michael marder groundless existence the political ontology of carl schmitt 2010

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

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GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF CARL SCHMITT

by

MICHAEL MARDER

2010

Te Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

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Copyright © 2010 by Michael Marder

All rights reserved. No part o this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any orm or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,or otherwise, without the written permission o the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marder, Michael, 1980–Groundless existence : the political ontology o Carl Schmitt / by Michael Marder.

p. cm.Includes index.ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-6595-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-8264-6595-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Schmitt, Carl, 1888–1985—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Political science—Philosophy. I. itle.

JC263.S34M368 2010320.092—dc22 2009051356

ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-6595-5

ypeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, IndiaPrinted and bound in the United States o America by Tomson-Shore, Inc

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For my mother and brother, Marina and Lev

Ich habe die Escavessaden des Schicksals erahren,Siege und Niederlagen, Revolutionen und Restaurationen,Infationen und Defationen, Ausbombungen,Diamierungen, Regimewechsel und Rohrbrüche,Hunger und Kälte, Lager und Einzelha.Durch alles das bin ich hindurchgegangen,Und alles ist durch mich hindurchgegangen.

Carl Schmitt, “Gesang des Sechzigjährigen”

I have experienced the tribulations o ate,Victories and deeats, revolutions and restorations,Infations and defations, bombings,Deamations, broken regimes and broken pipes,Hunger and cold, internment and solitary connement.Trough it all I have passed,And through me it all has passed.

Carl Schmitt, rom “Song o the Sexagenerian”translated by G. L. Ulmen

Contents

Acknowledgments ixList o Abbreviations: Te Works o Carl Schmitt xi

Introduction On the Possibility of a Non-ObjectivistPolitical Ontology 1

PAR I HE ELEMENSChapter 1 Geometry of the Exception: Te Point and the Line 13

o the Point! 15Beyond the Line 20Te Extremism o the Middle Point 27Te Point o the Political 32

Chapter 2 Te Danger: Unavoidability of Risk 38A axonomy o Risk 39Whence Political Risk? Te Anthropological minusthe Economic 44Risky Recognitions 49Risky Decisions 54

Chapter 3 Te Non-Ground: From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics 60A Philosophical Primer: Snapshots o the Event inHeidegger and Derrida 61Tere is No Such Ting as the “Political Sphere”! 62Schmitt’s Anti-Economism Revisited:Nomos/Appropriation, Politics/Expropriation 70How to Remain Faithul to the Event o Politics? 75

vii

viii CONTENTS

Chapter 4 Politics in Question 84Prelude: Questioning the Question 84Posing the Question 85Interlude: Yes or No? 92In Place o a Response . . . 94

PAR II HE CRIIQUEChapter 5 Metonymic Abuses of Modernity 103

In the Name o the Law . . . 105Constitutional Unity, Constitutional Details 113Te Fragility o the Status and the Irreducibility o the Political 118

Chapter 6 Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity 126Schmitt and Husserl: From the Crisis 126Te Ontology o Political Will 130P.S.: On Political Consciousness 141

PAR III ON HE GROUNDChapter 7 Living Forms: Culture, Multiculturalism, and

Complexio Oppositorum 149Disentangling Complexio Oppositorum 149Te Living Forms o Politics 153A Virtuous Circle: Te Mutual Invigoration o Culture and Politics 159Multiculturalism: A New Complexio Oppositorum? 162

Chapter 8 Political Hermeneutics: Te Necessity of Interpretation 170Schmitt and Gadamer: Decision and Interpretation 170Politics as Interpretation 175Interpreting the Meaning o the Political 179Political Teology as a Hermeneutic Endeavor 183

Acknowledgments

At the earliest stages o its composition, this book beneted rom thecomments o Hubertus Buchstein (Greiswald University); it was in thecontext o his seminar on “Carl Schmitt and Contemporary PoliticalTeory” at the New School or Social Research in Spring 2005 that the ideao Groundless Existence was born. Members o the editorial group at elosPress, including Russell Berman, David Pan, Joseph Bendersky, as well asthe publisher o elos, Mary Piccone, have been exceptionally enthusiasticabout the project, parts o which appeared on the pages o this indispens-able academic journal. My discussions with Rebecca Comay (University o oronto) were crucial or the ormulations o “the event o politics” inChapter 3 o the book, while the exchanges with Alexandre Franco de Ságave me new perspectives on Schmitt’s legal philosophy. Santiago Zabalashared his sharp insights on hermeneutics, substantially enrichingChapter 8 o the present study. I am also thankul to the AcquisitionsEditor at Continuum Books, Marie-Claire Antoine, who has been unwav-ering in her support or Groundless Existence. Finally, um enorme obrigadoà minha querida Patrícia. Sem ti, não conseguia.

Washington, DCSeptember 2009

ix

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Note: Modied versions o Chapters 2, 3, and 7 appeared as articles in the journal elos. “From the Concept o the Political to the Event o Politics”was included in elos 147, a special issue on “Carl Schmitt and the Event,”which I edited in Summer 2009 (pp. 55–76). “Carl Schmitt’s ‘CosmopolitanRestaurant’: Culture, Multiculturalism, and the Complexio Oppositorum”was published in elos, 142, Spring 2008, pp. 29–47, in a special issueon “Culture and Politics in Carl Schmitt.” “Carl Schmitt and the Risk o the Political” was eatured in elos, 132, Fall 2005, pp. 5–24, in a specialsection on Carl Schmitt. Finally, a version o Chapter 8 will appear as achapter in a collection edited by Santiago Zabala & Je Malpas and titledConsequences o Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

List of Abbreviations:The Works of Carl Schmitt

CP: Te Concept o the Political , Expanded Edition, trans. G. Schwab(Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 2007).

CPD: Te Crisis o Parliamentary Democracy , trans. E. Kennedy (Cambridge and London: MI Press, 1986).

C: Constitutional Teory , trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC and London:Duke University Press, 2008).

D: Die Diktatur: Von den Anängen des modernenSouveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkamp (Munich and Leipzig, 1921).

EC: Ex Captivitate Salus: Eahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Berlin: Duncker& Humblot, 2002).

G: Glossarium: Auzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951, ed. E. Freiherr von Medem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991).

HH: Hamlet or Hecuba: Te Irruption o ime into the Play , trans. S.Draghici (Corvallis: Plutarch Press, 2006).

LL: Legality and Legitimacy , trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC and London:Duke University Press, 2004).

LS: Land and Sea, trans. S. Draghici (Washington, DC: Plutarch Press,1997).

LS: Te Leviathan in the State Teory o Tomas Hobbes, trans. G.Schwab and E. Hilstein (Westport, C and London: GreenwoodPress, 1996).

NE: Te Nomos o the Earth in the International Law o Jus PublicumEuropaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: elos Press, 2003).

PR: Political Romanticism, trans. G. Oakes (Cambridge and London:MI Press, 1991).

xi

xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

P: Political Teology: Four Chapters on the Concept o Sovereignty ,trans. G. Schwab (London and Cambridge: MI Press, 1985).

PII: Political Teology II: Te Myth o the Closure o Any Political Teology (London and New York: Polity, 2008).

RC: Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport,C and London: Greenwood Press, 1996).

P: “Teory o the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concepto the Political (1963),” trans. G. L. Ulmen, elos 127, Spring 2004,pp. 11–78.

Introduction

On the Possibility of a Non-Objectivist Political Ontology

Spring 1947 witnessed a momentous set o events: the recurrentinterrogations o Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) by his American captors atNuremberg. Te triptych o the transcripts o these examinations, gath-ered in the rst special issue o the journal elos (Summer 1987) devotedentirely to the German political thinker, gives the reader a vivid insightinto Schmitt’s apologia in the course o which he was prompted to respondto the charges o providing a theoretical justication or Hitler’s Grossraumpolicy and o collaborating in preparation o the wars o aggression. Tequestioning by Robert Kempner bordered on the absurd, requesting thedeendant to write up constitutional opinions and essay-orm responses tothe incriminations. But, more than anything, at the dusk o Western meta-physics, it inverted the judicial scene that occurred at the inception o thisphilosophical tradition: the trial o Socrates. What Schmitt went throughwas not a public trial—he was never ormally charged with the allegationsset beore him, nor was he tried by his compatriots, nor was he sentencedto death as a result. While Socrates was accused, chiefy, o subverting theAthenian polis, Schmitt aced the charges o supporting and collaborat-ing with the Nazi state. In the rst case, the philosopher appeared to bea threat to public order, at odds with the democratic authorities o theday; in the second case, the political thinker was presented as the hand-maid o Hitler’s regime, the agent who laid the groundwork or a new order. Whereas the ault o Socrates was, in a nutshell, that he danger-ously exceeded the legal and custom-bound particularities o his city-state(trumpeting philosophy as a universal vocation), the crime o Schmitt wasthat, whether directly or indirectly, he aided and abetted German expan-

1

that, whether directly or indirectly, he aided and abetted German expan-sionism and its wars o aggression against what is universally human.

2 GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Tese dierences are symptomatic o the epochal contrasts betweenancient Greece and Nazi Germany—the contrasts thinkers like Heideggerpreerred to see as the closest o a nities—as well as between the begin-ning and the end o Western metaphysics, when the Platonic politics o truth, guided by the eternal, objective light o Ideas, is supplanted by post-metaphysical political thought, deriving its meaning rom the concretenesso human existence. Te Socratic subversion is a metaphysical embrace o the world o pure thought at the expense o all historical contingencies;the Schmittian sedition consists in a series o post-metaphysical interven-tions described as occasionalist, i not opportunist.

All too oen, however, Schmitt has been read, precisely, as a politicalmetaphysician, even by commentators as perceptive as Jacques Derrida. Ina curious and bitterly ironic remark during the April 1947 interrogations,Schmitt refected on the reception o his thought in response to Kempner’sassurance that he would examine the requested legal opinion o the ormer“very closely.” “I am happy to have ound a reader once again,” Schmittquipped, “In general, my writings have been read very poorly. I ear thesupercial reader.”1 Tis reproach, addressed not solely to the immediateinterrogator, rings true over the decades that have passed since then andis as resh or us as it was over sixty years ago, partly because the 1947interrogations have never really ended but have been leading posthumousexistence years aer the author’s death, and partly because Schmitt’s earsturned out to be warranted. What would it mean to read him “very closely”and in a way that is not supercial? Would there be any space le or ametaphysical interpretation were this demand satised? And, i not, whichalternative intellectual resources and traditions could assist us in living upto such a demand?

Te recent resurgence o interest in Schmitt, among those on the Le andon the Right alike, that has made o him a prophet heralding the declineo classical Liberalism, leaves one reluctant to join the ray, even i it is toadd a dissenting voice. Faced with the avalanche o “Schmitt scholarship”in the late twentieth- and early twenty-rst centuries, the goal o those whostudy his works should be to say less, rather than more, to subtract rom theinterpretive sediments that which suppresses and suocates the originalthinking o the political as political. o a certain extent, Schmitt’s preerredstrategy o “the saety o silence,” die Sicherheit des Schweigens,2 ought tobe transormed into the reticence o interpretation. Tis does not meanthat we should ignore the rich history o reception, on both sides o theAtlantic, o writings that prove to be more and more relevant and infu-

Atlantic, o writings that prove to be more and more relevant and infu-ential today; what I am advocating is a reduction o this mass o primary

Introduction 3

and secondary sources, to the political philosophical architecture they sketch out. While Schmitt’s undamental concepts o the sovereign deci-sion, the state o exception, and the riend-enemy distinction, to namebut a ew, have become common currency in contemporary practical andtheoretical analyses o texts and concrete political situations, their philo-sophical underpinnings and, more importantly, the impulse that gave birthto them have been largely ignored. Te standard approach to the study o the genesis o these concepts is broadly historical, in that it pays pains-taking attention to the context and circumstances o their emergence inthe chaos o Weimar Germany, or example, prompting Schmitt to writean extensive critique o liberal constitutionalism collated in his infuen-tial Verassunglehre (Constitutional Teory ). Te historicist methodology is, certainly, justied by the overtly polemical nature o his texts, by hisproessional training as a jurist, and by his insistently negative estimationo philosophy in general and o metaphysics in particular. One could evenargue that, in the disparate writings stretching over a signicant portion o the twentieth century, Schmitt produced neither political philosophy , norpolitical thought, in a conventional sense, but an engaged and somewhatragmentary practical theory o politics.

Tis argument, however, does a major disservice to what are, perhaps,the most ground-breaking political ideas o the past century, or at leastthree reasons. First, it treats their intuitions as mere reactions to historicalcircumstances; second, it is willing to concede to them an extremely limitedscope o relevance, conditioned by the extent to which our situation is stillthat o Schmitt (or is, at least, analogously so); and, third, it veils the deepermotivations or his interventions in political thought and practice. o say less about these interventions is to distill rom them the political philo-sophical architecture that denitively sets aside the classical Aristotelianoundations or the thinking o the political and that reuses to impose apreabricated orm onto the content o political lie, which alone bestowsmeaning on what has been correctly identied as the practical theory o politics. Tis non-Aristotelian architectonics does not amount to a systemo thought but to an ontology that inquires into the uniquely political modeo being, the ultimate goal o Schmitt’s analyses, which I will elucidate withreerence to his writings o the early and late periods alike.

Some will object, straightaway, that the emphasis on ontology is incon-gruous with political theology, which, instead o restricting the politicalsphere to a static systemic arrangement, considers it in the fux o its becom-ing—not o Being—as a history o secularization. Te above objection will

ing—not o Being—as a history o secularization. Te above objection willhold little sway as soon as we acknowledge that it revolves around a vague


understanding o ontology and an even more tentative grasp o what thereal target o Schmitt’s criticism is, namely, the objectivist-metaphysicalontology o impersonal political structures and institutions, rom whichfesh-and-blood human beings have been either evacuated by a theoreticalsleight o hand or rendered purely hypothetical, as in John Rawls’s conjec-tures about the “veil o ignorance,” leveling and equalizing the electoralprocesses. Te new political ontology is not so much the ontology o powerbut o political subjectivity and, hence, o the concrete existence o embod-ied gures populating Schmitt’s oeuvre: the sovereign, the enemy, theriend, the partisan, and so on. In other words, politics is an experience—and the most intense one at that—o human beings, whose very humannessis dened by the possibility o undergoing it, while political ontology is aninquiry into this experiential eld, lacking any predetermined structures,norms, or ground-rules.

Although the relation between political existence and institutions islargely negative, one cannot aord to neglect this latter tier o politics. Tenon-normative description o political experience does not bar a meditationon the ways in which political structures overlay, predicate themselves on,and—let it be stated already—suocate raw political experiences, thereby inadvertently undermining themselves. Te descriptive and the criticaltrajectories o Schmitt’s thought combine to orm the second acet o hispolitical ontology—an applied hermeneutical phenomenology. Te inter-pretation o human collective existence, o being-with and being-againstothers (I ask the reader to indulge me with this preliminary recoding o theriend-enemy distinction in onto-phenomenological terms), is comple-mented by a rigorous phenomenological reduction that strives to disclosethe experiential sources o the political buried beneath multiple institu-tional strata and sealed by the bureaucratization and reication o thepolitical. Describing these mutilated experiences, Schmitt wishes, in har-mony with the phenomenological objectives o the late Edmund Husserl,to de-sediment, to reactivate, and to reorient them toward the uture, withrecourse to the “real possibility” that would impart a new sense o vital-ity, incompatible with the endorsement o a totalitarian state, to collectiveexistence. But it is not only the critical-reductive inclination that unitesHusserl and Schmitt against the bureaucratization and, hence, the “deaden-ing” o lie in modernity; in Constitutional Teory ,3 the latter acknowledgeshis indebtedness to the early work o the ormer, or, more precisely, to histheory o identity worked out in Logical Investigations, which enriches ourappreciation o the discussions o democratic identication in Te Crisis o

appreciation o the discussions o democratic identication in Te Crisis o Parliamentary Democracy and Legality and Legitimacy . o sum up, then,

Introduction 5

non-objectivist political ontology is an existential-phenomenologicalreinvention o political philosophy with an eye to the lived experience o politics and its corrosion in modernity.

Most contemporary applications o political ontology are still shackled tothe objectivist metaphysics o those structures and orces that are observ-able rom “a bird’s eye-view” and are a posteriori accessible in the experienceo actual political subjects.4 Other uses o the term, or instance, by SlavojŽižek,5 place an exclusive emphasis on the subject, idealizing it, despiteovert declarations o allegiance to materialism, dialectical or otherwise.Te advantage o a existential-phenomenological political ontology is thatit is capable o balancing a critical analysis o institutions and a descriptivecharacterization o subjective experiences. Among its adherents we mightsingle out, in addition to Schmitt, two twentieth-century French theorists:Claude Leort and Jean-Paul Sartre. ackling the disincarnation o the polit-ical as a consequence o the French Revolution, Leort successully appliedthe phenomenological categories o his master, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,toward a philosophical analysis o democracy. At the core o the argumentis the idea that the democratic body politic constitutes itsel without a stableembodiment and that the participants in the democratic contest desire tooccupy, though only temporarily, this empty place, without ever lling theontological void o democracy. Given this promising conclusion, it is ratherunortunate that Leort’s keen phenomenological sensibility is too abstractand totalizing, because it lacks an existential dimension, but, instead, ore-grounds the most amorphous phenomenological concept o fesh, whichMerleau-Ponty, too, avored.6 In turn, Sartre explored the political impli-cations o both phenomenology and existentialism with reerence to aparticular political subject: the working class. Marrying Hegelian Marxismand Heideggerianism in Being and Nothingness, he came to the quintes-sentially Schmittian insight that the political distinction between “us” and“them” is built into political ontology rom which the Tird is absent.7 Nevertheless, the “Us-object” that struggles to cast o the neutralizing,oppressive Tird and to constitute itsel as a “We-subject” is nothing but theclass-consciousness o the oppressed. Te problem with Sartre is, thereore,diametrically opposed to Leort’s theoretical shortcoming: where the lat-ter chose an extremely abstract level o analysis or his political ontology,the ormer imposed on it a historical stricture o the proletarian collectivity that both trivialized other agonistic subjectivities and outlived, to a certainextent, its historical relevance.o be sure, in his private diaries, Schmitt oen registered his impa-

o be sure, in his private diaries, Schmitt oen registered his impa-tience with, i not a disdain toward, phenomenology and existentialism.


In the postwar notebooks, he writes, “But the ‘I’ is not the riend, nor isthe ‘non-I’ the enemy. It is not a matter o phenomenology; it is a mattero the accumulations o power in which one must assert onesel.”8 MartinHeidegger’s “ontological-existential method o interpretation” in Being and ime receives the appellation Kitschig-banal and “ethical-character-istic” (G 109–110). And, in the same notes collected in Glossarium, hecalls Heidegger “my dear riend and my honored enemy” (G 263). TatSchmitt underestimated the infuence o phenomenology and existen-tialism on his own thinking has been noted by his contemporaries, suchas Karl Löwith, who concludes that, “It is no accident i Heidegger’s exis-tential ontology corresponds to a political ‘decisionism’ in Carl Schmitt,a decisionism that shis the capacity or ‘Being-as-a-whole’ o the Daseinwhich is always on its own to the ‘totality’ o the state which is alwaysone’s own.”9 What Löwith and Richard Wolin in his ootsteps omit isthat, in the course o human existence, this capacity is never actualized,except in the moment o death. Although the construction o the totality is the nagging obsession o Being and ime, Heidegger is mindul o how impossible such a project would be, in light o the ecstatic character o existence that does not coincide with itsel due to its temporal lag behind(thrownness) and being ahead o (projection) itsel. Wolin’s extensiono this aulty argument to Schmitt’s writings is under a patently wrongimpression that the existential preoccupation with wholeness results inpolitical totalitarianism.10 Much ink and paper could have been savedwere Heidegger’s existentialism and its consequences properly under-stood in terms o the impossibility o totalizing human existence in itstemporal openness.

Even i we are to entertain the hypothesis that Schmitt’s political thoughtcomes into sharper relie against an extensive existential-phenomenologicalbackground, doubts will arise regarding the relevance o the proposedmethodology, specically, to a constructive theory o the political.“Existentialism and phenomenology,” writes Michael Gillespie, “livealways in anticipation o a radical change that at its core may be unattain-able . . . Tey are thus not likely to be the source o a lasting or stable politics,but they are likely to be a continuing voice o dissatisaction with politics inits everyday incarnations.”11 It is true that one should not harbor the hopethat “a lasting or stable politics” could come into being on the existential-phenomenological grounds o subjective political existence. And yet, thisimpossibility is not entirely negative, or it gives us a oretaste o Schmitt’spolitical ontology ree rom transcendentalist and objectivist-metaphysical

political ontology ree rom transcendentalist and objectivist-metaphysical

Introduction 7

prejudices. o ascertain that politics is ultimately grounded in concrete lieand in collective existence is to deny that its oundations depend on any preset legal or normative parameters. Te devaluation o the transcenden-tal grounding or politics, perspicaciously observed by Mathias Schmitz,12 wakes us up to a postoundational political ontology, the elements o which are discussed in Part I o this book. Setting the stage or this inquiry,Chapter 1 conceives o nomos, norms, and the law in terms o limitinglines and boundaries, as opposed to the exceptional point o the political,where the sovereign decision is made prior to and outside o these delin-eations. What Schmitt calls “the point o the political,” at which a certainquantity o antagonism qualitatively transorms and politicizes all otherdomains o human activity, likewise belongs in this geometry o the excep-tion. Te precariousness o the point detached rom the line is rie withrisk that, in the existential sense o the term, saturates all political actionsand phenomena in Schmitt’s writings. Te groundlessness o the politicalis poignantly expressed in the hopelessness o the partisan, who takes therisk o radical action and ghts in the ace o the overwhelming odds o deeat. It also infects all political decisions and recognitions (o the enemy,or instance) with extreme uncertainty that liberal administrative escap-ism tries to eliminate by subjugating substantive questions to proceduralexigencies (Chapter 2).

Further accentuating the groundlessness o the political, Chapter 3 con-ceives o the event central to Schmitt’s political philosophy on the modelo Derrida’s anti-metaphysical event o expropriation. Te “purity” o thepolitical, which is but a quantitative intensity o antagonism, hinges on theact that—unlike economics, morality, and so on—it does not have a properdomain o its own. It, rather, ungrounds all other realms o human action,and since the possibility o politicization inheres in them, the political may be understood as their de- or expropriation. Te dierence and non-iden-tity that inhabit the core o political identity, nally, take the orm o aquestion: being put in question by the enemy as the rst step toward politi-cal subjecthood and viewing the enemy as the shape o our own question.Casting existence and the human gure itsel in terms o an open-endedquestion without a denitive, essentialist answer completes the vital ele-ments o Schmitt’s non-objectivist political ontology (Chapter 4).

Te second part o Groundless Existence matches the pattern identiedby Michael Gillespie, in that it presents a phenomenological critique o politics, the Schmittian “voice o dissatisaction” with what goes under thename o politics in liberal modernity. What I call “the metonymic abuses o

name o politics in liberal modernity. What I call “the metonymic abuses o


modernity”—including the metonymization o the political by the state, o the constitution by constitutional laws as well as by the bourgeois constitu-tional ramework, and o legitimacy by legality—are the substitutions o anempty and ormal part or the whole, that pile layer upon layer o imper-sonal and dead political existence, whose historico-polemical potentialhas expired. Schmitt’s enterprise boils down to clearing away, by means o political-phenomenological reduction, these reied and oppressive strata inorder to leave enough breathing space or the subjectivity that invests themwith meaning (animates or activates them) and that is, at the same time,orgotten and lost underneath them (Chapter 5). In contrast to Gillespie’sthesis, this critical exercise is not xated on a purely negative assessmento all actually existing and potentially plausible political arrangements butboasts a positive and constructive side, which I explore in the ollowingchapter on “political reduction to constitutive subjectivity.” Here, I contendthat the categories “political will” and “political consciousness” are muchmore than mere metaphysical vestiges; they are the products o postreduc-tive attempts at theorizing the subjects, however obscured, who determineevery political constellation (Chapter 6).

It would not have been su cient to outline the contours o Schmittianontology and to recast his critique o political modernity in phenomeno-logical terms without demonstrating how this ontology could inormpolitical lie in its actuality. In Chapter 7, I locate the living and substantiveorm in politics by rethinking multiculturalism on the basis o complexiooppositorum (the complex o opposites) that determines the political ormo Catholicism in Schmitt’s early work. A reinvigorated multicultural-ism, inspired by Schmitt, will neither predelineate the terrain or politicalengagements, nor project culturally specic attitudes and belies onto thecontrived sphere o universality, but will grow out o a tense and agonisticnegotiation o cultural coexistence, reusing to synthesize the radically plu-ralistic arrangement in one concept. In sum, these living orms o politicalexistence owe their vivacity to their provenance rom collective lie thatimparts to them its own plasticity and fuidity.

Te same sort o fuidity pertains to politics as a hermeneutic endeavor,whereby changes in political existence precipitate new determinations andinterpretations o the vague evaluative concepts, such as “danger,” “emer-gency,” and so on. It is deeply erroneous to draw a strict line o demarcationbetween the active constitution-making capacity and the passive routine o interpretation, and, more specically, to deplore those judges, whom cer-tain American politicians dub “activist.” In doing so, one ails to realize that

tain American politicians dub “activist.” In doing so, one ails to realize thatevery interpretation is already an existential decision, which is necessarily

Introduction 9

active, transormative, and reconstituting. Since the law does not—indeed,cannot—interpret and apply itsel, interpretation becomes one o the mostcrucial loci o the political, where the hermeneutical decisions o concretesubjects “activate” the impersonal legal and political structures, oen trans-gressing the norm (Chapter 8).

Te multiplication o political interpretations sel-legitimated by sover-eign decisions denies the validity o positive legality, on the one hand, andthe transhistorical truth o natural law, on the other. Te collapse o theold transcendental certainties and the indenite prolieration o herme-neutical acts in their place are signs o the postmetaphysical situation,since, in the words o Gianni Vattimo, “hermeneutics is not a philoso-phy but the enunciation o historical existence itsel in the age o the endo metaphysics.”13 Political hermeneutics, in turn, does much more thanenunciate the intensely political nature o historical existence; its bold-ness lies in the subsumption o the question concerning the meaning o Being—ontology as a whole—under the question o the specic meaningo the political. With Nietzschean fair, Schmitt will have subscribed to theclaim that the hermeneutics o Being is not yet ully conscious o itsel asthe interpretation o the political relying, in keeping with Heidegger’s phi-losophy, on phenomenology and existentialism: phenomenology, since it isonly through the appearing o individual beings that Being discloses itsel,and existentialism, since Being gives itsel to a particular kind o being—the existent human being, Dasein—or whom alone the meaning o Beingpresents itsel as a question. Political phenomenology and political existen-tialism are, thus, the entwined “royal roads” to political ontology that, arrom constituting an ontically circumscribed region, surpass the depth andthe scope o Being as such.

Notes

1. ranscript No. 2161, “Interrogation o Carl Schmitt by Robert Kempner (III),” inelos 72, Summer 1987, p. 105.

2. Jerey Olick, In the House o the Hangman: Te Agonies o the German Deeat (1943–1949) (Evanston, IL: University o Chicago Press, 2005), p. 306. Likewise, in the end o thelast interrogation, answering Kempner’s question regarding his plans or the uture, Schmittreplies, “I will retreat into the security o silence” (qtd. in PII 1).

3. C 265.4. Te most blatant example o this approach is Colin Wright, Agents, Structures, and

International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,2006).

2006).


5. Slavoj Žižek, Te icklish Subject: Te Absent Center o Political Ontology (Londonand New York: Verso, 2000).

6. For a helpul analysis on Leort’s phenomenologically inspired political philosophy,see Bernard Flynn’s, Te Philosophy o Claude Leort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 2005).

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London and New York: Routledge, 1969), p. 418.

8. Quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, Te Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait o Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 113.

9. Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1995), p. 215.

10. Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the otal State,” in Teerms o Cultural Criticism: Te Frankurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism , ed.Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

11. Michael Allen Gillespie, “Te Search or Immediacy and the Problem o PoliticalLie,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert Dreyus and Mark Wrathall (Malden, MA and Oxord, UK: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 543–544.

12. Mathias Schmitz, Die Freund-Feind-Teorie Carl Schmitts: Entwur und Entaltung (Köln: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1965).

13. Gianni Vattimo, “Te Age o Interpretation,” inTe Future o Religion, ed. S. Zabala(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 45.

PART I

THE ELEMENTS

1Geometry of the Exception:

The Point and the Line

In what way, one might ask, is geometry relevant to the theory o thepolitical built on existential and phenomenological oundations? Is it notar-etched to appeal to this exact mathematical discipline in an eort toilluminate the messy reality and the lived experience o being-togetherwith and against others? Appropriate as they might be, these questions taketoo much or granted when it comes to geometry and politics. For, what i it were possible to recast crucial political concepts, such as the decision onthe exception and the political itsel, not to mention the very architecton-ics o Schmittian ontology, in terms o a relation between the point and theline comprised o an innite number o points? Schmitt’s texts, aer all,abound in reerences to extreme and terminal points, points o indier-ence, decisive or crucial points, middle points, points o ascription, on theone hand, and borderlines, amity lines, lines o division and isolation, onthe other, that come together in a kind o political topography, imperectly overlapping the geometrical and geopolitical spatialities. Beore proceed-ing, a ew warnings should serve as the markers o the rontiers withinwhich the spatial aspects o political ontology might be situated.

On at least three occasions, Schmitt announces that he is weary o theabstraction inhering in the geometrical spirit, l’esprit géometrique (P 69).With the emergence o the rst global lines, or instance, the new planetary consciousness instantiated in global linear thinking ( globales Liniendenken)is still too shallow, “with divisions drawn more or less geometrically: more geometrico.” It will take time or the spatial order o the earth to becomesubstantive (inhalt-erüllten), to ll in the bare outlines o the nascent

13

substantive (inhalt-erüllten), to ll in the bare outlines o the nascentgeometrical abstraction (NE 86), and, concomitantly, to breathe lie into


that political consciousness, whose object is the planet itsel. Such weari-ness is understandable in the context o Schmitt’s philosophy that eschewsabstract and “objective” political orms (e.g., the liberal Rechtsstaat ) in avoro subjective sovereignty, wherein the decision on the exception abides.Te geometricist impulse o the early modern philosophers who belongto the metaphysical stage o de-politicization, the impulse that led BaruchSpinoza to announce that his Ethics is Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata—“demonstrated in geometrical order”—right in the title o the book, is aliento Schmitt. Far rom being a solution, the vulgarly scientic and expressly “modern” approach to politics, as much as to ethics, is a part o the problem:the meaning o the political withdraws rom the modern grasp enthralledwith calculations and a rational metaphysics that prides itsel on having riditsel o its metaphysical origins.1 It appeals to the promoters o politics setapart rom the world o experience, to “[n]arcisstic dogmatists, renderedincapable o any matter-o-act experience as a result o their raison raison-nante” who “try to orm the world according to the axioms o their politicalgeometry” (PR 28). In a cunning, dematerializing inversion, geometricalnotions are thus transormed into the ideal molds or the phenomenologi-cal, fesh-and-blood world o political experience.

But that is not to say that the geometrical endeavor is simply synony-mous with abstraction; the ault lines between Schmitt’s modernism andanti-modernism will pass through his opposition to the ormal geometri-cal thinking and his equally strong insistence on the spatial dimensions o political existence. Te overall project o Te Nomos o the Earth is in syncwith the Greek sense o geo-metria, the measurement o the earth, and,in this attunement, it resonates with Husserl’s investigations on the phe-nomenological origins o geometry in the subjective experience o livedspace. While the genesis o the idea o a triangle lies in our encounterswith concrete triangular things in the world only subsequently idealizedand objectivated through repeated comparisons,2 the dry and etherealconcept o procedural justice originates rom its tangible instantiation inthe practical measurement and division o the earth that infects the “rootmeaning” o nomos. Only a concrete geometrical consciousness prior tothe machinations o objectivation is capable o operating with the primor-dial, earth-bound signication o nomos.

Besides politicizing geometry in the conventional sense o the termby grating it onto the acts o measuring and parceling the earth,Schmitt enunciates a uniquely political geometry, in which the pointrepresents the exception, and the line—the rule. he unity o order and

represents the exception, and the line—the rule. he unity o order andorientation in law (Recht ) discussed in the irst chapter o he Nomos

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line 15

o the Earth is the place where the two geometries (one o them politi-cized, the other—intrinsically political) converge, without precludingthe possibility o a certain disordering disorientation resulting romthe act o deconstituting or dissolving the line back into the points itarticulated. he line and the law are not simple unities but products o an aligned multitude o points and decisions that lend to them theircoherence. Under the inluence o this elementary geometrical tenet,no rule, no clear and precise demarcation o boundaries can do away with the disorder and the exception that persist in the irrepressiblepotentiality o the point, which both makes up and exceeds the line.And, conversely, the utopian project o liberalism, scornul toward thephenomenological principles o political topology, is to abricate a dis-embedded linearity o law devoid o lacunae and points o rupture orsovereignty.

To the Point!

Although much has been written on spatiality and, especially, on theunction o lines in Schmitt’s work,3 commentators have paid virtually noattention to the invocations o the point (Punkt ) that pepper his texts. Tisis not surprising, given that Schmitt neither accentuates nor thematizesthe point le at the threshold o the perceptible and scattered through-out his textual output. We do not, or instance, hear o such a thing asthe global point thinking , as opposed to the global linear thinking that hasdened globalization since the rst “discoveries” o the New World. I urgethe reader to rerain rom smiling at the strange and, perhaps, impos-sible endeavor o “point thinking”—Punktdenken, as Schmitt mighthave put it—which is immensely treacherous and uncertain and which,alone, corresponds to the radical thinking o the political. A great deal o uncertainty spawned by Punktdenken is attributable to the act that pointthinking involves two necessary and necessarily contradictory steps. Onthe one hand, it probes the political space below the linearity o global-ization and appropriation, exposing their micrological, non-objectiveconditions o possibility comparable to the points that constitute the line.On the other hand, it undoes, punctuates, redraws the line, and, thereby,stands or an obstinate reminder that continuity lives o a repression o ruptures or, more concretely, that any given nomos (i.e., any given linear juridical order and orientation) destines to oblivion the point that existedbeore the line, the original decision or the partitioning o the earth that

beore the line, the original decision or the partitioning o the earth thatsummoned nomos into being.


o compensate or the normative groundlessness o its origination,the line appeals, in the last instance, to denite divisions (bestimmteEinteilungen) and demarcations engraved in the literal ground, the soil:the rm line and nomos that fourishes rom it can always all back on theearth or their onto-phenomeno-political support.4 Rooted in such solid-ity, which Schmitt conjures up in protest to the modern predicament o rootlessness and displacement, are the acts o appropriation consonantwith the most elemental sense o nomos as well as the “standards andrules,” die Maße und Regeln, or human conduct (NE 42) that, much later,will generate the abstractions o normativity orgetul o their groundingin the earth. Te repression o the concrete similarly isolated by Husserlas the cause o the crisis plaguing European sciences and collective con-sciousness, is urther exacerbated by the extension o linearity to the wholeplanet, whose image appears thanks to “a headlong leap into the nothing-ness [ein Absturz in das Nichts] o a universality lacking any grounding”(NE 237). Te budding cold and uninhabitable abstraction o globality,which is but a geographic representation disengaged rom the lie-worldo human beings, overrides the earth and the soil that bore the rst lineso nomic demarcation.

Yet, the extension o linearity is, in an equal measure, a rupture, a“headlong leap into the nothingness” that, strangely, mimics the accom-plishments o decision-making. It punctuates that which it extends,unhinging and ungrounding the line removed rom its material sup-port in the soil. Comparable qualitative leaps and punctuations will,henceorth, accompany every attempt at redrawing the global lines andremaking the international order governed successively by the Spanishand Portuguese line o division, the English and French line o agonismand, nally, the American line o isolation. It is, thereore, in the head-long leaps o reordering that “point thinking” becomes apparent in itsdiscontinuous, unbounded, unstable, and extranormative character.Such thinking is not predelineated or predictable because it precedesthe line and dialectically accomplishes the rst spatial negation o space,“a determinate, qualitative dierence” o space rom itsel, as Hegeldenes it.5 Akin to the decision that signals the end o indeterminacy and asserts its independence rom innite deliberations and rationaliza-tions, the point is absolved rom all relationality even as it negatively mediates the sel-relatedness o space. Tis exceptional determination,this extra-normative eruption, this perormative declaration that is notbuoyed up by anything but itsel, aptly illustrates the sovereign decision

buoyed up by anything but itsel, aptly illustrates the sovereign decisionon the exception in Political Teology .


Te point condensed rom empty space geometrically mirrors the instanto the decision on the exception, which, besides making a mad leap, as it doesin the thought o Søren Kierkegaard, “[l]ooked at normatively . . . emanatesrom nothingness” (P 31–32). It cannot be ascribed to any preexistinglegal or political structures, despite the juristic delusions that see in the state“the terminal point o ascription [der Endpunkt der Zurechnung ], the pointat which the ascriptions, which constitute the essence o juristic consider-ation, ‘can stop’. Tis ‘point’ [Dieser ‘Punkt’ ] is simultaneously an ‘order thatcannot be urther derived’” (P 19). Te object o criticism in this passageis Hans Kelsen’s legal theory o imputation that uses the category “point o ascription,” Zurechnungspunkt , as a bridge between two component partso the legal norm, the oense and the sanction. Te terminal, non-derivedpoint o ascription is the ground o legitimation or the rest o the politi-cal edice, the “basic norm” (Grundnorm) that, Atlas-like, undergirds theentire juridical system constructed upon it. Interrupting this liberal idyll,a discerning critic will identiy its irremediable faw: positivist legal theory inverts the order o dependence when it interpolates the state, as a legalorder, into the place o the terminal point. o Schmitt, the legislative stateis not the source-point but something like a plane or the compound suraceo the political, which is why he surrounds the word Punkt in Dieser ‘Punkt’ with quotation marks. Te irony o Kelsen’s blunder does not escape himwhen he calls the conclusion that “a point must be an order as well as asystem” an “interesting mathematical myth [der interessanten mathema-tischen Mythologie]”6 (P 20), or there is a blatant contradiction in thequiet squaring o the point’s “simplicity” with the system’s complexity. Assuch, legality is the most derived construct and, thereore, the most super-cial starting point or substantive ascription, at least in that genealogicalinquiry which uncovers the non-normative origination o normativity inthe sovereign decision.

I the legal order really exists in and as a unity with orientation (toward the land or the sea and within these spatial domains), then it both lays outthe historical, changeable, and non-transcendental parameters or humanactions and remains radically dependent upon the subject whose orienta-tion inuses it with signicance. In the logic o Kant’s Copernican turn,subjective orientation creates an objective order and signals “an ability todene the position o the objects by means o a subjective distinction.”7 Itplays an important role in Husserlian phenomenology, too, in that thereis no abstract geometrical space without the experience o spatiality andthere is no experience o spatiality without an embodied orientation, an

there is no experience o spatiality without an embodied orientation, aninitial mapping o the things in the world as what is above and below, to


the right and to the le o my body . Te sovereign decision in Schmitt is theabsolutely modern subjective distinction, by means o which it is possibleto dene the position o political objects, or their normative ordering.8 Within the objective order, modern subjectivity, as well as the Kantian di-erence between the empirical and the transcendental subjects, amountsto nothing identiable in “reality,” and so the “nothingness” attributed tothe decision on the exception does not entail a positive metaphysical ormythological entity, but a subjective distinction spliced into the world o objects. Only a crisis o objectivity makes the nothingness o subjectivity and sovereignty palpable as what (or who) remains, negatively or reduc-tively, in the wake o the upheaval, aer the objective world o legality inwhich one had oriented onesel has collapsed, impotent to grant meaning-ul signposts or human action.o get back to the point rom the positivist labyrinthine conusion one

would need to reduce the lines and norms o the juridical order, howeverbasic they might be, to the groundless existence o sovereign decisions. Acrisis, be it economic or political, already plays the role o a historically induced reduction, which, nevertheless, awaits a theoretical elaboration.According to Schmitt’s polemic co-optation o Kelsen’s thesis, a genuine“point o ascription rst determines [bestimmt ] what a norm is and whatnormative rightness is [was eine Norm und was normative Richtigkeit ist ]. Apoint o ascription cannot be derived rom a norm” (P 32). Te underiv-able point turns into the catchword o existential political ontology. It rstorients us toward and, in orienting, determines “what is” (was . . . ist ) in therealm o law and right. A miraculous phenomenalization o empty space,a condensation o something out o the spatial or legal vacuum, it operateson the model o creatio ex nihilo, creation out o (what, rom the norma-tive standpoint, appears to be) nothing. Even in the ace o its subsumptionin the line, the point preserves this explosive potential. Hovering betweenthe most precise determination and utter indeterminacy, between a sin-gle coordinate and the innity o spatial extension it at once dialectically negates and condenses, between the isolated case o the exception and thenon-ormality o the logic that oregrounds it, the point verges on the era-sure o the line or, at least, on the suspension o linearity. I the line tracedon the ground enables the mechanisms o appropriation, then the pointsignals the possibility o expropriation, which is all the more grave, con-sidering that it constitutes the line and, thereore, disturbs the workings o appropriation rom within. Te point’s indeterminate determination pre-sides over everything that takes place in this essentially unstable political

sides over everything that takes place in this essentially unstable politicalontology.


Schmitt recovers the theoretical and practical signicance o the decisivepoint through the desublimation o the line, the reversal o the Hegelian Auebung , and the political-phenomenological reduction o the oundedplanes, lines, and points o ascription to the ounding, albeit groundless,level o the decision’s “positive determination”: “On what does the intel-lectual necessity and objectivity o the various ascriptions with the variouspoints o ascription rest [beruht ] i it does not rest on a positive determina-tion, on a command?” (P 20). Tat various ascriptions “rest” on the point(which is itsel active, restless, and devoid o a substratum that could sup-port them) does not betoken a systemic hierarchy o political ontology butthe subjective groundwork o the objective order, the groundwork that isnot o one piece with the system erected upon it. As a result, positive deter-mination is accessible only negatively, by way o a reductive criticism o the ounded abstractions and empty procedures that accumulate in politi-cal orders and institutions. As we shall see time and again, in his appealto political subjectivity and in his insistence on the negative, reductivemethod o retrieving the positive nature o pouvoir constituant , Schmitt isghting political modernity with its own weapons orged in the thoughto Kant (the Copernican turn), Hegel (dialectical negation), and Husserl(phenomenological reduction). His uneasy “anti-modern modernism”should not escape those who wish to cultivate a reading o his work thatwould be more nuanced than an oversimplied but all too common imageo Schmitt-as-a-German-reactionary would permit.

Let us revisit the dialectical reading o geometry in order to ascertainhow the reduction o the line culminates in the point o the political. In thesecond volume o Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, Philosophy o Nature, just as thepoint dialectically negates—that is to say cancels, preserves, and elevates—indeterminate spatiality, so, in the line, the point negates itsel in relation toitsel as an other (or in relation to another point). Te negation o the nega-tion generates the line that annuls but also maintains and elevates the pointinnitely refected into itsel. In Schmittian terms, the normalization o theexception in the norm does not do away with the exception but keeps itdormant, maintains it in a sublated orm, and lives o (leibt . . . von) it (P15). Te normalization o the exception may, at any moment, revert to theexceptionalization o the norm, as the lines o Right are undone into thepoints o sovereign decision-making. Te contention that the legal normis strong enough wholly to incorporate the exception is a building block inthe ideal construction o the bourgeois Rechtsstaat , or which “at no pointis the system ruptured, nor can it be infuenced, either or the purpose or

is the system ruptured, nor can it be infuenced, either or the purpose ornecessity o political existence” (C 174). What liberal apologists disregard


is a straightorward geometrical axiom, according to which any line con-sists o an innite number o points and is thus constituted as ruptured anddiscontinuous by them. Te points o decision-making are the bonds asmuch as they are the ssures, in a word, the hinges (brisures, the Derridian“broken articulations”9), o the legal order that hangs in the balance o allpolitical decisions, including those that rea rm the normalcy o the situa-tion. Te bizarre liberal adherence to the non-derived simplicity o the lineis, thus, a mirror image o Kelsen’s equally eccentric and anti-geometricalidea o the systematicity o the point.

Regardless o what the proponents o abstract legalism might believe,the dialectic o the exception and the norm has no resolution and cannotmove to a higher plane o the rule o law. A maniest lop-sidedness plagueswhat will have been the dialectical thesis and antithesis o the decision andthe norm: when the latter prevails, the ormer is conned to a bare mini-mum, but when the ormer gains the upper hand, the latter is altogetherdestroyed (P 12). Te powers o negation are unequal and heterogeneousin the point that antecedes the line and in the line that negates, yet cannotcontinue to exist without, the point. Te possibility o the sovereign deci-sion on the exception, even where it concurs with the norm and deemsthe situation at hand to be normal, remains exceptional and non-syntheticto the extent that it stands on the brink o undoing the line into a set o disparate points. Seen in this light, Schmitt’s specication o sovereignty as a “borderline” concept, Grenzbegri , deposits this concept, precisely, onthe border, i such a thing is conceivable, between the line and the pointand in the state o perpetual readiness to reduce the one to the other. Asa concept “pertaining to the outermost sphere [äußersten Sphäre]” (P 5)o political praxis and thought (the sphere that, at a distance rom every plane and every system, is about to divest itsel o its sphericality and to getcondensed into a point), it augurs the state o exception—that dangerouspoint, which lies beyond and is, simultaneously, included in the line.

