Gabriel Tarde & Carl Schmitt's Homo Sacer

The French Criminologist, Gabriel Tarde's laws of imitation lay emphasis, surely ironically, upon Metternich's Holy Alliance of intimacy, hierarchy and novelty. So as not to be confused with Eugene Sue, Tarde stressed the temporal priority, for mimesis, of the object of desire over its mode of acquisition.

The hideous morning after of the Night of the Long Knives- the dawn of what Carl Schmitt called the Ausnahmezustand , or state of exception which Agamben reads into our own hung over decade- is about the coolness of Crime's dark-glasses not such spooky surveillance as Paranoia attributes to the Law's blindfold.


Consider what Carl Schmitt was actually responding to when he fucked up big time. Hitler was not German, was not entitled to the dignity of conscription, but had been brought into German politics by the German Army to push their 'stab in the back' theory. But the good little Corporal was a bad little soldier. First he renders Ludendorff ludic, then he stabs-in-the-back Von Schleicher, finally, he even blows up Hindenburg.


Contra Agamben, Hitler was Schmitt's Homo Sacer, who- too sulphurous to be a scapegoat, e'er convict e'en conscript- could become the Tardean object of imitation of a Law that, at last!. wasn't an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, albeit mere, of God.