Normalising Sovereignty: reflections on Schmitt’s notions of exception, decision, and normality

This article aims at illustrating how Schmitt has conceived sovereignty, essentially as a ‘normalising power’, the function of which consists primarily in securing and stabilising the existential-normal dimension of the life of the community. The sovereign lays down the conditions of ‘normality’ that could guarantee the subsistence and efficacy of the socio-legal order. In expounding this argument, this paper pursues a twofold purpose. First, in contrast to the common view, I will argue that by moving to a ‘concrete order thinking’ the theoretical architecture of sovereign power, as independent production of the normal and the abnormal, re-emerges in the figure of the leader (Fürher). Second, Schmitt’s theory of sovereign power allows for the consideration of the uneasy relationship between sovereignty and normality. Terms like norms, normality and normalisation tend to exclude any relation to sovereign power. Schmitt’s thought offers an alternative point of view to the accepted understanding of the idea of norm and normality. In this regard, I will advance the thesis that norms do not escape the sovereign moment of their establishment; which is not an accessory element but a principle at the very core of the normativity of the norm.