Beyond the Line

Grenz (border), it will be remembered, is Kant’s word or the positive lines,at the same time inwardly and outwardly directed, that dene and enablewhat they encircle, in contrast to the purely negative limits (Schränken)unrelated to exteriority, the absolute barriers that cannot be overcome. Teborder is dened by its two-sidedness and, thereore, by the transgress-ability o the line that marks it: “Bounds [Grenzen] . . . always presuppose a

ability o the line that marks it: “Bounds [Grenzen] . . . always presuppose aspace outside a certain denite place and enclosing it; limits [Schränken]


do not require this, but are mere negations which aect a quantity so aras it is not absolutely complete.”10 More intriguing still is the Schmittianborderline concept that necessitates not a simple crossing o the line butthe transgression o linearity as such and the subsequent inauguration o the “outermost sphere,” not to be conused with an empty political spaceree o concrete points and determinations. Tis borderline concept, orSchmitt, is sovereignty, to which corresponds the most extreme, “outermostpoint” (äußersten Punkte) o the political, where the quantitative increasein antagonism yields the qualitative ormation o riend-enemy groupings(CP 29). In a veiled argument against Aristotle, who looked or the idealpolitical regime in aristocracy since it occupied the middling and moder-ate position between the excesses o monarchy and democracy, Schmittconsistently advocates or the extreme politics o the exception, the politicson or o the edge that tends toward the outermost point and sphere, leavingthe logic o linearity and mediation behind.11

Te borderline concept alls beyond the line but reuses to vacate o all determinacy the space it opens up. It might be tempting to concludethat the undertakings “beyond the line,” jenseits der Linie, that gave “reerein or looting, especially to English ‘privateers’” (NE 93) took place inthe realm o absolute reedom negatively construed as the reedom romdetermination and legal intererence, where the line is either erased oraltogether non-existent. Te anarchy o the sea—the element o reedom—will symbolically correspond, on the one hand, to the state o nature thatbecomes a receptacle or everything that happens on the internationalarena, “an empty space, o sorts” (LS 49), in which the relations betweenindependent states play themselves out and, on the other, to revolution-ary upheavals within a given polity. Tat is why the “energies o sea power[England] stood on the side o the revolution” (LS 79). Greatly acilitatedby the act that “rm lines cannot be engraved [keine esten Linien eingra-ben]” on the sea (NE 42), where acts beyond the line were perpetratedin the absence o the law, this interpretation envisions an undierentiatedspatiality both literally and metaphorically expressed in the vast and law-less marine expanses stridently contrasted to the nomological stability o the land. Te unlimited right o appropriation, which is an oshoot o thereedom o the sea, passes into total expropriation there, where the pointis not sublated into the line, the concrete geo-phenomenological principleo taking possession. While Kant recognizes the unsustainable nature o such anarchic “liberty,” or which he oers the palliative o the categoricalimperative, Hegel sees in unrestrained reedom the logical outcome o the

imperative, Hegel sees in unrestrained reedom the logical outcome o themarch o error in the aermath o the French Revolution.


Neither as determinant as the line nor as void o determination asabstract spatiality, the point’s “indeterminate determination” is what ismissing rom this account o the devolution o linearity in the state o exception. It is indisputable that amity lines dividing the Old World romthe New separated, in the same stroke, legality rom the license to useorce reely and ruthlessly in the area “that the line set aside” (NE 94). Butthe reedom entailed in the unlimited use o orce is itsel handed overto a double determination. First, a particular political decision taken onthis side o the line consecrates, by setting aside, a specic area where theEuropean legal order does not apply. Te realm o absolute reedom o “[e]verything that occurred beyond the line [and] remained outside thelegal, moral, and political values recognized on this side o the line [was‘jenseits der Linie’ geschieht, überhaupt außerhalb der rechtlichen, moralis-chen und politischen Bewertungen bleibt, die diesseits der Linie anerkannt sind ]” (NE 94) burgeoned rom specic legal, moral, and political processeswell within the connes o jus publicum Europaeum. It has been, in act,but a geopolitical projection o the European antasy or dread, dependingon the perspective one adopts, beyond the continental rontiers.

Second, and in a somewhat circular ashion, the permanent state o exception created by the acts o European sovereignty is not a limit butthe Kantian boundary that positively and reciprocally determines every-thing locked within the lines o legality and right. Te permanent state o war beyond the line guarantees the peace, security, and civility o law andmorality that are valid within European borders. Te bracketing (rational-ization and humanization) o war within the lines o legality is achievableexclusively thanks to its unbracketing and the unleashing o total, inhumanor non-human, enmity at the point where European public law ceases.12 “Everything that occurred [ geschieht ] beyond the line,” the happenings thathave not, in the eyes o Europeans, merited to be counted as, stricto sensu,historical are, thereore, transormed into the determining points o reer-ence or the construction o European “values” and “history,” as much asthe “two-sided” concept o the human.13 It is naïve to work toward an abso-lutization o the abstract ideal o humanity (and, by extension the empty discourse o human rights) that crucially requires a denigrated other orits construction and to demand the suspension o boundaries and limitsthat still dene it. Such naïveté gives birth to eschatological hope, “the con-tent o which is an homo absconditus who produces himsel and, moreover,produces the conditions or his own possibility” (PII 54).14 Te sel-pro-duction, or what in the introduction to Political Teology II Schmitt terms

duction, or what in the introduction to Political Teology II Schmitt terms“auto-composition” (PII 34), o the human as human, without any regard


to its constitutive sub-human (animal, i not beastly) and super-human(divine) others is, at once, the aspiration and the principle o modern sel-consciousness that reuses to heed what Nietzsche has to say on the subject o humanity, tarnished rom its very origins, covered in blood. Te bourgeoisreverie o the “sel-made man” is, perhaps, the most widespread ideologicalexpression o this principle, which, more broadly, oers a simplistic andmaterialistic solution to the “Münchhausen problem” in philosophy—theproblem o how spirit elevates itsel, as it were, by its own bootstraps.15 Te essence o atheism and o secular mentality, abstract humanism is, asLudwig Feuerbach correctly noted, a permutation o traditional theology,positing the human as the new god, that is to say, as a sel-given—betteryet, sel-drawn—line, which is not codetermined by everything that allsoutside o it.

Te unintended outcome o the suspension o the law that energizesthe apparatus o legality on this side o the line is the extension o sover-eignty and, thus, o a new determination o the exception to everythingthat, or everyone who, is placed in a limbo on the hither side. In con-trast to Giorgio Agamben’s appropriation o the state o exception, inwhich pure sovereignty conronts and directly orces itsel upon barelie,16 I believe that the Midas touch o sovereignty entails its innite sel- replication at the unstable point expelled outside the normative lines o Right and, consequently, allows or its ceaseless contestation. Te changesin global linear thinking bear out this claim. Te relegation o the New World to the realm “beyond the line,” where unlimited, extralegal appro-priation is condoned, undergoes an almost symmetrical inversion in thedrawing o the “line o the elect” ( Auserwähltheitslinie) that separatesthe American continent rom Europe, and the ideals o peace-reedom- justice rom the condition o bondage and war in which the Old World ishopelessly mired (NE 289). In the state o exception, the point absolvedrom the mechanisms o legality and subject to raw orce mimetically assumes sovereignty and propagates new lines o Right that contest andoverwrite the old ones. On the hither side o the line, new decisions onthe exception will be made, oen in direct opposition to the past acts o sovereignty that, in a sort o enabling violence, demoted whole groupsand continents to the precariousness o bare lie. Although decisions onthe exception galvanize sovereignty, they do so groundlessly, based onan impermanent oundation that may suddenly cave in under the eeto old sovereigns who have become too complacent and taken solace ingloriying the seemingly indestructible status quo.17 Stated more gener-

gloriying the seemingly indestructible status quo. Stated more gener-ally, the old global lines must be traced back to the very point they have


propelled into the uncharted territory beyond themselves or a reshnomos to spring orth.

Such is, also, the predicament o the partisan or guerilla ghter who,at the Leninist stage, “challenges not only a line [nicht nur eine Linie], butthe whole structure [Gebände] o the political and social order” (P 48).aking on the risk o a hopeless ght and understanding the stakes o notbeing recognized as, nor being accorded the dignity o, an enemy combat-ant (the experience o the Guantanomo Bay detainees is only the latestexemplication o this), these political subjects place themselves beyondthe line and, thereby, threaten the linearity and the “whole structure” they are ghting against. As in the most recent restitching o the nomos o theearth that has ended in the now overripe pax americana, the exceptionalpoint engenders a new sovereign agency, with the main dierence beingthat partisans stagger between the sovereign decision on the exception andtheir connement to the exception as such, partaking o both extremes.Te “irregular space o partisan warare” is tantamount to the state o exception, in which the partisan is the “center-point [ Mittelpunkt ] o anew way to make war, whose meaning and goal was the destruction o theexisting social order” (P 61, 62). More will need to be said on the subjecto this “center” that shares more traits with the excessiveness o the logical“excluded middle” than with the middling and moderate stance adoptedby Aristotle. Be this as it may, the emergent sovereign agents bestow alter-native meanings on the world now phenomenologically remapped inaccordance with the experience o their new political bodies, so that theworld as a whole cannot remain the same as it was beore these acts o resignication.

In keeping with the rst two examples—the American line o the electand the partisan challenge—o the nascent sovereign decisions madebeyond the line in deance o the already existing demarcations that deni-grated them in the rst place, the hypothetical construction o the humanin the Hobbesian state o nature should produce an alternative, “beastly”kind o sovereignty, as I have reerred to it elsewhere.18 Every venture thattransgresses the nomic line encounters “man” as “nothing but a wol amongother men, just as ‘beyond the line’ man conronts other men as a wild ani-mal [als wildes ier ]” (NE 95). Tis time, the line beyond which humanity is consumed in the abyss o wild animality is the onto-metaphysical andpolitical boundary set in place in order to restrain, in the manner o theKatechon, beastly sovereignty that colludes with the sovereign decision onthe exception at the point o extra-legality. Rather than a bastion o tamed,

the exception at the point o extra-legality. Rather than a bastion o tamed,impassive, resigned bare lie, the animalized state o nature, as much as


the state o exception which it allegorically duplicates,19 teems with overly active agents who conront one another as though they were disparatepoints scattered outside the connes o the law. It is the generic nightmareo the political state that establishes itsel at a distance rom this threat o disorder but, at the same time, never excludes the scenario o sliding back into the prepolitical pandemonium, which is supposed to be more terriy-ing than its own awesome glory, gloire shining with the borrowed light o the subdued chaos. Te point o animality exiled outside human bordersreciprocally determines the metaphysical content o “man,” even as, roma diametrically opposed side, the “superhuman” gure o the mortal god,Tomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, coners on us our humanness by transorm-ing “wolves into citizens” (LS 31).

Tis is but one instance o the innumerable categorial transgressionsbetween the human, the beastly, the divine, and the thingly-machinic, inwhich Schmitt revels while reading Hobbes. As a whole, they amount towhat I term “mythical criticism”—the indictment o the nominalist-em-piricist distinctions between “the human,” “the animal,” and “the thing”by the mythical totality o the Leviathan, which erases their borders andin which they use, passing into one another. Te critique o modernity rom the standpoint o myth should not appear strange rom the per-spective o Schmitt’s presentiment that the wholly modern notion o thestate is but the shell that remains o the ull mythical body. Te modernstate is an impoverished myth, a mythical body robbed o its sovereignsoul, a machine expected to run on its own thanks to the magic o legalsel-administration. In its totality, myth is condensed into a disruptivepoint that erases the onto-metaphysical lines drawn, since Aristotle,between the thing, the living thing (the animal), and the political ani-mal (the human). Or, should we say, rather, that the line erases itsel,because, likewise since Aristotle, it has contained and anticipated itsown transgression, insoar as the animal is, at the same time, a thing,albeit an ensouled one, while the human is an animal, with the supple-ment o the political? I this is so, then, enacting a deconstruction o objectivist metaphysics, myth not only has a stronger purchase on truththan any species o modern nominalism, but also muthos is the truth o the discourse that pertains ully to logos and that, or the rst time, callsitsel “metaphysical.”

It should be clear, however, that Hobbes does not—indeed, cannot—explicitly inscribe the anarchic point into “the irresistible and overpoweringhuge machine o the state.” One is admitted into this seductive mechanism

huge machine o the state.” One is admitted into this seductive mechanismonly on the condition o being orever deprived o the right to resist the


Leviathan by siding with the other beast o the abyss, the Behemoth, thatsymbolizes revolutionary upheavals, chaos, and anarchy:

Tere are no points o departure or a right to resist . . . It has no placewhatsoever in the space governed by the irresistible and overpower-ing huge machine o the state. It has no starting point, location, and viewpoint: It is “utopian” in the true sense o that word. (LS 46)20

Te points o departure or the right to resist are absent rom the terrainperormatively created by the acts o the Leviathan. Tat is not to say thatthere will be no disturbances o state order, nor does it mean that the “mor-tal god” can withstand the dissolutions o political unity into the chaoticstate o nature already visible in the broken mirror o civil war, with whichHobbes himsel was painully amiliar. Schmitt suggests, instead, that,or Hobbes, successul resistance translates into a ground-shi, a changeo political topology, a transmogrication o political space as a whole,not a rearrangement o points and lines within the old spatiality. A non- compromising choice pertains to the moment just beore the birth o theLeviathan: either right without resistance, or resistance without right; eitherthe political state, or the state o nature. Te u-topia or the placelessness o the point o departure or the right o resistance implies that this point isimpossible to attain within the state: it would cease to border on the absurdonly in a dierent landscape o signication, one that is no longer or notyet shaped by the Leviathan. In a more colloquial sense o “utopia,” thisaporetic right is but a liberal daydream meant to make the mechanicity o the administrative state more tolerable.

I, in the dialectical scheme o things, the line is the negation o thenegation that both cancels out and maintains the points comprising it, thenSchmitt’s quasi-geometrical approach to politics ollows Hegel no urther,reusing to elevate the line into a higher plane by means o another nega-tion. Schmitt recommends, instead, a suspension o the negation proper tolinearity and a release o the active political point rom the limits, whereinit has been deactivated. Te state o exception is this explosive dischargeo the point, when statutory norms are “set aside . . . or a certain time, sothat the limitation o political action . . . does not apply or this period” (C156). Te inapplicability o constitutional limitations should not give us theimpression that the exceptional point o the political represents an exuber-ant positivity and unlimited reedom, since it is subject to the indeterminatedeterminations enumerated above. Te simple act that the sovereign

determinations enumerated above. Te simple act that the sovereigndecides on the exception puts a provisional end to indeterminacy, in that


every sovereign determination alls short o preventing the fuctuations o political existence, which, like all existence, privileges the virtual and thepossible and is always ahead o itsel and o the static legal-political order.Tat is why the hope or a borderless cosmopolitanism oblivious to thespace and the exceptional points beyond the neo-liberal lines o Right (e.g.,WO) is misplaced. No attempt to redraw the global lines will eliminatethem entirely: “new amity lines [neue Freudnschaslinien] will be drawnbeyond [ jenseits] which atomic and hydrogen bombs will all” to keep thepromise o peace and security within them (NE 49).21 Beyond the line—the point: the dispersion o the state o nature and the New World, theextralegality o the partisan and wild animality, the explosions o atomicand hydrogen bombs, resembling the splitting o the unitary point. Andbeyond the point—post-atomic space. Asking himsel in one o his diarieswhich “line” will become predominant aer the atomic explosion, Schmittresponds:

No global line in the sense o raya, amity line, or the line o theWestern Hemisphere . . . and, in general, no line whatsoever, but only space [Keine globale Linie, im Sinne der Raya, Amity line oder Linieder westlichen Hemisphäre . . . sondern überhaupt keine Linie mehr,sondern ein Raum]. (G 180–181)

The Extremism of the Middle Point

Nothing could be urther away rom the border or the edge than the middlepoint. Tis statement obtains in a conventional geometrical way o think-ing, as well as in the juridical vindication o the “hierarchical order that islegally valid in the state [and that] rests on the premise that authorizationand competences emanate rom the uniorm central point [einheitlichen Mittelpunkt ] to the lowest point” (P 19). Te center regulates, moderates,and mediates between the extremes that, in turn, exchange their extrem-ism or the diluted authority it delegates. Insoar as Schmitt takes interestin the middle point, however, he does not assign to it the power o modera-tion but the sort o excessiveness that orecloses all dialectical mediations.He takes the side o the French counter-revolutionary philosopher Louisde Bonald against Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and expresses hispreerence or the moral disjunctions (moralische Disjunktionen) o the“either-or” type over the polarities (Polaritäten) that can be dialectically manipulated into an indierence point (Indierenzpunkt ) or synthesized

manipulated into an indierence point (Indierenzpunkt ) or synthesizedinto the higher third (P 54–55). Indierenzpunkt , usually taken as the


center or the place o equilibrium, relieves the polarities o their antago-nistic relation. But it is resourceless in the ace o the either-or disjunctionsthat lack a middle ground and, as a result, maintain their oppositional-ity and non-indierence. As Schmitt reiterates in Roman Catholicism, thesearch or the indierence point o a polarity starts with a “real cleavage”o “an antithesis that calls or a synthesis,” passes through the moment o “proound indecision,” which could potentially precipitate the need orpolitical decision-making, and ends with the escapism o “sel-negation inorder to arrive at [positive] positions” (RC 9). Te coveted indierencepoint is, thus, not a point o rupture but, on the contrary, the antasy o a sutured “real cleavage,” a point miraculously converted into a line. It isthe by-product o a ctitious humanism, where Homo Homini Homo, Manis Man to Man—“Homo Homini Homo, das ist der Nullpunkt der reinenIndierenz [Homo Homini Homo, this is the null-point o pure indier-ence]” (G 8222)—and where, consequently, extreme nihilism, a by-producto the absolute and intrinsic value o the human, reigns supreme.

An absence o middle ground does not bar the existence o a groundlessand disjunctive midpoint where decisions and other existential attri-butes come into their own. Te line rom Bonald cited by Schmitt—“ Jeme trouve constamment entre deux abîmes, je marche toujours entre l’êtreet le néant ”23—turns the “I” itsel into this middle point torn between twoabysses and, in this torsion, converted into yet another abyss. Te missingmiddle between the “either” and the “or” that do not converge under any circumstances is the logical excluded middle transplanted into existentialspatiality. Schmitt’s own designation o the partisan as the “center-point[ Mittelpunkt ] o a new way to make war” might be interpreted, in thissense, in terms o a point excluded rom everywhere, expelled beyond theurthest margins and peripheries, criminalized, and reused the modicumo respect that goes along with the status o the enemy. Te exclusion, or,indeed, the sel-exclusion o partisans rom the sphere o Right chargeswith incontrovertible gravity Bonald’s statement that, otherwise, risks slid-ing into an idle metaphysical speculation. Te partisans alone can rightly locate themselves between two precipices, as they ace the choice betweeneither the risk o a hopeless ght that desperately holds onto the shredso political being or a quiet resignation and a so descent into politicalnothingness.

Although, rom the perspective o state order, the partisan is less thannothing, rom the vantage point o the political, this gure is at the center-stage or in the middle point (“our sure point o reerence [Richtpunkt ],” as

stage or in the middle point (“our sure point o reerence [Richtpunkt ],” asSchmitt writes) that “rees us rom general genealogies o the philosophy


o history and leads us back to the reality [Wirklichkeit ] o revolutionary development” (P 45). Te partisan point o reerence disentangles itsel rom “general genealogies,” that is to say, rom the tendential lines that arealways more or less ideal to the extent that they represent the rays era-diating rom the Sun that is the philosophy o history. (I the reality o revolutionary development is non-linear or non-genealogical, how do wereconcile it with the Schmittian genealogy o the partisan that, in the sametext, runs rom Clausewitz to Lenin, rom Lenin to Mao, and rom Mao toSalan? Isn’t this somewhat despondent appeal to the “sure reerence point”an attempt to transcend rom within the very genealogy he has draed?)In this disentanglement, in this reeing up o the point rom the line thathas neutralized and desiccated it, Schmitt encrusts a miniature image o the liberation o the political, the renaissance o politics rom the excludedmiddle point, to which liberal ideology has consigned it.

Te extraction o the point rom the line stages a clash between thepurely economic principle o appropriation and the act o political expro-priation. Whereas the lines dening the order o ownership along with theentire nomos o the earth are eco-nomic, in the broad sense o being a sinequa non or the act o appropriation, the point is incapable o saeguardinganything, given that it marks the moment o rupture in the linear order o limits and boundaries consecrating the right o possession. o secure theconcept o property and private property simpliciter , liberal thought strivesto replace the political point with the stability o the economic line:

[L]iberal concepts typically move between ethics (intellectuality)[Geistigkeit ] and economics (trade) [Geschä ]. From this polarity [ polaren Seiten] they attempt to annihilate the political as a domain[as eine Sphäre] o conquering power and repression [Gewalt , vio-lence, MM]. Te concept o private law serves as a lever and the notiono private property orms the center o the globe [das Zentrum desGlobes], whose poles—ethics and economics—are only the contrast-ing emissions rom this central point [dieses Mittelpunktes]. (CP 71)

In the polar contrast between ethical spirit and economic matter, there areno existential disjunctions, since these opposites are, in act, modicationso the same notion, that is, private property. Te political middle point( Mittelpunkt ) is doubly overwritten with the center (Zentrum) o the globe,which enroots the sham contrast in metaphysical sameness, and with theabsolutist point o indierence, Indierenzpunkt , that was a “orerunner o

absolutist point o indierence, Indierenzpunkt , that was a “orerunner o the modern type o economic thinking and o a political state o aairs”


(RC 16).24 In the vernacular o Roman Catholicism and the Political Form,the political, condensed in “concrete representation,” shuttles between,without synthesizing or alling into either disjunction, the invisibility o spirit and the visibility o matter; it endures as the excluded middle betweenthe visible and the invisible. Now, the liberal master plan or the annihila-tion o the political is a second-degree exclusion o the excluded middle,responsible or the atrophying o the point into the line o the meridianemitted rom the center o the globe to its ethical and economic, spiritualand thingly, polarities. In this process, the political itsel is understood asa domain or a sphere (Sphäre) modeled aer the globality o the econom-ic—a deleterious misconception that we will dispute on a later occasion.Tat the liberal conceptualization is misguided is already made plain by the description o the political as a realm o power and violence, since thesephenomena are not purely political, unlike the riend-enemy distinction orthe sovereign decision on the exception. Te liberal attempt to destroy thepolitical is a priori doomed, or the simple reason that it misses its target:the political is not a sphere but the outermost point, which does not coin-cide with those elements (power and violence) that are imputed to it.

De-politicization ails to do away with the political; the exclusion o the excluded middle only deepens what it negates, instigating the unrestand the expropriating eects o the point. On the eighteenth-century metaphysical line (Linie) o progress, which “moved between two points[die Linie bewegte sich zwischen zwei Punkten]: rom religious anati-cism to intellectual liberty, rom dogma to criticism, rom superstitionto enlightenment, rom darkness to light” (CP 73), this exclusion stillretained an imprint o the political in the dualisms that did not admit ahigher third and eschewed the power o mediation. Nineteenth-century dialectics triangulated and reconciled the polarities o the precedingcentury in the syntheses that diluted “the polemical punch” o the antino-mies, contributing to their urther neutralization (CP 74). Te syntheticmidpoint was the apex o de-politicization, where the middle becamewholly interchangeable with moderation, even though the “restlessness o the negative” in the movement o the Notion rendered moderation itsel immoderate by transmuting every middle point into an extreme thesisor the next dialectical stage. Te twentieth century did not remorse-ully retrieve eighteenth-century metaphysics but anachronistically readKant aer Hegel, projected Hegel onto Kant, or suspended dialectics atthe threshold between the two philosophers (the best representativeso these trends were Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem o Metaphysics,

o these trends were Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem o Metaphysics,


Derrida’s Glas, and Walter Benjamin’s variations on “the dialectics at astandstill”). What, then, is the ate o the middle point in the suspensiono dialectics?

Heidegger’s political extremism is embroiled in his desire to reclaimthe spiritual and ontological middle point, the nationalist analogue o which is Germany. In the “Rectorship Address,” resorting to what Geo Waite ttingly identied as “the old pincers or convergence theory,”25 helocates spirit (Geist ) in the geopolitico-metaphysical Germany, which is inthe middle o the middle (hence, the pincers): the center o Europe, itsel located between the two empires o the Soviet Union and the United Statesthat stand or what is metaphysically the same (hence, the convergence).Te extremism o the middle point relies on the “great decision,” die grosseEntscheidung , leading to the deployment o “new spiritual orces romthis middle place [aus der Mitte].”26 For Heidegger, this standpoint is notaccidental, in that it permits spirit to assemble entities under the auspiceso Being. Spirit is, perhaps, nothing but a misnomer or the most crucialeects o Being, the gathering o beings into the One.

Te proximity o the Heideggerian alternative to Schmitt is unmis-takable both in the timbre o the Address and in the elements o itstextual economy, including the decision. In 1925, Schmitt, too, locatedGermany at the point o intersection (im Schnittpunkt ) o the Britishworld interests and the French continental-European interests.27 Te di-erence is that, at this crossroads, the middle place o spirit was the locuso victimization evident in the post-war reparations, an internationalimposition Schmitt ound reprehensible and juridically inexcusable. (Itshould be mentioned that he also rearticulated Heidegger’s idea in 1948,when he wrote that “Berlin lies in the fight path [literally, fight-line,Lulinie] between New York and Moscow . . . but this line gives neitheran orientation, nor an order [Berlin liegt in der Lulinie zwischen NewYork und Moskau . . . [a]ber diese Linien ergeben keine Ortung und keineOrdnung ]” (G 192). Te clear allusion, in this passage, to the beginningo Te Nomos o the Earth, with its emphasis on the unity o order andorientation, reuses the status o the new nomos to the line connect-ing two points that are metaphysically the same and, in this very move,reveals that Germany itsel is hopelessly subsumed in the “meaningless”line.) Admittedly, the extremism o the unstable and unpredictable mid-dle point may lead us along various blind alleys and monstrous venuesbut, despite this ever-present possibility, the wholesale identicationo political rebirth, let alone o the rebirth o the political, with the

o political rebirth, let alone o the rebirth o the political, with the


nationalist and National-Socialist legacy is indeensible. Te point o thepolitical is le vacant and radically inappropriable by this or that ideol-ogy because, as Schmitt soberly recognizes, it is always on the verge—orat the point—o immanent transcendence puncturing the status quo, theestablished order, and those domains o human action and thought thatare not classied as political.

The Point of the Political

Schmitt atomically splits the point o the political between the sovereigndecision on the exception and the existential intensity o riend-enemy groupings. A lion’s share o what is thus divided pertains to the sovereign,who, along with deciding on the riend-enemy distinction, determineswhether or not the extreme point has been reached:

For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must,even i only in the most extreme case—and whether this point hasbeen reached has to be decided by it—determine by itsel the distinc-tion o riend and enemy. (CP 49)

In an analogy to Derrida’s deconstruction o Husserlian phenomenology,the living source-point, the Augenblick o politicization, “breaks into two,detaches rom itsel, and—split against itsel—becomes contrapuntal.”28 Te moment o the decision is the “decisive point” (entscheidenden Punkt )that liberalism suspends “by denying that there was at all something[etwas] to be decided upon” (P 61). Te orm o the decision is adjourneddue to the denegation o the matter (something, etwas), on which it willhave impressed itsel at the point o the political. Te indeterminacy o “something,” the Scholastic quodlibet ens, is delivered rom its existentialdetermination by the decision and handed over to a specication by theimpersonal economic apparatus and the rule o law that, at bottom, cloak adictatorial decision-making authority.

Below the level o liberal de-politicization, the point o the political sig-nals a coupling o the most decisive determination and an indeterminacy o “something.” Te quality o determinate indetermination, which is sodissimilar to the denite divisions produced by the line, pertains to thepoint o the political in the nominalist philosophical method o Hobbes,who “seemed to be able to construct the unity o the state rom any arbi-trarily given point [von jedem beliebig gegeben Punkt ]” (P 34), as much as

trarily given point [von jedem beliebig gegeben Punkt ]” (P 34), as much asin Romantic occasionalism, which “makes it possible to take any concrete


point as a departure and stray into the innite and the incomprehensi-ble” (PR 19), and in the political-theological totality o spirit and matter,“potentially attainable rom every standpoint” (PII 44). Te momentary incarnation o the universal in the singular dispenses with dialectical medi-ations and refects the contemporary logic o the political. For a polemicalinstant, the point becomes metonymically interchangeable with the whole(e.g., when the bourgeois model o legality presents itsel as the source o all legitimacy in the struggle against the old aristocracy or when undocu-mented immigrants in France are championed as the oppressed in the ghtor their rights), yet it cannot hold onto such determinations o the totality without turning into the most rigid o lines. Te non-dialectical intersec-tions o the singular and the universal will be justied retrospectively, oncethe unity o the state or any other totality dissolves back into the point romwhich it was attained.

When Schmitt marvels at the act that, in practice and not just inHobbesian theory, “rom every ‘domain’ the point o the political is reached[vom jedem ‘Sachgebiet’ aus der Punkt des Politischen . . . erreicht ist ]” (CP62) as soon as the antagonisms structuring these domains surpass a certainthreshold necessary or the ormulation o the riend-enemy distinction,he, again, alludes to the determinate indetermination o the point, theprecision o which derives rom very “loose” origins (“every ‘domain’”). Iwill reread, shortly, this dense statement rom Te Concept o the Political ,underlining the word “domain.” For now, su ce it to say that the notiono the political in Schmitt is existentially understood as the politicizabil-ity o human existence, as the possibility inherent in what is, stricto sensu,non-political. Te conjunction o determinacy, at the precise thresholdwhere antagonisms are politicized, and indeterminacy, at whatever pointo departure or this movement, makes the political, at the same time, themost common and the most exceptional “thing,” the point to which alllines o human existence tend and at which they terminate, melting intopure intensities o antagonistic aect not to be conused with hatred. Inthis political geometry, the point and the line are not rozen in space; theunstable point, rather, makes every line into a vector lacking a teleologicalactualization in any particular regime or nomological order.

Schmitt uses the same German verb erreichen, meaning “to arrive” or“to reach,” in his explanation o what happens when these trajectories donot come to ruition in the point but are arrested halway. “It would be anindication,” he writes, “that these counterorces had not reached the deci-sive point o the political [den entscheidenden Punkt des Politischen nicht

sive point o the political [den entscheidenden Punkt des Politischen nicht erreicht haben] i they turned out to be not su ciently powerul to prevent


a war contrary to their interests or principles” (CP 39). Te possibility o non-arrival and, thus, the impossible, is the very possibility o possibil-ity that, in contrast to potentiality, does not epitomize a latent orm o actuality. Tat the oppositions structuring non-political domains do notreach the point o the political, even though their politicization remainspossible, is not an accidental deciency but the existential aporia o politi-cizability. Were they to be successul and to “become the new substanceo the political entity [die neue Substanz der politischen Einheit ]” (CP 39),the existential orm, which stands above this substance, would not havebeen altered and, independent o all actualizations, would have continuedto be oriented by utural possibilities. (“What always matters is only thepossibility o confict,” Schmitt reminds us in the same paragraph.29) Teextreme point o the political that exudes existential possibilities cannot besurpassed once and or all in any temporarily hypostatized oppositionalgrouping or sovereign decision.

Since no one substantialization o the political is adequate, the pointis dispersed into a multiplicity o points, where the gure o the enemy becomes phenomenally accessible: “Te high points o big politics aresimultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity,spotted as the enemy [Die Höhepunkte der großen Politik sind zugleichdie Augenblicke, in denen der Feind in konkreter Deutlichkeit als Feind erblickt wird ]” (CP 67).30 Te wordplay on Augenblick (the moment or,literally, the blink o an eye) and erblicken (to see or to spot) is, certainly,calculated and is intended to accentuate the concrete clarity and lucid-ity with which the enemy gure is apprehended. Te phenomenological Augenblick in Husserl is the moment o pure and living present when Ihear mysel speak at the source o inner psychic lie, while in Heideggerit is the instant o resoluteness, the conscious seizing o one’s nitude.31 Te living present o the political, or Schmitt, is a disparate multiplic-ity o pointed moments in a properly existential dispersion, where thestrange phenomenologization o the enemy, o the alien, o the other,breathes lie and meaning into politics. Such high points are not dialec-tically negated in a line; on the contrary, they orm the mountain peakso Nietzsche’s “monumental history” with its demand that every “sum-mit o such long-ago moment [ Augenblick] shall be or me still living,bright, and great.”32

But it is this phenomenality that, nally, becomes problematic in con-temporary politics or reasons that are both contingent and necessary.Te partisans, or instance, are not granted recognition as enemies; their

Te partisans, or instance, are not granted recognition as enemies; their


criminalization by the authorities deadens the political existence that hadcome to lie thanks to their actions. More irreparably still, partisan invis-ibility in the age o absolute enmity, when the gureless oe appears to beomnipresent, is a product o the dissolution o concrete contours that usedto dene the conventional enemy. Such dissolution is entirely consistentwith the internal critique o presence and visibility in non-political phe-nomenology. Following Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, the Augenblicko pure phenomenality lapses into its literal sense and signies the blink o an eye: a gaping absence, invisibility, or non-phenomenality in the midsto pure presence and the possibility o death that, incidentally, haunts theencounter with the enemy as the fipside o political lie. When the lin-earity o the outlines melts into an innite number o antagonistic points,when the reusal to recognize the enemy is rendered obsolete by the cir-cumstances, in which this recognition is structurally impossible, then thecore o the political turns into the indwelling o risk.

Notes

1. Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in Te Rebirth o Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Tought o Leo Strauss , ed. . Pangle (Chicago andLondon: University o Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49.

2. C. Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie: exte aus dem Nachlaß (1886–1901) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002). As or a broader signicance o geometry, inIdeas I , §72, Husserl asks “whether a phenomenology must be, or can be, constituted as a‘ geometry o mental processes’ ” (p. 161).

3. See, or example, Jari Kauppinen, “Law without Place: opology and Decision.Questions o Line and Literature,” in Law and Critique 9 (2), 1998, pp. 225–248; WilliamRasch, “Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (2), 2005, pp. 253–262; Luiza Odysseos, “Crossing the Line? Carl Schmitt on theSpaceless Universalism o Cosmopolitanism and the War on error,” in Te International Tought o Carl Schmitt: error, Liberal War and the Crisis o Global Order , ed. L. Odysseosand F. Petito (London: Routledge, 2007).

4. Tat is why Deleuze and Guattari’s wager on “the lines o fight” in A Tousand Plateausis doomed rom the start. No line can fee rom the denitive order it rst originates.

5. G. W. F. Hegel,Philosophy o Nature, Being Part wo o the Encyclopaedia o the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miler (Oxord: Clarendon Press), 2004, Paragraph 256, p. 31.

6. ranslation modied.7. Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Tinking?,” in Political Writings, ed. H.

Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 239.8. In Political Romanticism Schmitt’s methodology hinges on the identication o the

romantic subject, not on listing a series o romantic objects or themes: “Te denition o

romantic subject, not on listing a series o romantic objects or themes: “Te denition o


the romantic cannot proceed rom any object or theme that is perceived as romantic, romthe Middle Ages or rom a ruin. On the contrary, it should proceed rom the romanticsubject” (p. 3).

9. See Jacques Derrida, O Grammatology , trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1997), the section titled “La Brisure” (p. 65 and ).

10. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p. 352.

11. Schmitt abandons not only Aristotle’s ideal o moderation but also the tripartiteclassication o political regimes, which he replaces with the taxonomy o legislative,administrative, governmental, and jurisdiction states. C. the Introduction to Legality and Legitimacy titled “Te Legislative State System o Legality Compared to Other State ypes(Jurisdiction, Governmental, and Administrative States)” in LL 3–14.

12. So, also, when “war remains undamentally bracketed, . . . the partisan ends up out-side this bracketing [Hegung ]” (P 16–17).

13. “Bacon said the Indians were ‘proscribed by nature itsel ’ as cannibals. By no meansis it paradoxical that none other than humanists and humanitarians put orward suchinhuman arguments, because the idea o humanity is two-sided and oen lends itsel to asurprising dialectic” (NE 103).

14. Simply put, “Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs tohumanity. Even the murderer, at least as long as he lives, must be treated as a human being”[Carl Schmitt, “Te Legal World Revolution,” elos 72, Summer 1987, p. 88.]

15. Martin Heidegger, owards the Denition o Philosophy (London and New York:Continuum, 2008), p. 15.

16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lie, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 1998), p. 66.

17. Indeed, the point is symbolic o postoundationalism in political theory and praxis.18. Reer to my essay, “aming the Beast: Te Other radition in Political Teory,” in

Mosaic 39 (4), December 2006, pp. 47–60.19. Hence, Agamben: “Te state o nature and the state o exception are nothing but two

sides o a single topological process” (Homo Sacer , p. 37).20. Te third main consequence o the institution o the Commonwealth includes the

ollowing clause:

For he voluntarily entered into the Congregation o them that were assembled, hesu ciently declared thereby his will (and thereore tacitly covenanted) to stand towhat the major part should ordayne: and thereore i he reuse to stand thereto, ormake Protestation against any o their Decrees, he does contrary to the Covenant,and thereore unjustly. [Tomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), p. 123]

21. Tis is one o the argumentative threads in my interpretation o Hegel’s Philosophy o Right titled “Given the Right—O Giving (in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie desRechts)” [Epoché 12, Fall 2007, pp. 93–108]:

Our key task is to think right and line together . . . [W]e cannot exclude a real pos-sibility o redrawing the lines o right . . . Tere is no reason to doubt that lines and


rights are indispensable to a world that is not entirely awry, undierentiated, andchaotic. Strict ontological necessity puts their irreversible erasure out o question.Tis is not to say, however, that lines and rights ought to be impervious to inter-rogation, critique, and re-marcation. (p. 107)

22. Schmitt cites the same sentence rom Vitoria in NE 95 and PII 54.23. “I nd mysel constantly between two abysses, I walk always between being and

nothingness” (qtd. in P 55).24. “Te absolute prince and his ‘mercantilism’ were the orerunners o the modern

type o economic thinking and o a political state o aairs situated somewhere in the indi-erence point between dictatorship and anarchy” (RC 16).

25. Geo Waite, “Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: Te Hidden Monologue, or, ConservingEsotericism to Justiy the High Hand o Violence,” in Cultural Critique 69, Spring 2008, p.131.

26. Quoted in Derrida, O Spirit: Heidegger and the Question , trans. G. Bennington andR. Bowlby (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 45.

27. Carl Schmitt, Positionen und Begrie: im Kamp mit Weimer-Gen-Versaille, 1923–1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), p. 40.

28. Michael Marder, Te Event o the Ting: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism(oronto: University o oronto Press, 2009), p. 104.

29. It would be too acile to respond, in retrospect, to Schmitt’s interrogators atNuremburg, who tried to ascertain his direct responsibility or war crimes, by insisting onthe distinction between a normative approach and an ontological approach to the political,that is, by arguing that Schmitt did not advocate war as a normative ideal but phenomeno-logically described what happens in the case o war. Tat is because the emphasis on theexistential notion o possibility—“What matters is only the possibility o confict”—compli-cates the neat distinction between the normative and the ontological. Te possible is not thenormative Idea (in the Kantian sense) that should guide our conduct, but neither is it theactual, present, and objectiable “reality” o war. Just as the existential conception disruptsthe binary symmetry o the normative and the actual, so Schmitt’s concept o the politicalthat hinges upon politicizability as a result o the shiing intensities o riend-enemy group-ings is neither purely descriptive, nor entirely ideal.

30. ranslation modied.31. Rüdiger Saranski [Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Frankurt

am Main: Fischer aschenbuch Verlag, 2001)] recognizes the conceptual connectionbetween Heidegger’s moment o decisive resoluteness and Schmitt’s “moment o decision,” Augenblick der Entscheidung , as well as Paul illich’s Kairos, and other such “moments”traceable back to the philosophy o Kierkegaard (p. 199).

32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge andMelbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 68.

2The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

Te trope o risk holds an enormous potential or the development o the socialsciences, the humanities, and the emergent supra-disciplinary eld exceedingthese traditional designations.1 Without claiming to compile a representativesample, it is enough to cast a glance at a ew o these disciplines to detect theuniying, but still invisible thread that binds them. From the work o UlrichBeck in sociology, to Susan Strange’s ground-breaking book in heterodox eco-nomics, to “the ourth dimension” o “the desire o philosophy” explored by Alain Badiou, “risk” comes to the oreront o research and o human lie inlate modernity.2 Yet, despite the orays o these and other authors into thethemes that touch upon public policy and political philosophy, a distinctly political theory o risk that would break ree rom “zero-sum game” mentality is lacking. Tis gap, I insist, is not ortuitous, given the modern reactionary understanding o risk in a strictly economic context that impinges upon themore general sense o the term. Only an existential political theory, suchas the one we nd in Schmitt’s writings, is capable o grasping “risk” as ananeconomic, incalculable possibility and o handling it riskily, that is, withouttrying to diminish its intensity, without shying away rom the uncertainty andpermanent instability associated with it.

Beore extracting the highly promising, albeit somewhat marginal, invo-cations o risk in Schmitt’s writings, I wish to adumbrate the scope o sucha task. On the one hand, it could be argued that this trope restores a certain“spiciness” to Schmitt’s theory o the political by way o bringing into agreater relie its distinguishing existential and experiential components.3 Tis claim would inscribe risk within a narrow range o signicance. Onemight conclude, on the other hand, that risk is one o the organizing con-cepts or the category o the political,4 and, thus, attribute to it a much

38

cepts or the category o the political, and, thus, attribute to it a muchbroader import. I propose to carve out an approach that does not coincide

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk 39

with either o these positions but considers some o the Schmittian contri-butions to political theory with reerence to risk, which is more than a meretheoretical ingredient and less than a conceptual cornerstone. A destabi-lizing and, at the same time, enabling actor in the politics o recognitionand decision-making, it cultivates existential possibilities that populate theeld o the political.

A Taxonomy of Risk

Schmitt constructs his taxonomy o risk in Teory o the Partisan. Resistingthe dissolution o the concept into an all-purpose, emptied out construct“that blurs all borders,” he dierentiates between two modalities o risk, the“general” and the “pregnant” (P 30). Te ormer mode entails the “inse-curity and danger” that permeate the zone o a military confict, when “thearea’s entire population turns out to be involved in a risky situation” (P28). It is, then, the kind o risk that is amenable to political managementand manipulation skillully exercised in the US-led War on error, wherethe vague promise o security warrants a perpetuation and an intensica-tion o danger and insecurity or others (e.g., the Iraqi civilian population),or in the harnessing o the ear and trembling one eels when boarding abus in Israel and translating these aects into votes or right-wing hardlin-ers. Te general sense o risk permeates the situation o peril that is socially diuse, that does not depend on the will o those involved in it, and thatgives a negative impetus to its participants, who want to avoid it even at thecost o their own “rights” and “reedoms.”

Te partisans who entertain “the risk o a hopeless ght,” conversely,know themselves to be “that cannon odder used by great world powers ortheir armed conficts” (P 14). Te pregnant sense o risk they experiencecannot be manipulated because, in a state devoid o hope, the partisansdo not anticipate a restoration o normalcy and security—at least not orthemselves—and because they willingly assume the danger instead o evad-ing it. Oen, rustrated by their inability to exploit the eects o such risk,the “enlightened” Western leaders portray those who take it at their ownperil and that o the others as barbarically disrespectul toward the abso-lute value o human lie and, with this, relegate the enemy to the status o a non- or sub-human. For them, it is inconceivable that someone—a risk-taking partisan and its contemporary avatar, the terrorist—could avoidrisk-avoidance, sever one’s conatus essendi (the Spinozan “tie to being”),and throw onesel headlong into the uture with its uncertainties, dangers,

and throw onesel headlong into the uture with its uncertainties, dangers,and di culties. (We might note that “dangers and di culties at sea” is one


o the earliest semantic layers o “risk” in Antiquity.) Te partisan runsaground in the turbulence and uncertainty o the political, having reusedto keep away rom peril or to navigate around the extremes in an attemptto negotiate a sae middle route between the threat o biological death andthe certainty o political annihilation in an emergency situation.

Te pregnant sense o risk condenses in itsel the experience o ground-lessness, but it is not to be confated with the pessimist or atalist attitudestoward politics that mark the contemporary nihilism o political non-participation. In an apparent paradox, what instigates partisan activity isthe total renunciation o rights in the spirit o juridical passivity and inan extreme reaction that overfows the distinction between the activeand the passive subjective comportments, the Nietzschean dichotomy o sel-a rmation and ressentiment . At the same time that the partisan “actsin a risky way [in diesem Sinne riskant handeln . . .], exposes himsel per-sonally to the danger and also takes into account the eventual negativeconsequences o his actions,” he explicitly becomes the uninsurable par excellence and cannot appeal to the principles o justice—“so that he can-not consider it an injustice when these consequences hit him” (P 29). Tepregnant sense o risk diverges entirely rom the juridico-economic logic,where reparations, settlements, and insurance compensations balance outthe losses or the injustices, and veers on the side o the political. It is thisrenunciation o Right and o rights—the legal passivity o partisan subjectsnot precluding an active exercise o their political will—that renders theiractions so potent and dangerous. Partisans risk their lives in the ull knowl-edge that these lives, lived outside the order o legality, are neither legal,nor illegal, but extralegal. Political risk, then, is what we subject ourselvesto when we step outside the bounds, limits, and lines that have denedRight ever since Kant and Hegel in German philosophy. It orms an experi-ential supplement to the “point o the political,” where to risk onesel is not just to live on the edge but to step over the line and the threshold, to thrustonesel into the abyss, to sneer at the arts o navigation and negotiation thatare indispensable to the politics o “small tricks,” as Lenin derisively put it.

