Aufhören oder Weiterdenken? Zur Frage des Umgangs mit Carl Schmitt. Eine Debatte mit Jean-François Kervégan

Why should we read Carl Schmitt, an authoritarian and at times convinced National Socialist jurist, today? What could we gain and learn from Schmitt’s thought that would be of more than historical interest? And how should his indissolubly ambivalent texts be dealt with, methodologically and theoretically? With this special issue we aim to pursue these questions in a debate with Jean-François Kervégan, whose book “Que faire de Carl Schmitt?”, provides a fruitful starting point for this. Our claim will be, with Kervégan, that thinking with Carl Schmitt today means not so much to engage with his answers, but rather to take up his questions and to bring them beyond the form he gives them, to reopen them in order to enable new approaches to contemporary problems of the state, the law and democracy.