M & D Deep Duck Misc.

[Mark Kohut]

Also Very miscellaneous on Benito Cereno. It seems when Philip Roth was younger, but after his earliest works, when he was separated---divorced, dunno---from a bad wife steadily trying to get more money from him, taking him to court, etc. And he sez he was a very angry man, going to the shrink who wrote up his analysis, thinly disguised, which Roth discovered .........he used to answer his phone for awhile as ' Benito Cereno here'. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 11, 2015, at 3:17 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 10.01.2015 16:30, Monte Davis wrote:
> 
>> >hints, verbal whiffs
>> 
>> I finished Empire of Necessity, and Benito Cerreno -- the (white) Spanish "captain" whose rebellious slaves actually command the ship -- will henceforward be closer in my mind to Weissmann/Blicero than ever 
>> 
> 
> That's interesting because Carl Schmitt identified himself with Benito Cereno strongly.  
> > Ich bin der letzte, bewußte Vertreter des jus publicum
> Europaeum [...] und erfahre sein Ende so, wie Benito
> Cereno die Fahrt des Piratenschiffs erfuhr.
>         (Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus 75)
> 
> Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), specialist, as he tells us in the epigraph, in public and constitutional law, remains the most controversial figure in the history of German legal scholarship, and one of the few right-wing intellectuals to continue attracting interest from a variety of political spectra (Müller 272). He is also the most literary political thinker of the twentieth century, one who allowed myth and fiction to shape his ideas about law to create a unique "political theology," or, to use Ellen Kennedy's term, a "political expressionism" ("Politischer Expressionismus" 233–51). Kennedy has also suggested, controversially, that Schmitt's thought had a far-reaching influence on the theory of the Frankfurt School ("Carl Schmitt"). Nikolaus Müller-Scholl suggests that several early plays by Bertolt Brecht were meant to exhibit the aporia of state order that Schmitt theorized and that led to Nazi totalitarianism (supported by Schmitt at least through 1936) as its answer. Together with his friend Ernst Jünger, Schmitt read the American authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe as prophets of the global situation of World War II and of the postwar period, including, as the epigraph points out, the waning of the epoch of national sovereignty. Schmitt's student Armin Mohler claims that Schmitt cited Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" more than any other work of world literature. Mohler states further that the title character of the novella "hat C. S. aufs intensivste beschäftigt" (Mohler and Schmitt 153 n. 74). Two paradoxes accompany these facts: the first is that Schmitt, a German nationalist, would use an American piece as his personal motto; the second is that, despite his fascination for the story, Schmitt never published a complete essay on the novella, as he did on Theodor Däubler's Nordlicht, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and other works. Schmitt's reading of "Benito Cereno," or, more accurately, his use of "Benito Cereno" as a political and legal allegory and as a persona, does not find incorporation into a single treatise, but rather emerges indirectly from a series of reflections and diary entries and as an influence on Schmitt's treatment of the law of the sea. <
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> http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/seminar_a_journal_of_germanic_studies/v042/42.2beebee.pdf
> 
> 
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