Te dierences between the two usages o risk run much deeper still,and we will be able to gauge some o them i we pay close attention tothe ormal structure o the concept to which they belong. X risks Y orthe sake o Z:5 in addition to corroborating the intentional specicity o risk, as opposed to the more diuse associations o “threat” and “danger-ousness,” the ormula beore us draws a sharp division between the twosenses o the term. Where X (the partisan) and Z (telluric goals) remain

senses o the term. Where X (the partisan) and Z (telluric goals) remainconstant across the dividing line, Y varies so that, in the rst case, it stands


or the population at large, and, in the second, it symbolizes the partisan.In the partisan gure, in the barely perceptible—to the point o nearly merging with the background against which it stands—gure o thosewho put themselves at stake both as living beings and as legal subjects (P31), the risking and the risked coalesce. Te pregnant sense o the conceptwill elude us unless we acknowledge the doubling o the risking and o the risked in the same gure and the sort o active passivity o those whoidentiy, simultaneously, with the subject and with the object o risk. Statedin a somewhat drier academic manner, the gap between the two meaningso risk amounts to the grammatical distinction between risk as a noun andas a verb.

But, nota bene, there is also the unnamed third category o risk lurkingin the same text. With prognostic accuracy, Schmitt pinpoints the dangersthat a “police unctionary” in the occupied territory aces, insoar as “theoccupying power expects him to maintain security and tranquility, whichis what the partisans violate, while his nation-state expects his loyalty and,aer the war, will hold him responsible or his actions” (P 29). Overorty years aer the rst ormulation o Teory o the Partisan, the newly constituted Iraqi army and police orces nd themselves in this very pre-dicament. o be more precise, local police unctionaries live on the cuspo two overtly mentioned classes o risk. Tey orm, on the one hand, themost insecure part o the general population, oered as a convenient tar-get or various actions within the devastated polity and or the opposingparties to the overall confict. On the other hand and despite requently operating on the opposite side o the barricades, police unctionaries sharethe partisan experiences o risk in the more “pregnant” sense o hopeless-ness, personal exposure to danger, telluric attachment, and inescapableresponsibility. A scrupulous deconstructive study could readily utilize suchtheoretical semi-obscurity and pull on the loose third thread in the nascenttaxonomy until it disclosed the disavowed conditions o possibility or therelative clarity o the other two strands.

Another implication o Schmitt’s meditation on risk has to do with theage-old discussion o means and ends. In “Critique o Violence,” a text towhich Schmitt will implicitly respond in Political Teology , Benjamin con-textualizes the means-ends relationship within the discourses o naturaland positive law, advocating, concomitantly, an analysis “which would dis-criminate within the sphere o means themselves, without regard or theends they serve.”6 Although their extralegal status that was converted intothe means, i not the weapon, in the hands o the partisans (P 21) makes

the means, i not the weapon, in the hands o the partisans (P 21) makesall reerences to law obsolete, Schmitt’s theory takes to heart the emphasis


on pure means severed rom the ends: those who risk themselves turnthemselves, as the embodiments o extra-legality, into such pure means inthe struggle against the occupying orce. In light o the overwhelming oddso ailure that inorm partisan struggles rom the outset, the means-endsrelationship and calculative rationality are drained o their meaning. In thepregnant sense o risk, extralegality, the logic o pure means, and activepassivity are inextricably tied together.

Te refection on the ends becomes necessary only there where risk reers to the odds o the action’s realization or non-realization in the overallpolitical means-ends schema. Along the lines o Badiou’s philosophy o theevent, the linkage o means and ends is accomplished through an undecid-able wager, “a supplement committed to chance.”7 Tis linkage is, at thesame time, a severing o the relation between the two, in that the concep-tualization o truth as a gamble leaves space or the unpredictable and theincalculable. How does this stand with the partisans? Teir wager is decid-able with regard to its telluric attachment and the haunting “hopelessness”o the actively passive ghters. elluric, deensive goals tie the partisans tothe earth, give a voice to the ideals o enrootedness they ght or, and cor-respond to one o the etymological outlets o risk, the ancient Greek wordriza, or root.8 But, in contradistinction to the Catholics indirectly portrayedin Roman Catholicism as the partisans o the soil with “their own ‘terrisme’”(RC 10), they are ultramodern insoar as they are uprooted, mobilized withthe help o the latest technologies, and subjected to groundless existencethanks to the political risk they assume. Tey are cut o rom the landthey deend, in keeping with the second etymological channel o the sameword, which, in the Latin permutation o risicus or resecare, means “to cut.”Te wager is, thus, also undecidable due to the immanent destruction o telluric attachment, as well as the unleashing o traditional warare by theubiquitous and irregular partisan orce, the total engagement o the civilianpopulation, and the escalation o hostilities to the level o absolute enmity consistent with the emphasis on pure means and incalculability (P 74).Akin to the “rootlessness o the romantic” (PR 51), the modern predica-ment o the partisan is that o a cut root, a deracination that cannot recoverits organic origins in the soil (the object o a painully nostalgic yearning)and that, consequently, translates the logic o the cut into the orce o abso-lute negativity. Te partisan wager combines in itsel nothing less than theoriginal nomos and the modern anomie o the earth.

Te usion o the old nomos and anomie in the risky behavior o par-tisans is attributable to a massive shi rom the institutional to the

tisans is attributable to a massive shi rom the institutional to theexistential conception and practice o the political, which they spearhead.


Not coincidentally, the most lucid theoretical articulation o risk appearsin Teory o the Partisan that proclaims the end o traditional state politicsand places its bets on new, non-state actors. Te state, to be sure, exerts aneutralizing infuence on political lie, but whatever slips its grasp poses“disturbing and conusing prekaritäten [risks]” (NE 202).9 Te totally polit-icized population saturated with the experience o general risk is orced tochoose sides, to discriminate riends rom enemies in the absence o anacknowledged sovereign power that, otherwise, would have been responsi-ble or the political choice. Something like a collective political subjectivity thrives in such precarious conditions. But the most remarkable twist inthis transition is the denial o the partisans’ political standing by theirenemies who criminalize them and depict them as vandals or, worse, asinhuman (P 31). While this depiction is a belated attempt to compensateor the incapacity o the powers that be to manage and manipulate risk in the “pregnant” sense o the term, bearing in its deepest reserves a new model o subjectivity, its outcome is a topsy-turvy view o the political. Temost blatant eect o political risk lies in the criminalization o those whoassume it, that is to say, in the o cial de-politicization o those who are notrecognized as the political subjects that they are in the most intense way imaginable. At the extreme, criminalization means that the criminals aredenied their status as subjects and are treated as “objects to be renderedharmless and prosecuted” (NE 153). As soon as it is gained, political subjectivity is reied as a result o withholding the political designation romthe criminalized partisans, who have renounced in advance their right toreceive a just treatment, legal protections, and so on. But, rom their per-spective, rom the standpoint o their lived experience, they have switchedto a mode o being single-mindedly ocused on the political and infectedby “pregnant risk.” For them, there is, literally, no other sphere to whichthey could retreat rom the no-man’s-land o the political to which they are“existentially bound”10 and rom which they are o cially excluded, addingto the sentiment o hopelessness.

Despite the absence o hope rom partisan lives, their existence is tempo-rally oriented toward the uture. Te uturity o risk ts well into the generalpattern o Schmitt’s notion o the political, in which possibility unctionsas one o the leitmotis, consistent with the existential-phenomenologicalcommitments o Husserl and Heidegger. Risk, one might say, is the livedcorollary to the ormal sense o existential possibility that, at least in thework o the latter thinker, puts us ace-to-ace with our nitude and theinevitability o our impending death. Te uturity o “no uture,” o a pos-

inevitability o our impending death. Te uturity o “no uture,” o a pos-sible closure and ineliminable nitude actored into the political, looms


on Schmitt’s horizon, now in the guise o that which passively moves ormotivates the partisan and now in the guise o absolute enmity and theprospects o total annihilation it portends. Rather than oreclosing theuture, the risk o a hopeless ght and the advance renunciation o therights o guerilla ghters invest the utural modality o time with existen-tial gravity. Whereas the structure o political subjectivity is temporal, theessence o political temporality is a nite, terminal uture.

Whence Political Risk? The Anthropological minus the Economic

In Schmitt’s view, one o the preconditions or the injection o “risk” intopolitical discourse is wresting this category rom the economic domain.We could dispute this approach, o course, by pointing out that the pro-cess o exchange C-M-C’ (commodity-money-commodity) in Marx’sCapital is ar rom certain; in addition to the leap, the salto mortale, that value must perorm in order to pass rom the “body” o the commodity to the “body” o money in the rst metamorphosis (C-M), there is alwaysa chance that the process will not resume aer the last metamorphosis(M-C’) o a given cycle.11 Te risk inherent in any exchange is the ounda-tion o Marxist crisis theory. Economic instability is greatly exacerbated innancial speculation, where the non-monetary commodity presumably disappears (or else, value is cut loose rom its use-value component) andwhere prots are made on short-term investments and on the minutest variations o stock prices.12 Hence, exchange and speculation are two risky and contingent, though undoubtedly economic, ways o relating to theuture.

At times, Schmitt nds himsel on the verge o concurring that economicbehavior may be risky. It is conceivable, he writes, that “a consistent individ-ualist is one who ghts or himsel, and i he is courageous, at his own risk [eigene Geahr ]. He then becomes his own partisan” (P 23). Immediately qualiying this observation with the assertion that it only makes sense in adeplorably “indenite symbolization,” or, alternatively, in an abstractly gen-eral treatment o the concept o the partisan, Schmitt enumerates the strictcriteria delimiting the non-conceptual scope o partisanship: irregularity,increased mobility, heightened intensity o political engagement, and thetelluric comportment (P 22, 23).13 While a venture capitalist may play therole o an economic guerilla ghter, rapidly entering and exiting the mar-ket in the pursuit o “hit-and-run” interest, he is hardly a telluric, deensivegure. But what about piracy? At the urthest remove rom the center o

gure. But what about piracy? At the urthest remove rom the center o nancial speculation, situated on the ringes o the economic, the clandestine


prototype o a venture capitalist—the pirate described in Te Nomos o theEarth—was someone who “proceeded at [his] own risk (in the most dan-gerous sense o the word) and did not eel bound to any state” (NE 174).Later on Schmitt will regret this careless use o “risk,” which is, nonetheless,mindul o its complex maritime etymology: “I even once I characterizedthe pirates and the buccaneers o early capitalism as ‘partisans o the sea,’today I would like to correct this terminological error” (P 30). In light o the recent resurgence o piracy o the coast o Arica and elsewhere on highseas, this error should, indeed, be corrected, though or a dierent reason:there isn’t a linear progression rom the buccaneers o early capitalism to venture capitalists; rather, the contemporary pirates are the anachronisticappendages o capitalist globalization. Whether in the center or on the mar-gins o the global economic system, risk accompanies economic activity intoday’s world. Te only dierence is that some pay with their lives or theiractions, while others ace bankruptcy, and still others pass the costs o theirdaring speculations on consumer debt to taxpayers.

Against the background o his taxonomy o risk, Schmitt’s caution withregard to the economic is largely justied. A whole range o risks that allunder the heading o general risk may be taken on the economic arena, butthe pregnant sense o the term is, o necessity, excluded. First, capitalists donot risk themselves (at least not directly), but endanger their investments,stocks, and other assets oered rom the “uncontrollably risky” position o selling.14 Tat the bourgeois individual may be dened, at the extreme, by the ear o violent death is an idea uniting political philosophers as dier-ent as Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Hegel. Economic risk-taking doesnot at all invalidate the philosophers’ conclusion. Second, capitalists abstainrom the risk o a hopeless ght, let alone the rejection o legal rights. Teemergence o corporations with “limited responsibility” introduces thesaeguards that are supposed to prevent any such personal risks, even as, inthe sixteenth century, the middle-high-German Rysigo names a daring eco-nomic venture undertaken in the hopes o success. But consider the otherpart o the economic domain, comprised o wage-laborers who sell the only commodity in their possession, their labor power. Te risking and the riskedmerge here, per denitionem. Uprooted and plunged into a risky positiono selling nothing less than a part o themselves under the threat o beingdemoted to the industrial reserve army, wage-laborers come very close tothe experience o risk in the pregnant sense o the term. Tis “other part o the economic” is a blind spot glossed over by Schmitt’s anti-economism,and yet, hinting at the unexplored potential o his implicit “risk theory” that

and yet, hinting at the unexplored potential o his implicit “risk theory” thatputs fesh on the bones o the concept o the political.


Te pivotal methodological maneuver, not to be missed behind thetorrent o details and nuances, is not Schmitt’s cautious restriction o thesemantic reach o the term, but his derivation o political risk by way o anthropological mediations and thanks to the evacuation o risk rom theeconomic domain. Te evidence in support o this claim is subtle, andew commentators have paid attention to it in discussing the Schmittianreading o Hegel in Te Concept o the Political . Siing through the list o Hegel’s innovations in political philosophy, Schmitt encounters “the rstpolemically political denition o the bourgeois” negatively related to risk-taking:

Te bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apoliti-cal riskless private sphere [die Sphäre des unpolitisch risikolos-Privaten].He rests in the possession o his private property . . . He is a man whonds his compensation or his political nullity in the ruits o ree-dom and enrichment and above all in the total security o its use. (CP62–63)

Heinrich Meier, one o the ew commentators who has not glossed overthis passage, thinks that the “bourgeois has already been ‘sentenced’ inso-ar as he wants to avoid decision and seeks salvation” in the riskless privatesphere.15 Te point is well taken, but much more is at stake here than sim-ple decision-avoidance on the part o the bourgeois.

Te rst clue is the positive appraisal o Hegel’s denition as “polemi-cally political,”16 given that the overall sense o the Hegelian gesture, as itis understood by Schmitt, is to deny the political traits o the bourgeoi-sie, and hence the very possibility o a distinctively political economy.Schmitt goes so ar as to restrict economics to the private, riskless, apo-litical sphere, such that the three adjectives, taken to be interchangeable,would saeguard, rom the position o relative exteriority, the politicalsub-distinction between the public enemy (hostis) and the private one(inimicus). But the plausibility o the apolitical nature o the bourgeoi-sie is questionable even in Hegelian dialectics, where civil society, theplaceholder or bourgeois activity and a transitional stage between theamily and the state in the order o Sittlichkeit , or “ethical lie,” is neithertruly political, nor ully private.17 It is sel-evident, urthermore, that amember o the bourgeoisie cannot aord to rest “in the possession o hisprivate property,” as the superseded landed aristocracy did. Instead, therestlessness o constant reinvestment and reproduction o capital keeps

restlessness o constant reinvestment and reproduction o capital keepscapitalists on the treadmill o a ree market. Is the Schmittian reading o


Hegel, then, but a oil or molding the relation between the economic andthe political?

Te clues continue to abound when, at the very outset o the critiqueo parliamentary democracy, equality, the most economic o politicalconcepts, sheds all ties to risk that are now reserved only or its opposite:“Equality is only interesting and valuable politically so long as it has sub-stance, and or that reason at least the possibility and the risk o inequality”(CPD 9). Even though economic rationality encourages and, to an extent,predicates itsel on major inequalities, these are, in principle, equalizableby monetary means. Alternatively, political inequality that, through a par-ticular decision, may generate equality in the substantive sense hinges onthe qualitative, uneconomic, and ultimately non-equalizable allocation o sovereignty. Te risk o political inequality does not decrease in responseto any palliative, corrective measures, such as the rule o law, itsel het-erogeneous and hierarchical because o the dierentiation between thehigher-constitutional and the lower-ordinary courts and systems o legalities. Te risky possibility ( Möglichkeit ) o inequality has nothing incommon with the potentialities o economic unevenness in the distribu-tion o wealth. It is at least imaginable that such unevenness can be ironedout as a result o nancial redistribution and that, in the end, it would notprevent the numerical actualization o equality. Finally, Schmitt does notpoint an accusing nger at the concept o economic equality per se; he,rather, indicts calculative rationality as detrimental to human lie, in that itis not risky and in that it reduces risk to the likelihood o ailure (the crisis)in the nuts and bolts o the state-economic machinery (LS 45).

Te next stage o the argument enjoins us to substitute the risklessnesso the economic with the riskiness o the anthropological. For Schmitt,

Te problematic or unproblematic conception o man is decisive orthe presupposition o every urther political consideration, theanswer to the question whether man is a dangerous being or not, arisky or a harmless [ein riskantes ode rein harmlos nicht-riskantes]creature. (CP 58)

Te question does not announce itsel within the limits o economic refec-tion concerned with utility and protability, that is to say, with the materialinterest o the human creature, as opposed to “the conception o man” assuch. But would this criticism still be valid i economic theory were to chal-lenge its traditional connes and to examine its subjects closer and in more

lenge its traditional connes and to examine its subjects closer and in moredetail than utility-maximizing units? Be this as it may, the anthropological


alternative is a Bonaldian either-or disjunction: the human is either risky,or harmless. (Within the economy o the quotation, the other o “risky” isboth “non-risky,” nicht-riskantes, and “harmless,” harmlos. Te latter wordbears on the eects o risk, or absence thereo, on others and, thereore,oregrounds the general sense o the term.) Much o political theorizing isa comet tail o this elementary anthropological decision.aking the side o the risky conception o the human, Schmitt approv-

ingly cites his contemporary, German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, orwhom human beings are not determined by any objective actors but aredened, somewhat enigmatically, based on their capacity to create distance(CP 60). How would it be possible to manage, economically or politically,such undetermined beings? Management and administration, conceptual-izing the state and market economy as machines that run by themselves, venture, i I may borrow Heidegger’s expression, to “de-distance” humans,to convert the subjects o the political into objects o statistical manipu-lation, to determine them by bridging their constitutive distance. InChapter 4, I will come back to the role o questioning in preventing thismodern transormation that makes human beings harmless by render-ing them predictable. As Nietzsche would have it in On the Genealogy o Morality , the human is not a harmless creature but becomes one at the endo a long and grueling disciplining, culturing, taming, and regularization,thanks to which it receives the capacity to make promises. But, while orNietzsche, the promising animals come to have a uture, in Plessner and inSchmitt, the uturity o the human is eradicated along with the existentialrisk in the process o objectively determining the distance-making being.

Te ontological acet o the “problematic conception o man” as aquestion without a corresponding answer matches the epistemologicaldimension o a fuid, polemical, and ultimately non-dogmatic theorizationthat, in the best traditions o a rigorous phenomenological reduction, reusesto rest on the laurels o unexamined and examined presuppositions alike. Inresponse to his interrogator’s question, “You have the blood o an intellectualadventurer?” posed in the Spring o 1947, Schmitt answers, “Yes, that is how thoughts and knowledge develop. I assume the risk.”18 Tis is why, regardlesso his firtation with Nazism that led to this questioning, Schmitt’s politi-cal philosophy has attracted both leists and right-wing theorists who alsoassume the risk. Tat the onto-epistemological openness may welcome theuturity o the “no uture,” as it happens in the case o the partisan or in theabovementioned Nazi embroilment; that a risk taken once may spell out theend o subsequent risk-taking; that a political decision may imperceptibly

end o subsequent risk-taking; that a political decision may imperceptibly pass into economic administration—none o this invalidates or contradicts


the methodological radicality o espousing the groundless anthropologicalunderpinnings o the political. Despite everything Lenin has done to insti-tutionalize economic rationalism in Soviet Union, Schmitt does not lose hisesteem or the partisan Lenin, the deeply political inheritor o Hegel (CP63) who paved the way or this transormation. Te radical openness o risk would have been a seductive but ultimately inane slogan i it did not keepitsel open even to the possibility o its own closure.

We will do well to recall that Schmitt not only envisages the possibility o a counter-transormation, or instance, rom the economic into the politi-cal, but also construes the latter in terms o this possibility at the boilingpoint o extreme antagonism. Neither a purely quantitative, nor a strictly qualitative shi, the unrest o the political is the moment o Auebung that raises the intensity o antagonism to a substantially dierent level. oextend the purview o Schmitt’s “risk theory” is to argue that the indexor the completion or incompletion o politicization in various domains o human activity is the type o risk besetting each concrete antagonism thatshapes them. Te vital sign o the political would be the presence o risk in the pregnant sense, while the mix o two types o risk, which we havediscovered in the gure o the police unctionary who collaborates withthe occupying power, would signal either that the movement o politiciza-tion is well on its way, or that, conversely, it is succumbing to calculativeeconomic rationality. At its most decisive, risk (in the pregnant sense o the word) is the reductive, de-sedimenting orce that reverses the objec-tication o the human and that keeps the political alive by preventing itscomplacent addition to the list o other public spheres o activity.

Risky Recognitions

Any basic dictionary o Hegelian, as well as liberal, thought is bound toinclude “recognition” among its entries. Although this notion does notenjoy the same privileged status in Schmitt’s political theory, it still per-orms much theoretical work behind the scenes. I the concept o thepolitical rests on the articulation o riend-enemy distinctions, then it mustaccount or the mechanisms o identiying riends and enemies. But, withthis requirement, certain di culties arise that, at rst blush, appear insur-mountable. What is the ate o recognition when it is applied to the humangure that is undetermined and unathomable? I the enemy is the other,then how is it possible to identiy, let alone to recognize, alterity? And,more concretely, what are the criteria or political recognition—that is, i

more concretely, what are the criteria or political recognition—that is, i there are any?


From two perspectives that hardly share a common ground, with theexception o the textual materials on which they elaborate, Leo Strauss andJacques Derrida lay the groundwork or the discussion o Schmittian recog-nition. Te ormer thinker vividly pictures the encounter with the enemy:

“Disdain” is to be taken literally; they do not deign to notice the neutral;each looks intently at his enemy; in order to gain a ree line o re, witha sweep o the hand they wave aside—without looking at—the neutralwho lingers in the middle, interrupting the view o the enemy.19

Derrida, too, inquires into the conditions o possibility o the encounter.Tanks to the desire or recognition, the enemy

would gain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, becausethey would be identiable. Te gure o the enemy would then behelpul—precisely as a gure—because o the eatures which allow itto be identied as such, still identical to what has always been deter-mined under this name.20

Te consensus is that the enemy unctions as a perceptual gure. Teapparition o the enemy gure, according to Strauss’s interpretation thatresonates with Sartre’s analysis in Being and Nothingness, is indebted tothe vanishing o neutrality,21 the disappearance o everything that standsbetween enemies and could soen or absorb the risk and the shock o theatal encounter. But the swipe o the hand that prepares the unobstructedeld o disjunctive vision is itsel blind (“without looking at”) to that which“lingers in the middle” and contains the prospects o reconciliation. Visualrecognition o the enemy enabled both by the intensity o the look and by preparatory blindness produces, at the extreme, a gure without the neu-trality o the background. Te long-term consequences o such blindnessare risky in the pregnant sense, since they do not prompt the opponents tostrategize or the end o hostilities but stem out the prospects o a uturereconciliation that may ollow the stando and impregnate it with the spirito active hopelessness. Te Hegelian lie-and-death struggle or recogni-tion pales in comparison with this atal conrontation.

Now, Derrida is perhaps more attentive to the impossible gure withoutbackground. By virtue o remaining a gure, the enemy has not yet turnedinto the indeterminate prototype o absolute enmity, unlimited in time andin space, sublime, overfowing the nite representational capacity o humanbeings. In other words, the recognition o that which ts into the determi-

beings. In other words, the recognition o that which ts into the determi-nate gural contours and the bare act o looking ne-tune and moderate


the risk unleashed in the Straussian interpretation. Te contours o this g-ure are “reassuring” because they enclose the enemy in the perceptual eld;they are “ultimately appeasing” because they orestall absolute enmity and,by the same token, do not obviate a uture reconciliation. Besides the con-sensus on the guration o the enemy, it would be air to say that Derridais closer to the later Schmitt who is apprehensive about the possibility o total annihilation, whereas Strauss approximates the early, uncompromis-ing Schmitt o the Concept o the Political .

Te Straussian-Derridian solution does not touch upon the quandary generated by enemy recognition. It is true that, in the implicit phenom-enology o Schmitt, the political begins with the cognitive-perceptualelimination o the neutral third—whose trace may still linger in the very contours that delimit the enemy—that, logically, precedes the possibility o the enemy’s existential elimination. But what remains aer the reductiono the third? Is the enemy identiable aer the third has been removedrom my conrontation with him? Does it, to put this bluntly, present anidentity t or recognition? And can one recognize something other thanan identity, namely, otherness and dierence “themselves”? Te appellation“enemy” applies to “the other, the stranger; and it is su cient or his naturethat he is, in a specially intense way existentially something dierent andalien [in einem besonders intensiven Sinne existenziell etwas anderes und Fremdes ist ], so that in the extreme case conficts with him are possible”(CP 27). Negatively dened, it is an alterity, not an identity. Still, nothinghas been resolved by this conclusion because we do not yet know whatSchmitt means by “identity” and how it is constructed.

Aer enumerating various political identities—o “the governed and thegoverning,” “the state and the people,” and so on—Schmitt relates that “theseidentities [themselves] are not palpable reality, but rest on a recognition o the identity” (CPD 26, emphasis added). He thus exhibits a typical mod-ern, post-Kantian sensibility that processes all claims to objectivity, such asthe reality o an identity, through a prior determination by the subject whorecognizes this reality. Tat is to say, the recognition o identity politically translated into riendship entails a series o mediations supporting the ide-ational representation and the subjective construction o something thatwill not be ound in “palpable reality,” while the gure o the enemy trig-gers a present and immediate existential sensation o alterity as the threato otherness. However visceral and immediate, the relation to the enemy cannot evade a double indeterminacy inscribed in his blurred gure: he isnot only other, but also something indenite, anything whatsoever, etwas.

not only other, but also something indenite, anything whatsoever, etwas.Te undetectable partisan and the enemy who provokes absolute enmity


are the paragons o the enigmatic determinate indeterminacy characteris-tic o the oe in general.

Aside rom the degrees o immediacy and mediation, a more relevantcle separates the logics o identity and non-identity. Te recognition o the ormer is the prerogative o the governed who identiy with the peo-ple, as the source o governing legitimacy, and with the state by meanso complex ideological apparatuses. Such apparatuses, however, oer atbest a supercial explanation o identity—a term Schmitt takes in a sel-consciously Husserlian way: “For the urther justication o the word‘identity’ . . . I gladly reer to E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II” (C265). Identity betokens, or Husserl, “the dynamic unity o expression andexpressed intuition,” or, in other words, the mutual belonging in intuitiono signiying acts and that which they signiy. Such is the “consciousness o ulllment,” the actuality o psychic lie, wherein the seeing coincides withthat which is seen, the eeling with the elt, the desiring with the desired,and so orth.22 Te unity o the two elements is dynamic, precisely, becausethe expressed does not ulll the expression once and or all but divergesrom it as soon as the seen, the elt, the desired are no longer there, infesh and blood, beore the intuiting subject. In the elicitous moments o the regime, the identity o the governing and the governed results in thepolitical “consciousness o ulllment,” so that the coincidence is translatedinto the regime’s legitimacy. And yet, the temporal limits o the presenceo the intuited imply that the identity o the two elements is never securely established; the synthetic unity will come undone as soon as the expressionand the expressed intuition are at variance with one another, proving theinconstancy o the political-phenomenological identity.

Tis is where the gure o the enemy becomes handy in a more medi-ated way. Te sovereign decision defects the internal risk o impermanentidentication, externalizes the threat that, as a matter o act, resides withinthe dynamism o the identitarian unity, and puts the blame on somethingor someone other that (or who) could endanger this identity or, in theextreme, “the existence o the state” (P 6). It claims the right to recognizethe enemy, but recognition has nothing in the present to cling to, exceptthe vague sense o a uture threat. Te only guarantees o enemy recogni-tion are the “uture returns” o preparedness or impending conficts and,speaking in the terms o the theory o perormativity, the act o recognitionitsel. Especially in the cases o absolute enmity and the invisible enemy (but this equally applies to “the enemy” in general) there is no room or theconsciousness o ulllment because the expressed intuition—the enemy or

consciousness o ulllment because the expressed intuition—the enemy orthe other as such—is not available or the expressing or signiying act that


aims at its blurred or non-existent contours. Te identity within the politi-cal unit is assured by virtue o a permanent non-identity without this sameunit. Te enemies are constructed perormatively, by the sel-grounding,ergo ungrounded, act o recognition aimed at them, and, thereore, they are no more a part o “palpable reality” than various political identitiesconstructed by the community o riends.

A sel-grounding phenomenon is inevitably raught with risk, to thedegree that it arises rom a pronounced blindness, which Strauss under-scores, to everything that surrounds or alls outside o it. Te ensuing riskso recognition assume two orms: misrecognition and non-recognition.Misrecognition need not be understood as a deviation o representationrom a separate reality it is supposed to represent, since palpable reality is nolonger a part o the equation; rather, it is the upshot o the non-transparency and obliqueness o the political. Already in Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt expressed his adherence to arcana in politics and their mani-estations, or example, in secret diplomacy (RC 34).23 In colloquial terms,one’s perceived and declared riend may urnish a presentable and reassur-ing açade o non-alterity and, at the same time, act maliciously “behindone’s back,” or be a riend in the name alone. Great powers that wrestle withone another “will be lost i they cannot correctly distinguish between riendand enemy,” but, or such distinctions and, by implication, or the survival o these powers “there are ‘no guarantees’” (LS 49). Secret diplomacy compli-cates the recognition o riends and enemies, splitting the political into the visible and the invisible. Its modus operandi is non-phenomenality, a with-drawal rom public view, reviled by every thinker o the Enlightenment.

Tat the same ineliminable obscurity aects domestic politics becomesevident in the critique o parliamentary democracy, where the principle o “openness” in the debates between various parties is but a naïve and unat-tainable ideal. Once again Schmitt reiterates the idea that “[a]rcana belongto every kind o politics” including domestic, cabinet dealings “conductedby a ew people behind closed doors” (CPD 37–38). Tis non-transparency o the political process, both on the national and the international arenas,is the reality o our, post-Schmittian epoch. Te relevance o the domes-tic veil o secrecy to the contemporary political processes is only likely toincrease in the oreseeable uture, as it is instigated by the legitimate andctitious concerns with national security. Both secrets and risks will, para-doxically, survive and fourish in the so-called Inormation Age, not justin politics but also in economics where commercial secrets and patentingo everything rom computer programs to medicines give their propri-

o everything rom computer programs to medicines give their propri-etors a competitive edge in the ludicrously uneven “open markets” closed


to everything but transnational fows o capital. Te decit o openness ispalpable everywhere in the contemporary world. Shielded by Obama’s con-tinuation o the Bush policies, the Pentagon will continue to destroy andwithhold the documentary evidence o torture in the outsourced camps,while patented seeds will not yield renewable crops or the armers who areorced to buy them every year.

Te second negative corollary o recognition is non-recognition ueled by the changing patterns o visibility in the political sphere. It is sae to say thatnon-recognition brings the dynamics o misrecognition to a dramatic con-clusion. Te actors who literally embody the great political arcana are thepartisans who inhabit the “essential space o irregularity” and use secrecy and darkness as their “strongest weapons” (P 35). Greatly magnied, the jaggedness o the political playing eld turns into a ull-blown asymmetry when the invisible partisan ghts clearly identied “local police unctionar-ies” or the occupying troops.24 Te risk that the latter ace is more pregnantthan the Schmittian “pregnant sense” o risk (i such a thing is possible),because its version o incalculability is tied to the dissolution o the enemy gure in the absence o appeasing, albeit negative, outlines. Te invisible,non-recognizable enemy opens the door to absolute enmity growing romthe premonition, now classically associated with Donald Rumseld, that i the enemies are nowhere, then they are everywhere. And today’s War onerror ought predominantly against invisible enemies has already steppedover the threshold o a lived political-phenomenological reduction, beyondwhich an identiable enemy gure disappears, while enmity remains.

Risky Decisions

“Decisionism” has become something o a hallmark o the debates sur-rounding Schmittian political theory.25 But what has gone relatively unnoticed is the act that both the political decisions and the milieu inwhich they are taken are pervaded by risk. I the “decision on the exceptionis a decision in the true sense o the word” (P 6), then it always stands inthe shadow o crisis, danger, or the situation o “extreme peril” to whichSchmitt reers on the same page. o decide on the exception is to assumethe dangers one aces, without either feeing rom them, or submitting tothem in a blind, atalistic manner. Parallel to the conduct o partisans, thesovereign decision is a strangely telluric, actively passive phenomenonresponding to what cannot be anticipated in advance and, much less, codi-ed in legal statutes. Even so, it does not result in the outright renunciation

ed in legal statutes. Even so, it does not result in the outright renunciationo legality, as it happened in the case o the partisans whose extralegality


became their most potent weapon—but propels the sovereign to the outerlimits o the legal system.26

In addition to the general theory o risk, the political conguration o decision-making calls or a more patient and meticulous “risk analysis.”wo proound disconnects characterize this conguration: rst, betweenthe process o coming to a decision and the momentary act o decision-making, and, second, between the indeterminacy o the subject matter andthe determinacy o the orm. Te sundering apart o the process and theact replicates the divergence o means rom ends in the gradations o par-tisan risk and perorms Kierkegaard’s “leap o aith,” liberating itsel romthe discussions, deliberations, and calculations that prepare the groundor it. Inasmuch as they are liberated rom these processes, the acts o decision-making are rie with arcana veiling the political with secrecy andnon-transparency. Te decision remains incalculable, subjective, absolute,and, thereore, risky in the pregnant sense o the term regardless o the eldo meticulous calculations rom which it takes o (P 12). Te immoder-ate, anti-Aristotelian either/or structure o decision-making minimizes thearray o options that may have been juggled in the process o coming to adecision. It is, thereore, unctionally comparable to the preparatory elimi-nation o the neutral third, paving the way or political recognition.

In the Sorelian vein, Schmitt’s critique o parliamentary democracy turns on the impatience with the ruitless discussions that only innitely delay decisive action. Te will to intellectualization yields a watered down version o existential confict sublimated into a more rened battle o ideas,as ridiculous as “the radiator o a modern central heating system” painted“with red fames in order to give the appearance o a blazing re.”27 Tereluctance o politicians and theorists to ace the real and urgent politi-cal risk, their concentration on the risks o thinking and saying, does notmean that the risk o doing will disappear, as though it obeyed the dis-arming magic o their words and subjective intentions. Te existential risk will continue to grow exponentially due to the insidious ignorance thatwishes to neutralize it by means o thought and speech alone. Te bitterruitlessness o parliamentarism is what I call, in Schmitt’s ootsteps, “theindecisive deracination o the political” that eschews the risks o actingand, in so doing, heralds the greatest risks—those o political nullicationand, nally, the nullication o the political.

Te evasion o decision-making deerred by the interminable processo deliberation erases every clear line o demarcation between riend andenemy groupings without, at the same time, attaining the point o the

enemy groupings without, at the same time, attaining the point o thepolitical. And yet, Schmitt is loath to equate these deerrals with actual


de-politicization. Summing up his position, he writes in Te Concept o thePolitical :

Even less can a people hope to bring about a purely moral or purely economic condition o humanity by evading every political decision.I a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintainitsel in the sphere o politics, the latter will not thereby vanish romthe world. Only a weak people will disappear. (CP 53)

Te last sentence may smack o social Darwinism and a sort o politicaleugenics, a simple-minded application (o which Schmitt has been accusedoen enough) o “natural selection” and “sel-preservation.”28 Upon closerscrutiny, however, we see that there is nothing “natural” in politicalselection and, urthermore, that the impetus or political action is not sel-preservation but a decisive risk inimical to the desire or the status quoand the Spinozan conatus. Decision-making is as irreducible as the politi-cal itsel; behind a wide array o parliamentary articulations and debateshides the unarticulated decision not to decide. Te indecisive deracinationo the political consists in the lack o courage—in those who reactively strive toward and, in the same gesture, thwart their sel-preservation—toacknowledge the decision not to decide as a political decision and in thesubsequent loss o the last vestiges o sovereignty, or, at the very least, itsapocryphalization, as Schmitt describes it in Constitutional Teory .

Botched rom the outset, political “risk analysis” weighs particular pro-cedural risks, or instance, the danger o losing parliamentary majority, inorder to distract its practitioners rom the substantial risk decided a priori, in excess o any scales and measurements: the risk o not taking risks. Techoice, which Schmitt leaves to his reader, is ramed between, on the onehand, the risk o terminating the existence o a political entity as a conse-quence o sovereign decision to go to war that might end in deeat, and,on the other, the certainty o this entity’s dissolution in the atmosphereo indecisiveness that no longer holds in reserve the sovereign recourseto jus belli (CP 38). Risk-avoidance leads to the utmost risk borderingon the guarantee o ailure, the withering away o the political, and theunequivocal closure o utural possibilities. Te price paid or the selectiveblindness it induces is the inability to exercise political vision beyond askillul manipulation o parliamentary and legalistic procedures.

Te ormulation o this choice in Nazi Germany o the interwar periodis chilling. But Schmitt’s assessment applies to other contexts o liberal

is chilling. But Schmitt’s assessment applies to other contexts o liberalparliamentarism, where the risk o not taking risks is the deault attitude


ornamentally masked by discussions and debates. Risk-avoidance and thequest or neutrality are so ar-reaching that they endow liberalism construedas a “metaphysical system” with unity and consistency, at the same time asthey undermine its political standing. Whether it advocates the openness o the political eld devoid o the secret, or a division o powers intended to“neutralize the concentration o power” (CPD 37); whether it promotes the value o social harmony sprinkled with “healthy” competition and debate(CPD 35)—liberalism adulterates political risk in the pools o moral spec-ulation and economic enterprise. Its parliamentary variety is the “twilighto an intermediary state,” where the enjoyment o political infuence partsways with “the responsibility and the risk o the political [das Risiko desPolitischen]” (LL 88). It is no wonder that liberalism ailed to come up with apositive political model given that, under its infuence, decision-making losesits substantive, institutional, material supports and sovereignty is viewed asa dangerous and illegitimate heritage o absolutist regimes. Schmitt’s liberalopponents may lambaste, ad nauseam, his theory o the political or its dic-tatorial tendencies but in their excessive zeal they deprive humans o morethan the thrill and excitement promised by political risk-taking: they cometo negate praxis, eloquently portrayed by Schmitt in terms o the existential“possibility o a rebirth” (LS 5) rom the act o making a decision.

Notes

1. For a rather dense summary o the emergent “supra-disciplinary” eld, see Gayatri C.Spivak, Death o a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

2. Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellscha: Au dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankurt amMain: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986); Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1997); Alain Badiou, Innite Tought: ruth and the Return to Philosophy , trans. O.Feltham and J. Clemens (London and New York: Continuum, 2003).

3. Leo Strauss is the most prominent advocate o such an approach. In his commentary on Te Concept o the Political , [“Notes on Carl Schmitt, Te Concept o the Political ” in TeConcept o the Political , trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University o ChicagoPress, 1996)] Strauss a rms Schmitt’s “thesis o the dangerousness o man as the ultimatepresupposition o the position o the political” and implies that the illumination o thispresupposition restores “the seriousness o human lie,” pp. 96, 101.

4. Although I am not aware o any actual treatment o Schmitt’s political philosophy that would espouse this maximalist position, it is not outside the realm o possibility.

5. In a phenomenological mode o investigation, we could point out something like theintentional structure o risk (which makes sense only in the pregnant sense o the term)involving “the risking o the risked,” just like vision comprises “the seeing o the seen,”

involving “the risking o the risked,” just like vision comprises “the seeing o the seen,”touch—“the touching o the touched,” and so on.


6. Walter Benjamin, “Critique o Violence” in Refections, trans. E. Jephcott (New York:Schocken Books, 1978), p. 277.

7. Badiou, Innite Tought , p. 62.8. For the uncertain etymology o risk, see “Risque,” in Le Nouveau Petit Robert (Paris:

Dictionnaires le Robert, 1994), p. 1990.9. Schmitt continues this line o thought, describing the period o transition rom eu-

dal wars to the rise o the early modern state: “Everything that was not related to the statebecame unclear and precarious, and disappeared as soon as the closed and independentterritorial state appeared with its clear-cut sovereignty” (NE 202).

10. For a more diluted version o the existential bond, see Schmitt’s remarks on takingan oath to the Constitution (CP 81, 118).

11. Karl Marx, Capital I , trans. B. Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin, 1976), pp.200, 208.

12. Strange, Casino Capitalism, p. 111.13. Schmitt escapes the temptation o an idealizing philosophical analysis and does

not view these criteria as transhistorically valid. C. Carl Schmitt, “Gespräche über denPartisanen,” in Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. G.Maschke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), pp. 635–636.

14. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money , trans. S.Kohso (Cambridge: MI Press, 1995), p. 117.

15. Heinrich Meier, Te Lesson o Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction betweenPolitical Teology and Political Philosophy , trans. M. Brainard (Chicago and London:University o Chicago Press, 1998), p. 13.

16. Note that in the same text, Schmitt contends that “all political concepts, images, andterms have a polemical meaning” (CP 30).

17. “Te concrete person, who is himsel the object o his particular aims, is . . . oneprinciple o civil society. But the particular person is essentially so related to other particu-lar persons that each establishes himsel and nds satisactions by means o the others.” G.W. F. Hegel, Elements o the Philosophy o Right , trans. . M. Knox (London, Oxord, andNew York: Oxord University Press, 1967), pp. 122–123.

18. Schmitt, elos 72, pp. 103–104. Emphasis added.19. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, Te Concept o the Political ,” p. 106.20. Jacques Derrida, Politics o Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London and New York:

Verso, 1997), p. 83. Both quotations and my discussion o recognition pertain to hostis, the“public enemy.”

21. As a rule, Schmitt treats neutralization and politicization as two diametrically opposed processes. In light o this treatment, E.-W. Böckenörde’s [“Te Concept o thePolitical: A Key to Understanding Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Teory,” in Law as Politics:Carl Schmitt’s Critique o Liberalism, ed. D. Dyzenhaus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1998), esp. pp. 48–49] deduction o “the necessity o a ‘ pouvoir neutre’ within a state” unjus-tiably postulates an abstraction based on the concrete Weimar context o Verassungslehre .Te “neutral power” which Schmitt ound “in the public service and in Reich’s president” (p.

49) is, indeed, indispensable but only when the population ails to reduce the risk o internal


strie and to become unied in the ace o the external public enemy. Otherwise, “ pouvoir neutre” is utterly useless and articial.

22. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume II (New York: Routledge, 2001),p. 206.

23. For one o Schmitt’s earliest refections on the political arcanum, reer to D 13.24. Like complete visibility, complete invisibility is not conducive to the political. Te

administration o people by things, which is compatible with visibility, and purely abstractcategories (humanity and the enemy o humanity) that render visible representationsimpossible equally deny the political its viability (RC 27, 35). Tus, Schmitt’s interventionin Roman Catholicism is geared toward balancing the visibility and the invisibility o thepolitical on the model o the Church that is “in,” but not “o” this world (RC 52).

25. For a concise enunciation o this issue, see Paul Hirst, “Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism,”in elos 72, Summer 1987, pp. 15–26.

26. “Although he [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nev-ertheless belongs to it, or it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to besuspended in its entirety” (P 7).

27. “Many norms o contemporary parliamentary law . . . unction as a result like asuperfuous decoration, useless and even embarrassing, as though someone has painted theradiator o a modern central heating system with red fames in order to give the appearanceo a blazing re” (CPD 6).

28. “[D]espite the colorul existential rhetoric, there is no surmounting the act thatthe undamental political value we are le with is naked sel-preservation.” Richard Wolin,“Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the otal State,” in Teory and Society 19 (4),August 1990, p. 406.

3

The Non-Ground: From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics

As always, the title o this chapter is a promise and a contract. In keepingwith the titular undertaking that outlines a certain itinerary or a trajectory,the reader might expect to be guided rom the abstract sterility o the con-cept to the concrete level o political events as they unold in history, roma higher to a lower level o analysis, rom the general to the singular, romthe speculative (in the Hegelian sense) to the positively demonstrable.1 Letus be clear on the terms o the contract by noting that these expectationswill be rustrated right rom the outset or three reasons. First, the concepto the political in Schmitt is neither sterile nor abstract, given that it isexistentially embodied and lived in a determinate enemy/riend opposi-tion. Second, the meaning o the event diverges rom the colloquial senseo a mere historical occurrence and hinges on the thinking o Ereignis andévénement —the event o appropriation and expropriation in Heideggerand Derrida. Tird, there is, strictly speaking, no transition rom oneto the other, but only an eventalization o the concept itsel, a structuralopening o the concept onto the event, a premonition o the ungraspableand the extraconceptual in the concept that remains “o the political” only inasmuch as it is not identical to itsel, as Adorno would express it. It isdoubtul, then, whether this presumed transition would ever leave its pointo departure, or whether the emergence o the event in the concept wouldsupplant the latter rom the inside. I the second alternative applies, thenthe destination o this movement will have been already included in itspoint o departure in the guise o the concept o the political that does notideally coincide with itsel but anticipates its internal disarticulation by the

60

ideally coincide with itsel but anticipates its internal disarticulation by theevent.

