On a Stasis of Memory or Disrupting the Postliminium

Abstract

Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth is traversed from a spatial and a temporal logic. The first one links modern ‘global lines’, which separated Europe from its others, with the very foundation of law and, thus, also with the state of emergency. The concept of postliminium captures, in that same book, a crucial temporal aspect of those connections. Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, an Austrian historian from the nineteenth century, especially in his Travels from the Orient, is drawn into a privileged connection with Carl Schmitt. Fallmerayer’s view on Modern Greece and its double role at Europe’s periphery and cultural/historical center at the same time not only meets with Schmitt’s position, but, more interestingly, it permits the messianic side of Schmitt’s argument to become apparent from the viewpoint of the weak, the fragmented and the forgotten.