Estetica e istituzioni : forma e vita nell’Institutional Turn di Carl Schmitt

The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between aesthetics and life nested in Carl Schmitt’s morphology. From one hand, Schmitt appear to be inept to solve the problem of the relationship between form and life. Indeed, in Decisionism, Form prevails over life and, in Institutionalism, life prevails over Form. The former is inflexible and conservative, the latter weak and changeable. On the other side, Walter Benjamin sets up a deeper perspective to overcame Schmittian limits along the line of his early studies on German Romanticism. My aim is to prove – through the aesthetical background of these two political philosophers – that nowadays it is possible to understand the multifarious nexus between form and life only from both a political and an aesthetical perspective