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event 61

A Philosophical Primer: Snapshots of the Event in Heidegger and Derrida

Without denying the complexity and the heterogeneity o the contemporary philosophies o the event, I propose to map them on the axis running romappropriation to expropriation. Te paradigm cases or the two extremes o this continuum are Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who are, largely,responsible or the current interest in the notion o the event. Most emblem-atically, Heidegger’s second magnum opus, Beiträge zur Philosophie (VomEreignis), translated as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), boththematizes and traces its own sources back to the event (Ereignis). Heideggerbreaks the German word or the event into Er-eignis only to supplement itsstrict etymology, its derivation rom eräugen (“to bring into view or comeinto view”2), with the semantic, though not etymological, sense o that whichis one’s own, eigen.3 Henceorth, the event will carry ownness within itsel and will elliptically mean the event o appropriation. Tere are no signicantcontributions to philosophy that do not proceed rom this event that appro-priates the rst, essentially Greek, philosophical origin born in the thoughto the pre-Socratics, Plato, or Aristotle and, at the same time, brings into view the second origin, where conceptual philosophy reverts into “inceptualthinking,” which, alone, is in a position to encounter the rst beginning.4

In Being and ime, the phenomenological dimension o the event o appropriation, o “bringing into view” and, thereby, providing a non- transcendental condition o possibility or phenomenality is interpretation( Auslegung ), which dispenses to the aculty o understanding what is itsown, since “in it the understanding appropriates understandingly thatwhich is understood by it.”5 What this means is that, although phenomena,such as sights, sounds, and so orth, are given to us already imbued withmeaning, the initial pre-interpretation is incomplete without the appro-priative grasp o understanding that, recapturing its origins, consciously interprets the given and draws out what is implicit in it. Heidegger urtherrecognizes that, more oen than not in everyday lie, the incipient pre- understanding does not pass into an explicit appropriative interpretationand, thereore, does not give rise to the event. His codeword or the inau-thentic arrest o the phenomenological hermeneutic is Gerede, idle talk,which “is the possibility o understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.”6 In the public world o “the they” (das Man),knowledge circulates like an empty rumor that is on everyone’s lips butbelongs to no one in particular. And it is this inauthenticity o Gerede thatbecomes one o the sites wherein deconstruction sets itsel to work in an

becomes one o the sites wherein deconstruction sets itsel to work in aninversion o Ereignis into the event o ex propriation, the displacement o


the very propriety o the proper, and the infection o appropriation withthe improper and the inappropriable.

Derrida’s argument, i it is one, advances in a sequence o prudently plannedsteps. In order to prepare the stage or the inversion o the Heideggerian event,he reveals that the most proper is, at the same time, what is most singular,idiomatic, and, thereore, necessarily inappropriable, abyssal. Ereignis is, thus,delivered to the abyssal o singularity: “It is thereore in the abyss o the proper[dans l’abîme du propre] that we are going to try to recognize the impossibleidiom o the signature.”7 Ereignis in abyss (Ereignis en abîme) seduces with “theallure o the inappropriable event [l’allure d’un événement inappropriable]”8 thatindenitely deers the situation, in which one would nd onesel in absoluteproximity to onesel, the situation every metaphysics o presence counts upon.9 Te paradox is that the event o appropriation is immanently expropriated by its most radical instantiation—by the absolutely proper, singular, and idiomatic(hence, inappropriable) “thing.” Te event, thus, can never be claimed as one’sown because o, both, its sheer uniqueness and utter generality.

Although appropriation and expropriation are not bound together by adialectical logic o antithetical co-belonging, the latter hypostatizes a par-ticular moment o the ormer. In and o itsel, Heidegger’s Ereignis does notgrasp something denitively present but perormatively creates the secondbeginning o philosophy in the “inceptual” leap that, instead o landing onan already ormed terrain, nds a new grounding in itsel. It ollows thatgroundlessness, an abyssal and vertiginous bottomlessness, characterizesEreignis well beore its deliberate expropriation. A simple inversion or re- valorization, already actored into that which is inverted, is not enough,which is why Derrida drowns the dierence between the proper and theimproper in the indierence o immemorial expropriation by the sponge,one o many deconstructive metaphors or writing: “Insoar as it ingests,absorbs, and interiorizes everything, proper or not [du propre comme dunon-propre], the sponge is certainly ‘ignoble.’”10 Te sponge, to be sure,does not entirely erase the dierence between the proper and the improperbut makes it unstable, porous, and undecidable. Its “ignobility” symbol-izes the meta-impurity o the opposition between the pure and the impure,between the authentically grasped and the inauthentically pre-interpreted,and, nally, between the events o appropriation and expropriation.

There is No Such Thing as the “Political Sphere”!

What presents itsel as the unbounded versatility o the concept o the polit-

What presents itsel as the unbounded versatility o the concept o the polit-ical, achievable rom any other eld (economic, religious, etc.) provided


that the intensity o antagonisms within it reaches a boiling point, coin-cides, precisely, with the kind o opening unto the event that I have begunto chart above. “Te political can derive its energy,” Schmitt asserts,

rom the most varied human endeavors, rom the religious, eco-nomic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its ownsubstance [es bezeichnet kein eigenes Sachgebiet ] but only the intensity [nur den Intensitätsgrad] o association or dissociation o humanbeings. (CP 38)

George Schwab generally translates the German Sachgebiet as “domain,”but in this instance he avors its rendition as “substance,” and does so orobvious reasons. Is it conceivable that a book investigating the concept o the political would deny the existence o an autonomous political sphere,eld, or domain? Isn’t it the explicit task o the text at hand to delimit sucha sphere, separating it rom what is not political? Or else, what are we tomake o Schmitt’s odd contention that the political parasitically inhabitsother regions o human activity but lacks a domain o its own?

Te di culty with Schwab’s translation is that, on countless occa-sions, Schmitt dees the liberal evacuation o substance rom politics andits oshoot, the obsession with ormal proceduralism, both o which gohand-in-hand with de-politicization. Moreover, since he is interested inthe concept o the political, it would be erroneous to equate this or any other concept with the sphere o activity it eectively enables. Even i wecould segregate a properly political Sachgebiet , it would not coincide withits rigorously delineated concept. Deprived o a playing eld o its own,the concept reaches the heights o anti-oundationalism, as it shuns cleartopographical distinctions, transgresses ontological boundaries, and, as aresult, acquires that plasticity which nourishes its ability to dwell in andto transmogriy all other domains. Te political ails to establish either aninternal economy, broadly understood as a domicile, or an external econ-omy with the spheres it infects.

I would like to emphasize this asymmetry corroborating Schmitt’s anti-economism, which, as we shall see, extends much deeper than its overtormulations in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, where the economicrepresents a simple negation o the political, the administration o men by things. In return or giving up the right to a domain o its own, the politicalcomes to reside in all other domains as a possibility related to the varying intensities o oppositions peculiar to them. In expropriating itsel, it expro-

intensities o oppositions peculiar to them. In expropriating itsel, it expro-priates the spheres it inhabits, since above a certain degree o antagonism


they cease to be moral, religious, economic, and, instead, become political.Tat which has no proper terrain o its own spirits away the ground o other regional ontologies that are always economic inasmuch as they ormseparate regions or domiciles. De-politicization, rethought in this light, isnot a historical accident that bealls the political, but its “truth,” an idiosyn-cratic expression o expropriation, to which the political non-sphere is notimmune and to which the “homelessness” o the political attests.

In Jacques Rancière’s ingenious writings, politics occurs when the unac-counted part, the “part that has no part,” such as the undocumented migrantworkers, demands to be counted, disrupting the routines o policing.11 ForSchmitt, it is not so much a group o political actors but politics in toto thatstands or a “part that has no part” in the structural arrangement o humanlie, since it is a place o that which has no (delimited, circumscribed) placeo its own. Te political will not shrivel to a sphere antithetically related tothe economic, social, cultural, and other associations,12 yet its aneconomicrelation to various zones o human activity and the absence o a politicaltopography proper should not lead us to believe that Schmitt’s thinking issloppy or that it exhibits conceptual laxity. o the contrary, Te Concept o the Political is a quest or the “specic meaning [spezischen Sinnes]”o politics (CP 72). It proceeds in the spirit o Kant’s Copernican turn inmodern philosophy and, mutatis mutandis, belongs in the rich phenom-enological tradition extending rom Husserl to Heidegger and Derrida.o concentrate on the meaning o Being, as Heidegger does, or to study the “specic meaning” o the political, as Schmitt proposes, is, rst o all,to challenge the assumption that one could treat Being and the politicalobjectively. More positively put, it is to sensitize onesel to the problemso interpretation (and, by implication, the appropriative Ereignis) pertain-ing to whatever comes under the light o investigation and to reassert theultimate irreducibility o the interpreter, be it Dasein—a being who raisesthe question o Being—or the sovereign who gauges the levels o intensity and determines those critical points (not objectively set once and or all)where the quantitative surge in hostility accomplishes a qualitative shitoward politicization in the categories o collective existence. Te law doesnot interpret itsel, just as the keywords o politics (legitimacy, emergency,etc.) are not endowed with a univocal encyclopedic meaning. We will ndourselves perpetually returning to this insight, in one orm or another.

Tus, Schmitt inscribes his discussion o the political in a kind o nega-tive ontology, in the non-space or, better yet, in the displacement o dierentdomains o human action. As a result o this originary dislocation, that

domains o human action. As a result o this originary dislocation, thatwhich is purely political—the careully distilled intensity o antagonism—is


neither empirically accessible outside the spheres it eventually transorms,nor is it transcendentally given in the manner o Kant’s a priori conditionso possibility. Tat is not to say that “possibility” does not play a crucial rolein Schmitt’s theory o the political with its presupposition o the real andever-present possibility o war (die reale Möglichkeit des Kampes) and theprospect o the physical annihilation o the enemy, and o onesel withoutwhich politics is insipid and meaningless (CP 32). Like Heidegger, whoposits possibility “higher than actuality” in Being and ime,13 Schmitt sub-stantiates the existential character o his philosophy by accentuating thepossible.14 One implication o the political-existential stance is that there isno such thing as an actual political sphere because every sphere is poten-tially political or politicizable due to a possible increase in the intensitieso association and dissociation structuring it. Te act o politicization willbe retrieved only retrospectively, a posteriori, aer the interpretive decisionon the sphere’s transguration has been made.15 Tat is why no liberal de-politicization can do away entirely with the political, which is not a domainamenable to being supplanted, but the overarching principle o displace-ment and, hence, the dynamic governing de-politicization as well.

At this point, it would be instructive to recall Schmitt’s amous state-ment in Political Teology that “[a]ll signicant concepts o the moderntheory o the state are secularized theological concepts” (P 38) and theone that echoes it in Political Teology II : “All de-theologized conceptscarry the weight o their scientically impure origins” (PII 128). Alongwith the claim that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polem-ical meaning” (CP 30) these invocations o the theological contribute tothe structural displacement o political conceptuality in two distinct ways.

First, political concepts do not spring up sui generis but derive rom thetheological sphere in a denite process o dislocation called “seculariza-tion.” Te modern theory o the state—a designation that is, admittedly,much narrower than the concept o the political as such—is orced to takeits terms on loan rom the very pre-modern theological doctrine it ridi-culed and all but invalidated. But, i this doctrine constitutes the rst o the our historical stages o neutralization and de-politicization theorizedin Schmitt’s 1929 essay, then their entire succession—though it is by nomeans clear that this is a question o a “succession”—commences with therestoration o the origin, a negation o the negation, de-secularization,and, thereore, a retreat rom the political back to its displaced source.Tus, in a sweeping statement, Jacob aubes conrms that the restora-tion o the source’s metaphysical purity is incompatible with the political.

tion o the source’s metaphysical purity is incompatible with the political.His analysis o the “gigantomachy around the word ‘pure’” leads him to


depict Schmitt as, so to speak, a partisan o the impure, battling againstthe neo-Kantian transcendental purity o the law divorced rom what wewill readily recognize as the cornerstones o phenomenology and concretelie itsel: experience, language, and history. As aubes states, “Schmitt s’est battu contre une chose: la pure théorie du droit [Schmitt ghts against onething: the pure theory o the law].”16

Political theology, on the other hand, recuperates the principal stage o de-politicization (the theological) in a way that is rie with ambiguity, thatis aithul to the original impurity o political origins, and that producessuch strange mutations as the gure o the partisan, at once politicizedto the bone and criminalized, de-politicized. Te glimmer o hope orre-politicization shines when the rigid modern distinction between thechurch and the state gets eroded, as Schmitt maintains in Political Teology II . Te re-politicization o theological discourse is a direct outcome o itssel-proessed de-politicization: the theological “claim becomes politically more intense along with the degree to which theological authority claimsto supersede political power” (PII 113). Te claim o a domain—in thiscase the theological—to absolute independence renders it only more polit-ical and, thus, not absolutely identical to itsel.

In the second moment o the structural displacement o political con-ceptuality, the polemical meaning o political concepts harkens back notto other concepts, such as the theological, but to the other o the conceptthat is the enemy o philosophy par excellence: the strategic, situational,even bellicose—i we are mindul o the act that the Greek polemosalludes to war—polemical context, wherein we sustain concrete conronta-tions with the enemies or orge alliances and association with the riends.Tey arise, to put it simply, rom the content o political lie. One literally ghts armed with political concepts and distinctions that, with respect toHobbes, Schmitt calls “weapons in political struggle,” or, at times, “counter- concepts,” Gegenbegrie.17 Te Hegelian twist, however, is that the weaponsare not extraneous, prosthetic implements but an expression o the onewho uses them in a ght: “weapons convey the substance o the ghterhimsel” (LS 85). Te polemical means are the ends o the struggle; the“winning” concepts (e.g., legality) shed the vestiges o the context in whichthey served and are enthroned as the universal content o the political.

Te dislocations o the political by other concepts and by the other o the concept converge in the event both in the everyday sense o a singu-lar happening or occurrence—o everything that may be categorized asa part o the polemical context—and in the special sense o expropria-

a part o the polemical context—and in the special sense o expropria-tion that reduces to sheer nonsense all appeals to the “pure origination”


o the political, renders impossible its emplacement, circumscription,economization, or domestication, and undermines a permanently validdemarcation o the variegated elds o human activity. An imprint o theevent o the political is discernable, also, in the quotation marks, to whichSchmitt connes the domains transgured by a quantitatively producedqualitative shi:

Te oen quoted sentence o quantity transorming into quality has athoroughly political meaning. It is an expression o the recognitionthat rom every “domain” the point o the political is reached andwith it a qualitative new intensity o human groupings [daß vom jedem “Sachgebiet” aus der Punkt des Politischen und damit eine quali-tative neue Intensität menschlicher Gruppierung erreicht ist ]. (CP 62,translation modied)

Te quotation marks around “Sachgebiet ” that are missing rom the Englishtranslation indicate the expropriation o every “domain” at the point o thepolitical (Punkt des Politischen), where each sphere loses its linear iden-tity qua the theological, the economic, the moral, and so on, and ceasesto exist as a sphere the moment it becomes politically charged. Mirroringthe transposition o the point beyond the line and the typology o risk,the event o expropriation aporetically combines the calculable level o intensity and the incalculable threshold where all measures and measuredresponses outlive their relevance in the ace o the “qualitatively new.”It draws together extreme indeterminacy—insoar as it may be reached“rom every ‘domain’ [vom jedem ‘Sachgebiet’ ]”—and utmost determina-tion emanating rom the exact turning point o politicization and rom theparticular criteria that distinguish the political rom the “relatively inde-pendent endeavors [domains, MM] o human thought and action [relativ selbständigen Sachgebieten menschlichen Denkens und Handelns]” (CP25). I Schmitt declares the relative independence o these non-politicalspheres, it is in order to point out that, at any moment, they may undergoa process o politicization and that they, thereore, rely on the political inthe last instance.

O course, this reliance is exceptionally risky, in that instead o supply-ing a secure oundation, the political withholds even the least topographicsupports rom what is relatively independent o it.18 Te point o thepolitical, like the point o the decision that lies at its core, is an instant o the greatest risk, an experience o groundlessness. Te political is not the

the greatest risk, an experience o groundlessness. Te political is not themost basic stratum propping up the rest o the edice o human thought


and action, but a veritable earthquake that, in bestowing meaning on thecategories o human existence, disarticulates, unhinges, or ungroundsthe latter and, in this unhinging, absorbs every sphere o lie (as Schmittputs it in Te Leviathan in the State Teory o Tomas Hobbes, “incessantriend-enemy disputes . . . embrace every sphere o human activity” [18]),similarly to the Derridian sponge that expropriates everything it ingests.Te groundless character o the political is, perhaps, best understood asa particular phase o nomos’s uncoupling rom land-appropriation and itstransposition onto the uncertainty o the sea. “Ships that sail across the sealeave no trace [hinterlassen keine Spur ]. ‘On the waves there is nothing butwaves’” (NE 42–43). As a disruption in the ideal co-implication o orderand orientation (Ordnung and Ortung ), the anarchic spatiality o marinetrace-erasure, like the political itsel, cannot be orced into a determinatesystem o enclosures, regional divisions, and appropriations. Better thanthe land, the sea lives up to the political event o radical expropriation.

Notwithstanding the acute deconstructive sensibility he exhibits inTe Politics o Friendship, Derrida misses the non-regional and, in somemeasure, extra-conceptual determination o the political in Schmitt. TeFrench philosopher oversimplies things when he writes that

it [Schmitt’s discourse] oers a pure and rigorous conceptual theory o the political, o the specic region o that which is properly andwithout polemical rhetoric called the “political”, the politicity o thepolitical. Within this region, in the enclosure proper to a theoretical discourse, all examples, all acts, all historical contents should thusissue in knowledge.19

Needless to say, in Schmitt’s discourse, the political does not and cannotbe conned to a specic region, though it does have a specic meaningthat revolves around the riend-enemy distinction. In addition to this obvi-ous lapse in his interpretive vigilance, Derrida willully orgets the impureand “improper” genealogy o the concept o the political issuing rom itstheological (thus, non-political) origins, with this impropriety magniedmaniold by the subversive role o the political in the expropriation o theremaining domains o human action. As or the usual meta-accusationthat the polemical gist o political images and concepts does not make itsel known in a thinking o the political that glories polemics, it is not hard toread between the lines who Schmitt’s enemy is and against whom his theory is ormulated, namely, the liberal-democratic model o state administra-

is ormulated, namely, the liberal-democratic model o state administra-tion predicated on the practices o economic management.


In light o these corrections and rejoinders, how is it possible still toinsist on the purity and propriety o something that lacks a particulardomain and is, perhaps, allergic to the logic o appropriation as such?Pursuing this line o thought, we will uncover nothing more and noth-ing less than Derrida’s own polemical program. It is not by chance thatin this, apparently innocent, depiction o Schmitt’s political philosophy he includes words with the heaviest metaphysical luggage, “pure” and“proper,” that he has submitted to a stringent deconstructive analysis, asearly as in O Grammatology and in Margins o Philosophy . But we willneed to wait or a rather long time, more than one hundred pages o TePolitics o Friendship to be exact, beore he puts his cards on the table, dis-closing the motivation or his imposition o these terms on Schmitt andor a violent imprisonment o his thought in the “enclosure proper to atheoretical discourse.” Without urther ado, this motivation has to do withwhat Derrida puts orth as an “interesting hypothesis,” according to which“Schmitt would . . . become the last great metaphysician o politics, the lastgreat spokesperson o European political metaphysics.”20 Te enclosure o the political concept Derrida imputes to the non-place o the political will,thus, mirror the closure (clôture) o metaphysics, where Schmitt replacesHeidegger who occupies the place o Nietzsche as “the last great metaphy-sician” responsible or accomplishing, without ever completing, the nalreversal o Platonism.

Tis interested, invested reading ignores not only the clearest o indica-tions that the political does not have a particular sphere o its own but alsothat Schmitt has compressed and slotted metaphysics in its entirety intothe second stage o neutralization and de-politicization in his 1929 text. I the most basic way to transcend metaphysics is to historicize it, then thealleged last metaphysician has passed the test o post-metaphysical thought.I am not insinuating, however, that Schmitt is beyond reproach on theissue o metaphysics or that his grade or this test is “entirely satisactory.”Derrida, to be air to him, is partly correct in ascribing a metaphysicalprogram to the theorist who radically expropriates the political, yet nally puts it in the service o guarding and protecting that which is one’s ownor the purpose o preserving, at any price, “one’s own orm o existence[der eigenen Art Existenz ]” (CP 27), in spite o the existential threat stem-ming rom the enemy. o peg the accuracy o the charges that Schmittclandestinely practices a garden variety o metaphysics,21 one would needto contend with this mixed heritage. And to help him leave behind the lastmetaphysical vestiges, one would have to recommit Schmittian politics to

metaphysical vestiges, one would have to recommit Schmittian politics tothe event o expropriation.


Schmitt’s Anti-Economism Revisited: Nomos/Appropriation,

Politics/Expropriation

Schmitt’s anti-economism is, by now, a jaded topic that ails to surpriseanyone versed in the arguments o Roman Catholicism and Te Concept o the Political . In the mindset o liberal-democratic governance, the eco-nomic supplies a blueprint or the impersonal pursuit o politics drainedo danger and risk, ostensibly ree rom the element o decision-making—which turns into another word or tyranny—and, at the extreme, devoid o the last shreds o representation it has disbanded into the sheer presenceo things (RC 20). Te catalogue o these merciless attacks on economismwould not be complete without mentioning that, or Schmitt, the economicis the nal and, perhaps, the most decisive stage o neutralization and de-politicization and that it is intimately tied to the despotism o technology that militates against the possibility o spiritual lie. o sum up, his anti-economism refects an anti-anti-political stance, an assault on everythingthat weakens political concepts and phenomena.

A mere invocation o the critique o presence, directed against theeconomic predominance o things and warily moderated with the rejec-tion o abstract, disembodied concepts (e.g., “humanity,” which lacks abody, either literal or gurative, thus orestalling the possibility o politicalphenomenology), should have su ced or the rst line o the deense o Schmitt against the charges that he has smuggled a heavy metaphysicalluggage into his theory o the political. Te notions o the human and thething, two acets that, along with the animal, make up the architecture o Aristotle’s metaphysics,22 elicit some o the bitterest scorn rom Schmitt inhis early work. As though this were not enough, on the positive side, histhinly veiled attack on metaphysics entails the avowal o “concrete rep-resentation” and o its corollary, “invisible visibility,”23 which resemblesthe Derridian trace, an absent presence or present absence muddling thepurity o philosophical constructs. Be this as it may, even i Schmitt couldbe interpreted as advocating a proto-Arendtian autonomy or primacy o the political vis-à-vis the social and the economic,24 he would not havebeen satised with a simple inversion o the Marxist base-superstructuremodel, given that the political is not one domain among others, crucialor the continuation o the lie o spirit as it might be. We must, rather,assume the task o reconguring the relationship between the politicaland the economic, in a way that leaves direct determinations and evenover-determinations behind. In the course o this reconguration, I will

over-determinations behind. In the course o this reconguration, I willshow that the lines o demarcation between the two also pass at the heart


o the Heideggerian and Derridian meditations on the event o appropria-tion and expropriation.

Abstractly, then, politics is the antithesis o economy; the tacit goalo the analysis o economism is to rescue the realm o “spirit” rom thepredominance o things that triggers the all-too-amiliar scheme o rei-cation.25 Concretely, however, there are three obstacles in the path o thiseasy solution.

1. Economic oppositions can become political, i they are lled with anappropriate intensity o antagonism. As Schmitt puts it in Te Concept o the Political ,

when it reaches a certain quantity, economic property, or example,becomes obviously social (or more correctly, political) power, pro- priété turns into pouvoir , and what is at rst only an economically motivated class antagonism [Klassengegensatz ] turns into a classstruggle [Klassenkamp ] o hostile groups. (CP 62).

Note the rened irony o this example: the embodiment o the economic,the ultimate receptacle o appropriation—property—is expropriatedqua property, becomes “improper,” and turns into power under the sway o the political transormation. Tis kind o expropriation does notacilitate the Hegelian synthesis o two previously antithetical terms butreveals that even the most neutralized category is amenable to a suddenpoliticization. Te opposition o the political and the non-political issubordinate to the antagonism that, at the same time, characterizes thepolitical and that erases this very opposition.

2. Tere can be no symmetry in the relation between economy and poli-tics because, unlike the ormer, the latter has no domain o its own and,consequently, does not partake o the most basic and denitive eco-nomic operation, the act o appropriation. Tis absence o symmetry,once again, lends support to the conclusion that the political and theeconomic will not constitute an economy, not even the economy o oppositional relationality and mutual negation that inheres in every antithesis. Teir antithetical interrelation will be understood as thor-oughly historical and polemical, not as an ontological given.

3. Te legal status o the non-European territory appropriated by Europe-ans testies to the ambiguous mixture o the economic and the politicalat the origins o colonialism. Te justication o colonial occupation inthe writings o the sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher and jurist

the writings o the sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher and juristFrancisco de Vitoria occupied a gray area between “imperium (or


jurisdictio) over human beings and the acquisition o dominium, i.e., private ownership o things” (NE 137). Subsequent legal thinkers haveignored this distinction between political right and economic right—which corresponds to the dierence between Dasein and entities otherthan Dasein in Heidegger—and addressed only “the acquisition o thingsin general” (ibid.). It would be a crude error to conceptualize colonialismas a political phenomenon; at best, it is a vivid example o indecision and vacillation between the political and the economic; at worst, and at itsmost modern, it is a orce o economic appropriation. Te signicance o the colonial omission is that the current victory o economism has beenachieved at the price o erasing the complex interplay between the pro-prietary dominium and the non-economic imperium, a distinction thatstill carried some weight in early modernity.

Beore proceeding any urther, it is important to realize that Schmittdoes not take or granted the meaning o economy but, instead, approachesthe subject matter in a meticulously philosophical manner guided by thequestion, “What is the economic?” In Greek, economy is a composite termconjoining the “nomos” and the “oikos” (the house) in a combination that ismore or less tautological: “the unity o nomos is only the unity o the oikos”(NE 345). Much will depend, thereore, on the interpretation o nomos thatholds the key to the unity and the essence o the economic.

Schmitt contemplates the nomos o eco-nomy in the Materials or Constitutional Teory amassed between 1924 and 1954. He isolates threepertinent bases o the Greek noun, rom nehmen (to take or appropriate)through teilen (to divide or distribute), to weiden (literally, pasturage, orproductive work).26 Appropriation is the most undamental etymologicaland conceptual stratum o the economic nomos, one that makes possibledistribution and production alike in the tripartite economy o “economy.”27 By the same token, it is the most orgotten, to the point o utter repression,o the three meanings o nomos, and its descent into oblivion acceleratesin the aermath o the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. So unre-lenting is the tendency to omit this deepest layer that Schmitt himsel dropsappropriation rom his critique o economy in Roman Catholicism, wherehe ormulates its dierence rom the political and writes that “[b]y claim-ing to be something more than the economic, the political is obliged tobase itsel on categories other than production and consumption” (17). Hissilence apropos o appropriation could, to be sure, mean that the excludedterm does not explain the excess o the political over the economic, but the

term does not explain the excess o the political over the economic, but thecontextual rame o the passage makes it clear that in 1923 Schmitt does


not yet view the latter as anything other than a combination o productionand distribution.

Parallel to the orgetting o Being in Heidegger, the question o appro-priation, responsible or the event o the economic par excellence, migratesto the blind spot o utopian socialism (Proudhon) and to the outskirts o liberalism, or which the truncated and perverted sequence o the produc-tion and distribution o wealth exhausts the nature o economic reality.28 Marx’s ingenuity, on the other hand, lies in his recovery o this repressedeconomic stratum on the edge o its transormation into the political, thatis, in the recuperation o the principle o appropriation and the demandor the expropriation o the expropriators that, alone, lends credibility toradical political economy:

Marx . . . concentrates the whole weight o his attack on the expropria-tion o the expropriators, i.e., on the precedure o appropriation[Vorgang des Nehmens]. In place o the old right o plunder and theprimitive land-appropriations o pre-industrial times, he substitutedthe appropriation o the total means o production.29

Tis more nuanced approach implies that the Schmittian onslaught againsteconomism targets primarily those actors that trigger the impoverishmento the political potential o the economic, its reduction to the spheres o production and distribution, and, most recently, to heedless productivismomented by technological demands and by instrumental rationality.

What distinguishes production rom distribution and, especially, romappropriation is that it does not require a great deal o decision-makingbut dissolves this capacity into the productive technological apparatusand into the general order o things. At the most “ounded” (to resort toa Husserlian notion), ossied, and supercial level o production, whichMarx deemed to be the “inner abode” and the deeply buried source o the capitalist sel-valorization o value, economic rationality is at its mostmaterial, “concerned only with things” (RC 16), preoccupied with thatwhich can be appropriated, yet indierent to the act o appropriationitsel. Conversely, the political entails Unsachlichkeit . Te English trans-lation o this word in terms o “a lack o objectivity” (CP 32) built into thedecision-making capacity is an obvious and correct one, though anotherrendition is possible: in a variation on the negative determination o political immateriality, Unsachlichkeit can also mean “unthingliness.” Teliteral connotations o this term bolster the idea that the political does not

literal connotations o this term bolster the idea that the political does nothave a domain o its own, its proper Sachgebiet , its circumscribed realm


o things (Sachen), or the sovereign and constitution-making decisionscannot be entirely diused in an impersonal eld but are concentratedin a concrete will, whether individual or collective. And i the political isunthingly, then it does not all under the purview o the act o appropria-tion, which it sanctions, assuming that only a thing can be targeted by this act.

Tus ar, the trajectory o the argument easily alls prey to the tacticalmaneuvers Derrida nesses in O Spirit that juxtaposes Heidegger’s de-nition o the thing as “worldless” to the world, which is always spiritual.30 On this view, Schmitt has succumbed to an unquestioned metaphysicaldistinction between the spiritual (politics) and the spiritless (the econ-omy) and has unambiguously taken sides in this articial theoreticalmatrix redolent o the crudest idealism. And yet, the idealist scenariois lopsided and cannot be attributed squarely to Schmitt; the politicalappears to be purely spiritual and immaterial only rom the standpoint o economic rationality. A symptom o complexity in Schmitt’s examinationo the relationship between spirit and the thing, representing the politi-cal and the economic respectively, is his reusal to consider it as a simplebinary opposition, let alone as the point o riction between a thesis andan antithesis. As the penultimate sentence o “Te Age o Neutralizationsand Depoliticizations” proclaims,

lie struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness [und der Geist nicht mit der Geistlosigkeit ]; spirit struggles with spirit, lie withlie, and out o the power o an integral understanding o this arisesthe order o human things [die Ordnung der menschlichen Dinge].(CP 96)

I underline just two aspects o this incredibly ertile passage, which invitesan otherwise interminable analysis: rst, there is never a stando betweenspirit, the world, politics, on the one hand, and spiritlessness, the thing, theeconomy, on the other, seeing that the struggle they are involved in is asym-metrical and takes place as an inner division within spirit, the world, andso on, engulng their opposite; and, second, these inner splits and ssureso spirit against itsel—the splits and ssures that galvanize the riend-en-emy distinction constitutive o the political and that include the divergenceo the political rom economic rationality—result in the order o humanthings, now transcribed not as Sachen but as Dinge. Te barely perceptiblelinguistic shi rom one appellation o the thing to the other signals that the

linguistic shi rom one appellation o the thing to the other signals that thepolitical, too, possesses a material, “thingly” dimension and, urthermore,


conveys that the struggle o lie against lie and o spirit against spirit aectsthe thing itsel, subject to the clash between the order o human Dinge andthe impersonal, administrative arrangement o Sachen. Such is the event o the thing divided against itsel and, thereore, no longer resting in the sel-identity o an inanimate entity abstractly opposed to spirit. It partakes o the event o politics, where the catalogue o what is expropriated includes,rst and oremost, every stable and rigid identity o lie, spirit, or the thingwith itsel and, additionally, the spatiality o the political devoid o its ownregion or proper domain.

What is the place o the concept in this ramework? Te Hegelian dialec-tical concept longs or its identity with itsel, awaiting that time outside o time when identity bridges and reconciles the identical and the non-iden-tical across all the unrests and tribulations that beall Spirit in its historicalinstantiations. But the eventul expropriation o the rmly establishedconceptual identity innitely postpones the moment o the concept’s nalreturn to itsel and, by implication, deers the end o the political divisionbetween riends and enemies, lie and lie, spirit and spirit, and so on. Teconcept o the political, der Begri des Politischen, will not have been able todrive away this irreducible dierence without, at the same time, annihilat-ing the political “itsel.” Tat o which it is a concept (the political) preventsits closure and absolute homecoming, puts it on the brink o the event, andateully entwines the concept with its own expropriation. Der Begri desPolitischen is uncanny because, instead o grasping ( greien) the political, itpermits the latter to grasp us, to push us to the extremity o the limit, wherethe sovereign decision on the exception and the real possibility o killingand being killed by the enemy grips and unsettles us, making lie bothinteresting and dangerous, as Leo Strauss observes in his infuential com-mentary on Schmitt. Te existential concept is nothing i it is not an outletor the event oretokening the possibility o its—and our —expropriation.

How to Remain Faithful to the Event of Politics?

In raising this question I do not have in mind what Alain Badiou terms“delity to the event,” that germination o the subject who perormatively attains the level o subjecthood by a rming his or her allegiance to theevent.31 Badiou’s “delity” still clings to the modality o the event thatequally appropriates the subject and the “thinking o the situation”: “obe aithul to an event is to move within the situation that this event hassupplemented, by thinking . . . the situation ‘according to’ the event.”32 Te

supplemented, by thinking . . . the situation ‘according to’ the event.” Tesituation is the ontological superdomain, indierent and indeterminate,


where the paths o the ourold event o art, science, politics, and loveare dierentiated and charted. o be aithul, to stay on these paths, is toexercise the interpretive appropriation o the otherwise neutral situationthought “‘according to’ the event.”

Returning to Schmitt, we ace a much more di cult dilemma i we ask how it is possible to harness, at the level o concrete material practices, thepotential o the expropriative event that blasts open the concept o the politi-cal. Does Schmitt himsel succeed in the task o transerring the ungroundednotion o the political, which does not belong in any particular sphere, topolitical practices that concretely embrace this non-belonging? Tis is wherehis political philosophy is vulnerable beore the Derridian diagnosis o itsmetaphysical entrenchment. We could say that Schmitt retreats rom thestructural displacement o the concept o the political and vacillates to theother extreme o the event (appropriation) when he subjects the riend-en-emy distinction to the exigencies o preserving “one’s own orm o existence.”In so doing, he perpetuates the intellectual inheritance, which Spinoza, thatscandalous seventeenth-century metaphysician, bequeathed to Westernphilosophy by embedding the abstract principle o identity in the concretepredicament o the living desire to maintain onesel in existence.33

In what ollows I will advance a somewhat counterintuitive argumentthat, in the applications o his theory, Schmitt does not abandon the politi-cal event o expropriation, though he does misconstrue the concept o expropriation as nothing but the negative mode o appropriation. Temisconstrual I am reerring to occurs in the 1953 text on the basic ques-tions o any social and economic order and, in particular, in the refectionson the Marxist “expropriation o the expropriators,” die Expropriation der Expropriateure. “I the essence o imperialism,” writes Schmitt, “lies inthe precedence o appropriation over distribution and production, then adoctrine such as the expropriation o expropriators is obviously the stron-gest imperialism because it is the most modern [oenbar stärkster, weil modernster Imperialismus].”34 Besides exhibiting a narrow understand-ing o expropriation as the underside o appropriation, this passage ailsto ask whether the event o the expropriation o the expropriators leavesthe dynamics o appropriation intact, or whether this dynamics is ate-ully altered and stripped o all imperialist overtones. Does appropriationremain the same beore and aer the expropriation o expropriators hastaken place? I believe that it does not, i expropriation is not taken as areapportionment o what was previously appropriated but as a momentary paralysis o the economic order and the radical displacement o ownness as

paralysis o the economic order and the radical displacement o ownness assuch in a way that remains aithul to the event o politics.


Despite a hurried dismissal o Marxist expropriation as “the mostmodern” orm o imperialism, Schmitt’s political philosophy alls on theDerridian side o the event articulated in the suspension o the “proper.”Te exigencies o preserving “one’s own orm o existence” against the threato the enemy (in appealing to these exigencies, doesn’t Schmitt solicit sup-port rom the Spinozan conatus essendi, and does he not contravene hisprior adherence to the political purged o various neutralizations and de-politicizations, including the metaphysical ones?) need to be re-embeddedwithin the ramework o Te Concept o the Political , rom which they issue. Immediately beore he adopts this deensive attitude, Schmitt placesan accent on the absence o a neutral third party that could adjudicate theexistential confict with the other: “Tese [conficts] can neither be decidedby a previously determined general norm [in vorhaus getroene generelleNormierung ] nor by the judgment o a disinterested and thereore neutralthird party [eines ‘unbeteiligten’ und daher ‘unparteiischen’ Dritten]” (CP27). Te decision lies exclusively with the actual participants in the confictand their judgment—“Only the actual participants can correctly recognize,understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme caseo confict” (CP 27)—that remains existentially groundless, insoar as ithinges neither on the externality o the general norm nor on the whim o a neutral third party.

Te unambiguous rejection o the norm, which stands or sham neutrality that surreptitiously caters to particular interests, cannot open an exceptionor the conatus, or the law o perseverance in one’s being, without, at the sametime, stripping the parties to the confict o their decision-making ability andre-establishing the primacy o the impersonal metaphysics o “substance.”In contrast to Spinoza, Schmitt cannot exempt the question concerning thepreservation o one’s own orm o existence rom the practices o decision-making. Although the decision not to preserve this orm is a dangerous one,as it may spell out the end o urther political decisions, in the absence o apossibility to make this choice, a determinate general norm (e.g., the “naturallaw” o sel-preservation) is reinstated only to annul the decision as such.35 As we have seen, the event that lives up to its name is risky in the pregnantsense; it admits even the possibility o its own closure, proscribing a serieso uture existential decisions. Regardless o the content o what is decidedin each case, the existential decision will have singled out and subscribed toone o at least two options. Otherwise, obeying the dictate o natural law,we are le with the “either” divorced rom the “or,” that is to say, with a pre-determined program o action that is no longer political—or example, the

determined program o action that is no longer political—or example, thenormative and “necessarily antagonistic exclusion o concrete others.”36


From the existential point o view, while the objective outcome o a deci-sion might be the same, the dierent paths that have led to its actualizationare crucial or its evaluation. When Schmitt derides pacist indecision,crystallized in the proclamation that a “people has nothing but riends,”he concludes, in an extremely disconcerting manner, that such politicalexhaustion will cause a “weak people [ein schwaches Volk]” to disappear(CP 53). But it, certainly, matters whether this disappearance has comeabout as a result o indecision and risk-avoidance discussed in Chapter 2,or thanks to a deliberate choice not to preserve one’s own orm o exis-tence—to expropriate onesel.37 I the latter is the case, then the sameoutcome must be interpreted as a sign o strength, not o weakness, a signthat, in the long run, this orm is renewed thanks to its sel-expropriationand that the political decision remains meaningul, having been given achoice between two distinct alternatives. In the spirit o Schmitt’s politicalphilosophy, which occasionally clashes with the letter o his texts, com-mentators need to tackle not only the metaphysical-nationalist but also themoral residue in the oreboding value judgment he passed on ein schwachesVolk by restricting it to instances o political atigue that do not encompassthe decision to let go o one’s orm o collective existence or to disclaim itsnationalist character.

An obvious, and patently Spinozan, objection that might arise at thispoint would be that no one in the right rame o mind (i.e., having the goodclearly in sight) is prepared consciously to give up one’s conatus essendi,or that which keeps one ast to existence. And, assuming that this deliber-ate decision were possible, would the event o the political be an elaborateaçade or a political suicide? Tis is the direction in which Derrida takesthe thought o the event in Rogues, where he exposes the aporiae hauntingthe binaries o heteronomy and autonomy, absolute hospitality and sover-eignty, the host’s sel-expropriating openness to alterity and the desire tooccupy one’s spot under the sun. Te general heading or these aporiae is“autoimmunity”: the capacity o a living entity to “destroy, in an autono-mous ashion, the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it againstthe other.”38 With this biological allusion, Derrida illustrates how, in theprocess o deending itsel rom the other, an entity can autonomously eectuate its own heteronomy and expose itsel to alterity. And, conversely,what a skeptic might dub “political suicide,” the autonomous choice toexpropriate onesel, breathes lie and meaning into the political decision onthe orm o one’s own existence. (I contend that the concept o the politicalis itsel suicidal, in that, as a concept, it strives toward identity and recon-

is itsel suicidal, in that, as a concept, it strives toward identity and recon-ciliation, negating the agonistic and uncompromising potentialities o the


political which it, nevertheless, cannot erase.) Te autonomous transitionto heteronomy marks the maximal sense o the event o expropriation.

I we are attentive to the ne grain o Schmitt’s text, we will observe thatit is not political existence as such but the orm ( Art ) o this existence thatis preserved or rejected in the decisive conrontation with the enemy. ocling to an outmoded orm o existence is to keep the old status quo onarticial respiration, long aer the content rom which it had arisen with-ered away. A regular revisiting o the decision prevents the dissociationo the content o existence rom its orm, in that it measures and assessesthe changes in the ormer to ensure that the latter has not petried. Here,the event o expropriation is diluted to its minimal sense o shedding theold orm o political existence that no longer corresponds to its contentin order to assume a new, existentially substantiated orm. Tis minimalevent o expropriation provides or a certain continuity between the sec-ond and the third “absolute meanings” o the constitution in Constitutional Teory : between the constitution as a living orm or a “special type o political and social order . . . not detachable rom . . . political existence”and as “the principle o the dynamic emergence o political unity, o theprocess o constantly renewed ormation and emergence o this unity roma undamental or ultimately eective power and energy ” (C 60–61). Inthe process o renewal that adumbrates the living connection between theorm and the content o politics, expropriation acilitates the “emergence”and “ormation” o new unities (orms o political existence) and unctionsas the inalienable aspect o decisions on the constitution as a whole. It isnecessitated by the act that there is no proper, ideal, transhistorical modeo lie perectly betting a concrete political unity once and or all. Or, romthe methodological perspective, the issue is whether or not existence and,above all, political existence is grasped existentially , that is, not in keepingwith the objective and seemingly ever-present metaphysical categories butat the level o what Schmitt, somewhat awkwardly, labels “concrete lie,”immanently changeable and abounding in utural possibilities.

Does the concept, on its part, escape the ate o those unities that orm anddissolve in the process o renewal? When Schmitt revisits the intuitions o his 1932 work, Te Concept o the Political , aer World War II and outlinesthe shis o political ocus rom clearly identiable state actors to irregularpartisan ormations, he warns against what he calls Begrisaufösung , “con-cept dissolution,” in the treatment o the gure o the partisan:

In some cases, this alteration o meaning becomes exhausted in an inde-

In some cases, this alteration o meaning becomes exhausted in an inde-inite symbolization [allgemeinen Symbolisierung und Begrisaufösung ]


that ends up dissolving the original concept. Te result is that every non-conormist individual who acts as he sees t can be called a partisan . . . Suchconceptual dissolutions are a sign o the times, which should not beignored and would deserve a separate examination. (P 22–23)

Te process o concept dissolution that sees the partisan turn into every-thing and nothing in particular is most salient at a time o transition and,hence, in the emergence o a new conceptual unity. Te minimal sense o ontological expropriation is epistemologically relevant to the concept o the political as well, permitting its orm to adjust to the increasingly moresignicant partisan content and interspersing this period o adjustmentwith hyperbolic extensions and overvaluations o the partisan.

More importantly, the maximal sense o expropriation that goes along withthe concept’s dissolution exceeds Schmitt’s disparaging rhetoric. Far rombeing a mere “sign o the times,”39 this dissolution, which depicts the event o expropriation, is olded into the concept o the political that reuses to insulateitsel in stable identities, constantly alls apart and, thereby, channels the evento politics. Although it might appear that the concrete eatures o the partisan,including irregularity, greater mobility, and increased intensity o engage-ment, threaten to replace the rigorously conceptual orm with an obscure,energetic, and embodied gure, whose outlines are essentially blurred, they are, to the contrary, a sign o the utmost delity to the concept that eedso the logic o displacement, lacks a clearly identiable domain o its own,and transgresses the boundaries o all other domains. With the partisan’s riseto prominence, the concept o the political expropriates itsel, autonomously eectuates its heteronomy, and welcomes the event o politics. And it is thissel-expropriation that supplants all positive, constative pronouncements onpolitical ontology with an open-ended question.

Notes

1. On the historical background o the much debated distinction between politics and“the political,” see Kari Palonen, “Politics or the Political? An Historical Perspective on aContemporary Non-Debate,” in European Political Science 6, 2007, pp. 69–78. I concur withPalonen that the abstract privileging o the political “provides the scholar with an excuse toretain a pro-political attitude while remaining disinterested in the actions o politicians” (p.78). Tis disengagement, however, does not mark Schmitt’s political philosophy discussedin the article.

2. Richard Polt, Te Emergency o Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 73.


3. “[]he er- in Ereignis has the unction o stressing and putting orth the movemento eignen in -eignis.” Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, “ranslators’ Foreword,” in MartinHeidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. xx. See also GiorgioAgamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanord:Stanord University Press, 1999), p. 117.

4. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emadand K. Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 40.

5. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (übingen: Verlag, 1993), p. 148.6. Ibid., p. 169.7. Jacques Derrida, Signésponge/Signsponge, trans. R. Rand (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1984), p. 28.8. Ibid., p. 102.9. Tus, in Jacques Derrida’s O Grammatology [trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)] the property o representamen “is not to be proper [ propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itsel ( prope, proprius). Te represented isalways already a representamen” (p. 50). See also Derrida’s “White Mythology,” in Marginso Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 1982),especially the part titled “Te Flowers o Rhetoric,” pp. 245–257.

10. Derrida, Signsponge, p. 72.11. C. Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy , trans. J. Rose

(Minneapolis and London: University o Minnesota Press, 1999).12. Schmitt denounces “the nineteenth-century antitheses” that place the political on

the hither side o every other sphere o human activity as evidence o “liberal depoliticiza-tion.” See CP 23.

13. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit , p. 38.14. Having acknowledged a certain proximity between Schmitt and Heidegger,

Jean-François Lyotard [Heidegger and the ‘Jews’ , trans. A. Michel and M. Roberts(Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 1997)] hurries to distance the latter romthe ormer, with the excuse that political theology does not go ar enough in the direc-tion o “a rigorous deconstruction o the categories o ontotheology and politics” (p.72). As we shall see, Derrida perpetuates this way o treating Schmitt that remainsoblivious to the existential character o his political thought, which is not shackled toits “Catholic” sources.

15. Joseph Bendersky [Carl Schmitt: Teorist or the Reich (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983)] notes that this potential politicizability o every sphere is intendedto combat the liberal contention that there are neutral or apolitical spheres (p. 88).

16. Jacob aubes, En Divergent Accord: À Propos de Carl Schmitt (Paris: Payot & Rivages,2003), p. 90.

17. See, or instance, NE 73.18. While Heinrich Meier [Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: Te Hidden Dialogue , trans. J.

H. Lomax (Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 1995)] is right to distinguish

the political rom all other “relatively independent domains,” he is somewhat careless in


attributing a “undamental” (p. 16) dimension to it, a dimension which ought to be takenwith more than one grain o salt, as the present analysis shows.

19. Derrida, Politics o Friendship, p. 117.20. Ibid., p. 247.21. Tese charges are echoed by Andrew Norris in his paper “Sovereignty, Exception,

Norm,” in Journal o Law and Society 34 (1), March 2007, pp. 31–45.22. o put it briefy, the notion o the thing is a cornerstone o the Aristotelian meta-

physical edice, where the animal is “the living thing” and the human is “the politicalanimal,” or, by implication, “the political living thing.”

23. C. “Te Visibility o the Church: A Scholastic Consideration,” an appendix toRoman Catholicism and the Political Form, pp. 47–59.

24. Tis is the position Eckard Bolsinger deends in his Te Autonomy o the Political:Carl Schmitt’s and Lenin’s Political Realism (Westport, C and London: Greenwood Press,2001).

25. John McCormick [Carl Schmitt’s Critique o Liberalism: Against Politics as echnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. p. 57] does well to compare Schmitt’scritique o economic rationality with the Lukácsian notion o reication, even i this com-parison overlooks some o the complexities involved in the anti-economism o the ormerthinker.

26. Carl Schmitt, “Appropriation/Distribution/Production: oward a ProperFormulation o Basic Questions o Any Social and Economic Order,” trans. G. Ulmen,elos 95, Spring 1993, pp. 54–55. Much o these refections on the meaning o nomos are a con-densed orm o the systematic and monumental eort preserved in Te Nomos o the Earth. Te semantic list o the meanings o nomos is ar rom exhausted here, or it can have aplethora o “derived” senses, rom “a mere rule” to the opposite o phusis. C. NE 67.

27. It is surprising that in his essay “radition o the Immemorial,” included inPotentialities, Agamben takes these three economic principles to be Schmitt’s articulationso the political (p. 112). Only this ba ing conusion allows him to separate Ur-teilung romappropriation and to call it a “taking . . . that has no appropriation to accomplish.”

28. Schmitt, “Appropriation/Distribution/Production,” p. 59.29. Ibid., p. 62.30. Jacques Derrida, O Spirit: Heidegger and the Question , trans. G. Bennington and R.

Bowlby (Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 47–48.31. In a dierent context, Colin Wright [“Event or Exception? Disentangling Badiou

rom Schmitt, or owards a Politics o the Void,” in Teory and Event 11 (2), 2008] distancesBadiou’s event rom Schmitt’s exception.

32. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding o Evil , trans. P. Hallward (New York and London: Verso, 2002), p. 41.

33. “Considered juristically, what exists as political power has value because it exists.Consequently, its ‘right to sel-preservation’ is the prerequisite o all urther discussions;it attempts, above all, to maintain itsel in existence, ‘in suo esse perseverare’ (Spinoza)”(C 76).

34. Schmitt, “Appropriation/Distribution/Production,” p. 63.


35. Schmitt does not oppose pacism to the natural law, as Robert Howse [“FromLegitimacy to Dictatorship—and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique o the Anti-Liberalismo Carl Schmitt,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique o Liberalism , ed. D. Dyzenhaus(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 66] claims, but to the decision on whetherone should maintain one’s orm o existence.

36. In his recent article, Matthias Fritsch [“Antagonism and Democratic Citizenship(Schmitt, Moue, Derrida),” in Research in Phenomenology 38 (2), 2008, pp. 174–197]imputes, precisely, such normativity to Schmitt.

37. For instance, when a minority group assimilates into the mainstream society.38. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: wo Essays on Reason, trans. M. Naas and P.-A. Brault

(Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2005), p. 125.39. Preparing the ground or the argument advanced in “Teory o the Partisan,”

Schmitt writes in Constitutional Teory : “One may generally say that the concept rendersitsel relative and pluralistic as soon as the consciousness o political existence underminesitsel” (95). But what i, instead o being a symptom o such sel-undermining, the relativ-ization (and, indeed, the dissolution) o political concepts is necessary or their adjustmentto a new content o such existence? Aer all, isn’t it his contention that all concepts in thespiritual sphere are marked by an unavoidable pluralism?

4

Politics in Question

Prelude: Questioning the Question

“Politics in Question”: these three words will have meant both too muchand too little. oo much, because o the expression’s plurivocity, its richsemantic potential tapped, or instance, in a suggestion that politics,deprived o a sphere o its own, inheres in an open-ended question that,like human existence itsel, lacks a response, a strict closure (though notnitude), a universally valid and positive, let alone normative, injunc-tion. Tis syntagma might also intimate to us that politics is endangeredand ragile, so much so that its existence is oen doubtul, put in ques-tion, placed under erasure, in the manner o Heidegger’s Being. Or, is itthe case that the second interpretation tacitly draws on the rst, in thatthe ragility o politics, its placement under erasure, is due to the act thatit nds a domicile, however uncertain, in the orm o the question? Wecould mention an additional rendition o the syntagma that sees in poli-tics in question a questionable politics—something that Schmitt and hisinterpreters are acquainted with all too well. Tis third possibility is a ully legitimate one until, that is, it slides into moralizing judgments passed onthis politics as unquestionably reactionary or, worse still, evil. In light o this last hermeneutical possibility, the opening o the question is immedi-ately converted into its closure that, emboldened by the sel-righteousnesso such judgments, in one breath, extinguishes the questioning impulseand the promise o the political.

It should be remarked that the vigilance o the question does not con-sist in a desire to propagate pure indeterminacy and, thus, to dodge all judgments, all matters o responsibility, decisions and denitive pro-

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judgments, all matters o responsibility, decisions and denitive pro-nouncements. It awakens, instead, an aspiration toward justice, the ancient

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desideratum to dispense to each her or his own, or, more specically, togive back to the political a groundless, endangered existence that, with theintensication o antagonisms in other spheres o human lie, puts the exis-tents so politicized in question. I, as we have already seen, the politicaldoes not have a clearly circumscribed domain o its own, i it is fuid andsubversive enough to politicize all other domains o human activity, then itis more tting to think about it along the lines o ultimately unanswerablequestions than in terms o one-dimensional replies. And it is at this point,in the existential wager par excellence, that “politics in question” meanstoo little because, rather than turning the political into an object o inquiry or a target or interrogation, it puts us in question, disconcerts, unhinges,and unsettles us. When one abides in the mode o questioning, raising aquestion that does not come to rest in any consensual response, one doesnot remain in control o what is thus unleashed, but experiences a sense o being haunted by the question, o being driven ever deeper into its abyss.Following a hypermodern sensibility, the putting o the human subject inquestion is not a disturbance o a preexisting identity; it is her very identity.In a preliminary way, I suggest, then, that we experience a political-existen-tial crisis whenever we are put into question in our very being and that thiscrisis is not a merely feeting, temporary, singular occurrence but the shapeand being o the human being who is inexorably unhinged, questioned,targeted by the other, whom I call “my enemy” but without whom I losemy human countenance.

Posing the Question

Much o Schmitt’s political thought may be positioned between two dicta,one o them poetic, the other—philosophico-anthropological. Not only do these statements pertain to disciplines and spheres o cultural produc-tion other than political philosophy, but they are also quotations that havetheir provenance in authors other than Schmitt, who polemically takesover their meaning and, hence, politicizes them. Unevenly distributedacross the Schmittian oeuvre (one statement is cited only once, while theother winds like Ariadne’s thread, in many guises, through writings o di-erent periods), in their heterogeneous ways, both shed light on the roleo the question in political ontology. Let us put these textual ragmentsside-by-side in order to allow them to communicate to one another, torelate in a aint whisper everything that is going on between them, namely,an existential politics. We are already abreast o the rst o these: “Man,

an existential politics. We are already abreast o the rst o these: “Man,or Plessner, is ‘primarily a being capable o creating distance’ who in his


essence [in seinem Wesen] is undetermined, unathomable, and remains‘an open question’ [unbestimmt, unergründlich und ‘oene Frage’ bleibt ]”(CP 60). In the second ragment Schmitt cites the German poet TeodorDäubler, “Te enemy is our own question as Gestalt [Der Feind ist unsereeigene Frage als Gestalt . Alternatively: Te enemy is a gure or our ownquestion]” (G 243). While, rom Meier to Derrida, commentators havegenerated a veritable exegetical genealogy o this last sentence, I want tohear it with a slightly dierent ear, an ear attuned neither to the enemy, norto the gure but to the question that imparts sense to both.

Te openness o the question investing the essence o “man,” the lack o closure and the indeterminacy o nite human existence, is not an auto-matic endorsement o passive and unconditional hospitality to the othercelebrated in the second hal o the twentieth century, most notably, by theFrench philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. o be sure, the two currents o thought (that o Levinas and that o Schmitt) may share a common source inan attempt at rethinking classical theological doctrine, according to whichhumans are, rom the rst, situated in a dialogue with God to whom they respond and whom they question, on account o the reedom o atheism—what Levinas terms in otality and Innity “created reedom” or “absoluteseparation”—harking back to the secular attitude woven into the abric o theism. Whereas the reelaboration o this doctrine led Levinas toward anethical philosophy o welcoming the other, who may even be my enemy, orSchmitt, it served as the condition o possibility or an ongoing polemical,political-theological contestation o what it means to be human, a con-testation that occurs at the level o concrete, embodied, historical humanbeings, not at the level o humanity as an “all-embracing social ideal” (CP55). I the human being is unathomable, or literally ungrounded, uner- gründlich, that is because its determination is a sel-determination1 which,i it is not to yield a monstrosity o yet another essentialism and belie theopenness o nite existence, must maintain a high degree o plasticity andindeterminacy. (Let it be said, in passing, that Plessner’s statement power-ully resonates not only with Schmitt but also with Heidegger, or whomhuman essence is nothing but existence and, thereore, a certain “ecstatic”openness o the nite oriented by its possibilities.2 In other words, all threeauthors concur that human essence is existence and that the rhetoricalorm o the latter is a question.)

Tis existential denition does not call or an extreme solipsism per-meating the tradition o radical humanism: the sel-determination andthe sel-contestation o the human is, in rather Hegelian terms, the gen-

the sel-contestation o the human is, in rather Hegelian terms, the gen-esis o identity in opposition to otherness, or, more concretely, a polemical


determination o one human collectivity vis-à-vis another such collectiv-ity. Nor can we aord to ignore the other source o heteronomy, o whichSchmitt is keenly aware: the dimension o human corporeality, our “actic-ity” that makes us vulnerable—even ontologically so—and “naked,” nackt ,especially when we eel that we are clothed in the armor o the latest tech-nologies (EC 79, 85). Te autonomy o sel-determination is not the lastword o the political; it is as i the centerpiece o Plessner’s philosophicalanthropology solicited the poetic conclusion concerning the enemy as our own question, in that the enemy accomplishes, without ever completing,the real work o heteronomy, unhinging and maintaining undone the g-ure o the human conceived as “an open question.” Te enemy metes outto us the principle o our existence, so much so that the riend-enemy dis-tinction—the unbridgeable distance constitutive o the political—is itsel constituted by him as the prototype o all dierence, the mechanism o distantiation (including sel-distantiation), dening the spacing aroundwhich “man” constructs himsel as “a being capable o creating distance.”What this implies is that the question is the essence o the political, whilethe political is the essence o the human.

Te source o the paradoxical dispensation o what makes us human,its emanation rom the concept o the enemy, becomes exceptionally clearin Ex Captivitate Salus, where Schmitt repeats the poetic ormula, with abarely perceptible hermeneutical variation:

Who may I nally recognize as my enemy? Maniestly, he alone whocan put me in question [der mich in Frage stellen kann]. Insoar as Irecognize him as my enemy, I recognize that he can put me in ques-tion. And who can eectively put me in question? Only mysel. Ormy brother. Tat’s it. Te other is my brother. Te other is revealed asmy brother and the brother reveals himsel as my enemy . . . Teenemy is our own question as gure. (EC 89–90)3

wo observations are in order here.First , i the enemy is the only one who can put me in question and i,

moreover, the human being is understood as an open question, then theenemy grants me my humanity—a word we should register without atinge o humanism—by way o activating the uniquely human existentialstance o nding onesel enduringly put in question. For the rst timein human history, the concept o the human is not anthropomorphic,in that the living human being is no longer “modeled on [an abstract

in that the living human being is no longer “modeled on [an abstractimage o] humanity” (PII 57). Te ull weight and the dangerousness


o this non-humanist idea o the human should not escape our atten-tion: the enemy who existentially puts me in question, who is denedby this very act, and who doles out my identity to me does so concretely as a death-bearing adversary. As Schmitt unambiguously species, “Teriend, the enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning pre-cisely because they reer to the real possibility o physical killing . . . Waris the existential negation [seinsmäßige Negierung ] o the enemy” (CP33). We will, no doubt, return to the uncanny negation that, instead o denying or saying “no” to the enemy as our own question, emphatically a rms this gure, along with the possibility o death it carries. Te realpossibility o death is preerable, in Schmittian terms, to the certainty o nihilism, the boredom and revulsion instilled in us by the decay o thedangerous and risky core o the human. An orientation toward death,as the possible outcome o enmity, does not gloriy what it orients itsel toward, does not take its cues rom the hither side o lie. Rather, thedetour through the tangle o the enemy, the existential question, theimminent threat o mortality, and hence a nite lie, puts me ace-to-ace with mysel and, in so doing, uels the liveliness, the vivacity, o my lie, in the same way that Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” gives one achance to live otherwise, holding onto the promise o authenticity, how-ever errant and ephemeral. Finally, one more element needs to be addedto this tangle, namely, philosophy as the meta-experience o question-ing, the questioning about that question which outlines the contours o the human being.4

Second , there is a strange slippage in the passage quoted above. Whilethe enemy puts me in question, he, in turn, is treated as “our own question.”What has changed between the two invocations o the question in thisdense text? What allows Schmitt to oscillate so lightly between the privateand the public, to shi rom the rst-person singular to the rst-personplural in this conrontation with the enemy? o be sure, the encounter withthe political enemy is never private, even i I have the impression that itconcerns only the two o us. Te politically engaged enemy is, according toSchmitt’s insistence, a public, not a private adversary: hostis, not inimicus(CP 29). But the lines o demarcation between the public and the privatehave never been more blurred. In a hypothetical situation in which I ndmysel alone, I am still, or already, with my enemy, who has the exclusiveright to put me in question. I am with mysel, put into question by mysel as my own enemy; a human being’s “relation ad se ipsum is not possiblewithout a relation ad alterum” (RC 51). Paradigmatically, by maintaining

without a relation ad alterum” (RC 51). Paradigmatically, by maintainingdistance rom mysel, in a slight variation on Plessner’s denition o the


human, I dispense my humanity to mysel as other and bestow a measureo recognition upon mysel by becoming my own enemy even in the “pri- vacy” o my prison cell. So, when I am in a ace-to-ace situation with anexternal enemy, we are not two, but already orm a crowd. It remains to bedecided to what extent this train o thought is motivated by the desire to putphilosophy in the service o therapeutic ends, given Schmitt’s own impris-onment at the end o World War II—the predicament in which this textwas composed—and to what extent it is applicable to the human conditionas such. What is clear, nevertheless, is that the simultaneous ssuring andunity o the I, its psychic-political makeup, is an aerglow o the theologi-cal paradox o the rinity, which osters stasis in the speculative dialecticalsense o “quiescence, tranquility, standpoint, status” and, at the same time,“unrest, movement, uproar, civil war” (PII 123). Te slippage between“me” and “our” in Schmitt is a political refection o the theological prob-lem o the unity and multiplicity o the rinity that would ba e the ancientdialecticians o the one and the many or, more pertinently or us, wouldderail the eorts to set the public enemy apart rom the private one.

Further complicating things, Schmitt tacitly makes the I interchangeablewith the other who is my brother. Te exclusive right o putting onesel inquestion (“Only mysel”) is immediately ollowed by an alternative thatshould have been ruled out by it (“Or my brother”). In this calculus, then,the minimum number is three: there are always (1) the I; (2) mysel as my own potential enemy; and (3) the virtual supplement o my brother whocan stand in or me in the same capacity. It is or this innitesimal politicalcommunity that the enemy represents our own question as gure. But whatdoes it mean to say that the enemy is “ours”? In declaring it “my own” or“our own,” do I preclude the possibility o absolute animosity, even i theenemy is mine or ours only as a question? Do I, as it were, domesticate andappropriate this problematic gure both conceptually and experientially?

Admittedly, the enemy is the one who gures or even pregures us,gives us a determinate shape, but he does so by putting us in question,expropriating us, destining us to perpetual disquietude. o say that thegure o the enemy entirely overlaps that o the question is to attest tothe act that the enemy (or the other) is invisible, essentially hidden, andunrecognizable. It is also a way o reinorcing Plessner’s anthropologico- philosophical denition o the human, which amounts to a way o speaking about the essence o man that is exquisitely reticent and thatmost closely approximates not speaking about it, at least rom the van-tage point o those who expect a ully elaborated answer at the end o a

tage point o those who expect a ully elaborated answer at the end o aseries o questions concerning the object o inquiry. What is questioned


about is, itsel, a question; the question inquiring into the essence o thehuman being discovers that the latter is an open question, incompatiblewith the presumed open-endedness o a parliamentary discussion, and,as such, does not tolerate the nality o a response. Such is the “ormalstructure” o the abyss, which may be glimpsed when I refectively ask mysel, “Wer bist du? u quis es? [Who are you? ],” posing “eine abgründigeFrage [an abyssal question]” (EC 9). Who questions and who or what isquestioned about makes a tremendous dierence, especially because thischasm between the “who” and the “what” retraces the initial cle between“the I” and “mysel” in the genesis o the enemy.o sum up, the enemy is a concrete and embodied gure, indeed a living

symbol, o questioning that animates political lie and makes us human inthe rst place, with all the risks and dangers pertaining to the courageousanthropology, which, instead o breeding unexamined presuppositions,reaches a political decision to endorse the undecidability o human nature.I have been also arguing that the line borrowed rom Däubler implies thatthe enemy is our question as our own gure. Tat is to say, what orms usis the other, who puts us in question, whether creating in us a sense o soli-darity in the ace o the common threat, or introducing a ssure between“the I” and “mysel,” who is my rst enemy. But, in discussing the gurationo the collectivity that claims the question o the enemy as its own, it wouldbe unorgivable to neglect another word rie with a vast number o seman-tic infections. Tis word is Gestalt —gure or orm; better yet, a ormedgure—situated, vis-à-vis the enemy and the question, on the other side o the copula in “Te enemy is our own question as Gestalt .”

Neither Däubler nor Schmitt use the word Form derived rom Latinand reserved by Schmitt or the situation o war, in the course o whichone attempts to ward o the enemy, to deend onesel rom being put inquestion by the other, to eliminate “the existential threat to one’s own way o lie [Existenzorm]” (CP 49). Te expression Existenzorm translated as“a way o lie” literally reers to the orm o existence chosen in an almostconsumerist way rom among a wide array o available options. Tesediverse “ways o lie,” including “the American way o lie” tirelessly ele-gized by George Bush in the eight years o his presidency and, presumably,threatened by terrorism, supercially overlay the more basic, gural ormo collectivity as the source o their cultural-political nourishment. Tesubstantive distinction between the two orms o orm explains why I canattempt to kill the enemy, who undermines my usual, everyday orm o existence, even though I am unable to eliminate his ormed gure, Gestalt ,

existence, even though I am unable to eliminate his ormed gure, Gestalt ,which denes and dees the gural orm o our (the riends’) collective


existence. Te task o the political-phenomenological hermeneutics Schmittclandestinely spins out o Däubler’s pithy statement is, precisely, to inter-pret the ormation o our question as Gestalt that deepens, extends, andelaborates on the question without yielding a response. It would be advis-able to read the word “as,” als, in the Heideggerian ashion, that is, as anapophantic “as,” which, in Being and ime, does not descriptively addanything new to the phenomenon but reveals the phenomenon’s own-most structure—in this case, the ormative quality o the question. Teassertion that ‘the enemy is the question as Gestalt ’ views the liminal anduncanny phenomenon o the enemy as the ounding gure o political lieunctionally homologous to the question’s animation o all philosophicalpursuits. Te question and Gestalt , in their open-endedness and plasticity,are the echoes o existence oriented not toward the actual, but toward thepossible.

Te existential approach to human essence might be thought o asspeaking to what constitutes the human, not o it, even where the out-come o such a dialogical ormation is the non-ideal negation o the otherthrough physical killing. Te reticence o the political question may giveus an impression that it abjures speech altogether, in that the “enemy isnot a debating adversary [Diskussionsgegner ]” (CP 28). Like the Frenchsyndicalist George Sorel, Schmitt reacts, in the rst instance, against theliberal-parliamentary infation o speech that interrelates and reconcilesall dierences on preordained, procedural grounds. Every question in adeliberation merely awaits its resolution and the consensus that ensuesrom it; it is an answer not yet given. Tose who narrow discussion downto polite deliberation aiming at consensus do not want to admit that onecan ght with words, engage in polemics. Te romantic ideal o an end-less conversation is still worse than a consensual conclusion because itcovers up sovereignty, or else deers the moment o coming to a decision.Te very meaning o “discussion” atrophies when, in the impoverishedorm o deliberation and consensus, culminating in deliberative democ-racy, it is bound to parliamentary procedures, deployed to saeguardpolitical regimes against tyranny and dictatorship. “‘Discussion’,” accord-ing to Schmitt, “here has a particular meaning and does not simply meannegotiation. Whoever characterizes every possible kind o deliberationand agreement as parliamentarism and everything else as dictatorship ortyranny . . . avoids the real question” (CPD 4–5). Te avoidance o “the realquestion” that does not anticipate a potential answer is the prerogativeo administration, as opposed to the political-existential espousal o the

o administration, as opposed to the political-existential espousal o thegure o questioning in its unulllable possibility.


Interlude: Yes or No?

One o the most palpable instances o questioning in political lie is theoccasion o a reerendum. Schmitt touches on the subject o reerendain Legality and Legitimacy and in Constitutional Teory displaying whatseems to be a certain ambivalence with respect to the decision-makingcapacity o the citizens involved in them. On the one hand, the partici-pants in a reerendum do not permit the questions to unsettle them; they protect themselves rom its disconcerting power by making the minimaldecision, or by voting “yes,” which, or Schmitt, is tantamount to the samething: “Te majority o state citizens are generally inclined to leave politi-cal decisions to others and to respond to questions posed always such thatthe answer contains a minimum o decision” (C 134). Or, again, “oday,consequently, it is the case that the participants in a reerendum are only those who vote ‘yes’” (LL 64). On the other hand,

even i they have a determinative will only in less denitive momentsand express themselves recognizably, they [the people] are neverthe-less capable o and in a position or such willing and are able to say yesor no to the undamental questions o their political existence . . . []hepeople can always say yes or no, consent or reject, and their yes or nobecomes all the more simple and elementary, the more it is a matter o a undamental decision on their existence in its entirety. (C131–132)

What is Schmitt’s position, then? Are the respondents passive yea-sayers,or do they make their collective voice resound, by consenting to or reject-ing the proposed measures?

In order to solve the puzzle o the sudden about-ace that happens in thespan o two or three pages in Constitutional Teory , I propose to retrace,with diligence, the dierences between the two passages. In the rst rag-ment I cited, Schmitt writes about an indeterminate question posed in thecourse o a reerendum. He accuses his contemporaries (“oday, conse-quently . . .”) o political irresponsibility expressed in the propensity to leavedecisions to others, but there is still no sense o the extreme urgency o theundamental existential decision that is apparent in the second quotation.Perhaps, in their capacity as citizens, ne-tuning the details o the existingcivil order, the respondents will orego their responsibility and, above all,will treat the question lightly. Te ensuing deault decision (not to decide)

will treat the question lightly. Te ensuing deault decision (not to decide)is tethered, at the aective level,5 to the citizens’ essentially conservative


desire or civil peace and security they associate with the status quo. Tepath o least resistance is preerable in this case.

Nevertheless, the desire or security oen contravenes the demands o political reality and undermines itsel when the deault decision ails tobolster the existing order. o “leave political decisions to others,” in thesecircumstance, is to run a risk, which is much more grave than that o tacklingthe existential question head on. At stake in the second passage, where thecapacity o the people (“capable o such willing,” “can always say yes or no”)to reach a political decision is unequivocally a rmed, are, precisely, thesequestions o collective existence “in its entirety.” Not only is it impossibleto evade them, but also such questions exceed the legal-discursive scope o their enunciation or a reerendum. In the aermath o the Quebec reerendao 1980 and 1995, or example, the rejection o Quebec sovereignty had atremendous impact on the collective existence o Quebecers “in its entirety,”eroding their national consciousness. Yet, in the een years that elapsedbetween the two polls, the ormulation o the issue changed. Te questioningimpulse was all but lacking in a long descriptive statement that was posed asa “question” beore the voters in the rst reerendum. Tis absence explainswhy the deeat o the separatists le the door open or another chance to putthe issue beore the voters in a much more decisive way. Te second questionwas more recognizable as such and the subsequent negative response quelledthe separatist movement or the oreseeable uture.6

Te caveat is that, insoar as the undamental questions o politicalexistence aect the onto-existential core o those who must answer them,they compel the respondents to give “simple and elementary” responses,yes or no, that overfow whatever is said or written and pertain, instead,to the level o saying ,7 the living nucleus o language that bestows mean-ing upon the said. Te said, Levinas contends, ought to be reduced to thesaying, i we are to approximate ethical lie; Schmitt insists on the reduc-tion o a response at a reerendum to the basic political drive that precedesand animates it. It is precisely this reduction that unolds between the twoostensibly contradictory passages: the political subject is converted rom acivic personality (the citizen) to the people entrusted with the ateul deci-sion. Guided by their partial interests, the citizens are unable to ace thebasic existential question or to attune themselves to the political saying .But, when political existence “in its entirety” is threatened, a correspondingsubjectivity is molded, or better or or worse, by this threat that awakens itrom a dogmatic slumber in civil society and that overfows the dogmatismo the said. From its incipience, political subjectivity is a collective response

o the said. From its incipience, political subjectivity is a collective responseto the unfagging question o its existence.


In Place of a Response . . .

We could end this chapter here, with the elementary response given to theall-encompassing existential question, were it not or Schmitt’s thorough-going dedication to a questioning that does not accept the nality o any response. Aer all, ar rom eviscerating the crucial questions, the basic“yes” or “no,” which exceeds all discursive constructions, only urtherinstigates them. And so, aced with the unusual nature o these replies,we should consider what a rmation and negation really signiy in thisinstance and how sovereign decisions enter into an alliance with the ques-tioning impulse.

I, as Schmitt stipulates, the enemy is not a “debating adversary,” then sheor he puts me in question silently, non-argumentatively, and, hence, with-out giving me a chance to respond by verbally deending mysel. Resortingto Levinasian terms, this meaningul silence is the saying without anythingsaid. Te onto-existential questioning, which does not require vocalization,let alone engagement in a discussion, and which disturbs me to the core o my being, derives rom the other who puts me in question simply by virtueo being my enemy. O course, there is nothing natural about this “being,”which is identied by virtue o a sovereign decision. Still, when, in Teory o the Partisan, Schmitt revisits the issue o the genealogy o the enemy,reiterating his avorite line rom Däubler, the apparently unmediated andintrusive stance o the enemy situated “on my own plane,” the mere actor acticity o the enemy’s being, raises the non-discursive question thatsimultaneously challenges and shapes my own Gestalt . He writes:

Te enemy is our own question as Gestalt . I we are determined as toour own Gestalt , where does this double enemy come rom? Teenemy is not something to be done away with on any grounds what-soever, something to be annihilated as worthless [Unwertes vernichtet werden muß ]. Te enemy stands on my own plane [steht au meiner eigenen Ebene]. For this reason, I must contend with him in battle, inorder to assure my own standard, my own borders, my own Gestalt. (P 71–72)8

Te enemy-question is not to be “done away with,” but is to be preserved—even nurtured—within the logic o Gestalt in which this passage is set up.On the one hand, the orm (Gestalt ) o our own question, that is to say,the orm o our own existence, is the enemy; on the other hand, it is my

the orm o our own existence, is the enemy; on the other hand, it is my own Gestalt , along with my standard ( Maß ) and my borders (Grenze),


that I protect in a lie-and-death conrontation with the enemy. Te ques-tion, paradoxically, needs to be kept alive so that I could ace its bearer incombat without endeavoring to annihilate or negate him. But what aboutthe “real possibility” o killing and being killed? Te annihilation Schmittproscribes is conceptual and gural, not physical; the enemy should notbe eliminated rom our lie-world, whose horizon he orms, nor becomea target o absolute enmity, which threatens to eliminate the question heraises and, coextensively, to erase my own gure. I cannot say “no” to thequestion raised by the enemy. I can only a rm it (as my own), even whenwe are locked in a potentially deadly combat.

Te Nazi nal solution as a response to the “Jewish question” is posi-tively unpolitical, i we judge it by Schmittian standards. Tere are no victors in the eld o absolute enmity because when I achieve my goal andprevail over the enemy, negating him or her, I lose mysel, taking leave o my gure. A nal response to the question o the enemy causes the degen-eration o all questioning impulses and the dissipation o politics into apure negation: “absolute enmity is Fichte’s ‘own question as Gestalt ,’ that isa non-I created by his own I as his counterimage in a process o ideologicalsel-alienation.”9 Schmitt’s depiction o Fichte as the philosopher o abso-lute enmity hardly conceals the process o his own sel-alienation in theprison cell and the creation o the other, as his “own counter-image,” whoputs him in question in the course o the splitting o the I. Fichte, though,stands accused o an immoderate idealism that, armed with pure nega-tivity, does not permit the tension between the I and the other to subsistin a productive and symmetrical deadlock. For Schmitt, Hegel’s deni-tion o the enemy would be much more eective in this instance, since theHegelian enemy is not only “a negated otherness” but also a participantin the mutual negation, preserving the political tension in the orm o a“relation o two nothingnesses” (CP 63). A relation such as this can only take place in the encounter between two open questions that are nothingwithin the purview o objective ontology and everything in the order o existence. “Tis mutuality o negations,” Schmitt concludes, “has its ownconcrete existence” (CP 63), which is sorely missing rom the idealism o absolute enmity.

Mutual negation and negation in general are inconsistent with thedenial o the enemy. Te two main ways o denying the enemies are theircriminalization, aiming at de-politicization, and the pacist a rmationthat there are no enemies, that “we are all riends.” Regardless o the routechosen, denial is always conceptual, not existential: when we deny them,

chosen, denial is always conceptual, not existential: when we deny them,we deprive ourselves o the category o the enemy and put an end to an


existential engagement with them. Or, rather, we engage with them by disengaging ourselves rom them, neutralizing their threatening gureeither in misrecognizing them as riends or in treating them as outlawswho should be thrown behind bars. And, i the enemy is our own questionas Gestalt , in denying enemy, we strip ourselves o the orm o a question(a properly human orm) and, thereore, disavow ourselves. Te answerwithout a question marking an uncritical mode o thinking as much asa de-politicized lie takes the place o the question without an answercharacteristic o the philosophical approach, Plessner’s anthropology, andSchmitt’s politicized existence.

What is the role o the sovereign decision in this political anthropol-ogy that avors the absolute openness o the question? And does Schmitt’sinamous decisionism invalidate the association o the question and thepolitical, bringing to an end the essential undecidability o the question?Once again, a patient and meticulous analysis will shadow very closely theracture at the heart o the philosophical question divided between twomodalities: “who” and “what.” In its quiddity or “whatness,” sovereignty is a decision on the exception, but a decision that does not tolerate thenality o determination because what it decides upon is something unsta-ble and ultimately undecidable, so much so that undecidability turns intothe underside o sovereignty. As long as extralegal situations ungraspablewithin the established legal order continue to present themselves, a sov-ereign decision will be needed to grapple with them. Observe, however,that in Political Teology Schmitt treats the “question o sovereignty,” dieFrage der Souveränität , as “the question o the decision on the exception[die Frage nach der Entscheidung über Ausnahmeall ]” (P 9). As though itwere not enough that sovereign decisions are incapable o arresting whatthey decide upon, sovereignty itsel is a question pervading the writings o “the seventeenth-century authors o natural law” and Schmitt’s own DieDiktatur . Viewed in this light, Schmitt’s texts are exercises in metapoliticalquestioning, raising the question concerning the questions o sovereignty,the essence o the political, and so orth. As such, they cannot be read witha purely political eye, but invite the participation o theology, philosophy,and anthropology, among other disciplines. Only “[i] the theological and the political are two substantially separate spheres—toto caelo dierent—thena political question can only be dealt with politically ” (PII 113). But thisconditional clause will not stand because these are not “two substantially separate spheres”; the political is a secularized version o the theological, isnot a “sphere” and, as a pure intensity o antagonism, it is unettered rom

not a “sphere” and, as a pure intensity o antagonism, it is unettered romany substance. Political questions cannot be dealt with only politically.


Now, the who-modality o the question is always nestled in its what- modality. o give two most telling illustrations, the “answer” to the question,“What is the concept o the political?” is “Who is recognized as an enemy,and who as a riend?,” while the “response” to the query, “What is sover-eignty?” is another question, “Who decides on the exception?” It is notdi cult to see how Schmitt will accomplish a phenomenological reductiono this structure to the constitutive political subjectivity, extracting, in eachcase, the second question rom the rst and demonstrating that the essenceo the political is the embodied existence o gures that correspond to thewho-modality—the sovereign, the enemy, and so orth. Tat is why, tocome back to the issue o sovereignty, “the question is always aimed at thesubject o sovereignty [immer ist die Frage au das Subjekt der Souveränität gerichtet ]” (P 10), where the directedness, the targeting, the intentionality o the question delineates a reductive itinerary rom “what” the phenom-enon is to “who” interprets and understands it as what it is.

“Te question [o sovereignty],” Schmitt urther species in the sametext, “is that o competence, a question that cannot be raised by, and muchless answered rom, the content o the legal quality o a maxim. o answerquestions o competence by reerring to the material is to assume thatone’s audience is a ool” (P 33). I these questions cannot be answeredrom the content, the political orm holds the answer, provided that by “orm” we mean a living, creative, shaping orce o Gestalt that has already announced itsel in the question o the enemy. In other words, the ormalquestion o competence does not all within the what-modality o “legalqualities.” Normative content needs to be bracketed (set aside, though notentirely done away with) or us to expose the subjective kernel it blan-keted, and the best way to do so is to imagine the collapse o a legal orderand to ask which authority remains in its aermath. Schmitt applies tothis order Husserl’s theoretical eigning o the destruction o the world inIdeas I , where the latter philosopher proved that the “pure consciousness”o constitutive subjectivity ineluctably survives this destruction.10 Te sov-ereign, we might add, is the one who outlives the disintegration o the legaluniverse. Te who-modality that emerges rom this bracketing is identicalto “the whole question o sovereignty”: “It is precisely the exception thatmakes relevant the subject o sovereignty, that is, the whole question o sovereignty [Frage nach dem Subjekt der Souveränität, das heißt die Fragenach der Souveränität ]” (P 6). Not a mere auxiliary problem, the issueo competence, the question “Who may decide on the exception?” is, inits magnitude and signicance, equal to the concept o sovereignty as a

its magnitude and signicance, equal to the concept o sovereignty as awhole.


Setting aside the question o content and its correctness, [die] Frage nachder inhaltlichen Richtigkeit , Schmitt concludes that

what matters or the reality o legal lie is who decides. Alongside thequestion o substantive correctness stands the question o compe-tence. In the contrast between the subject and the content o a decisionand in the proper meaning o the subject lies the problem o the juris-tic orm. (P 34–35)

Te contrast he evokes is not pre-given but may be accessed exclusively through a reductive-phenomenological retrieval o the question o the“who” (the subject) occluded by the question o the “what” (the content).Te juristic orm obtained rom this contrast and involved in the questionconcerning the proper meaning o the subject o sovereignty is, itsel, notdierent rom the subject who makes the decision. Te questions multiply,resembling a series o Russian dolls: behind the question o the “what,”we have uncovered the question o the “who,” which, in turn, harbors theproblem o the juristic orm.

But, i the precision o the content, substantive correctness, or (dare wesay?) truth is no longer relevant to political lie, what does Schmitt meanby the “proper meaning o the subject,” Eigenbedeutung des Subjekts, whowill make the sovereign decision? How is this “propriety” to be ascertained,when all objective evidence is rejected? Te di culty o ascertaining it is oneo the catalysts or the controversy surrounding the question o sovereignty that lingers in the absence o a ully determinate response that would outlinethe objective conditions or its exercise. “Te controversy always centeredon the question, who assumes authority concerning those matters or whichthere are no positive stipulations, or example, a capitulation?” (P 10). Teonly way to live up to the indeatigable source o questioning dwelling in thiscontroversy is to fesh out the proper meaning o the subject o sovereignty with reerence to the particular instances, where the possibility o decidingon the exception is partially actualized, accomplishing a transitus de poten-tia ad actum,11 without ever being depleted in any one o these instances.Schmitt’s radical “contextualism,” his unwillingness to entrust political lie toimpersonal structures and mechanisms, ought not to be mistaken or a ail-ure to develop a coherent (and abstract) political philosophy.12 Te existentialevidence or sovereignty is in tandem with the political and metapoliticalquestions allergic to the nality o an answer, the questions that, at the sametime, reduce the entire legal-administrative apparatus to the deeper stratum

time, reduce the entire legal-administrative apparatus to the deeper stratumo the political.


Notes

1. Saranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland , p. 235.2. “Our comments on the preliminary conception o phenomenology have shown that

what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement’ [‘Richtung ’:tendency, direction]. Higher than actuality stands possibility . We can understand phenom-enology only by seizing it as a possibility [im Ergreien ihrer als Möglichkeit ],” Heidegger,Being and ime, p. 38.

3. In Te Politics o Friendship, Derrida undertakes a close reading o this passage,ocusing on the gure o the brother and ratricidal war. When it comes to the question, hewrites:

Te enemy would then be the gure o our own question, or rather i you preer thisormulation, our own question in the gure o the enemy . . . Te brother or theenemy, the brother enemy, is the question, the questioning orm o the question,this question that I ask because it is rst o all put to me. I ask it rom the momentit descends upon me, with blunt violence, in an oensive and in an oence . . . Tequestion injures me; it is a wound within mysel. I pose this question only, I pose iteectively, only when I am called into question by the question. (p. 150)

While much o the deconstructive thinking on the issue o the question motivates the cur-rent text, I would suggest that Derrida is slightly careless when it comes to this gure inSchmitt’s work because (1) he treats the quotation rom Däubler as reversible, not respect-ing the precise arrangement o the words surrounding the copula and (2) he ails to couplethis citation with the crucial idea drawn rom Plessner who proposes a view o the humanbeing “originarily” constituted (not breached) by the question.

4. On this point, consult Derrida, O Spirit , p. 17.5. For an elaboration o the aective dimension o the political in Schmitt, see Kam

Schapiro, Sovereign Nations, Carnal States (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press,2003).

6. Te “question” in the 1980 reerendum was:

Te Government o Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest o Canada, based on the equality o nations; this agreement would enableQuebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish rela-tions abroad—in other words, sovereignty—and at the same time to maintain withCanada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting rom these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another reerendum; on these terms, do you give the Government o Quebec themandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada?

Te second question asked:

Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign aer having made a ormal oer to Canada or a new economic and political partnership within the scope o the bill

to Canada or a new economic and political partnership within the scope o the bill respecting the uture o Quebec and o the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?


7. On the notion o “saying” that animates and underlies “the said,” reer to EmmanuelLevinas, Otherwise Tan Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: DuquesneUniversity Press, 1973), passim.

8. ranslation modied.9. Carl Schmitt, “Clausewitz als politische Denker,” Der Staat 6 (4), 1967, pp. 495.

10. “In these studies we shall go as ar as necessary to eect the insight at which we areaiming, namely the insight that consciousness has, in itsel, a being o its own which in its ownabsolute essence, is not touched by the phenomenological exclusion [i.e., reduction].” Husserl,Ideas I , p. 65.

11. Agamben has noted the inexhaustibility o potentiality in sovereignty in his HomoSacer (reer esp. to pp. 61–62). In particular, his thought o inoperativeness conrms theirreducibility o the question, with its innite potentialities, to any actual answer.

12. See Alexandre Franco de Sá, “Te Event o Order in Carl Schmitt’s Tought and theWeight o the Circumstances,” in elos 147, Summer 2009, pp. 14–33.

PART II

THE CRITIQUE

5Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

Te experience o modernity in aesthetics, politics, and philosophy isdened by a certain purposeul and calculated minimalism. At times, insome o its most sel-refective moments, it perorms a veritable auto- reduction, which is more potent than a critique and which has the potentialto cut through strata o metaphysical obscurities and baroque ontologies toreveal its own conditions o possibility in the most lucid way imaginable.Such is the modus operandi o modern art that, in exploring the nature o color, the trajectory o a line, and the very material rom which it arises,reduces the voluptuous and sensory richness o premodern aesthetics toessential mereness or bareness. Yet, oen enough, modern minimalismis more detrimental to the domain it transorms than the insidious onto-metaphysical legacy o the tradition, against which it conspires. When theourold approach to causality Aristotle develops in Book II o Physics andBook V o Metaphysics is dramatically diminished, so that only one o itsacets (the e cient cause) survives, thought itsel becomes as ormal andmechanistic as the shipwreck o ancient Greek philosophy washed ashorein modernity. Tere is no doubt that Aristotle’s structure o causality isontologically raught and embroiled in an outmoded hierarchical andteleological world molded by ormal, material, and nal causes. But themodern system o e cient causality, where all cause-eect relations taketheir cue rom the case o a billiard ball that, having been struck, producesa predetermined result in another such ball that happens to be in its path,is not devoid o metaphysical presuppositions that shore up the emergentscientic-experimental paradigm. What passes itsel o as the deonto-logical and universal element o thinking is, indeed, the most ormal andthe emptiest crust o the old metaphysics that, instead o vanishing com-

103

the emptiest crust o the old metaphysics that, instead o vanishing com-pletely, perdures in modern philosophy, scarred and mutilated. Despite its


universalist pretense, the mechanicity o e cient causality ails to encom-pass the conceptual whole and exhibits a deplorable impoverishment o thinking in modernity.

I am dwelling on the ate o Aristotelian causality at some length becauseit is relevant to the modern experience o politics, where, too, one callsupon a decontextualized, disembedded, hollowed out part o the meta-physical whole to stand in or this whole in a relation o representation.Rhetorically, this process goes by the name “synechdoche” (a part substi-tuting or the whole rom which it issues), which, in turn, is a subclass o “metonymy,” literally meaning “a change o name,” whereby “the name o an attribute or a thing is substituted or the thing itsel.”1 Just as a partialaspect o what Aristotle understands by a “cause” comes to monopolizethe modern understanding o causality as such, so in the modern politicalorder a hypostatized part stands in or the whole when bourgeois legal-ity metonymically signies legitimacy in general, constitutional law andthe Rechtsstaat constitution denote the constitution and the constitutionalregime, and the state appears as the incarnation o the political. Te ram-pant abuses o metonymy and synechdoche in modern political thoughtpolemically raise a particular type o legitimacy, a specic kind o constitu-tion, and one o the loci o the political to the status and the dignity o thegenus, in a way that is intended to de-legitimize their rivals.

In an eort to curb the metonymic abuses o modernity, would we needto rehabilitate the teleological suppleness o Aristotelian metaphysics, or,going even urther, to endorse dictatorial rule as, in its own way, legiti-mate? Tis misguided question may be ound, in one orm or another, inthe arsenal o Schmitt’s critics who not only impute a reactionary, anti-modern character to his political philosophy, but also ail to see that thereis an alternative to reinstating an objective political ontology. Instead o harking back to Aristotle, Schmitt avails himsel o Husserl’s methodologi-cal innovation, particularly the phenomenological reduction (epoché ) thatbrackets the uppermost, vacuous crusts o political reality—that is, themetonymies—to reveal the concrete motives, presuppositions, subjectivi-ties, and decisions that bring them orth. In this exercise, reduction playsthe role o an ultra- or hyper-modernity that conronts the eigned mini-malism o the synechdoche with a more radical minimalism that isolatesthe activating principles o political ontology. I the experience o moder-nity is the impoverishment o experience (be it purposeul or unintended),then the political variety o phenomenological reduction practiced by Schmitt brings this development to its logical conclusion, laying bare the

Schmitt brings this development to its logical conclusion, laying bare theconditions o possibility or political existence.

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity 105

In the Name of the Law . . .

By aligning the three metonymic abuses o modernity, this chapter recon-structs the multilayered edice o contemporary politics and, at the sametime, shows how Schmitt chisels away its xed and desiccated buildingblocks, resorting to a technique o political reduction. While the constitu-tive subjectivity that underpins the rest o the edice and makes up theirreducible residue o this enterprise will be treated in the next chapter, hereI point out the necessary interconnection between the structure’s buildingblocks. In the vertical arrangement o various metonymies, legality, whichusurps the place o legitimacy, is the most supercial, de-personalized,“dead” stratum, while the political metonymized by the state is the mostproound and animating source, deaced by everything that is predicatedupon it. Finally, the metonymy o the constitution and constitutional law is the intermediate step between the state that does not merely have butis its constitution and legitimacy assumed on the grounds o the existingconstitutional order.

Although legality is correctly understood as the lieless and most dep-ersonalized crust o the modern political edice, Schmitt excavates thespecial polemical intention o the original anchoring o all legitimacy inlegality. “Legality,” set in its original historical context, “has the meaningand purpose o making superfuous and negating [überfüssig zu machenund zu verneinen] the legitimacy o either the monarch or the people’splebiscitarian will” (LL 9). Admittedly, historicization is not a panaceaagainst the metonymic abuses o modernity. But a mere invocation o theterm’s historically situated and polemical sources dusts away the veneer o neutrality and universality it has strategically adopted in the ght againstcompeting models o legitimacy and urther augmented in the aermatho its victory in this struggle.2 Where consensus has been long established,it uncovers the still smoldering cinders o a confict—and, hence, o apolitical phenomenon—that has been naturalized not without the help o that triumphant historiography which Benjamin so vividly depicted in his“Teses on the Philosophy o History.”

I “the dominant concept o legitimacy today is in act democratic”legality (CPD 30), then those regimes that do not conorm to thistrend are proclaimed to be the illegal and illegitimate rogue states. Tenon-democratic political leaders o countries such as Iran, Russia, andZimbabwe grasp and, even, subscribe to the rules o the game as well as,i not better than, anyone else. Tey stage arcical elections coupled with

i not better than, anyone else. Tey stage arcical elections coupled withthe intimidation and suppression o their political opponents by means


o brute orce, all the while consistently acting “in the name o the law,”or nowadays not even the most autocratic head o state will admit togoverning on the basis o his (most oen, his) personal voluntas. Putin-Medvedev, Bush, Mugabe, and Ahmedinejad can equally appeal to thelegality o the process that got them “elected” and even disavow variousorms o non-democratic legitimacy. Tey can declare their domesticopponents illegal to the point o “excluding them rom the democratichomogeneity o the people” (LL 30), metonymically identiying the dubi-ous majority they command not with their party, but with the state itsel.With the main oppositional gures, including Kasparov, Kas’yanov, andespecially Khodorkovsky legally barred rom participating in the mostrecent Russian presidential elections (and, in the case o Kasparov andKhodorkovsky, put in jail), the Russian state o cials took a lea romSchmitt’s critique o the purely legislative state, in which the majority can “treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then per-haps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door” (LL 30). Tepolitical crisis in Zimbabwe saw Mugabe unwilling to cancel the secondround o the a priori rigged elections aer his sole opponent, svingarai,had withdrawn rom the race. Te turmoil in Iran’s “illiberal democracy”was the product o a systemic miscalculation that turned voting into asemiorbidden ruit; once the voters were given a taste o it, they clamoredor more—much more than the Islamic Republic was able to oer. In thislast case, the “revolutionary” government’s insistence that it would not goeven one step beyond the law in sorting out the results o the 2009 presi-dential election spoke volumes to the ideologically versatile deploymento legality used to shield the most despicable acts o violence and injusticeperpetrated by the “law-abiding” rulers.

In gaining the upper hand over, making superfuous, and, at times,physically obliterating its adversaries, the ideal o legality negates itsel,deprives itsel o all political energy and raison d’être.3 Having achieved juridical and political hegemony, the structure o legality and the abstractly universal idea o humanity that emerged in the eighteenth century as a parto the agonistic denial o eudal aristocracy (CP 55), outlive their polemicaland historical purposes and give voice to legitimacy, as it were, by inertia,in a peculiarly vacuous and ormal way that allows anyone who is eager tomaintain the status quo to join the chorus o its supporters. Te “successul”entrenchment o legality produces the rst inversion in the political edice,such that legitimacy becomes “only an expression o legality and derivedrom it” (LL 9), belying the derivation o legality rom the legitimacy o

rom it” (LL 9), belying the derivation o legality rom the legitimacy o a law-making action. More generally, it proves that metonymization is a


sure path toward de-politicization, the extinction o antagonisms in a com-plex and sel-contradictory whole that now allows itsel to be expressed by one o its parts. Te historical decision to opt or the legislative state hadbeen undoubtedly political, regardless o the various neutral and apoliticalmasks it has donned ever since; conversely, the metonymy o legality andlegitimacy evidences the devolution o the decision to the deault setting.Te ideal o the legislative state that goes so ar as to a rm its equivalenceto justice extends a concrete decision on the orm o collective existenceinto an abstract norm indierently applicable to all other political uni-ties. A blatant contemporary example o this normative imposition is Iraq,where the decision on the political orm o the state has not arisen rom thecontent o collective existence but has been dictated by normative regula-tive ideals and reinorced by the Allied surges.

Te subsequent emphasis on “the rule o law” as the centerpiece o legal-ity is misguided and absurd i one takes it literally. ime and again, Schmittexplains that “laws do not rule . . . Whoever exercises power and govern-ment acts ‘on the basis o law’ or ‘in the name o the law’ [‘au Grund einesGesetzes’ oder ‘in Namen des Gesetzes’ ]” (LL 4).4 A dangerously innocentbelie to the contrary is comparable to other instances o not taking gu-ratively, as a trope or as a metonymy, the expressions “the Crown rules”or “the Bench decides.” Reiying machinations notwithstanding, the law does not have an inherent capacity or sel-interpretation, just as the bench,on which a judge sits, lacks the ability to prolierate judgments out o itswooden body. Still, under the rubric o legality, the most reied orceso modernity are deemed to be the most spiritual ones, as is the case inthe work o Hugo Krabbe, who declares in Te Modern Idea o the State that “[w]e no longer live under the authority o persons, be they naturalor articial (legal) persons, but under the rule o law, (spiritual) orces”(qtd. in P 22). Pretending to demystiy authority, to rid it o personalism,whether natural-unmediated (the divine right o kings) or articial-medi-ated (Hobbes’s Leviathan), the rhetoric o the rule o law claims or itsel the realm o absolute spirituality, the non-thingly and impersonal groundo legitimacy. Nonetheless, the spiritual orces emanating rom the vacuouscategory o the human and taking shape in the legal order o the state intro-duce into a wholly “modern idea” a slew o metaphysical presuppositionsthat are even more bizarre than the ctions o personalism.o put it dierently: Krabbe, in his celebration o the rule o law, is heed-

less to the insidious mystication, which is proper to modernity itsel. othematize the metonymic abuses o modernity is to disenchant the ratio-

thematize the metonymic abuses o modernity is to disenchant the ratio-nal, wholly enlightened disenchantment that, as Adorno and Horkheimer


would conrm, practices a magic o its own. It is to negate the negation o the “iron cage” where absolute calculability and dispassionate rationality precipitate the world o Kaa’s Te Process that mangles, overdetermines,and conceals the threads o actions (the eects) pointing back to subjectiveintentions and decisions.5 Or, as Schmitt soberly notes in Constitutional Teory , “the ‘rule o law’ means nothing more than the rule o the o cesentrusted with legislation” (186), thereby elucidating the rhetorical dis-simulation o authority in its very products. In de-mythologizing the claimthat decisions are taken “in the name o the law,” what he oers us is apalliative against the kind o etishism that subordinates all claims o legiti-macy to legality.

Te hypotheses Schmitt has put orth on the subject o the name andnaming in Te Nomos o the Earth and related writings will be useul orour assessment o the expression “in the name o the law.”6 On the onehand, in names and name-giving, he detects “the tendency to visibility,publicity, and ceremony,” that is to say, an aspiration toward phenomenal-ity that would no longer keep power “invisible, anonymous, and secret”(NE 349).7 In spite o, or thanks to, its etymological connection to nomos,the name is a tendency to the destruction o politics that does not subsistwithout a certain measure o invisibility and secrecy, the great arcana, towhich Schmitt appeals in his earlier writings. On the other hand, this ten-dency is all but stopped in its tracks, given that the power to name hasdisappeared and it is no longer obvious what a name is. otal visibility andpublicity (in a word, phenomenality) are imaginable only in the impossiblesituation where the name does not verge on de-substantialized nominal-ism but directly expresses the essence o the thing it reers to. Tat is why,or Schmitt, politics will straddle the visible and the invisible, the publicand the intensely private, the open and the withdrawn, without dissolv-ing in pure presence or in pure absence. Tose who act “in the name o the law” skillully exploit both extremes when they conceal personal actso interpretation and decisions beneath the demand or a thoroughgo-ing openness o the legalistic procedure. Based on the name—somethingespecially baseless and debased in modernity—a tie between legality andlegitimacy is orged, only to erase itsel rom the metonymization o thelatter by the ormer.

Te political ideal o openness and transparency reverts into its very opposite when acts “in the name o the law” create an additional ruse and,thereore, another level o concealment and obscurity that do not charac-terize other modes o legitimation. Jean-oussaint Desanti has reerred to

terize other modes o legitimation. Jean-oussaint Desanti has reerred tothis eature o speaking “in the name o” as speech that redoubles speech,


which both presupposes and conceals its subjective substratum.8 Schmittcalls such speech a blu when he writes that

it would be obviously grotesque i one announced court decisions inthe “name o a measure,” instead o that o the king, o the people, oro the law, or i one would swear an oath to measures or a rm “loy-alty to administrative directives.” (LL 11)

However absurd, the last a rmation o loyalty was at the heart o Medvedev’s 2008 “election campaign” in Russia, in that he swore allegianceto the course (read, the administrative directives) o the Putin Plan or thecountry’s uture development. Action “in the name o the law” interposesa screen between the sovereign political subject who delivers the decisionand those who are expected to recognize its legitimacy. Te screen willbecome translucent upon a discovery o who it is that speaks and acts “inthe name o . . . ,” veiling and obuscating him- or hersel in the impersonalsystem o legality, where “the law” elliptically means positive law. (Tisellipsis, we might add, is not accidental, or it carries on a long traditiono conceptual abuse and mistranslation, starting with Cicero’s renditiono the Greek nomos as the Latin lex , an event that “is one o the heavi-est burdens that the conceptual and linguistic culture o the Occident hashad to bear” (NE 342). With this, Schmitt’s reproach resonates with theHeideggerian analysis o Latinization that has amplied the orgetting o Being in Western philosophy.9) Te partitions will all only when we reducethe ormally legal superstructure to the political “lie-world” o decision-making and polemical engagement undergirding it and, at the same time,betrayed by it.10

Te empty name o the law, which may be lled with any positive con-tent whatsoever, remains essentially ambiguous. While, overtly, it setsitsel to work as the vanishing mediator between the legality it evokes andthe legitimacy that ought to derive rom this evocation, the name o thelaw structures one o the dominant and decisive contradictions o mod-ern politics. Apropos o this contradiction, Schmitt writes, “the normativection o a closed system o legality [die normativistische Fiktion eines geschlossenen Legalitätssystems] emerges in a striking and undeniableopposition to the legitimacy o an instance o will that is actually presentand in conormity with law [rechtmäßigen Willens]” (LL 6). Te closureo the system o legality is an attempt to debar all remnants o politicalsubjectivity and to accomplish the modern transormation o political

subjectivity and to accomplish the modern transormation o politicalorm into its purely objective variety.11 Te normative ction born in this


closure is that the system o legality is void o all subjective elements, andit is this triumph o pure objectivity that glues together legality and legiti-macy in modernity. In the second hal o the statement, however, Schmittimmanently undermines the untenable results o the legal closure. What,he seems to ask, do the proponents o this closed system have to say aboutthe will (whether directly expressed at a reerendum or mediated througha representative assembly) that arises in conormity with the law? Clearly,or Hegel, the instance o such a will trumps the objective and ormallegalism, because it marks the moment when the law is sel-given at ahigher level o synthesis reuniting the subject and the object o Right.Tis is not the case in the normative ction, according to which, aer theobjectivization o the political orm, only the law itsel is sovereign andlegitimate. In the name o the law, the will that actually conorms to itbecomes irrelevant, thus contributing to the “motivational decit” said tobeleaguer contemporary democracies.

Te most eective way to expose the ction o normativity is to subjectit to the test o immanent criticism that does not arise rom the absoluteexteriority o a dissenting will but rom that which concurs with the law ina non-objective ashion. Instead o strengthening the existing method o legitimation, the excess o legitimacy subverts itsel rom within. Even i the same legal outcome is reached in the name o the law and as a result o exercising an actual political will, which nds itsel in tandem with this law,a competing model o legitimacy suraces in this exercise as a signal thatthe operations o metonymization (and, by implication, de-politicization)are incomplete and that the system o legality is but a synechdoche o thetotality that is legitimacy. Tis is the argumentative core o Schmitt’s 1932text that revels in the contradictions o the uneven, striated character o the legislative state, with its dierentiations between the higher and lowerorders o legality, the simple and the constitution-amending majority,and the provisions or the “extraordinary lawgivers” (außerordentlichenGesetzgeber ), be they presidential decrees or plebiscitary reerenda, thatgive rise to extralegal legitimacy. Extraordinary lawgivers, especially, sealthe ailure o legality that, at its inception, has been polemically orientedagainst their legitimacy.

A purely legalistic ramework o legitimacy, then, requires variousextralegal prostheses, on which it can rely in the substantive decisions andactions comprising its political lie. Some o these prosthetic devices areequally ormal and empty, including the ormula “in the name o the law”that puts the name on the side o nominalism, altogether detaching it rom

that puts the name on the side o nominalism, altogether detaching it romthat which it names and permitting even the opposing actions in a civil


war to “reject the right o the opponent, but in the name o the law” (EC56). Others (e.g., the extraordinary lawgivers) are exemplars o political- existential richness and, as such, they militate against the metonymicreduction o legitimacy to legality. Others still, imitate in their fowery rhetoric the extraordinary lawgiver, only to make a legalistic universemore livable and tolerable. Be this as it may, the process o metonymizationwould have been impossible were it not or the mutation o the ormal ele-ment o legality, gradually severed rom the content o political existence.When, revisiting Legality and Legitimacy more than a quarter o the cen-tury aer the text’s initial composition, Schmitt stresses that “legality wasoriginally an essential piece o occidental rationalism and a orm o legiti-macy, rather than its absolute opposite” (LL 96), he hints at the act that,at that point in history, the very orm o orm was dierent rom its emaci-ated, general, and abstract modern counterpart. As a orm o legitimacy,legality is at once (1) its species or subtype, hence, a part o a much vasterramework o legitimacy, and (2) an integral, though antagonistic, part o the whole in which it participates, a orm that is still tethered to the contentrom which it arises and to which it returns, in the last instance, subject tothe decision-making power. In this sense, the substantive orm o orm isakin to what, in the 1920s, Schmitt couched in terms o complexio opposi-torum, the complex o opposites, where a living ormation brings togetherthe most contradictory contents, without nulliying the tensions betweenthem. Tat this arrangement is more politically viable is made plain by thepersistence o antagonism between the competing models o legitimacy included in it and handed over to sovereign decision-making.

Te heyday o “occidental rationalism” is the republican version o legality that “proves to have the much stronger validity . . . [o] the rational,progressive and only modern orm; in a word, the highest orm o legiti-macy [die höchste Form der Legitimität ]” (P 70). But, unortunately, the“highest orm” is only one step away rom the crudest ormalism, wherethe infated generality o legality passes into a pure orm that, in the bestcase scenario, delegates the messiness o the political content to legitimacy,and in the worst, subjugates and shapes legitimacy in its own image. It isin this slippage rom the “highest” to the “purest” orm bere o any con-tent whatsoever and in the subsequent inversion o the relation betweenlegality and legitimacy that the metonymic abuse o modernity accom-plishes itsel. Te pure orm is a pale refection o complexio oppositorum,in that it is indierent to the content on which it imposes itsel. As a con-sequence o this parody, contemporary bourgeois legality does not need a

sequence o this parody, contemporary bourgeois legality does not need adeterminate political arrangement and, hence, does not necessarily have


to be democratic; the legislative Rechtsstaat component o the constitution“contains no state orm” (C 235), while the state “conned exclusively to producing law . . . does not . . . produce the content o the law” (P 23).Modern political orm is twice removed rom that which it encompassesand dominates rom the position o relative exteriority, as opposed to theliving orm o complexio oppositorum that grows rom the antagonisticcontent itsel. Tis, in nuce, is the dierence between the systemic impulseinterrelating the content and the extraneous orm thrust upon it and thetotalizing drive replete with an “organic,” though by no means harmoni-ous, connection between the two.

Te conusion o the highest and the purest, most general orm allowslegality, as a particular mode o legitimacy, to seize the place o the wholein an indelible metonymic displacement.12 Te ctitious generality thathas no intrinsic links to any given state orm, nonetheless, singles out aparticular state type in order to coner upon it the mantle o exclusivelegitimacy. It is not di cult to guess that this type reers to the legislativestate:

In the general legality [allgemeinen Legalität ] o all state exercise o power lies the justication o one such state type [eines solchenStaatswesens] . . . In this regard, the specic maniestation o the law isthe statute, while legality is the particular justication o statecoercion. (LL 4)

o recap: as a particular kind o legitimacy, legality claimed or itsel theniche o generality and neutrality only to legitimate a particular (“onesuch”) type o state. Its claim, thereore, will not transgure the generalinto the universal because it is nothing but a detour rom one particularity to another in a desperate eort to deny the orce o perormative sel- legitimation to the act o sovereign decision-making.13 Te dictate o thelaw will be experienced as coercively imposed on us, crushing the Kantian-Hegelian dreams o reconciling reedom and legal obligation.

But the chain o metonymizations does not stop there; or the adventureo legitimation, another metonymic abuse serves as a goldmine. Althoughit is, prima acie, banal and tautological, the maniestation o the law in thestatute delegitimates its other historical instantiations, or instance, in theword o the king. When Schmitt reveals the obuscated presuppositions o modern legality,14 it turns out that statutory law is a synechdoche o the law,while legal coercion, meant to lead humanity toward emancipation, is on

while legal coercion, meant to lead humanity toward emancipation, is onthe par with other systems o oppression, including those that are typical


o administrative and governmental states. As we shall see, Schmitt’s exca- vation o these hidden presuppositions does not only shake up the logicalbases o hegemonic political theory but also reductively aims at the deeperlived, active, phenomenological oundations. He will show that legality does not contain within itsel the source o its own meaning, but relies onthe Husserlian meaning-bestowal (Sinnsgebung ) by “an act o legitimacy ,whereby the legality o a mere law rst is made meaningul [sinnvoll ]” (NE73).

Constitutional Unity, Constitutional Details

When it comes to the constitution, the metonymic abuses o modernity intensiy to the extent that they occasion mystications at once ontologicaland historical. Te most serious o these at the ontological level is a positiv-ist and empiricist reduction o the constitution to constitutional law: “theconstitution (as unity) and constitutional law (as detail) are tacitly ren-dered equivalent and conused with one another” (C 68). Tis confationo the whole and its part is a monstrous synechdoche that runs parallel to,and oen intersects with, the substitution o legality or a much broaderramework o legitimacy. As it was the case in the metonymy o commonlaw and positive legalism, “constitutional law” signies a collection o dis-parate statutes that satisy the demand or a written constitution (C 69).Te ormal concept o the constitution becomes attached to a undamen-tal collection o written statutes, dissolving the existential unity o pouvoir constituant in a haphazard conglomeration o empirically identiable,objective details.

It could be argued that, in his criticism, Schmitt ails to question thedichotomy o the spirit and the letter o the text and, predictably, priori-tizes the ideality o the ormer over the materiality o the latter. In thisdisparagement o the written constitution, Derridian deconstruction will,undoubtedly, detect a bareaced denigration o writing: that purposeulorgetting o the signier’s body which has been prevalent in the history o Western philosophy since its very beginnings. But the point is not thatSchmitt scorns writing; rather, he is interested in the existential condi-tions o possibility or the textual production o the constitution thanks tothe decision on the orm o the state’s political lie or, in general, consti-tution-making power that is irreducible, unobjectiable, and empirically inaccessible. It is impossible to discover what constitutes the constitutionas a unity, without reducing, phenomenologically, the written statute to

as a unity, without reducing, phenomenologically, the written statute tothe “ounding” stratum o the political decision presupposed in every


single detail that overlays it. “For its validity as a normative regulation,every statute, even constitutional law, ultimately needs a political decisionthat is prior to it, a decision that is reached by a power or authority thatexists politically” (C 76).

Te priority o the decision that determines the constitution in theabsolute sense15 (and, by extension, the statutes that agree with it) meritstheoretical consideration. I want to suggest that the political decision isprior temporally, logically, and phenomenologically, which is to say thatit is chronologically precedent to its constitutional codication, unctionsas a sine qua non or statutory inscription, and urnishes the oundingexistential layer or these ounded stipulations. Te rule o law does notadjudicate itsel; the constitution, too, does not establish itsel but is, likean artwork, the creation o an active political subjectivity. Here, again, wecome across a reductive unearthing o the suppositions that have been con- veniently covered over by the proponents o the metonymic and etishistic“sovereignty o the constitution,” suppositions, such as, “Te people mustbe present and presupposed as political unity i it is to be the subject o aconstitution-making power” (C 112), or “Political existence was presup-posed in this undamental process, in which a people acts consciously ina political manner” (C 102), or “Te constitution is valid by virtue o the existing political will that establishes it” (C 76).16 Nineteenth-century thinkers variously conceded that it was only human, all too human to creditthe products o our collective thoughts and endeavors (God, capital, sci-ence, etc.) with independent existence. Schmitt upholds their thesis in the juridical sphere but also tries to rectiy this delusion by de-metonymizingthe liberal equation o the constitution and constitutional law. His “de-metonymization” anchors the constitution in “political unity,” “politicalexistence,” or “the existing political will,” and so restitutes to the constitu-tion its political character that, alone, may account or its unity and order.

When, conversely, constitutional details overstep their limits and turninto a synechdoche or constitutional unity, when the system o law aspiresto take over the totality o political existence, the constitution disintegrates,or, at the very least, gradually exhausts itsel in everything that springsorth rom it. Constitution-making power renders possible the very consti-tutional arrangement that violates its own conditions o possibility. Facedwith this problem, Schmitt resolves to reanimate this dying impulse in aperpetual reconstitution o the political unit “as something emerging, assomething always arising anew” (C 61)17 and, thereore, in politics as arealm o becoming. Given that, in the absolute sense, the state does not

realm o becoming. Given that, in the absolute sense, the state does nothave a constitution, which would be detachable rom its political existence,


but is its constitution (C 60), the recurrent re-activation o the originaldecision and the state structures it subtends is, simultaneously, a reconsti-tution o the constitution itsel. By “reconstitution,” then, I do not meanan unavoidable change in the basic decision on the orm o political lie,swapping a monarchist constitution or a liberal-bourgeois once every ouryears. Although it might sometimes call or a total overhaul o the basicprinciples o the old regime, reconstitution revisits the original politicaldecision, which is the “substance o the constitution” (C 78), with the view to reconrming or rejecting it. Tis is one o the modalities o whatI’ve termed “the event o politics,” where political unities are always opento the possibility o their sel-expropriation.

Te political epoché is a reduction o metonymy and o the ormallegal minimalism that narrows the constitution down to constitutionallaw. As in Husserl’s phenomenology, this reductive movement terminatesat the essence (Wesen) o the phenomenon in question, demonstratingthat, in the case o Constitution, the metonymy with constitutional law is inappropriate, precisely, because “the essence o the constitution isnot contained in a statute or a norm” (C 77) but in the political exis-tence o the constitution-making subject. Once deconstituted or reduced,even the very ormal concepts o constitutional law appear as “essentially [wesentlich] political concepts” (LL 17). Now, i the essence o the consti-tution lies in the existential categories (e.g., the decision) that undergirdit, then Schmitt’s political philosophy echoes the Heideggerian conceptiono Dasein, whose essence, quid est , is existence, quod est , being-there, ornot-being-simply-present-at-hand. 18 More crucially still, the groundingo essence (say, the essence o the constitution) in existence (the decisionregarding its political orm) is itsel groundless, in that it does not rely or support upon a stable metaphysical or ontological scaold. For thosewho hold onto various essentialisms, this is a shaky construction, since itdoes not draw legitimacy outside o the subject who exists politically in amode o being, which is yet to be specied. In response to Richard Wolin,then, it should be said that Schmitt’s political ontology is essentially exis-tential, since it is not merely adorned with the ornamental, voguish, andultimately expendable vocabulary o existentialism but receives its criti-cal strength rom the irreducibility o the political subject. As though toembrace this groundless grounding, Constitutional Teory wears the risk associated with it as a badge o honor in asserting that the “[c]onstitu-tion in the positive sense means essentially denition o its own orm o existence” (C 121). Te technical word or the “denition o its own orm

existence” (C 121). Te technical word or the “denition o its own ormo existence” is “perormativity,”19 and no reduction can accompany this


orever precarious, sel-reerential, sel-grounded and hence ungroundedpredication any urther. Political existence, at which the Schmittian epoché arrives, is irreducible, though it can be denied as soon as its fuid subjectiveorms and decision-making capacities are objectied.

Te second kind o constitutional metonymy is historical, peaking inthe ideology o nineteenth-century liberalism. A particular type o consti-tution here presents itsel as the constitution in general in an unabashedpolemical denial o the rivaling political arrangements. Schmitt writes:

Te principles o the modern, bourgeois-Rechtsstaat constitutioncorrespond to the constitutional ideal o bourgeois individualism, somuch, indeed, that these principles are oen equated with the consti-tution as such and “constitutional state” is given the same meaning asthe “bourgeois Rechtsstaat.” (C 169)

Tis metonymic abuse that swaps a part o the constitutional taxonomy orthe whole is yet another attempt to generalize the particular and to inter- ject its abstract orm prior to the singular instances o decision-making onbehal o the political subject. It deprives the constitution o its substance—the political decision—and essence that lies in the existential entity capableo making this decision. Te de-substantialization o the political is, thus,mediated through the replacement o existential ontology with an ostensi-bly de-ontological emphasis on normativity that projects the principles o bourgeois individualism onto the very idea o constitutionality.

In contrast to the metonymy o legality and legitimacy, a mere general-ization does not su ce or the identication o the bourgeois constitutionwith the constitutional state; the process o idealization comes to its aid, inthe same sense o ideality, to which the title o Paragraph 4 o Constitutional Teory alludes, namely, “Ideal Concept o the Constitution (‘Constitution’in an exemplary sense, thus named because o a certain content).” Teideal concept renders “a certain content”—the Rechtsstaat constitution—exemplary, acilitates its generalization, and contributes a recalcitrantconceptual jumble to the metonymic abuses o modern political thought.“In the nineteenth century,” Schmitt writes on the subject o conceptualindetermination, “the denition o the concept o the constitution is mademore di cult by the act that the ideal concept o the bourgeois Rechtsstaat is lumped in with the concept o the constitution” (C 95). Political the-ory cannot move orward beore resolving this di culty. Te positive goalo political reduction is, thereore, to disentangle the webs o the mud-

o political reduction is, thereore, to disentangle the webs o the mud-dled concepts, rst, by highlighting the metonymic abuses and fimsy


generalizations that imbue the historically specic with an air o univer-sality and, second, by honing conceptual specicity, chiseling away thatwhich does not “essentially” belong to it, or instance, in the derivation o the “absolute sense” o the constitution.

Concerning the second positive moment o reduction, it will be remem-bered that the nal purity o the concept does not coincide with its mostabstract orm (the political stands or the concrete riend-enemy distinc-tion), nor even with the metaphysical priority o “ownness” (what is purely political has no domain o its own and expropriates all other domains),but with the existential basis, the groundless ground o political subjec-tivity and decision-making. It is this basis that is sorely missing rom, orelse is cleverly disguised in, the metonymic and etishistic “sovereignty o the constitution.” Te synechdoche o political subjectivity is, arguably, thecornerstone o the revolutionary French constitution, in which “amongthe commissioned representatives o the three estates (nobility, clergy,bourgeoisie), those o the third estate constituted themselves as the con-stitution-making National Assembly on 17 June 1789” (C 134). One o the three estates constituted itsel as the whole in what I venture to call “asel-transcendence o the particular,” providing a blueprint or the Marxisttheory o the proletariat as the universal class that will rise above and nulliy the structure o class society. It was transormed into the decisive politicalsubjectivity, camoufaged by the discourse o the universal rights and thesovereign unction o the constitution-making National Assembly.

Te ateul case o the French constitution casts new light on the issue o political representation. Isn’t representation, aer all, a kind o synechdo-che, where a part speaks, more or less directly, or the whole? Does the idealo the bourgeois Rechtsstaat constitution deny outright constitutional legit-imacy to other political regimes, or does it claim to represent and mediateconstitutionality in general? Te political theories o Rancière, Badiou, andŽižek are united in an eort to rethink politics and representation itsel as an explosive synechdoche, where a singularity momentarily steps intothe place o the universal, causing something like a short circuit in thedialectical machinery o mediations. (Tis will have been the rhetoricaldenition o Badiou’s event, to which Žižek wholeheartedly subscribes.)Tat is not to say that the three theorists indulge in the metonymic abuseso modernity, since they drop the pretense o abstractly universal repre-sentation, gear much o their philosophical energy toward the lie-worldo political existence and subjectivity, and (implicitly) side with Schmitt intheir rejection o legalism and liberal de-politicization. Tere is a marked

their rejection o legalism and liberal de-politicization. Tere is a markeddierence between openly advocating or the synechdoche o Rancière’s


“part that has no part” in the vacant place o political subjectivity, on theone hand, and surreptitiously slipping an imperialistically generalizedand abstract particularity in or the universal, on the other. A deliberately adopted rhetorical strategy o the synechdoche that, in lieu o becominginstitutionalized, retains a markedly volatile status may, potentially, reinvigorate political representation wrested rom the procedural ormalismo liberal constitutional democracies and imbued with non-metaphysicalsubstance.

Still at the historical level, Te Nomos o the Earth summarizes theprereductive conusion and abusive metonymization o one constitutionaltype exceptionally well:

At the end o the 19th century, until the Hague land war conventionswere established, liberal constitutionalism was synonymous with“constitution” and “civilization” in the European sense [ galt der liber-ale Konstitutionalismus als identisch mit Verassung und Zivilisationim europäischen Sinne]. (NE 208)

Te achievement o liberal hegemony is, more precisely, that the twoterms are not synonymous, as the German original testies, but “identi-cal” (identisch), due to the synechdoche we have been considering above.Accordingly, to uncover their non-identity is an undeniably political task,or which, besides political reduction, a meticulous linguistic analysis provesto be indispensable. Anticipating Schmitt’s disapproval o the tendency tolatinize the Greek nomos as lex , the non-identity o liberal constitutional-ism and the constitution in general is already discernable in the usage o the Latin root in Konstitutionalismus, as opposed to the Germanic rootin Verassung . Perhaps somewhat poetically, we could say that it is an oldquarrel between the Greek “pure” origin and its Latin violation that goeson in the guise o liberal constitutionalism that globalizes the stakes by lay-ing claim to the constitution and civilization “in the European sense.” Tis globalatinization, as Derrida sometimes calls it, is one o the entrenchedmetonymic abuses o late modernity.

The Fragility of the Status and the Irreducibility of the Political

Te nal catachresis o political modernity is the consummation o thepolitical in the concept o the state. Within the gradations o Schmittianreduction, the state is certainly more “undamental” than the order o

reduction, the state is certainly more “undamental” than the order o legality, to which Kelsen and other legal theorists equate it. I, in addition


to helping to dene sovereignty, the exception has an auxiliary role to play in Political Teology , then it practically reduces the legal order and showsthat the state is the irreducible residue o this suspension, or “it is clearthat the state remains, whereas the law recedes” (P 12). Crudely put, thestate o exception is a lawless state but it is a state nonetheless—an exis-tential political plane or the exercise o sovereignty. Tat does not mean,however, that the state is axiomatically irreducible. Te rst sentence inTe Concept o the Political—“ Te concept o the state presupposes the con-cept o the political [Der Begri des Staates setzt den Begri des Politischenvoraus]” (CP 19)—disputes exactly such an unwarranted conclusion andsets the tone or the rest o the book that gleans the political not only rom various moral, economic, and other antagonisms but also rom the brack-eting o state structures that depend upon it. Remarkably, the rst verb inthe book is “presupposes,” “setzt . . . voraus,” and the presupposition Schmittuncovers is not merely logical, but phenomenological. Te state is oundedupon the concept o the political, which conditions it to the same extent asthe lie-world that supports the very scientic paradigms that suppress it.Te equation “state = politics” is “erroneous and deceptive [unrichtig und irreührend ]” (CP 22), or, in our terms, is an instantiation o the most inju-rious metonymic abuse o modernity.20

Concerning the “altogether incomparable, singular historical particu-larity o this phenomenon [Erscheinung ] called ‘state’,” Schmitt asserts that“‘statehood’ is not a universal concept valid or all times and all peoples”(NE 127) and, more damningly still, that the seventeenth-century state isthe rst product o the age o technology (LS 34). As with the notion o legality, the historicizing gesture serves the purpose o reducing this phe-nomenon by reconnecting it with the specicity o the “people” (or, morebroadly, with the constitutive political subjectivity that generates it) andby scraping o the veneer o neutrality that overlays it, not to mentionthe various mechanisms o naturalization that paralyze it. Yet, the claimthat statehood is not a universal concept is not to be confated with theconcept’s liberal relativization. Te latter does not dare historicize the statebut only uncritically interprets it as one human association among, and onthe par with, many others, as well as an outlet or “the merely normative,and thereore judgeless” ethics.21 Liberal relativization, initially motivatedby the desire to dismember the unitary and sovereign body o the monar-chical state, perversely renders the deaced entity absolute again, by proxy with the abstract universality o rational normativity.

Let us, then, submit the phenomenological priority o the political to a

Let us, then, submit the phenomenological priority o the political to apractical test similar to the one that positive law underwent (and ailed) in


the state o exception. We might ask, rst: What i Teory o the Partisan asa whole were read as a reductive experiment, in which the political, in thegure o the partisan, survived a parenthesization o the state?22 When thepolicy is no longer existentially primary, when “other groups or associations,especially the contemporary state, are no longer able to bind their own mem-bers in such a denitive way, as is the case with the ghters o a party engagedin a revolutionary struggle” (P 20), then the elusive locus o the politicalshis to partisan, non-state actors. It is not that the state is unbound rom thepolitical which it necessarily presupposes, nor is partisan activity inherently and universally more political than that o the state. Rather, the implicationso Schmitt’s condemnation o the contemporary state situated (and this is themainstay o the “associationist theory o the state”) on the same level as otherconsensual groups are that (1) it does not have a monopoly on the politicaland, thereore, will be interrelated with the political only thanks to a mislead-ing synechdoche; (2) it may be identied with the overarching backgroundo human actions and concerns as their ultima ratio (P 25) but this infationo the state will not vitiate the political as the rst and the last non-objectiveground o collective existence; and (3) it is amenable to being politically reac-tivated i, or whatever reason, it becomes decisive again or such existence.23

For the second test case or the reduction o the state one must look to Te Concept o the Political , where Schmitt writes that “[i] within thestate there are organized parties capable o according their members moreprotection than the state, then the latter becomes at best an annex o suchparties, and the individual citizen knows whom he has to obey” (CP 52).Te historical creations o “a state within a state” are plentiul and wellknown, rom the Sicilian organized maa to the quasi-eudal lords o theBrazilian avelas. Schmitt cites this hypothetical situation while contem-plating Hobbes’s political philosophy that views the state as the mediumwherein the citizens exchange their obedience or protection: unless thepolitical unit is able to exercise its capacity to provide security, there isno reason or its members to continue obeying its decrees. Te point,however, is that the enervation o the state’s protective unction does notpreclude a ormation o other existentially intense riend-enemy groupingsthat assume a political character, become decisive, and reduce the state totheir “annex.” Tis is scrupulously in line with Schmitt’s theory, in which apolitical entity does not need to be a state, as long as the intensity o asso-ciation and antagonism within it reaches the qualitative “boiling point”o the political. Even the prerogative to declare the state o exception orto wield a real possibility o war ( jus belli) is no longer the exclusive right

to wield a real possibility o war ( jus belli) is no longer the exclusive righto the state. In 2007, or instance, avela leaders in Rio de Janeiro issued


a warning to the inhabitants o the city, to observe the days o mourn-ing or their killed comrades, thereby exceeding the role o criminals andeectively announcing the state o exception. (Te warning was ollowedby organized attacks on police stations around the city that day.) Te totalexistential embroilment o the extra-state group members in a politicalentity that can exact rom them “the readiness to die and to unhesitatingly kill enemies” (CP 46), thus coners upon them a certain political decisive-ness that, in Schmitt’s view, is not reserved or the state alone.

Perhaps more obviously, a reduction o the state and the concomitantanimation o the concept o the political marks revolutionary upheavals.While many uprisings, notably the French Revolution, do not produce anew political ormation (C 127), in a more restrictive scope o the termstate, which Schmitt avors, even the French Revolution could be seen asa practical reduction o the state, though not o the political principle. Arevolutionary overthrow o monarchy negates the state, which is insepa-rable rom the monarchical constitution, provided that the latter does notstand or a bare and externally imposed orm but adheres to the “absolutesense,” according to which the being o the state and that o the constitu-tion are one and the same. (o put this statement o identity in Aristotelian vernacular, while the constitution is the state’s ormal cause, the politicalis its material cause.) Like Hobbes, who harbored no illusions with regardto the permanence o any institutional organization and who was rank about the nature o the Leviathan as a “mortal god,” Schmitt highlights thenitude o the state that is not dispelled by the status into which it congeals.Te rigidity o the status quo is a deense mechanism o political reactionormation—to borrow a psychoanalytic notion—that, dissimulating itsel in the notion o peace, which is in truth nothing more than the Kantian“peace o the cemeteries,” bespeaks its ragility and reducibility.

Making such ragility apparent, a “successul revolution directly estab-lishes a new status and eo ipso a new constitution” (C 61) as soon as itoverturns the old status quo. When Schmitt reiterates the etymologicalconnection o the state and status on the rst page o Te Concept o thePolitical —“the state is a political status [Staat ist . . . der politische Status]o an organized people” (CP 19)—and later on in his “intermediate com-mentary” on the political—“Linguistic parallels with a general term likestatus, which can suddenly mean state [wie status, das plötzlich Staat bedeu-ten kann], are obvious” (P 20)24—he adds luster to the theory o the state’sreducibility. Te status is that which can and ought to be reduced aer ithas become stable and static, bringing to a halt the unrest o the political

has become stable and static, bringing to a halt the unrest o the politicalthat was responsible or its issuance in the rst place.25 (Still, this unrest can


never be wholly subdued, given the other sense o the Greek stasis, mean-ing not just quiescence but also the exact opposite, tumult. Te status and,by implication, the state are essentially sel-undermining entities.) Te sta-ble açade o the status hides the extreme vulnerability o everything thatsuppresses its sources, be it capital with its pretense o being independentrom the labor power it exploits, or the state that disavows its political oot-ing and presents itsel as a neutral legal order. Faced with the ragility o the status, Schmitt will not evade the exigencies o deconstituting or recon-stituting the state and the need to overthrow the status quo that drains itspolitical sources o their vitality.

Fourthly, Political Teology ends with a nod o approval to French coun-terrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, in whose cited remarks

we can also see a reduction o the state to the moment o the decision[eine Reduzierung des Staates au das Moment der Entscheidung ], to apure [reine] decision not based on reason and discussion and not jus-tiying itsel, that is, to an absolute decision created out o nothing.(P 66)

Tat Schmitt uses the word “reduction,” Reduzierung , in this instance issignicant because the decision that becomes accessible at the end o thereductive trajectory is absolute and, above all, “pure,” distilled to the exis-tential essence o the political. Te reduction o the state does not obliteratethe principle o the political but, to the contrary, sets it ree, renders it abso-lute, and reveals it in its eidetic-phenomenological “purity.” Te act thatthe decision is not based on anything else (either reason or discussion),which in Schmittian political-theological lingua ranca corresponds tocreation out o nothing, phenomenologically means that it is that post-reductive residue which, unlike the state, remains irreducible.

Te quadruple test we have perormed above conrms the catachresis,or the polemical-rhetorical abuse, at the heart o the metonymy joiningtogether the reducible state and the irreducible politics. Nothing would beurther rom the truth than a deduction, rom this reducibility, o the claimthat Schmitt is a closeted anarchist who celebrates the withering away orthe overthrow o the state. All he shows is that this institution is neitherthe deepest nor the exclusive source o political lie, but that it, too, derivesits vitality rom the political. As a result, the thesis, “Tat the state is anentity [ein Einheit ] and in act the decisive entity rests upon its politicalcharacter [beruht au seinem politischen Charakter ]” (CP 44), indicates that

character [beruht au seinem politischen Charakter ]” (CP 44), indicates thatthe deprivation o the state’s logical and phenomenological “oundations”


simultaneously strips it o its decisiveness and, indeed, o its unity as anorm, a procedure, or a legal order. Aer the dismantling o the old status,the political is not eliminated but merely relocates elsewhere, withdrawing,or instance, to the secretive and scarcely perceptible position o the par-tisan. Tis dislodgement does not annul the politicity o the political but,rather, validates it as a principle o dislocation and expropriation that lacksa sphere o its own.

Notes

1. J. A. Cuddon, Te Penguin Dictionary o Literary erms and Literary Teory (Londonand New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 510. Te privileged examples o a metonymy hereare legalistic-political: the Crown standing or the monarchy, and the Bench representingthe judiciary.

2. Te political underside o this veneer is, also, exposed in every instance o the appli-cation o the law: “Legal normativity [in Schmitt’s view] hid political confict rom sightbut did not make it disappear. Confict re-emerged every time the law was to be applied”[Martti Koskenniemi, Te Gentler Civilizer o Nations: Te Rise and Fall o International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 428].

3. In part, this negation is produced as a temporal ssure between the “modern” andthe “traditional” that is supposed to aord the modern a chance o sel-ounding. HansBlumenberg [Te Legitimacy o the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA andLondon: MI Press, 1983)] summarizes this implicit aspect o Schmitt’s position well whenhe writes, “It must seem paradoxical to Carl Schmitt that the legitimacy o an epoch is sup-posed to consist in its discontinuity in relation to its pre-history” (p. 97).

4. In a similar vein, the constant rerain o Constitutional Teory is that the constitutionis not sovereign. See, or instance, C 238.

5. “[M]odern legality, above all, is the unctional mode o a state bureaucracy, which hasno interest in the right o its origin” (NE 82).

6. See, especially, “Nomos-Nahme-Name,” in Der Beständige Auruch: Festschri ür Erich Przywara, ed. Siegried Behn (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz, 1957), pp. 92–105 andTomas Schestag, “Namen nehmen: Zur Teorie des Namens bei Carl Schmitt,” MLN 122(3), April 2007, pp. 544–564.

7. On the same page, he immediately adds:

Even the elevation o impersonal laws to general norms, even the rationalisticclaim to pure legality, which as the expression o reason, every legitimacy wants tosurpass, even this classical human creation o 1789 did not abandon the name, andsought to rule “in the name o the law.”

8. Te original French expression is “cette parole qui redouble parole.” Jean-oussaintDesanti, Une Destin Philosophique (Paris: Hachette, 2008), p. 61.

9. Yet, or Schmitt, Being itsel is reducible to power. As he writes in his prison diaries,“Power is Being; Being is Power; this is concealed behind every word o Being [ Macht ist


Sein; Sein ist Macht ; das steckt hinter jedem Wort vom Sein]” (qtd. in Waite, “Heidegger,Schmitt, Strauss,” p. 125).

10. In introducing the term “the political lie-world,” I am reerring to EdmundHusserl’s Te Crisis o European Sciences and ranscendental Phenomenology [trans. D. Carr(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 137]. Husserl thinks that the way totackle the crisis o objectication is to recover the non-scientic and experiential ounda-tions o science in the lie-world, Lebenswelt . Mutatis mutandis, Schmitt suggests the samesolution in an attempt to resolve the crises o parliamentary democracy and the subsump-tion o the political impulse in abstract systems o legality.

11. In Political Teology, Schmitt clearly identies this transormation as ollows: “Onething is certain to be recognized in this modern theory o the state: Te orm should betranserred rom the subjective to the objective” (29).

12. Tis beuddlement is a part o “the conusion o legal positivism, in particular themuddle o words and concepts characteristic o 19th century jurisprudence” (NE 69).

13. Judith Butler highlights the perormativity o the sovereign exception inPrecarious Lie: he Powers o Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso,2004), p. 61.

14. For instance, apropos o legal positivism: “Tis thoroughly dominant theory was nolonger conscious o its own historical and theoretical presuppositions” (LL 96).

15. Gopal Balakrishnan considers this sense to be “meta-legal” (Te Enemy , p. 94).16. Although Schmitt, by deault, imputes a national and nationalist orm to political

existence, this orm is not the sine qua non o such existence, but its modern, historically specic appellation.

17. More recently, Eric Santner [On Creaturely Lie: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicagoand London: University o Chicago Press, 2006)] has drawn inspiration rom this politicalenlivening that comprises Schmitt’s existentialism:

What I am calling creaturely lie is the lie that is, so to speak, called into being,ex-cited , by exposure to the peculiar “creativity” association with this threshold o law and non-law; it is the lie that has been delivered over to the space o the sov-ereign’s “ecstasy-belonging”, or what we might simply call “sovereign jouissance.”(p. 15)

18. Similarly, the partisan stands outside all bracketed, moderated confict “in hisessence as much as in his existence [sogar sein Wesen und sein Existenz ]” (P 19, trans-lation modied). Tis statement needs to be complemented by a reading o Paragraph9 o Heidegger’s Being and ime in conjunction with Proposition 6.44 o Wittgenstein’sractatus.

19. Slavoj Žižek, in Te icklish Subject , inches close to the denition o sel-denitionas “perormative”:

Te exemplary case, o course, is Carl Schmitt’s decisionist claim that the rule o law ultimately hinges on an abyssal act o violence (violent imposition) groundedonly in itsel: every positive statute to which this act reers in order to legitimize

only in itsel: every positive statute to which this act reers in order to legitimizeitsel is sel-reerentially posited by this act itsel. (pp. 113–114)


20. Tose commentators who categorize Schmitt as a “statist” are either unaware o orchoose to ignore his political reduction o the state. wo examples will su ce here.

1. “Schmitt is a conspicuous representative o this statist tradition in the twentieth cen-tury; he radicalizes the antinomy between the heterogeneity o society . . . on the onehand, and the uniying orce o a sovereign power . . . on the other” [Ulrich Preuss,“Political Order and Democracy: Carl Schmitt and His Infuence, in Te Challenge o Carl Schmitt , ed. S. Moue (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 176].

2. Te argumentative thrust o Renato Cristi’s Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberal-ism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardi: University o Wales Press, 1998). Regarding(1), let it be said that the radicalization o the antimony between state unity andsocial heterogeneity ails to recognize the importance o de-politicization that per-mits the administrative state to subsume society itsel and remains impervious to thepolemical usage o the term state.

21. Carl Schmitt, “Ethic o State and Pluralistic State,” in Te Challenge o Carl Schmitt ,p. 196.

22. Tis would illustrate Susan Buck-Morss’ [“Sovereign Right and Global Le,” inRethinking Marxism 19 (4), Fall 2007] ruitul intuition that “[s]overeign power exists beoreand beside the state, and can never be subsumed as immanent within it” (p. 438).

23. Despite what one might expect here, Schmitt does not rame this decisiveness interms o the “total state” that “becomes ‘total’ out o weakness, not out o strength andpower” (LL 92). We could, or instance, conceive o this re-engagement o the state alongthe lines o radical democracy, where the involvement o the citizens in environmental,economic, and other issues becomes an integral part o political reality.

24. See also NE 133: “every state sought to create (by means o specic treaties) apositive jus publicum Europaeum that would give it a juridical advantage by stabilizing aavorable status quo.”

25. At the level o international politics, it has the unction o bracketing bellicose con-ficts in the orm o state wars (NE 141).

6Political Reduction to

Constitutive Subjectivity

Schmitt and Husserl: From the Crisis

Te destruction o the state holds in store two considerable consequencesor Schmittian reduction. First, the exposure o the state-politics meton-ymy triggers a process o politicization that continues the trend startedin the disclosure o the orms o legitimacy other than legality and in thecorrection o the ontological and historical infation o constitutional law in conjunction with the liberal-bourgeois constitution. Te uniqueness o the nal de-metonymization in comparison to the ones preceding it isthat it sparks o the movement o pure politicization, in which neitherlegitimacy, nor the constitution, nor, or that matter, any other politicalelement but the political as such is released into its own rom the staticgrasp o the state. Te “release” o the political is the second consequenceo the Schmittian epoché . I secrecy, darkness, and silence are the parti-san’s weapons, then the reduction o state structures to political principles verges on non-phenomenality and non-visibility in a clear inversion o the disingenuous liberal-bourgeois ideal o total transparency.1 Partisaninconspicuousness accounts or nothing less than a resh start o the polit-ical, the newly ound strength to hold in reserve that, in Schmitt’s view,denes every beginning. “Te moment o brilliant [ glanzvoller ] represen-tation,” on the contrary, “is also and at once the moment in which every link to the secret, non-apparent [ geheimen, unscheinbaren] beginning isendangered” (CP 94).2 Te phenomenal brilliance o representation—which, perhaps, does not apply to the early Schmittian notion o “concrete

126

which, perhaps, does not apply to the early Schmittian notion o “concreterepresentation”—violates the non-phenomenality o the secret and dris

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity 127

away rom the prospects o reviving the political encoded in the word“beginning.” It is le up to the partisan to suture the silent, invisible link to the beginning.3

At the bottom o the reduced edice, thereore, one does not encounterthe Husserlian shining “thing itsel,” “that which is sel-evidently given,”4 but partisan obscurity that retraces the non-negative withdrawal o thepolitical replete with that which is evidently not given, the arcana. Te elu-siveness and ugitive character o the post-reductive remainder will explainSchmitt’s enthusiasm or the “very beautiul sentences” in Heidegger’sBeing and ime, such as “silence is the essential possibility o speech” (G 109), orhis reproach directed to Machiavelli, who “spokeat all about power, makingit into an object o idle chatter” (G 49). I we wanted to be more Schmittianthan Schmitt himsel, we would have asserted that all acts o sovereignty are esoteric and “apocryphal” (c. C 155), not just those undertaken inthe liberal-bourgeois state that disowns the idea o sovereignty or assignsit to the impersonality o the law. Te ineable “ground” o non-phenom-enality nally blurs the distinction between political theology, on the onehand, and existential political ontology, on the other, and bestows meaningon every orm o collective lie, while keeping itsel obstinately insulatedagainst all exegetic overtures.

Te remark, “[p]olitical being preceded constitution-making” (C 102)that, in turn, was prior to the ormalization o the constitution and thenormative regimes o legitimation erected around it, is worthy o becom-ing one o the key theses o Schmitt’s unwritten onto-existential politicalmaniesto. We reduced this structure rom the top down, cataloging, ateach step o the way, the metonymic abuses to which its essential ele-ments were subjected in the “onslaught against the political [der Kamp gegen das Politische]” that describes modernity.5 It goes without sayingthat the ght (der Kamp ) against the political is itsel eminently politi-cal. But the reductive release o political being has raised more questionsthan it has answered. Te last demystication contributed to a new mys-tery o the political that cannot be pinned down and that is allegorically expressed in the elusive gure o the partisan. Te reason or this is thatpolitical being is not, in the last instance, a statute, a norm, or a stateapparatus, but the non-objectiable, immanent,6 constitutive subjectivity that mirrors the ontological predicament o Heidegger’s Dasein (neitherpresent-at-hand, nor ready-to-hand) and o Husserl’s “pure conscious-ness.” Te existential-phenomenological query that suggests itsel to usis, thus, not, “What is the structure o Schmitt’s political ontology?” but

is, thus, not, “What is the structure o Schmitt’s political ontology?” but“Who is its subject?”


Beore addressing or, rather, raising more explicitly this question, weneed to acknowledge that, aside rom his interest in political invisibility,Schmitt’s methodological conclusions and the sociocultural diagnosis o modernity converge with those o Husserl’s phenomenology. Te ormalanalogy comprises various channels o inquiry concerned with the problemo modernity and with the possibilities o its resolution. Phenomenologically envisaged, the oppressive layers o bureaucratized and neutralized insti-tutions, including the law and the state, are an extension o what in hisbook Te Crisis o European Sciences and ranscendental Phenomenology Husserl terms “sedimentation” (Sedimentierung ). Husserlian sedimenta-tion involves a orgetting o the concrete oundations o abstract knowledgein lived human experience, along with the ounding impulse itsel, thanksto the preponderance o abstractions ounded, instituted, or establishedon that which has been orgotten.7 aking the logic o sedimentation toheart, the goal o the preceding chapter was to argue that the experienceo the political at the ounding level o Lebenswelt , the lie-world, has beensuppressed by the ounded institutionalization o politics that, paradoxi-cally, presupposes and extirpates this lived, embodied, existential basis.For Husserl, the crisis erupts, precisely, when ounded abstractions tendtoward an excessive separation rom their phenomenological oundationsand when what we know about the world assumes the character o amil-iarity or obviousness. On the political side o things, the crisis evinces adivergence between the institutional arrangement, such as the state, andits existential premises—collective decisions on the orm o political exis-tence, ormations o the community o riends against enemy groupings,and so on—and it is these “groundless,” existentially sel-legitimating polit-ical oundations that all prey to neutralization. We witness, as a result, theobjectivization o the political in modernity, its divestment o any subjectiveunderpinnings uncritically dismissed as archaic despotism. Te objectivelegal order comes unglued rom the subjective orientation, thereby, shut-tering the unity o nomos and ushering the age o political nihilism.

A particularly pernicious aspect o institutionalization is extreme or-malization, leading to the persistence o that which had taken root in thepolitical lie-world long aer its existential raison d ’être has become anti-quated and irrelevant. Te di culty in dealing with ormalization has todo with its inevitability and, thereore, the uneasibility o its wholesaleeradication. I there is a “solution” to the problem o modernity, it doesnot dictate a complete rejection o abstract thought, which as Adorno andDerrida have taught us, is the pharmakon (remedy and poison) o ree-

Derrida have taught us, is the pharmakon (remedy and poison) o ree-dom, nor does it succumb to the anarchist temptation to abolish all ormal


political structures. Te stress Schmitt places on the exception should, like-wise, alert us on the act that it is an exception to the rule, which is notrescinded but, on the contrary, preserved and strengthened thanks to are-valorization o its telos embedded in the political lie-world. In lieu o prescribing an easy way to overcome the problem o modernity, Husserlianreduction and Heideggerian de-ormalization impose the exigency o apatient, i not Sisyphean, theoretical and practical work o discarding layerso sedimentation that are bound to regrow, given that their accumulationconstitutes the weight o history.

Tis, then, is the other dimension o the crisis: the survival o an empty organizational or legal orm at the expense o the decision that gave rise to it.Schmitt writes, “the issuance o a constitution can exhaust, absorb, or con-sume [erschöpen, absorbieren oder konsumieren] the constitution-makingpower” (C 125), immediately adding, however, that this exhaustion nei-ther invalidates nor renders irrelevant the political will. In a move thatis patently phenomenological, Schmitt conronts the loss o the politicallie-world and the abrogation o the animating impulse in the objectiv-ized statutory structures that betray it, in the double sense o expressingand exhibiting disloyalty to it. Constitution-making power is worn out inthat which is constituted by it; existentially vibrant meaning gives way tolegalistic abstractions. Because this power is so vital or political lie, itsabsorption and exhaustion in the constitution only deepens the crisis anddemands a new decision on the political orm. One sign o the crisis o ormalization is the dissolution o a unied constitution into a set o par-ticular laws (C 69), an early warning that the will, rom which the unity o the constitution stemmed, is no longer expressed in its own objectication.Te statute stays behind as an empty shell, an abstraction no longer linkedto concrete existence, a sediment disengaged rom political being.

Te resources o critical thinking are, then, mobilized against the crisiso modernity. Like Husserl, who harnesses philosophy to the task o reacti- vating the orgotten origins o knowing, learning to see the enigmatic coreo the amiliar, and “accomplishing or onesel that which has originally given rise to what one is now aware o as ‘ready-made,’”8 Schmitt is com-mitted to an archaeological reactivation o the “living sources” o politicsburied deep beneath the ossied institutional structures. It is important torealize that, given Schmitt’s polemical and highly situational usage o polit-ical concepts, his accentuation o the elemental experience o the politicalis also contextually and historically ensconced in a reaction to the crisiso modernity threatening with a complete de-politicization, neutraliza-

o modernity threatening with a complete de-politicization, neutraliza-tion, and ormalization o human existence. Piercing through ready-made


institutional reality, political reduction has in view the same goal as Husserl’sphenomenological reduction, namely, reviving politics as a lived experi-ence and as a concrete, deormalized phenomenon (in a qualied sense thatexcludes something like the pure sel-evidence and the absolute visibility o the political). Te advantage o this phenomenological elaboration onSchmitt’s project is that it avoids imputing to his methodology a mishmasho heterogeneous “modes o unmasking, historicization, ideational recon-struction and decontestation”9 and, thus, endorses theoretical coherencewithout compromising on historical sensitivity. Tis is what steers us tothe conclusion that the philosophical underpinnings o his method dove-tail with the variations on Husserlian reduction in Heidegger’s destruction( Abbau, Destruktion) and Derrida’s deconstruction.

Who or what remains aer the political-phenomenological reduc-tion has bracketed various abstractions and “obvious” descriptions o thepolitical? Here, too, a reerence to Husserl will prove useul. According toVolume I o Ideas, what survives the operations o reduction is that which ispurely immanent to consciousness, “intentionality,” or the directedness o consciousness toward something. As intentional, consciousness is, in eachinstance, conscious o something (perceiving o the perceived, desiring o the desired, thinking o the thought), in a double sense o the genitive; con-sciousness both bestows meaning on phenomena and is co-produced withwhatever it is conscious o. Reduction gives us access to a whole region o Being, which, while it is a part o the world, construes this world as mean-ingul. ransposed rom Husserl’s phenomenology onto Schmitt’s politicalphilosophy, constitutive subjectivity can equip the reader with a model orunderstanding the collective and the individual subjects o the politicaland the permutations o the irreducible pouvoir constituant rom whichconstitutional orms rst emanated. While the irreducibility o the subjec-tive element has been oen associated with the old metaphysical notiono the will that seems to have percolated into Schmitt’s theory, the reduc-tive-phenomenological take on the issue makes recourse to metaphysicalexplanations less plausible. But what, exactly, allows us to make a case ora post-metaphysical, existential-ontological interpretation o constitutivepolitical subjectivity in Schmitt’s political philosophy?

The Ontology of Political Will

Te most conspicuous, and perhaps the most controversial, instantiation o constitutive subjectivity in politics is the sovereign will. A political philoso-

constitutive subjectivity in politics is the sovereign will. A political philoso-phy that seeks, at any cost, to avoid the trappings o modern positivism is


likely to appeal to this notion, despite running the risk o inheriting the oldmetaphysical quandaries associated with it. Schmitt, nevertheless, is care-ul enough to skirt the positivist Scylla and the metaphysical Charybdis by resorting to the will—the paradigm case o pure psychic inwardness—soas to ingeniously destroy the master distinction o traditional metaphysicsbetween interiority and exteriority. Te “word ‘will’,” he maintains, “denotesan actually existing power as the origin o a command. Te will is existen-tially present [vorhanden]; its power or authority lies in its Being [seine Macht oder Autorität liegt in seinem Sein]” (C 64). Tis denition, workedout early on in Constitutional Teory , does not mean that a purely inte-rior, psychic entity, which exists a priori, only subsequently actualizes itsel either as Hegel’s Geist that passes through world-history, or as Nietzsche’swill-to-power. Nor is political will coterminous with the psychic will o theimmediate person, even when this person alone is responsible or decid-ing on the constitutional orm o political lie. Schmitt’s “will” is, merely,power in its actuality, an always already exteriorized expression o politi-cal existence, while power is an appellation or the eectivity o the will,which is not a withdrawn, noumenal cause10 but an active intervention in agiven state o aairs (actually existing power as the command’s origin). enyears aer the publication o Constitutional Teory , in his book on Hobbes,Schmitt will rea rm the destruction o the key distinction o traditionalmetaphysics, politically converted into the contrast between public and private reason at the threshold o liberalism. Tere, he will criticize Hobbes’sproto-liberal discrimination between des and conessio, aith and con-ession, a discrimination that created the private sphere, where one canentertain the illusion o exercising one’s own judgment, ree rom all politi-cal constraints (LS 56). But already in 1928, this destruction paved theway or a certain continuity between the will, the command, and the law.Succinctly put, while the law is a ormalized expression o the command,the command is an extension o the actually existing power (the will) romwhich it derives. Upon close examination, the will should be discernablein the law, notwithstanding the extreme ormalization that beuddles theintrinsic connection between the two. And the instances o the sovereigndecision on the exception, ar rom being transcendental intrusions, acili-tate this non-empirical discernability, deormalizing or reducing the legalexpression o the will orgetul o what it was to express in the rst place.

Te existential presence and actuality o the will does not, in point o act,betoken Schmitt’s secret inclination toward positivism,11 since the beingo the will, wherein power lies, is not positively demonstrable. Although

o the will, wherein power lies, is not positively demonstrable. AlthoughHeidegger, too, aimed to erase the articial divide between psychic


interiority and the outside world using a completely dierent pretext o the ecstatic constitution o Dasein, he did so by oregrounding anotheropposition—between the analytics o existence and the analytics o non-existential categories. Te price paid or the political deconstruction o thepivotal metaphysical distinction is blatant disrespect or the basic theoreti-cal move o Being and ime, where the existential problematic o Dasein iswarily protected against the commonplace tendency to comprehend humanbeings in terms o the categories that bet things, namely, Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) and Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand). Schmitt’sdepiction o the will, with its mix o actuality, presence, and existence, viti-ates the eorts to puriy existential terms o all categorial overtones, or soa Heideggerian complaint would go. But what i, rather than disregard theexistential primacy o possibility, to which he tirelessly attested throughouthis lie, the political philosopher described the sovereign will rom its ownphenomenological standpoint? What i the existential presence o the willactually accorded with Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein’s acticity, that is,the idea that Dasein is necessarily spatialized, or embodied, and that it isnot “a spiritual Ting which subsequently gets misplaced ‘into’ a space”?12 It is equally detrimental to consider the will as “a spiritual Ting,” providedthat it has a acticity o its own, a political acticity , we might say. Te politi-cal will must have an existential substratum—not to be conused with themodern sense o body politic—to which it is related not as something “mis-placed” but as a matter o act inseparable rom its being: “only somethingexisting in concrete terms can properly be sovereign. A merely valid normcannot be sovereign” (C 63). Tis onto-existential ambit o sovereignty impels urther analysis and elaboration.

With the assertion that the power o the will resides in its Being (inseinem Sein), Schmitt brackets, parenthesizes, or reduces a long history o legitimizations that depended either on a direct theologico-metaphysicalanchoring o authority (in the divine right o kings, or instance), or on amore circuitous secularization o previous religious concepts (the sacredsovereignty o the people as a modied version o God’s supreme authority).I the power o the will is grounded in its Being, then it is sel-grounded insuch a way that its ontic maniestations, known as monarchical, aristocratic,and democratic regimes—as well as the three degenerate orms Aristotlematches them with in Te Politics—oer a very supercial and incompleteexplanation or political reality, glossing over its ontological grounding inthe decision on the orm o political existence. Underneath mythologicalcovers, the sovereign will is existentially sel-justiying and sel-validating,

covers, the sovereign will is existentially sel-justiying and sel-validating,in other words, “the word ‘will’ denotes the essentially existential character


o this ground o validity [wesentlich Existenzielle dieses Geltungsgrundes].Te constitution-making power is political will , more specically, con-crete political being [konkretes politisches Sein]” (C 125). As in the earliercitation rom Constitutional Teory , the will is practically identical to theexistential nature o political being, that is, the Being o political beings,as opposed to a set o basic laws or state structures. Moreover, it is notsomething in being, a spiritual “thing” misplaced into political space, toparaphrase Heidegger, much less an identiable regime with its statutory,institutional accoutrements and representatives. It is, rather, political Beingas such. Te semantic equivalence o Being, will, and power—each terminterchangeable with the other two—hints at Schmitt’s ultimate innova-tion in political philosophy, his discovery o the eld o onto-existentialpolitics.

Despite the binding o the will to concrete, embodied existence, con-stitution-making power is not restricted to its monarchic or autocratic variety given that every “systematic unity and order” arises out o “a pre-established unied will” (C 65). Having reduced (deconstituted) theliberal-democratic state and the Rechtsstaat constitution to the oundingdecision on the orm o political lie, Schmitt not only peers behind variousorms o constitution, but also reconstructs ontic political reality on thenewly discovered ontological basis. Beore Schmitt, Hegel, also, concededthat all sovereignty originated in the shape o subjectivity, albeit conceivingo the will’s sel-determination as an abstraction:

Sovereignty . . . comes into existence only as subjectivity sure o itsel,as the will’s abstract and to that extent ungrounded sel-determinationin which nality o decision is rooted . . . Te truth o subjectivity,however, is attained only in a subject.13

Hegel’s naïvety lies in his hope that the groundless sel-determinationo the will could acquire an objective grounding in the bourgeois state,where universal reason gets actualized. Tis dialectical expectation testi-es to a perversion o the relation between the ounding and the ounded,so that the most inessential part o the political edice passes itsel o asthe most undamental. Tis gross error is urther compounded by theall too metaphysical assumption that existence, whether political or not,can be initially abstract and that its historical display is a process o con-cretization, a well-grounded sel-determination. Te political sequence indialectics that extends rom the abstract to the concrete and reaches an

dialectics that extends rom the abstract to the concrete and reaches anapex in the universal subject-object synthesis, undergoes an inversion in


Husserl’s phenomenology and Schmitt’s political philosophy, both o whichberate the accelerating abstraction and orgetting o the concrete ounda-tions o knowledge and political lie. Even i, methodologically, politicaland phenomenological reductions are to begin with abstractions, they willdo so not in order to fesh them out in concrete existence but or the sake o tracing these uppermost crusts o the political and cognitive edices back to their roots in the lie-world.

What Hegel celebrates as the subject-object synthesis o political history,whose pinnacle is the nineteenth-century Prussian state, is, or Schmitt,both an accurate metaphysical picture o reality two centuries old (NE149) and a alse concretization o the will, in a word, personication. Inthe preceding chapters I have grouped the personications o the law, theconstitution, and the state, as the supposed seats o modern sovereignty,under the heading o etishism. Te credo that the laws, not the personsmaking or administering them, rule throws a ruse over existentially vigor-ous sovereignty, rendering it apocryphal, amid the ever more sophisticatedtransposition o human categories onto the products o human activity.While in Hobbes’s appropriation o the myth o Leviathan, “the state isnot in its entirety a person” but a combination o the Cartesian body-ma-chine and a sovereign soul, the liberal alteration o this image o the stateretains solely the mechanized body, having discarded its sovereign kernel.Te political machine has lost its organic overtones and gives the impres-sion that it is a sel-propelling automaton. “Te process o mechanization,”Schmitt observes, “is not, however, arrested but completed by this personi-cation” (LS 34) that makes a depoliticized lie more dramatic, i not moreinteresting, and thereore more tolerable or those who nd the spectacle o duels (wars) between the personied entities ascinating. But the elementso personhood, now assigned to the mechanized state, are a poor consola-tion or its soullessness and impersonality; such an assignation results in acontrived concretization o the will and in the illusion o neutral sovereignty dissolved, as though by osmosis, in various state structures. A “remarkablepersonication [Personizierung ] o the law” elevated “over every politicalpower” (C 63) does not describe the Hegelian Auebung o abstract universal reason in the tangible written statute, or the incarnation o rationallaw in positive legality,14 but a polemical, and oen extralegal, legitimationo the law that lends a ormal voice to political will.

Personication, the political legacy o the baroque, superimposes a ur-ther neutralizing sediment onto the political lie-world, in that it silences thedebate over pouvoir constituant with reerence to “the will o the state.”15 It

debate over pouvoir constituant with reerence to “the will o the state.” Itresorts to a mixed strategy o lling the void o the modern “disincarnation


o society,” in the words o Claude Leort, and recalling the political to itsexistential and phenomenological oundations without investing power inthe person o the monarch. What it really personies, however, is not “soci-ety” but society’s disincarnation, the nihilistic void at the core o modernpolitics, its disembodiment that neither should nor can be resolved intothe abstract gure o humanity, or into the concrete order o things. Are weto learn to live with a vacuous political ontology, or can we imagine othermodes o embodiment, concretization, phenomenological appearing on thepolitical scene, i only in those rare moments when sovereignty is exercised?Schmitt certainly wishes to ll out the void o the political, but he does notintend to do so once and or all, postulating a new objective metaphysicalstructure as the nal point o ascription. Te political-phenomenologicalproject is motivated by a desire to aid the fourishing o concrete politicalincarnations that will be as changeable as political existence itsel and thatwill derive rom the dense texture o this existence. Te nihilistic void atthe center o modern political ontology gapes only when this ontology ispreconstituted rom an abstract vantage point that reies the eld o politi-cal activity and, then, retrospectively, breathes the “spiritualism” o thelaw into the deormed corpse o the political. Te empty (and, thereore,contestable) place o sovereignty might as well stay unoccupied in general but, in the concreteness o political lie, Leortian “disincarnation” sheltersspecic interests and political actors. Te link between personhood andauthority has not disintegrated altogether; no longer subject to the exi-gencies o the spectacle and, more specically, the spectacularization o authority, it is merely withdrawn rom public sight and, thus, politicized asthe greatest arcanum o modernity.

As though mocking Hegel’s political philosophy, personication persistsin the long-awaited synthesis o the rational and the actual in the mod-ern liberal-democratic state. A well-unctioning political embodiment o reason should have absorbed—negated and preserved: dialectically sub-lated—all remnants o contingent personalism, such as the principle o revenge in the administration o justice. But nothing corresponds to thisdialectical expectation in political reality: the personication o states onthe international arena, which is a relic o the “allegorical tendency o theRenaissance” (NE 144), continues well into the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, with Hegel himsel modeling international relations and, espe-cially, interstate wars on the lie-and-death struggle or recognition in theintersubjective sphere.16 Te anthropomorphism o political thought thatsees wars as duels between magni homines and that antasizes about the

sees wars as duels between magni homines and that antasizes about thestate as “a legal subject and a sovereign ‘person’” (NE 142, 145) stands


halway between the majestic sovereignty o the monarch’s absolute willand the routinized sovereignty o state machinery, trying to convey thatthe latter is a direct inheritor o the ormer. Distinct rom such personi-cation, Schmitt’s idea o sovereignty as a decision on the exception is a veritable synthesis, i there ever was one, o the personal thesis and theimpersonal antithesis. Instead o wistully looking back to the premodern,not yet secularized gure o sovereignty, the decision on the exceptionresponds to political modernity, stepping in only when state machinery breaks, when it becomes unworkable, or is unable to process something,in an auto-reduction that recalls the emergence o the category “presence-at-hand” in Heidegger (in Being and ime things become present-at-hand,reduced to their “mereness,” when they break or when they lose the qual-ity o inconspicuous amiliarity, that is, when we no longer know whatto do with them). All law might be situational but so are the sovereigndecision and the will that—not unlike the worldhood (the Being) o theworld that rst becomes accessible through the gap in the totality o sig-nications opened by the unworkable, present-at-hand thing—representpolitical being, which shines through this break in the body-machine o legality and o the state. Te truth o the political mechanism does notreside “in its technological perection” (LS 45) but in the breaking pointswhere its limits are revealed.

It remains to be explained what Schmitt means by “a preestablishedunied will.”17 In citing this entity, does he reviviy metaphysical ounda-tionalism that thrives on explaining concrete reality by means o a priori transcendental causation (the Idea, the thing-in-itsel, the will—terms thatorchestrate everything in the world rom which they are absent)? Does theinsistence on the unity o constitution-making power throw us back ontothe old, tried and tested terrain o metaphysics?

Te “pre-establishment” o the will does not happen in a transcenden-tal realm outside o history but is, itsel, a political abrication, which, indemocracies, cannot come to pass without an extreme homogenizationo citizenry, or what Noam Chomsky calls “a manuacturing o consent.”Te metaphysical concept o the general will obuscates a very practicalquestion as to “who has control over the means with which the will o the people is to be constructed: military and political orce, propaganda,control o public opinion through the press, party organizations, assem-blies, public education, and schools” (CPD 29). Leist political thinkers,including French philosopher Louis Althusser, reer to these institutions as“Ideological State Apparatuses” responsible or the orderly production o

“Ideological State Apparatuses” responsible or the orderly production o docile subjects in the image o the master Subject o ideology, a secularized


gure o God. For our purposes, it is enough to highlight the historico-ideological construction o the will o the people, which is orged through aseries o raudulent identications. In the process o setting up the collec-tive that is not reliant upon the organicity o Gemeinscha or upon a purely political consolidation in the ace o an enemy threat, the voting majority gets identied with the people in general and, hence, also, the will o the“outvoted minority” is absorbed into that o the majority (CDP 25). Tewill o the parliament is, in its turn, translated into the will o the homog-enized people (LL 24) and, thus, into the metaphysical construct o volonté générale. Tat is to say, the unity o the will in democracy, be it direct orrepresentative, is not a simple, non-analyzable unity distinguishing allmetaphysical concepts, but a oneness that overlays and suppresses dier-ence and heterogeneity. Political reduction exposes the vertical layering o identications only to point out that at the bottom o the ideological con-struction we shall not detect a orgotten atomic unity o the will; rather weshall stumble upon the smoldering cinders o a confict resolved througha successul imposition o the political will o the victorious party on the vanquished who interiorize it as their own.

Both in the ormation o the general will and in the exploitative dynam-ics o capitalism, basic inequalities persist under the mask o absolute andtotal equality. Trough an intricate process o identication, the struggleo particular wills is quelled, i only temporarily, and a ragile civil peacedescends upon past adversaries. Yet, despite all appearances to the con-trary, Schmitt’s version o the cessation o hostilities paving the way to theormation o the people’s will has nothing in common with what socialcontract and state o nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls)have to say on the subject. Perhaps, it would have still been possible torehabilitate these much-maligned—with the exception o Rawls—theorieso the origin o the state that, despite their shortcomings, recognized theirreducibility o the will, were it not or three essential shortcomings. First,instead o reducing the existing political arrangements to their constitutiveunderpinnings, all theories o the state o nature are imaginary projec-tions o anthropological assumptions onto a hypothetical historical periodbeore the rise o the state. (At the outset o Te Discourse on the Origin o Inequality , Rousseau devastatingly criticized the general methodology o the earlier “state o nature” theories, only to project a contrasting anthro-pological presupposition onto the human origins.18) Second, although thewill, which announces itsel in the nascent social contract, limits itsel tocalculative rationality, this will does not denote an “actually existing power”

calculative rationality, this will does not denote an “actually existing power”but, to the contrary, delegates political clout to a new, presumably neutral,


authority o the state said to be at its behest. And, third, regardless o theundamental dierences among them, social contract theories postulateconsensus and, consequently, utter de-politicization at the source o politi-cal institutions.

Surely, the consensual drive in the ormation o a constitution is con-ceivable, but solely under exceptional circumstances:

When a constitution is at issue, a compromise will only be possiblewhen the will to political unity and state consciousness strongly anddecisively outweighs all religious and class-based oppositions, so thatthese religious and social dierences are rendered relative. (C 83)

Whether a unied political will is orged under the aegis o compromise or,whether conficts between various intensely antagonistic groups continueto brew, the political maintains its primacy over other spheres o humanactivity because, in both cases, it assumes the highest existential relevance.Te deepest ault line passes not between unity and disunity but betweenaectively invested—Freud would say, cathected—modes o being withand against others and a nihilistic indierence to one’s group identity. I this is so, then “the will to political unity” cannot be motivated by a vagueappeal to bipartisanship or by a yearning or an unchangeable and non-po-litical common substance o the American nation, upon which the ideology o Barack Obama is heavily reliant. For the political to outweigh all otheroppositions and induce a unity, the gure o the enemy must loom large onthe horizon o national, inranational, or transnational collectivities.

Originary consensus is especially pertinent to the ormation o ederationsthat come about as a consequence o an agreement, approximating mostclosely the social contract scheme. Still, the contractual model cannot hopeor equality among those who have achieved such a compromise, becausethe assessment and interpretation o the adherence to and the violations o the terms o the contract are the prerogatives o sovereign decision-making.“Who decides whether there is a valid contract, whether the grounds to dis-pute it are persuasive, whether the right to withdraw is provided, etc.?” (C120). Tus ormulated, the question o constitutive political subjectivity comes back to haunt that which has been constituted, demanding a con-stant reconstitution o political orms in every “application” o rules and ineach act o overseeing and judging procedural “correctness.”

However potent it may be, the criticism o “the will o the people” doesnot solve the problem o the sovereign will in other, non-democratic politi-

not solve the problem o the sovereign will in other, non-democratic politi-cal regimes. Te second rejoinder to the allegation that, in Schmitt, the will


reeks o old metaphysics has to do with the notions o unity and indivisibil-ity o sovereignty in general. Te key consideration here is whether the willas such, irrespective o the political regime it institutes, is a ready-made“entity,” or whether, with phenomenological fair, it comes into being withthat which is willed. According to Nietzsche’s daring assertion in On theGenealogy o Morality and, especially, in Te Will to Power , there is no subjective doer behind the deed. Te agent is a later, a posteriori, and, to a largeextent, ctitious interpellation into the action.19 Schmitt and Husserl donot subscribe to this, or all intents and purposes, scandalous conclusion,yet it is my hypothesis that political will and the sovereign qua sovereigncome about as a result o the decision on the exception; that is to say, they do not precede the moment o the decision but are decided into existencein this very moment. Te production o the sovereign and o the will by the decision is a sel-production, in that, in the absence o any transcen-dental supports, the sovereign is decided into existence by him- or hersel ,by the act o sovereignty, which, rom the standpoint o the existing legal-political order, is null and groundless. Te unity o the will is the upshot o the unity o action (that decides on the exception, that gives a particularconstitutional orm to political being, etc.) so that, in each case, the actionconstitutes the will not as an abstract and undetermined spiritual entity,but as a specic willing to . . . But since action is temporally nite, the willmust also exhibit the same quality. Its existential nitude requires a con-stant reactivation, a rebinding o its ties to what is willed, i the process o sedimentation and the crisis whereby the willed separates rom the willingis to be managed, i not outright overcome.o pursue urther the analogy with Husserlian phenomenology, where

all consciousness is a consciousness o something (the perceiving o thatwhich is perceived, etc.), Schmitt’s political will is not an amorphous,abstract potentiality but a power, the constitution-making power to beexact, that “activates itsel through the act o the undamental politicaldecision” (C 140). Te political decision, thereore, determines the will,and not vice versa. Its unity is, decidedly, not an expression o the “monis-tic metaphysics” distinctive o mainstream jurisprudence, where normative“[u]nity and purity are easily attained when the basic di culty is emphati-cally ignored and when, or ormal reasons, everything that contradicts thesystem is excluded as impure” (P 21). In contrast to the sovereign will,the unity o normative and legal system, initially built upon it, is meta-physical both due to the ideal o purity it upholds and due to its totalizingimpulse emphatically ignoring the heterogeneity o the exception. o the

impulse emphatically ignoring the heterogeneity o the exception. o theextent that “reedom o the will” still makes sense, it is not to be taken as a


simple lack o determinations in the aermath o a stale metaphysical quar-rel between the proponents o “ree will” and “determinism” but is to beunderstood, at best, in the Kantian vein o reedom as sel-determination,albeit without the reliance on the transcendental subject o reason. Tisexplains the auto-production o the sovereign will, which appears to haveoriginated miraculously, ex nihilo, but, which actually, “generates its ownunity [Einheit ]” (C 70)—the unity that, as we shall see, subsists on dier-ence—by temporarily gathering itsel up in the instant o the decision.

Tat the unity o the will, whose auto-production is at once a hetero-production, is never simple or atomic is true even or non-democraticpolitical regimes. In an important 1970 treatise, largely neglected in sec-ondary scholarship, Schmitt articulated his views on unity in the context o his analysis o rinitarian political theology. Bitterly disagreeing with Erik Peterson’s assessment o the contemporary prospects or political theology elaborated in Der Monotheismus als Politisches Problem (1935), Schmittexposed the partiality o “one God—one King” ormula that shackled thepolitical problem o monotheism to monarchism. Given the Jewish mono-theistic slogan “one God—one people” and the principle o the RomanEmpire “one God—one World—one Empire,” the real conundrum orpolitical theology is “ political unity and its presence or representation”(PII 72), not a simple, non-derived, unproduced oneness. Te inerencethat the synthetic nature o any unity logically entails an anterior plurality promises a resh approach to the institution o monarchy (literally, “a singlearché or origin”), the very site where Christian political theology has beenAristotelianized. “Te politico-theological question o monarchy becomesmore complex,” Schmitt explains,

through the act that neither Origen and the Alexandrian theologiansnor St. Athanasius use the word monarchy; they talk o divine monasinstead. Te word “mon-archy” implies the Aristotelian mia arche,the principle o the One, whereas the word monas relates to thePythagorean-Platonic unity o the number. (PII 72–73)

While the principle o the One is the metaphysical axiom par excellence,the ideal unity o number does not bar the possibility o dierentiation anddivision o what has been gathered up into it (i.e., Platonic dialectics). Werethe Pythagorean-Platonic infuence on Christianity to gain an upper hand,monarchy would have been habitually read as monas-archy consistent withrinitarian plurality o the One in the constant process o consolidating

rinitarian plurality o the One in the constant process o consolidatingits unity, but also alling apart, becoming divided against itsel. It is by no


means certain either that the unied (as opposed to the single) will is inaccord with itsel, or that the economy o the rinity is governed by theideal o perpetual peace, or, again, that, in the depths o my psychic econ-omy, when I am alone with mysel, I ace no enemies. Just as the solitudeo the prison cell may prompt me to put mysel into question, to becomemy own enemy, so divine solitude is not without its rictions, especially in light o the doctrine o the rinity as a “politico-theological stasiology ,”where, as we know, stasis entails both the condition o quiescence and anuproar or tumult ( Auruhr ) o civil strie (PII 123). Indeed, the intriguinginterpretation o stasis is given both in Ex Captivitate Salus and in Political Teology II , texts that extend the basic political opposition between riendsand enemies to psychic economy and theological dogma, respectively. I God himsel can be his own enemy, not to mention all the conscious andunconscious ways in which human beings consistently undermine them-selves, then the sovereignty o the political will can act against itsel, thereby precipitating the event o political sel-expropriation.

P.S.: On Political Consciousness

Te analysis o constitutive subjectivity in Te Nomos o the Earth deservesa special treatment because it interjects “consciousness” in the place o “will.” While the doxa o Schmitt scholarship holds that, in the period aerWorld War II, he abandoned decisionism and subscribed to an institu-tional analysis o politics, the recurrent reerences to the latter term in themost emblematic work o “later Schmitt” indicate that he did not orsakethe methodology o reducing political structures to the subjectivity thatconstitutes them. At rst glance, the desire to attribute the origination o nomos to the land and its earliest divisions is a leap back to an objectiv-ist—some would say eudal or bucolic—political metaphysics. Aer all,what is “groundless,” literally and guratively, about the suggestion that“[e]very ontonomous and ontological judgment [ontonome, seinsgerechteUrteil ] derives rom the land” and that, “[]or this reason, we will beginwith land-appropriation as the primeval act in ounding law” (NE 45)?Schmitt’s neologism “ontonomy,” meaning the nomos o Being and seman-tically playing on “autonomy,” is anything but endorsing an autonomoussubjectivity, since subjective judgment is doubly dependent on the order o Being and a derivation rom the land. A conceptual divide thus stretchesbetween the early deduction o the state and the law rom an existentialdecision on political orm that refects the unity o the will, and the con-

decision on political orm that refects the unity o the will, and the con-ditioning o nomos by land-appropriation. Tanks to this partitioning o


his body o work, Schmitt is reintegrated into the pantheon o modernphilosophy, which, in his words, “is governed by a schism between thoughtand being, concept and reality, mind and nature, subject and object” (PR 52), a schism whose political vicissitudes would include a spectacular splitbetween order and orientation and, thereore, the impossibility o recover-ing the unity o nomos.

Te bad news or the proponents o an epistemological break betweenthe early and the late Schmitt is that there is ample evidence or the promi-nence o constitutive subjectivity in the postwar writings as well. I law is rst ounded on the basis o land-appropriation, then the subjectivity o the appropriator needs to be theoretically addressed, or all appropria-tion is appropriation by someone. An appropriator o the land, whetherindividual or collective, must operate with a historical consciousness (inHusserl’s vernacular, noesis) o the object (noema) to be appropriated. Terst appropriations guided by myth and treating the earth as sacred did nothave the same historical object “land” in sight, as did the Europeans in theAge o Discoveries. Even more,

or centuries, humanity had a mythical image o the earth, but noscientic understanding o it as a whole. Tere was no concept o aplanet, o human compass and orientation common to all peoples. Inthis sense, there was no global consciousness [ globale Bewußtsein]and thus no political goal oriented to a common hope. (NE 50)

Tis is not to say that the “mythical image o the earth” was not a spe-cies o knowledge, albeit not o the scientic kind; Schmitt would notobject to the emblematic statement o Adorno and Horkheimer, “Myth isalready enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” Te absenceo a noematic object “earth” on the planetary scale refected a deciency o conceptual knowledge and an inability to grasp the earth as a whole. Acircumscribed object o knowledge invited an equally limited orientationto (and ordering o) this object, which amounted to the exclusion o thesea rom the rst nomos.

It is a phenomenologico-political axiom that the earliest global orderarose rom the rst global consciousness o the earth as a whole and, ur-thermore, that every new nomos o the earth developed rom “a new stageo human spatial consciousness [Raumbewußtsein] and global order” (NE48). Whereas Marx argued, against the adherents o German Idealism,that consciousness does not determine Being, but, vice versa, Being deter-

that consciousness does not determine Being, but, vice versa, Being deter-mines consciousness, political Being, in Schmitt, is a coimbrication o the


subjective conscious orientation and the objective order wherein it orientsitsel. Since, according to Husserl’s undamental discovery already antici-pated by his teacher, Franz Brentano, all consciousness is a consciousnesso something, the noesis and its noema are entwined, so that the globalpolitical consciousness is, in and o itsel, a consciousness o the globalspatiality, with which it co-originated and which was inaccessible to themythical imagistic awareness o the earth.20 Political consciousness is notreducible either to a passive contemplation o its object or to an active “cre-ation” o the world. It shapes and is, in turn, shaped by that o which it isconscious: the nomological ensemble o order and orientation is Husserl’snoetic-noematic unity translated into the categories o political ontology.

Te historical transmutations o political consciousness prevent itsbelonging with its object rom rigidiying into an abstract metaphysicalentity. Te positive impact o the crisis that rends the unity o order andorientation and thrusts disoriented subjects into a nihilistic attitude is thatit instigates the imagination o another order and the ormulation o a new nomos. For the phenomenological consciousness, the crisis takes the shapeo an empty intentionality, an act o noesis that does not reach its noema orails to achieve ulllment in its object: this is how Husserl perceived thestructure o mere signication, which does not touch upon that which issignied and alls short o bringing what it targets to perceptual presence.However, the cleavages between consciousness and that o which it is con-scious as well as between orientation and the order in which one orientsonesel, need not signal the dead-end o pure abstraction but a transition toa new object, which is yet to be ound. Te disintegration o the old nomos redirects political energy rom actuality to the historical possibility o “anew stage o human spatial consciousness”; nihilist indierence would be,ollowing Nietzsche, a turning point in this redirection, a hiatus betweendierent regimes o motivation. Te promise o the crisis lies in what Ihave called the “auto-reduction” or the sel-deconstruction o nomos call-ing or its subsequent reactivation in a dierent conguration o order andorientation.

One o the momentous messages o Te Nomos o the Earth is that polit-ical consciousness is not always compatible with state consciousness, or,to resort to the terms o Constitutional Teory , that the will to give ormto political being through the act o establishing a state is but a singularand somewhat peculiar moment in the history o political conscious-ness. “France,” Schmitt writes, “was the leading power and the rst stateto become sovereign in terms o its juridical consciousness” (NE 127). Te

to become sovereign in terms o its juridical consciousness” (NE 127). Tetheoretical noematic objectivity o sovereignty is inconceivable without the


noetic consciousness o sovereignty, which Schmitt terms “juridical.” But,since sovereignty is not an object but a subjective-existential stance, thisconsciousness had to be raised to sel-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein)rst “attained in the thinking o two jurists: Bodin and Gentili” (NE 159).Te historicity o political consciousness and sel-consciousness impliesnot only that the actuality o the will and its pouvoir constituant are ormedrom a limited range o historical possibilities available in a given time-rame but also that political ontology is essentially historical and that themeaning o political Being is time.

Notes

1. In “Nomos—Nahme—Name,” Schmitt cites approvingly Carl Joachim Friedrich’sstatement “All power hides,” reminiscent o the ancient Greek, “Phusis (nature) loves tohide,” and Hannah Arendt’s thesis that “Real power begins where secrecy begins” (NE336).

2. ranslation modied.3. Tus, Rodolph Gasché [“Te Partisan and the Philosopher,” in Te New Centennial

Review 4 (3), Winter 2004, pp. 9–34] is somewhat careless in reerring to “partisan war” asa “phenomenon” (p. 10) and, more generally, to “the phenomenon o the partisan” (p. 11),or “the chameleon-like phenomenon o partisanship” (p. 12).

4. Edmund Husserl,Te Crisis o European Sciences and ranscendental Phenomenology ,trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 127.

5. “oday nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political [Heute ist nichts moderner als der Kamp gegen das Politische]” (P 65).

6. David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and HermannHeller in Weimar (Oxord and London: Oxord University Press, 1997), p. 81.

7. Reer to Paragraph 9, “Galileo’s Mathematization o Nature” in Husserl’s Te Crisis,pp. 23–59, and especially Section H, “Te Lie-World as a Forgotten Fundament o Science,”pp. 48–53.

8. James Dodd, Crisis and Refection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis o the EuropeanSciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), p. 134.

9. Jan Müller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method: Between Ideology, Demonology, and Myth,” in Journal o Political Ideologies 4 (1), 1999, pp. 61–85.

