Orders of Evil: Carl Schmitt, French Literature, and the Phenomenology of the Political

Abstract: This article offers a reassessment of the nature of Carl Schmitt’s “political theology” by returning to the contested relation between its two constitutive terms: does the political determine the theological, or vice versa? In reading Schmitt’s theory of the “autonomy of the political” against his constructive theology, I argue that the tropology of shadows unraveled in his diaries constitutes an alternative “shadow method” that exists in tension with the secular method proclaimed in Political Theology (1922). Schmitt’s reading of three French novels in the Catholic tradition which address the problem of evil reveals a version of Christofascism guided by protological concerns that ultimately eclipse any meaningfully universalist eschatology.