Following up on the comments on Martínez Marzoa below, but also on the discussion of nihilism brought up by Guillermo, I just ran into a quotation (from an essay by Adam Sitze I have my hands on but cannot yet share) that might be useful.   What is at stake is the nihilism, or the developing nihilism, in political modernity starting from Hobbes, say.  For Schmitt the imperial complexio oppositorum had kept things in check throughout the Middle Ages, but the necessary renunciation of the body of Christ as morphogenetic power for the res publica creates a brutally unhappy consciousness.  Now I quote: “The impersonal laws of the State can only produce political form and exercise morphogenetic power in an ungrounded manner, by presupposing the complete separation of Power from the Good.  Indeed, the strength of impersonal law (its principled insistence on the formal equality of all persons before the law) is predicated on a displacement of the morphogenetic power of the complex (a hierarchy centered upon the Person of Christ).  In the absence of a felicitous use of morphogenetic power, the State finds that law alone is insufficient for accomplishing the aims it inherits from the complex, and discovers itself to be in need of supplements for its impersonal law (which is to say, the neutralization of conflict through dispositifs of discipline, govern mentality, and security, but also, if necessary, through the use of military and, later, police forces) at the service of repeated sovereign decisions that reproduce a semblance of the unity and integrity of Roman Catholic visibility and publicity by setting aside the impersonality of law (with its insistence on formal equality) in order to fabricate a public enemy, whose schema can then serve as the point of reference for the formation of the unity and integrity of a newly secular public.  In short, the State achieves the aims bequeathed to it by the complex to the extent that it now includes exclusion.”  The latter is a precarious solution that nevertheless held more or less effectively through the times of the nation-state.  Which is now full of holes at every level.   The deep self-undermining of the political was itself the political though modernity, and it still is, but now without the possibility of a return.