Partisan as Katechon : Carl Schmitt’s Myth of the Earth

Abstract

The topic of this article is a comparison of two figures in Carl Schmitt’s late thought—the partisan and the katechon. Treating the former as part of Schmitt’s polemical philosophy, in which the object of polemic is his contemporary liberal and pacifist view of the institution of war, the author shows that the German jurist actually treats the partisan as the one who restrains the advent of the age of the latter, fought in the air, thus defending the soil as the site of warfare. He juxtaposes Schmitt’s reflections on partisan warfare with his reflections on the significance of the soil and earth and the terrestrial way of life for law, showing, first, that for Schmitt, the partisan is the bearer of the myth of the land as the legitimation of political and legal institutions, and, second, that the figure of the partisan is the link that binds together Schmitt’s fundamentally inconsistent thought.