Political Romanticism - Tumblr Posts
To a great extent, all ecclesiastical and state institutions and forms, all legal concepts and arguments, everything that is official, and even democracy itself since the time it assumed a constitutional form are perceived as empty and deceptive disguises, as a veil, a façade, a fake, or a decoration. The words, both refined and crude, in which this is encompassed are more numerous and forceful than most of the corresponding idioms of other times; for example, the references to "simulacra" that the political literature of the seventeenth century employs as its characteristic shibboleth. Today the "backstage" that conceals the real movement of reality is constructed everywhere. This betrays the insecurity of the time and its profound sense of being deceived. An era that produces no great form and no representation based on its own presuppositions must succumb to such states of mind and regard everything that is formal and official as a fraud. This is because no era lives without form, regardless of the extent to which it comports itself in an economic fashion. If it does not succeed in finding its own form, then it grasps for thousands of surrogates in the genuine forms of other times and other peoples, only to immediately repudiate the surrogate as a sham.
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism
Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood. If we consider the situation from aspects such as these, then we should not always focus only on the good-natured pastoralists. On the contrary, we must also see the despair that lies behind the romantic movement — regardless of whether this despair becomes lyrically enraptured with God and the world on a sweet, moonlit night, utters a lament as the world-weariness and the sickness of the century, pessimistically lacerates itself, or frenetically plunges into the abyss of instinct and life. We must see the three persons whose deformed visages penetrate the colorful romantic veil: Byron, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, the three high priests, and at the same time the three sacrificial victims, of this private priesthood.
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism