According to Trawny, the experience of the archive is one of materiality. Every source of the archive, the work of an „Archon“ (i. e. an author), unfolds from a spectralitiy of matter or material. In this sense the work in an archive is primarily one of conservation and documentation. The problem of this handling with scripted matter rises inbetween the old metaphysical difference of form and content; form is here in itself the relation between the materiality of a certain textgenre (e.g. a letter) and its content. How are we dealing with this inbetween hermeneutically?

Reinhard Mehring has been researching Carl Schmitt’s work from the archives for 40 years and reports on the changing image of Schmitt over these years.

Peter Trawny: Professor of philosophy at the University of Wuppertal, head of the Martin Heidegger Institute, co-editor of the Martin Heidegger Complete Edition, philosopher and author.

Reinhard Mehring: Habilitation in Philosophy (Humboldt University) Berlin), has been Professor of Political Science at the University of Education in Heidelberg since 2007. He has written numerous books on Carl Schmitt and edited important Schmitt correspondence.