In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the exception and for a while the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich. The Buribunks ironically for beings that lived only for self-memorialisation has been mostly lost to history. However, the digital realm, with its emphasis on the informatic traces generated by human doing, and the continual interest in Schmitts work to explain and criticise contemporary constellations of power, suggests that The Buribunks is a text whose epoch has come.
This volume includes the first full translation into English of The Buribunks and a selection of critical essays on the text, its meanings in the digital present, its playing with and criticism of the literary form, and its place within Schmitts life and work. The Buribunks and the essays provide a complex, critical and provocative invitation to reimagine the relations between the human and their imprint and legacy within archives and repositories. There is a fundamental exploration of what it means to be a being intensely aware of writing itself.
This is not just a volume for critical lawyers, literary scholars and the Schmitt literati. It is a volume that challenges a broad range of disciplines, from philosophy to critical data studies, to reflect on the digital present and its assembled and curated beings. It is a volume that provides a set of fantastically located concepts, images and histories that traverse ideas and practices, play and politics, power and possibility.
Part I: Introducing The Buribanks
1 The Buribunks as law, technology and literature
Kieran Tranter and Edwin Bikundo
2 The Buribunks: An essay on the philosophy of history
Carl Schmitt, translated from the German by Gert Reifarth and Laura Petersen
3 Behind the words of Die Buribunken: Translators comments
Laura Petersen and Gert Reifarth
Part II: The Buribunks as typeset
4 The Buribunks, post-truth and a tentative cartography of informational
existence
Kieran Tranter
5 The theological-bureaucratic science fiction of Philip K. Dick and Carl
Schmitt: An economic theology of omniscience in The Buribunks
Timothy D. Peters
6 Inauthentic temporality and the age of hyperburibunkism
Richard Polt
7 Megarianism, emancipation and the (im)potentiality of political ontology: A
commentary on freedom in Schmitts dystopia
Michael P.A. Murphy
8 The challenges of anti-intellectual parody
Karen Petroski
9 Quantity turns into quality: Breathing life into dead scholasticism
Francine Rochford
Part III: The Buribunks as writing
10 On writing. Under control. The Buribunks and the autographic society of
control
Vittorio Lubrano
11 Modernist life-writing and early cinema in Carl Schmitts The Buribunks
Joseph Owen
12 Die Buribunken a pastiche: A mechanised modernity failing Hegel and
Kierkegaard
Nour Benghellab
13 Sola scriptura: Doubling of life and critique of modernity in The
Buribunks
Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa
14 Schmitts Roman links in The Buribunks: Enriching the satire
Karen Schultz
Part IV: The Buribanks as part of Schmitts wider oeuvre
15 Mephistophelean irony in Carl Schmitts Political Romanticism, The
Buribunks and Ex Captivitate Salus
Desmond Manderson and Edwin Bikundo
16 Imagined facts, actual enemies: The Buribunks and the political
Attila Gyulai
17 Between The Buribunks and the Christian Epimetheus
Fabrizio Grasso and Matteo Negro, translated by Carla Biondi
18 Schmitts life within the academy since 2001
Lachlan Robb, Charles Lawson, Catherine Pickering and Edwin Bikundo
Kieran Tranter is chair of law, technology and future in the School of Law, Queensland University of Technology. Kieran researches the legalities of technology and the technologies of legality. His current projects concern the motor vehicle in the governance of the Australian settler state, mobile connectivity and everyday life in the Global South.
Edwin Bikundo is a senior lecturer in the Law Futures Centre, Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Edwins research addresses international and comparative law, legal theory, and law and the humanities. He is currently finalising a book about Giorgio Agamben, international law and JohanWolfgang von Goethes Faust.
