The Origin of Power: A Study on Carl Schmitt

In a 1954 work titled Dialogue on Power and Access to the Powerful, Carl Schmitt reflects on power and its ‘essence’. On the one hand, a strategy is in place to demonstrate Schmitt’s own non-involvement with the concrete exertion of power in the Third Reich, a non-involvement about which it is legitimate to have more than one doubt. What interests us in this article, however, is another side of the Dialogue: Schmitt’s reflection on power as such. Extremely careful about the mechanisms of power that men exert among themselves, Schmitt’s analysis has a background – to be deciphered – that refers to a non-immanent original dimension of power. To trace this dimension, whose references are scattered throughout the text, (a) we shall proceed to follow the course of the Dialogue on Power, pinpointing the tragic character established here with regard to human power, and (b) we will try to establish what for Schmitt is the origin, in its truth, of power. Lastly, (c) we will attempt to indicate a possible line of research in view of a horizon unacknowledged by Schmitt, that of a power that can have the possibility and the potency to destitute itself as domination, that is, as a series of relations of subordination that repeat and follow those between master (dominus) and servant.