Lacan’s reading of Freud, serve as examples and as a methodological frame for showing how a strong account of literary mediation can set the scene for a different account of sovereignty and freedom than is available in the Schmittian tradition.