Published: August 5, 2025
This entry reexamines Carl Schmitt’s foundational claim that “the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism” by confronting its implications in a world increasingly shaped by logistics, digitization, and the privatization of sovereignty. Where others might read Schmitt as a legal theorist or Nazi apologist, this dispatch dares to resurrect his lens—not to redeem it, but to rewire its framework for a post-industrial domain in which network routes, delivery infrastructures, and corporate contractors have assumed the functions once reserved for nation-states and mercenaries.
Schmitt's lens has always been provocative—his pairing of existentialism and jurisprudence, of the friend-enemy distinction with the authority to declare exception, laid the groundwork for a style of political theology that never quite shed its clerical shadow. But what if this framing was not merely theological in metaphor, but infrastructural in function?
Today, sovereignty is less about statehood and more about platformhood. The ability to determine access, to regulate visibility, to throttle or subsidize the flow of goods, people, and information—these are now the marks of sovereign capacity. Amazon's control of fulfillment centers, YouTube’s recommendation engine, and Uber’s surge pricing are not conveniences or utilities. They are declarations of the exception—instances when normative order is suspended and market prerogative rules absolutely.
In this light, logistics becomes political theology’s successor—not merely the movement of goods, but the capacity to declare whose needs justify motion and whose do not. The operator of a route holds not just a vehicle and a cargo, but a schema of priorities: what deserves to arrive, and when. The rider becomes priest, the van a tabernacle, the dispatch an act of canonization.
This dispatch therefore does not seek to historicize or romanticise Schmitt so much as it aims to reinstantiate the political as something lived—coded into software, priced into algorithms, and operationalized in a world of subcontracted responsibility. The modern contractor inherits not only the routes once mapped by empires, but the metaphysical weight of selection: what is deemed worthy of time, fuel, and labor.
And so a new form of political theology arises, not in seminar rooms or war cabinets, but in the dashboards of gig workers and the data centers of logistics firms. The exception is no longer declared at borders but inferred from metadata. And in this schema, to route is to assume sovereignty.