Unlike de Sá, Mika Ojakangas subscribes to what Louis Althusser would have called "an epistemological break" in Schmitt's corpus, expressed in the turn from the decisionism of his early thought to the institutionalism of his "mature" writings. But Ojakangas, too, is interested in the notion of the event as it relates to the law and its "sacred origins," traceable back to the telluric relation to the earth. Whereas the first legal order arises directly from land appropriation, which evokes the Heideggerian take on the "event of appropriation," the reinstitution of the law hinges on the forgetting of its sacred origins, as it does in Derrida's "Force of Law." Removed from its roots in sacred space, or the appropriated segment of the earth, law is not only deterritorialized, but it is uprooted from the concreteness of life and transformed into a set of normative rules. For Ojakangas, the event denotes the creation of sacred space and, thus, of the existentially concrete figure of law. Yet the question is whether the history of its subsequent reinstitution, unfolding under the sign of the forgetting of origins, is itself an integral part of the event, since the process of appropriation is unable definitively to set itself apart from expropriation and desacralization.
