Complexio Oppositorum: Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt*

On November 22, 1923, Emmy Hennings received an ecstatic letter from Hugo Ball, her husband and fellow founder of Zurich Dada, describing his “constant immersion in jurisprudence”: For months, I have studied the writings of Professor Schmitt, of Bonn. He is more important for Germany than the entirety of the Rhineland, with its carbon mines included. Rarely have I read a philosophy with as much passion as his, and a philosophy of law at that! A great triumph for the German language and for legality. He seems to me even more precise than Kant, and rigorous like a Great Spanish Inquisitor when it comes to ideas.