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Carl Schmitt, Saint Paul and Paradoxical Truth

A B S T R A C T Carl Schmitt’s decisionism has long been faulted for its indifference to the decision’s content. Some have portrayed the decision as an act taken for the sake of order rather than of anything inherent to what is decided; others have charged that Schmitt abandoned any external standpoint from which to privilege one political statement over another. This paper argues that these interpretations have missed the important role played by truth in Schmitt’s framework. It does so by tracking the affinities between Schmitt’s decisionism and Saint Paul’s notion of paradoxical truth. In Paul’s paradigm, something is true by virtue of its distance from all proof and codification, so that its validity stems solely from its proclamation. Reading Schmitt’s Weimar writings as drawing on such a notion of truth recasts the decision as that which guarantees as true what cannot be proven or codified. For the decision to fulfill its political function, Schmitt needs what is decided to possess a paradoxical character, and he needs it to be taken seriously as a truth by those who decide and acclaim it.