Bibliographical Comments on Carl Schmitt

Commenter Gabriel Sanchez has some interesting things to say. To me, the most interesting involve the availability of Schmitt's work in English. Given the amount of attention Schmitt has gotten in recent years, one would think that the gears would be turning and soon we'd have the complete works -- but to my knowledge, there is not even a scholarly edition of the complete works in German, much less in English. What we have in English are a series of rather small books and short translations scattered throughout journals, and up until this spring, Political Theology -- one of his most discussed books -- was out of print.

What's the deal?

And why not an anthology? For instance, I just picked up the standard Marx-Engels Reader (ed. Tucker), which seems to be an agreed-upon standard for non-experts seeking to get a sense of the scope of Marx's thought. From what I know of Schmitt's work, such an anthology would be comparatively easy to assemble. His tendency toward relatively short books would make it easy to include entire works and avoid the danger of printing a series of potentially misleading extracts, for instance. Given the current status of Schmitt's work in English, an anthology of 400-500 pages would represent not simply a valuable condensation of a larger body of work -- it would arguably be a major step forward for knowledge of Schmitt in the English-speaking world. Even if there are already 400-500 pages (in Norton Anthology format) worth of stuff out there in English right now, half of it is out of print and most of the rest is difficult to track down.

Maybe I can get a fellowship to go over to Germany and get started on this. But until then, does anyone have any idea why this problem is so pronounced, given that Schmitt has become so unavoidable in certain ways?

If that question doesn't do it for you, here's a stupid one: Does it seem to anyone else that Schmitt is referred to by his first and last name more often than other thinkers are? You've got Hegel, Derrida, Agamben, Benjamin (though he gets a first name more often than some), Adorno, Marcuse, Zizek.... and Carl Schmitt. Is it the unexpected "C" that so fascinates us?