La possibilità dell’alternativa: decisione politica in quanto dischiusura

This paper considers whether the category of sovereign “decision,” as it is used in Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, has analogies with the paradigm of “choice” as it is theorised in neoliberalism. Both decision and choice belong to that mode of judgement that “cuts” the field of alternatives in two; in two “extreme” alternatives. This mode of judgement not only presupposes the subject of the decision, but also sets up the terms of the choice, clearly indicating the optimal option. For Schmitt, a political decision arises in a “case of necessity”: in the “serious case” of war. And yet, it is precisely the neoliberal depoliticisation of war that reduces it to a rule, and every choice fundamentally to a stance for or against. To escape from the neoliberal reduction of political decision in the form of a choice, I examine another mode of decision, absent from Schmitt’s texts: “disclosedness”.