10. Schmitt deems Romantic occasionalism to be a negation o “the concept o causa, inother words, the orce o a calculable causality, and thus also every binding norm” (PR 17).I this is the case, then the political will in Schmitt, too, is “Romantic” since it nds itsel athome in such a negation.

11. Te “positivism o my time oppressed me,” Schmitt admits in Ex Captivitate Salus (pp. 63–64).

12. Heidegger, Being and ime, p. 83.


13. Hegel, Philosophy o Right , p. 181. Hegel soon comes back to this idea, stressing theungrounded character o the subjective (“the will’s ultimate ungrounded sel”) and objec-tive (“its similarly ungrounded objective existence”) aspects o sovereignty, which he readily identies with the “‘majesty’ o the monarch” (p. 185).

14. Jean-François Kervégan [Hegel, Carl Schmitt: La Politique entre Speculation et Positivité (Paris: PUF, 2005)] notes, in this respect, that just as Hegel mounts a principledopposition to the idea that positive and rational law are essentially dierent, Schmitt reducesthe rational to the positive, thereby acknowledging substantial continuity between the twosystems o legality (p. 34). O course, the reasons or this conclusion are drastically diver-gent in the two cases: while Hegel sees positive law as a concretion o the rational, Schmitt views rational law in terms o a rationalization o the existing positive law, which is parallelto the alse concretization o the will in the personication o the state.

15. “Tey [jurists o positive law] nd it meaningul to trace all legality back to the con-stitution or the will o the state, which is conceived o as a person. However, they have animmediate answer or the urther question regarding the origin o this constitution or theorigin o the state; they say it is a mere act” (NE 82).

16. C. Hegel, Philosophy o Right , “Sovereignty vis-à-vis Foreign States,” p. 208.17. Likewise, the “constitution is valid by virtue o the existing political will o that

which establishes it. Every type o legal norm, even constitutional law, presupposes thatsuch a will already exists” (C 76).

18. In Rousseau, the “‘state o nature’ o earlier philosophy, which was treated as anintentional abstraction or a historical act, becomes a concrete idyll that takes place in orestand eld, a ‘romantic antasy’” (PR 57).

19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power , trans. Walter Kaumann and R. J. Hollingdale(New York: Vintage, 1968), esp. “Te Will to Power as Knowledge,” p. 262.

20. “Te idea o a coexistence o true empires, or independent Großräume in a commonspace, lacked any ordering power, because it lacked the idea o a common spatial orderencompassing the whole earth” (NE 55).

PART III

ON THE GROUND

7Living Forms: Culture, Multiculturalism,

and Complexio Oppositorum

Disentangling Complexio Oppositorum

Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) eatures a term, the impor-tance o which political philosophy is yet to athom. Tis notion, complexiooppositorum, describes Catholicism as “a complex o opposites,” because,as Schmitt observes,

there appears to be no antithesis it [Roman Catholicism] does notembrace. It has long and proudly claimed to have united within itsel all orms o state and government . . . But this complexio oppositorumalso holds sway over everything theological. (RC 7)

Having survived the metonymic reductions o modernity, the complexio’selastic orm—and more needs to be said on the subject o the exceptional,miraculous eatures o this orm—knows no exceptions, since it encom-passes every antithesis within itsel and brings together “all orms” o political organization. Its inclusiveness notwithstanding, the complexio does not name a vacuous orm o orms and even less does it envisage acomplete dialectical synthesis; the accommodation o mutually exclusiveentities does not synthesize them into a Hegelian unity but leaves enoughspace or them to retain the tension o oppositionality, which ought tobe rigorously distinguished rom the temporary torsion o a contradic-tion awaiting a resolution. So receptive is the complexio to the pressureso political antagonism, that an alternative version o the book on Roman

149

o political antagonism, that an alternative version o the book on RomanCatholicism, titled “Te Necessity o Politics,” begins with the postulation


o its ghostly double, “an anti-Roman ‘complex’”1 joining together unlikely allies—Protestants and orthodox Christians—against the dreaded elastic-ity o the Catholic political orm.

In his model o the complexio, Schmitt rerains rom invoking ahigher third that would mediate between the thesis and the antith-esis. Upon rejecting the Hegelian method, he shows how the complexo opposites—in the vernacular o Political Teology , a conglomerationo disjunctions, not o polarities—occasions a breakdown o dialectics,which routinely brings to naught the contradiction that impels it andpositivizes negativity.2 Instead o neutralizing the antagonisms it houses,the complex o opposites nurtures and accentuates them; instead o totalizing or inserting the particulars under the umbrella o a singleconcept, it permits them to clash and derives its political energy romthis enduring stando. But, above all, it dees the logic o the actualiza-tion o potentialities, where “all political orms and possibilities becomenothing more than tools or the realization o an idea” (RC 5). It is thisdeance that bestows an existential character on the complex that graspspossibilities qua possibilities without subjugating them to the “catego-rial” ontology o the ready-to-hand (Heidegger), or turning them intomere “tools.”

Resistance to dialectics is woven into the, prima acie, anti-modern abrico the complexio. When in eighteenth-century metaphysics, God “becamea concept and ceased to be an essence,” He “was removed rom the worldand reduced to a neutral instance vis-à-vis the struggles and antagonismso real lie [des wirklichen Lebens]” (CP 90). Philosophy and its birthright(conceptualization), thereore, idealize the actuality o lie, prompting anincreasingly abstract epistemology to supplant practical ontology. Only the complex’s rejection o the neutralizing and, by implication, deadeningsubsumption o antagonisms in a conceptual unity preserves that o whichthey are but meager symptoms: within itsel, it maintains lie’s actuality (Wirklichkeit ) that, in order to remain alive, must be compatible with itsdisjunctive other—the virtuality o inexhaustible existential and uturalpossibilities, particularly those pertaining to nitude and death. (Let usremark, parenthetically, that Schmitt himsel is quite unambiguous withregard to the anti-Hegelian position o his early work,3 in light o whichthe gloriously Hegelian language o his various commentators is all themore surprising.4 Be this as it may, the promise o a orm that embraces allantitheses, without extinguishing them, is nothing less than the promiseo the political as such.) Te virtual actuality o lie is a counterpoint to

o the political as such.) Te virtual actuality o lie is a counterpoint to

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum 151

the actualization o (the virtual) Spirit allen into history and orming theworld here-below.

Whereas the width o the complex is measured by its applicability tothose who, in eect, oppose its theological source, the reerence to thebecoming-conceptual o the God o the philosophers intimates the com-plex’s proundity, its inordinate depth. Not only does it revitalize thepolitical dunamis inherent in unalloyed, disjunctive oppositions, but it also“holds sway over everything theological.” Considered against the theoreti-cal backdrop o Political Teology , according to which political conceptsderive rom theological origins,5 complexio oppositorum is, at the sametime, one o such concepts and a more general link in the transition romthe theological to the political, signaled in the very title o the 1923 textthat combines a singular religious doctrine with the universality o politi-cal orm. Indeed, i books aspire to live up to their titles, Schmitt’s RomanCatholicism and Political Form is a superb example o this aspiration, inthat it announces the immediate conjunction o matter and orm, thetheological and the political, the singular and the universal, which, itsel,becomes possible within the ramework o the religion it evokes and theorm generated by this religion. Tat complexio oppositorum envelops alloppositions without exception would have been a trite comment i its ormwere abstractly universal; however, the orm o the institution that embod-ies it—Roman Catholicism—is itsel exceptional:

From the standpoint o the political idea o Catholicism, theessence o the Roman Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a spe-cic, ormal superiority over the matter o human lie [in einer spezisch ormalen Überlegenheit über die Materie des menschlichenLebens] such as no other imperium has ever known. (RC 8, empha-sis added)

For now, I would like to deer the discussion o this extraordinary orm andwill return to it aer pointing out the consequences o the special status o the Catholic imperium.

It is common knowledge in contemporary political philosophy thatSchmitt’s sovereign is “he who decides on the exception” (P 5). But therelation o complexio oppositorum to sovereignty complicates this deni-tion, given that it is an exceptional arrangement that, like the Platonickhōra, receives everything without exception. Te complex politicizes itscontents not by singling them out and, in a sovereign manner, decisively

contents not by singling them out and, in a sovereign manner, decisively


bestowing upon them the (ormal) status o an exception but by drawingout a uniquely political orm immanent to them. In other words, thanks tothe mere incorporation o all antagonisms into this imperium, their politi-cal nature comes to the ore, and this, precisely, calls or a detour throughthe miraculous, an anti-modern reenchantment o the world that does notconorm to the empty mold o an ideal orm, “an empty vessel lled withcontents that change rom case to case” (PR 30), but propagates “ormality”rom the content o lie itsel.

Te theological correlate to the juridical concept o exception( Ausnahme) is a “miracle” (Wunder P 5), and complexio oppositorum isnothing short o miraculous. One cannot help but experience a sense o wonder when aced with the unmediated way, in which it brings togethermutually exclusive ideas and institutions. Besides this recovery o immedi-acy, another piece o evidence or the extraordinariness o the complexio isthat the origins o this term, which “in Schmitt’s lietime was employed by the great Protestant historian Adol von Harnack, who used it to explain, i not justiy, the ‘anti-Roman aect’,” go back to alchemy.6 Schmitt’s polemi-cal co-optation and revamping o a syntagma used by a Protestant thinkerwho shared the antagonistic “aect” diagnosed in the rst line o the 1923text is a methodological accomplishment consistent with his commitmentto the polemical possibilities o all political concepts. What interests mein the genealogy o the complexio, however, is its alchemical anchoring,which, I believe, is neither an idle curiosity, nor a sign o the pining orthe irrational said to haunt Catholic thought. Having traversed the deserto modernity, the reenchantment o the world does not slide down intomyth;7 were it to do so, it would have surrendered itsel wholeheartedly to unknowable, overwhelming otherness and would not have ought theother as the enemy. Schmitt himsel staunchly resists the romanticizing views o Roman Catholicism and the “dubious honor,” bestowed upon it,o serving as a temporary shelter rom the iron cage o modernity. Why,then, even mention the esoteric alchemical roots o a somewhat neglectedSchmittian concept that goes the greatest distance toward describing hispolitical and theological ideal?

I we could designate a companion book to Roman Catholicism, no othercandidate would stand out more than Carl Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis,which, as a supplement to Schmitt, has the potential o triggering a renais-sance o the classical psychopolitics Plato ormulates in Te Republic. Atthe cusp o alchemical, psychological, and Christian symbolism, Jungechoes Schmitt’s insights into the equal inclusion o masculine and emi-

echoes Schmitt’s insights into the equal inclusion o masculine and emi-nine authority gures in Roman Catholicism that “is already a complexio


oppositorum.”8 Te psychoanalyst urther insists that the oppositions struc-turing the psychological sphere must be concretely personied, while thepolitical philosopher subjectivizes the categories o sovereignty, enmity,and so on. Concertization o psychological orces is at the heart o Jungian“archetypes” (the complexio is explicitly mentioned in the politically ger-mane chapter titled, “Rex and Regina,” “King and Queen”), just as the eltneed or a re-subjectivization o sovereignty prompts Schmitt’s rethinkingo “representation.” Tat is not to say that subjectivation is the same aspersonication; as I indicated in Chapter 5, much o the conusion sur-rounding Schmittian “decisionism” dissipates as soon as the two processesare sharply distinguished. Te writings o Schmitt and Jung are the siteso the convergence between the psyche populated with archetypal gures,theatrically allegorizing mental lie, and the art o politics, entailing anability to juggle the abstract and the concrete elements included in any rep-resentation without sacricing one o them or the sake o the other. Teidea that the “pope is not the Prophet but the Vicar o Christ” reveals that,“[i]n contradistinction to the modern o cial, his position is not impersonal,because his o ce is part o the unbroken chain linked with the personalmandate and concrete person o Christ. Tis is truly the most astound-ing complexio oppositorum” (RC 14). In a vicarious relation o power, theabstract and the concrete, the same and the other, are not mediately recon-ciled; they, rather, enter into a permanent stando that generates the ormo a concrete representation, which, in the secularized political realm, ndsembodiment in the gures o the sovereign, the enemy, the riend, and,perhaps, the jurist.9

The Living Forms of Politics

We are now ready to ace the marked “alchemical” origin o complexiooppositorum, a way o thinking that ascinates Schmitt because it succeedsin the search or a living orm (or else, “the philosopher’s stone”) in whichthe philosophical tradition, arguably, has ailed. Te living, existential ormthat gis Roman Catholicism with remarkable elasticity and that becomestransmuted into the political as such, is neither a posteriori imposed ontodead contents in a sort o dialectical magic inusing inert matter withspirit, nor does it mirror the disquietude o lie rom a contemplativestandpoint external to it. Its emphatically non-modern “alchemy” bypassesall mediations and demonstrates that the Catholic complexio oppositorum,“despite its ormal character, retains its concrete existence at once vital and

“despite its ormal character, retains its concrete existence at once vital andyet rational to the nth degree [die trotz ihres ormalen Charakters in der


konkreten Existenz bleibt, lebensvoll und doch im höchsten Maße rational ist ]” (RC 8). In a direct union o the signier and the signied, it is lie itsel and, simultaneously, a concrete representation o lie in excess o what itrepresents.10 Like the coveted “elixir o lie,” the living orm—an oxymoron,when considered rom the perspective o modern thought—is capable o rescinding the historical tendency toward an abstracting neutralization o all substantive concepts. From Kant’s transcendental philosophy to MaxWeber’s sociology o law, the hollowing out o orm, its becoming proce-dural, calculable, transcendental, “pure,” has presented itsel as a necessity to Western thought (P 26–28). At its most rened, dead ormalism is thekey to the organizational structure o democracy that, along with technicity itsel, is robbed o its substantive content, or, “i one regarded it rom theperspective o some political program that one hoped to achieve with thehelp o democracy, then one had to ask onesel what value democracy itsel had merely as a orm” (CPD 24).11 Te answer to this question is that, as anemptied out—hence, dead—orm, democratic political organization pos-sesses only an instrumental value devoid o any inherent, substantive ends.Following the lead o modern science in ocusing on pure means divorcedrom all substantive goals, it either lapses into extreme opportunism andpopulism, mimicking the plasticity o the complexio, or ruthlessly stampsthis voided mold onto contents that would not have assumed it otherwise.More oen than not, these alternatives are combined with Machiavelliancunning, as they are in Obama’s technocratic populism enamored o strictproceduralism and presiding over the most staggering redistribution o wealth, through bailouts avoring the rich, in human history.

Te argument o Political Teology is sophisticated enough to construethe orm’s living character negatively, as a counterthrust o the ull and thick “orm in its substantive sense [der Form im substanziellen Sinne]” (P 26)that dees its modern “emptying out” without nostalgically reclaiming thepositive Aristotelian teleology o ormal causality. As we have discoveredin the case o the Constitution, its substantive denition did not resurrecta metaphysically xed, atemporal notion o substance, but transcribed itinto the existential decision on the political orm. Political lie per se isboth subject and substance, i we are willing to borrow a morsel o Hegel’sargument in Phenomenology o Spirit , while applying it to the political andmodiying it to refect the absence o a higher unity o Spirit that wouldreconcile these concepts converted rom traditional metaphysics to exis-tentialism. Or, to turn this proposition around, substantiveness connotessomething living, namely, that the “state thus becomes a orm in the sense

something living, namely, that the “state thus becomes a orm in the senseo a living ormation [Der Staat wird also zu einer Form im Sinne einer


Lebensgestaltung ]” (P 25). Harking back to the dierence between thegure o the enemy as shaping the rst-person plural o those who con-ront it and the orms o lie this collectivity o riends wants to protect,the “living ormation” (Lebensgestaltung ) o the state is not the same as itsorm (Form). Te signicant distinction between the two orms o “orm”signaled by the deliberately dierentiated usage o the Latin-derived Formand the Germanic Gestalt almost vanishes rom the English translation.Qua ormation or guration, the static orm is set in motion, such that thissetting-in-motion itsel becomes the denitive moment o a ragile, nitelie, hinging on a orm that is always on the brink o reezing into staticormalism.

In the world o an artisan, the process o orming or guring is the acto shaping the materials on which one works without ignoring the pecu-liarity o their content. But the inverse is also true: in art as much as inpolitics, the subjects themselves are molded by their materials. Subjects areormed (better yet, orming) substances: “Substances must rst o all haveound their orm; they must have been brought into a ormation beorethey can actually encounter each other as contesting subjects in a confict”(PII 114). Substance becomes something living, is enlivened, when it isorganized in ormations and counterormations o opposing groups, thatis to say, when it is subjectivized and politicized. Nietzsche’s “terrible artistso existence” and Schmitt’s sovereign were amiliar with the dangers anddemands o guration; aer all, they tra cked in those determinations o political lie that held the potential to backre and reshape those who gavethem their original orm. Te complexio, o course, is less personal thanthat. It is a eld o orces—to resort to a Nietzschean term once again—where “shaping” proceeds as the determination o oppositions by pittingits various component parts against each other. So potent is the orm orthe eld o orces proper to the complexio oppositorum that it will precipi-tate and encompass, among other things, the opposition between matterand orm that will urther invest it with substantiveness and liveliness. Itspotency does not derive rom the orm’s hollow and abstract capacity tocontain anything whatsoever, but rom its impurity, its aectation withthe matter-orm dualism that is responsible or the complexio’s “specic,ormal superiority over the matter o human lie” (RC 8), the very lie, inwhich it is, nonetheless, encrusted.

Te existential signicance o the living orm is that it is beholden to thepossibilities, not the actuality, o political lie. One practical implicationo its attachment to the possible is that Schmitt’s treatment o the national

o its attachment to the possible is that Schmitt’s treatment o the nationalentity is neither nationalist nor essentialist, precisely because its political


existence fourishes “without ever subordinating itsel . . . to a conclusiveormation” (C 128). Unlike those modernist thinkers who turned thenation into a orm, as Stathis Gourgouris convincingly argues in DreamNation,12 Schmitt reads the nation as a source o various political orma-tions, with which it will never ully coincide. In his intriguing enunciation,the nation “has the complete reedom o political sel-determination” and,thus, “can be the ‘ormless ormative [ ormlos Formende] capacity’” (C129). As an ontological capacity, the nation is an existentially palpable pos-sibility, a guration inexhaustible by any particular orm it might assume.And it is ormlessly ormative in the sense that it engenders orms o col-lective existence, without thereby turning into a totalizing “orm o orms”or into a transcendental “mere orm,” anterior to its empirical and histori-cal instantiations. It may be accessed only by way o bracketing the actualorms o communal lie, or, better yet, by their imaginative variation—recommended by Husserl—that would extend the constitutional orm topolitical regimes other than the bourgeois Rechtsstaat , which esteems itsel as the exclusive constitutionally legitimate orm o government.

Schmitt’s nations, as sets o political-existential possibilities that can-not be entombed in the orm o nationalism, anticipate various theoreticalconstructs in late twentieth-century social and political philosophy, includ-ing Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Giorgio Agamben’s“coming community,” which, in the words o Jean-Luc Nancy, is “not a com-munity o essence” but “a being-together o existence.”13 Tese are, to besure, post-nationalist approaches to politics that seem to be remote romthat o Schmitt: the reader may be rightly suspicious o the word “nation-alism” peppering the pages o Constitutional Teory , a negatively chargedword that substantially limits any sort o openness in the political constitu-tion o the community as a “ormless ormative capacity.” But, while Schmittoperated within the connes o the political vocabulary o the Europeanmodernity, which predominates in his political philosophy despite hisorays into ancient Greek and Latin texts and etymologies, he recoded itsnomenclature in sync with his existential-phenomenological program. Teliving orm o the nation (and one could easily substitute “the political com-munity” or this term) is the ormative capacity o a community o riendsto determine itsel as such vis-à-vis an oppositional grouping, to give itsel a determinate, though changeable, shape in the world o nations withoutnationalism. Te deep source o this capability is the ormless, messy, and,rom the aesthetic standpoint, perhaps, ugly content o political existence,indeed o lie itsel, which abounds in antagonisms but also in countless

indeed o lie itsel, which abounds in antagonisms but also in countlesspossibilities or new orms and congurations o the polity.


In addition to undercutting abstract ormalism, the expression “livingorm” invites a meditation on the notion o lie: What is lie and how toconceive o its opposite? What is the meaning o coming to lie, or being“enlivened”? How does the process o “deadening” occur in the sphere o the political? Most recently, Samuel Weber has poignantly suggested inargets o Opportunity that what appears to be the opposite o lie—a “death- bearing enemy”—is, in eect, its condition o possibility, the guarantor o the tense vitality proper to the (at least) bipolar political world o riendsand enemies.14 In the same book, he, nevertheless, chided Schmitt or all-ing back on a traditional opposition o “man versus machine, which he alsoassociates with the opposition o lie versus death.”15 Schmitt’s treatmento the phenomenon “lie” is, in Weber’s view, simultaneously nuanced andcrude, veritably exempliying his subject matter, complexio oppositorum.

Helpul as this analysis might be, it leaves undisturbed the meaning o lie in Schmitt’s (early) writings. Te immediate and intuitive equationo the living with the inner and the dead with the outer is a trademark o the modern attitude, where the living organism and the dead machine areperceived as opposites. It would be inaccurate to ascribe this thought toSchmitt—as Weber has tried to do—who alerts the readers that the pre-modern, mythical concept o the machine was not at all at odds with theliving organism (LS 37). Te book on Roman Catholicism as a wholelearns rom myth while taking precautions not to all into its nets; its twomain trajectories deal with the lie o the orm and the substantive or-malism o living that radically departs rom the relative immanence andimmediacy o mythic lie. At the point o intersection between the twotrajectories, to enliven is, in a certain sense, to ormalize, to draw out theorm that was already implicit in the “messy” and inexact content, all thewhile minimizing opportunities or the betrayal o their “messiness” andinexactitude. Te pulsion o drawing out is, by the same token, tantamountto drawing these contents into the embrace o complexio oppositorumthat provisionally determines their oppositionality. Te mechanism thatdoes the dual work o externalization and internalization is concrete rep-resentation and, in particular, its rhetorical, discursive maniestations.One could say that, ultimately, the complexio is produced in speech or, asSchmitt put it,

[]he power o speech and discourse—rhetoric in its greatestsense—is a criterion o human lie . . . It moves in antitheses. But theseare not contradictions; they are the various and sundry elements

are not contradictions; they are the various and sundry elementsmolded into a complexio and thus give lie to discourse. (RC 23)


We must rigorously contrast this rhetorical production, utilizing whatHeidegger might reer to as the hidden power o “primal words,” to thedeliberative empty talk o an innite parliamentary discussion, whichSchmitt denounced in Te Crisis o Parliamentary Democracy . Te ormalpotency o words lies not in the metaphysically obscure inception o lan-guage in Being and o Being in language, but in the antithetical movement,which traverses the complex o determinate oppositions and rom whichthe lie o discourse derives. Concrete representation remains aithul tothe polemical-political ground o discourse and to lie itsel.

Whereas the substantive orm is both living and enlivening, deormaliza-tion deadens, in that it depoliticizes, deorms, disgures, and neutralizes alldeterminate oppositions, making them lose their determinate guration(Gestalt ), as a consequence. As always in Schmitt, deormalization that dis-bands the complex o oppositions is doubly menacing: it promises, on the onehand, a reversion into the absolute dierence o atomized, ormless contentthat cannot be mustered into an oppositional arrangement and, on the other,a conversion o living orms into the absolute indierence o a purely abstractorm or concept, such as “humanity.”16 “Universality at any price would neces-sarily have to mean total depoliticization” (CP 55), and particularity at any costproduces the same eect because it dissolves political oppositions into meredierence.17 Death, thereore, also arrives in two ways: (1) the rigor mortis o abstract contradiction, hyperormalism, hyperdetermination; or (2) decompo-sition into pure dierence and complete indeterminacy (to be air, in contrastto the rst, the second kind o death is a storehouse o possibilities, a catalyst o new oppositional ormations that crystallize rom unormed dierence).

It ollows that Schmitt’s conception o lie is non-vitalist and non- organicist. Lie is not an impersonal orce o sheer immanence that sweepsevery organic entity into its midst: that which is most living in it is complexio oppositorum, which is to say that the most ateul, the most potent,and ultramodern stando, in which modernity and its other, too, areembroiled, transpires between lie and death within the living lie itsel.18 A living orm worthy o the name holds in itsel this constitutive ni-tude, regardless o the occasional Schmittian criticism o mechanizationand its external relation to death, aired by Weber. It is enough to take aglance at “Te Age o Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” to realize thatwhat Schmitt calls “the pluralism o spiritual lie [Pluralismus des geistigenLebens]” is nothing other than the secularized complexio that accommo-dates both lie and death:

[I]t is wrong to solve a political problem with the antithesis o organicand mechanistic, lie and death. A lie which has only death as its


antithesis [Ein Leben, das gegenüber sich selbst nichts mehr hat als denod ] is no longer lie but powerlessness and helplessness. (CP 95)19

Lie does not ace death and mechanization as external possibilities but,as a living orm, harbors its opposites within itsel.20 Te alchemical- political quest or this orm cannot aord to disregard the mechanistic andthe inorganic, much less exclude them rom the non-conceptual, evental“pluralism” that extends its welcome to all determinate oppositions. In thesame way that the living orm o the complexio internalizes the antinomy o orm and content, lie, which species this orm, contains within itsel thedierence between lie and death, sheds its identity as purely living, and,thus, paves the way or the event o politics.

We might project these existential theses back onto Schmitt’s reusal toromanticize Roman Catholicism by allying it with the “soulul polarity”o the contrived “dichotomy between a rationalistic-mechanistic world o human labor and a romantic-virginal state o nature” (RC 10).21 Catholicismdoes not t the position o the higher third, in which the opposites are nally reconciled and it should not be accorded the partial status o a polarity (the“soulul polarity”) relative to instrumental rationality. However monstrousor deadening it is, the soullessness o the rationalistic-mechanistic world,taken to be emblematic o modern culture, is an oshoot o lie, perhaps,one that denes lie’s very liveliness in setting o its inner antagonisms.(Despite all appearances to the contrary, here, too, “lie struggles with lie,”as Schmitt writes at the end o his essay on de-politicization). Te inatua-tion with and the idealization o the premodern are reactive upshots o the very culture they wish to evade; they are culture’s unsuccessul attemptsat sel-orgetting, alsely transcendent movements that get all the moreentangled in the webs o antagonistic immanence. Tis inner splitting o lie will elucidate an alternate meaning o “culture,” which, throughout thehistory o Western philosophy, has been equated with death, and it will setthe stage or a reconsideration o its contemporary avatar, multicultural-ism, in terms o a mutation in the structure o complexio oppositorum, asone o the historical possibilities available or co-optation by pouvoir con-stituant today.

A Virtuous Circle: The Mutual Invigoration of Culture and Politics

In keeping with the process o neutralization, where political intensity ebbsaway rom the institutions that previously drew sustenance rom it, the

away rom the institutions that previously drew sustenance rom it, theemptiness o abstract orm is a historical by-product o every depoliticizeddomain, be it theology, metaphysics, or economics. But the cumulative


eects o this hollowing out ultimately threaten culture itsel, which emergesas the h, albeit unnamed, stage o de-politicization: “Once everythinghad been abstracted rom religion and technology, then rom metaphys-ics and the state, everything appeared to have been abstracted above allrom culture, ending in the neutrality o cultural death [die Neutralität deskulturellen odes]” (CP 93). Absolute neutrality, or Schmitt, is tantamountto nihilism, or to what, on the next page o the 1929 text, he calls “theear o cultural and social nothingness [die Furcht vor dem kulturellen und sozialen Nichts]” (CP 94). A cogent response to this ear should not strug-gle to recuperate, on an individual basis, ormerly politicized domains; itshould, rather, reinvigorate the cultural orm that has gathered up in itsel the previous spheres and that has been gradually eroded with every suc-cessive wave o de-politicization. In other words, the goal is to politicizeculture in toto by allowing cultural lie, in the sense o the antagonisticcomplexio oppositorum, to fourish in the place claimed by the neutrality o death. Only then will we be able to make an existential choice between twoabysses o nothingness: the sociocultural neutrality o nihilism, on the onehand, and the sovereign decision on the exception, on the other. Given thischoice, Schmitt tends to view his own political philosophy as a katechon (or the restrainer) against the rst abyss, even i its success depends not onappealing to any rm normative oundation but on plunging headlong intothe second abyss o the decision made ex nihilo.

For those who concentrate on Schmitt’s dismissive attitude to cul-ture in Te Concept o the Political and on the traditional ties o cultureto death, engrained in the history o Western thought, the proposedrehabilitation o a living orm will be dubious, to say the least. Aer imag-ining the complete disappearance or leveling o enemy-riend distinctions,“[w]hat remains is neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, eco-nomics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc.” (CP 53). Te open-endedlist o the wreckages o liberal modernity is by no means haphazard, sincedepoliticized culture translates seamlessly into a kind o civilization wherethe alse dilemma o choosing between economic rationality and a legally codied morality is the only “serious” alternative to the danger-ree andlight (but, ultimately, boring) human existence in a perpetual search ornew sources o entertainment. Stated unsympathetically, culture is enter-tainment—something hopelessly inadequate to the task o breathing new lie into the political. o this accusation, Strauss’s astute analysis oers thebest retort: Schmitt paints a historically specic image o impoverished cul-ture that, as such, does “not have to be entertainment, but . . .can become

ture that, as such, does “not have to be entertainment, but . . .can becomeentertainment.”22 Te uncomplimentary depiction o cultural bankruptcy is


not a denitional necessity, but a possibility that comes to pass in its empty ormalization throughout the recent stages o neutralization. Entertainmentgains an upper hand when the “pluralism o spiritual lie” is trimmed downto a one-dimensional monoculture disseminated on a mass and, later on,on a global scale. Te position Strauss champions is, probably, prejudicedby an elitist valorization o high over low culture, so that all seriousnesspertains to the ormer and an empty, “nauseating” curiosity—to the latter.In and o itsel, however, culture is not allergic to politics.

But what about the incontrovertible act that, up to the present, phi-losophy has insistently identied culture with death?23 Does the traditionalphilosophical treatment o the concept still allow us to consider it underthe rubric o a “living orm”? Already or Hegel, culture as “sel-alienatedspirit” is instituted thanks to “the true sacrice o being-or-sel . . . that . . . sur-renders itsel as completely as in death.”24 In the medium o language,consciousness sacrices itsel to a desire to make sense to the other, a desirewhose ulllment indicates that my “real existence dies away.”25 Te deatho individual consciousness is a miniature version o spirit’s sacrice o itsbeing-or-sel (“ . . . surrenders itsel as completely as . . . ”) on the altar o sociality erected by language and culture (in making sense, my “real exis-tence dies away”). More recently and more explicitly, Jacques Derrida hasmaintained that

there is no culture without a cult o ancestors, a ritualization o mourning and sacrice . . . Te very concept o culture may seem tobe synonymous with the culture o death, as i the expression “cultureo death” were ultimately a pleonasm or a tautology.26

Te stakes o the close connection between culture and death are high;i, as Derrida submits, the two terms are nearly synonymous, then cul-ture might connote pacication and a dissolution o all contradictions, ina word, de-politicization.

Upon closer scrutiny, this conclusion proves to be unwarranted or, atleast, too crude in its uncritical acceptance o the terms’ meaning. In Hegelas well as in Derrida, death is not a nality abstractly opposed to lie but apart o the concrete, living lie itsel. Te “culture o death” that ritualizesmourning cares or the double survival—the excess o lie over and aboveitsel—o those whose memory is institutionally monumentalized and o those who cultivate this memory. Similarly, the dying away o “real exis-tence” in language is not the last word o subjects who get a new purchase

tence” in language is not the last word o subjects who get a new purchaseon lie in their discursively mediated intersubjective relations. We shape


cultural lie in an intimate relation to death and, urther, we live it on a di-erent plane than a mere biological existence. Even the expression “cultureo death” is ambiguously polyvocal thanks to the genitive orm that couldname one type o culture (the culture o death versus the culture o lie), or the essence o culture as such, its being o one piece with death.

In an exegesis o Schmitt’s work, Strauss experiments with a more deci-sive break with the philosophical equation culture = death, noting that“‘culture’ always presupposes something that is cultivated: culture is alwaysthe culture o nature. Tis expression means, primarily, that culture devel-ops the natural predisposition . . . ; it thus obeys the orders that nature itsel gives.”27 Culture, in his rendition, is the sel-relation o nature, an instantia-tion o the living orm that is not imposed on its contents but grows outo them, “obeys the orders” o what it cultivates.28 Te uncanny a nity o this denition o culture to the living, substantial ormation o complexiooppositorum is not coincidental. Te shaping o determinate oppositions, inaccord with the shaped content, comes into its own in the idea o cultivationthat, in addition to nature, incorporates the dierence between nature andculture into itsel. In the last instance, the cultivation o human and non-human, as well as organic and inorganic, nature is the arche-political acto deciding the internal orm o oppositions and setting them in motion asa living ormation (Lebensgestaltung ), while the creation o cults—be they o the dead or o nature itsel—may be conducive to the consolidation o astatic cultural orm (Form) and an arbitrary imposition o oreign abstrac-tions on the “cultivated” content. Culture, thereore, becomes animated by virtue o its participation in the logic o living orms that sketches out theoutlines o complexio oppositorum; in its substantive maniestations, it isalways already politically loaded. But Schmitt is, above all, a thinker o thecrisis o the political that raries this substantive dimension. A orm o orms victimized to the greatest extent in the age o neutralizations anddepleted to the point o merging with entertainment, culture holds thehighest potential among the other “shipwrecks” o de-politicization (eco-nomics, morality, technicity, etc.) to resist this dominant trend and to givea new impetus to the political.

Multiculturalism: A New Complexio Oppositorum?

Te contemporary reality o multiculturalism uses everything Schmittound to be reprehensible about liberalism: it coincides with an ideal typeo administrative politics that pretends to abandon enemy-riend distinc-

o administrative politics that pretends to abandon enemy-riend distinc-tions in avor o a much more indeterminate “cultural dierence,” as long as


it poses no tangible threat to the regime. Historically, however, the reasonsbehind adopting multiculturalism as an o cial policy have been politi-cal in the distinctly Schmittian sense. In 1971, Pierre rudeau’s CanadianLiberal cabinet put together the precursor to the 1988 Multiculturalism Act in the hope o luring the votes o the increasing “New Canadian” immigrantpopulation and, more importantly, o thwarting the aspirations o Quebecnationalists, whose insistence on the province’s unique status was dilutedwith reerence to the cultural specicity o other ethnic communities.29 Asa result o the “Policy o Multiculturalism within the Bilingual Framework,”the separatist movement was indirectly designated as the abstract enemy o “cultural diversity,” masking its status as the concrete adversary o the ed-eral state. Te dierence o Quebec was no longer dierent enough, becauseit stood, at most, or one example among others o the miscellany o culturalbackgrounds and traditions that Canada was composed o.

I cite the Canadian case in order to illustrate the political possibilitieso multiculturalism well in excess o its objectives explicitly avowed by aliberal polity. Although a Schmittian reading o this historical instance isplausible, it will be necessary to elaborate a more general way o politiciz-ing and, hence, polemically co-opting, a term that has become somethingo a catchword in today’s politically correct discourse. Asking a patently philosophical question, “What is multiculturalism?,” will lead us to a real-ization that it is the truth o culture that knows itsel as such, that is, as aplurality. Let me unpack this polemical denition with an eye to Schmitt’stext. In 1929, he writes,

all concepts in the spiritual sphere, including the concept o spirit, arepluralistic in themselves [sind in sich pluralistisch] and can only beunderstood in terms o concrete political existence . . . [E]very cultureand cultural epoch has its own concept o culture. (CP 85)

Like “all concepts in the spiritual sphere,” culture is not a totalizing synthesiso diverse, oen antithetical, moments. Te unstated negative reerence toHegel in this passage is quite blatant, given that his philosophy o history hypostatizes a particular culture, raises it to the dignity o the concept inits concrete universality, and, thereore, entrusts it with the task o beinga yardstick or its counterparts. Schmitt’s radical historicism, on the con-trary, operates in the eld o non-synthesizable pluralism, which inheresin every “spiritual concept” and generates a orm based on the particularhistorical content o “concrete political existence.” Within this ramework,

historical content o “concrete political existence.” Within this ramework,to a rm that multiculturalism is the truth o culture is not to make a


transcendental-metaphysical claim. Quite the opposite is the case: this a r-mation implies that no one culture can legitimately posit itsel as the goldstandard o Culture, since it must negotiate its living orm with the internalresources and historically limited understanding at its disposal. In the epocho multiculturalism, the plurality o culture renders the pluralism o spiri-tual concepts phenomenally apparent, but, in so doing, it seeks to presentand represent these concepts as such, tangibly, in fesh and blood, divestingthem o their immaterial, non-empirical, “spiritual” dimension.

Multiculturalism’s popular and trivializing underside that has earned itsuch a bad reputation should not be dismissed, precisely, because its polit-ical-phenomenological vulgarity is a pale refection o what I called “thetruth o culture.” Commenting on the Janus-aced structure o multicul-turalism, Gayatri Spivak takes stock o its complexity and draws rom it alesson or postcolonial strategy:

I the multiculturalists’ many cultures cannot be captured by somenotebook denition, nor can Rorty’s Enlightenment culture . . . Ourtask is to look at the two strategies: culture as a battle cry against oneculture’s claim to Reason as such, by insider as well as outsider; andculture as a nice name or the exoticism o the outsiders.30

Tis succinct ormulation is political in the best o Schmittian traditions.Spivak acknowledges the existence o two cultural modalities, one o whichretains a certain substantive and political richness o the “battle cry,” whilethe other, seemingly depoliticized in the capacity o “a nice name or theexoticism o the outsiders” and trimmed down to entertainment, pursuespolitics by other means. Although she echoes Schmitt’s criticism o a total-ized concept o culture (“captured by some notebook denition”) put orthin the name o Reason, it is at this point, at the apotheosis o the political,that Spivak both continues and ceases to ollow Schmitt. She overtly identi-es the enemy—“one culture’s claim to Reason as such,” in other words, aninstitution that presents itsel as the dispassionate arbiter o all conficts—ina gesture that remains indispensable to any political practice. Tis enemy,however, is not an external oe or an internal adversary, but a unilateral (inthis case, Eurocentric) usurpation o the cosmopolitan idea,31 against whichinsiders ght shoulder-to-shoulder with outsiders. Still, the postcolonialtheorist is careul not to turn the enemy into an abstraction but to bestow this appellation on those who promulgate an abstract, albeit contextually specic, cultural orm in the guise o a decontextualized, disembedded

specic, cultural orm in the guise o a decontextualized, disembeddeduniversal, practicing yet another metonymic abuse o modernity.


Te alliance o insiders and outsiders is a part o the multicultural pre-dicament, where the living orms o various cultures must be co-negotiated,considering that they coexist within the same political space. Te outcomeo this process will not be an automatic consensus, because cultural coexis-tence means incalculably more than “ensuring every citizen the opportunity to grow up within the world o a cultural heritage . . . without sueringdiscrimination because o it.”32 It escapes the liberal politics o recogni-tion and, particularly, Jürgen Habermas’s minimalism that the only way to make multiculturalism politically relevant is to transorm the culturalsphere into a playground or antagonism. In the course o this transorma-tion, the gure o the enemy needs to be sharply outlined, and I hurry toreassure the liberal skeptics that its contours will not capture a particulardemonized cultural subgroup. Te enemies, then, are those who practicea blown-up and standardized projection o particularity that, under thecover o Reason, endeavors to impress itsel i not on the other culturalparticulars, then on the normative ground upon which antagonisms sur-ace and get resolved. For a dierent, political avatar o multiculturalismto achieve some measure o success in a conrontation with the cunningorce o liberal “tolerance” (which masks an intransigent totalitarianism)it would need to debunk the myth o neutral and abstract rationality usedstealthily by its practionars to pursue their political objectives. In additionto welcoming oppositions in its midst, it would retrace the inner split atthe heart o the phenomenon “multiculturalism,” analogous to Schmitt’senunciation o the struggle o lie with lie, spirit with spirit, and so on.

Te eatures o complexio oppositorum come through in this portrayal o multiculturalism, as though in a photographic negative.33 Unlike its liberalcounterpart, which cleverly passes totalitarian rigidity or the tolerance o “otherness” and “diversity,” the proposed Schmittian multiculturalism doesnot predelineate the terrain or political engagements, nor does it projectculturally specic attitudes and belies onto the contrived sphere o univer-sality. On the positive side o things, it embraces sometimes-contradictory cultural particularities in a non-totalizable ashion, keeps open the space orpolitical antagonism, urnishes a radically pluralistic living orm, and non-transcendentally expresses the truth o culture. Tis correlation betweenthe complexio and a revised multiculturalism, consequently, inscribes thetwo terms in the long list o theological concepts and their secularizedpolitical maniestations.

It could be objected, o course, that the ascription o these revolution-ary eatures to an institution so steeped in the rhetoric o de-politicization

ary eatures to an institution so steeped in the rhetoric o de-politicizationand neutralization is a gment o theoretical imagination or a product o


wishul thinking that bears little resemblance to multiculturalism’s liberalinstantiation and risks deteriorating into the very totalitarianism it criti-cizes. I oer two ripostes to this recrimination. First, even i the blueprintor a dierent kind o multiculturalism sketches out a hopelessly untenableutopian ideal, the sheer contestation o the institution’s o cially accepted version partially realizes the so-called utopia. Putting orth an oppositionalmulticultural strategy, as Spivak does, challenges a deadening, institu-tionalized, desiccated orm and induces a stando irresolvable on the oldprocedural grounds. Regardless o its empirical existence or nonexistence,a rigorously theorized multiculturalism indebted to Schmitt’s political con-cepts makes existentially vibrant and repoliticizes a stale keyword o liberaldiscourse. It, roughly, accomplishes what Schmitt himsel has done to thenotion o complexio oppositorum, which he polemically inherited roman anti-Catholic thinker or the purpose o illuminating the innermostessence o Roman Catholicism.

My second retort is not unrelated to the rst: we should unlearn theprincipal ideological lesson o liberalism that presents the scarecrow o totalitarianism as the sole alternative to its own “tolerant” and “repre-sentative” approach. Neither the repoliticized multiculturalism, nor thecomplex o opposites it emulates is compatible with totalitarian politics.According to Schmitt, the demand or a total state “which potentially embraces every domain” is an ill-advised reaction to the great neutraliza-tions and de-politicizations o the nineteenth century (CP 22). Althoughthe same verb—embracing, ergreiende—crops up here to encapsulate boththe activity o the total state and that o complexio oppositorum, the gapbetween them is unbridgeable. Whereas, basing itsel on the erroneousequation state = politics, the ormer actually intensies de-politicization(CP 22), the latter wrests intense oppositions rom the deadening grip o neutrality and delivers them to their political Being. Unwittingly adher-ing to the logic o Roman Catholicism, multiculturalism is not a higherthird, the neutral ground or the resolution o disputes, but it is, also, notthe soulul polarity o soulless totalitarianism. A reinvigorated concep-tion o multiculturalism launches a critique o its liberal double rom aperspective ar removed rom totalitarianism, which will never espouse aliving orm.

Notes

1. Carl Schmitt, “Te Necessity o Politics,” in Vital Realities: Schmitt, Berdyaev, de laBedoyère (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 23. Compare the rst sentence o this text: “Tere


is an anti-Roman ‘complex’” with its counterpart in Roman Catholicism and Political Form:“Tere is an anti-Roman temper” (p. 3).

2. One could express this breakdown with the help o Benjamin’s term “dialectics at astandstill,” except that, in Schmitt, the halt o dialectics is not equivalent to the Messianiccessation o all activity, but to its political unolding outside the connes o resolvablecontradictions.

3. “Out o a spiritual promiscuity which seeks a Romantic or Hegelian brotherhoodwith Catholicism, as with so many other ideas and individuals, a person could make theCatholic complexio into one o many syntheses and rashly conclude that he had thereby construed the essence o Catholicism” (RC 8–9).

4. For example, “Te Church’s complexio oppositorum thus incorporated a boundlessadaptability . . . Te Church was a model o balance and moderation. It could allow the wid-est and most varied expression o ideas and orms, since it was assured o an absolute unity at its apex” [Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism, p. 91].

5. One is tempted to note here that another amously “programmatic” statement o Schmitt is that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (CP30). Aer putting the two statements side-by-side, we cannot help but witness a spectacularcomplexio oppositorum in Schmitt’s own understanding o the political both as enchained toa determinate theological content, however transormed it might become, and reed or theindeterminacy o polemics.

6. Samuel Weber, argets o Opportunity: On the Militarization o Tinking (New York:Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 28.

7. Te closest Schmitt gets to “sliding down into myth” is his indulgence in a kind o mytho-logy , a prudent and diagnostic thematization o, what I term, the logos o muthos inworks as diverse as his book on Te Leviathan, the two volumes o Political Teology , and essayssuch as the 1923 “Die politische Teorie des Mythus,” in Positionen und Begrie: im Kamp mit Weimar-Gen-Versaille, 1923–1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), pp. 9–18.

8. Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesiso Psychic Opposites in Alchemy , trans. R. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977),p. 374. Compare this to Schmitt’s statement:

Te pope is called the Father; the Church is the Mother o Believers and the Brideo Christ. Tis is a marvelous union o the patriarchal and the matriarchal, able todirect both streams o the most elemental complexes and instincts—respect orthe ather and love or the mother—toward Rome. (RC 8)

9. Tis is the point that Sarah Pourciau [“Bodily Negation: Carl Schmitt and the Meaningo Meaning,” MLN 120, 2005, pp. 1066–1090] misses when she writes that

to propound an alternative theory o qualitative representation, he [Schmitt] draws ona Roman Catholic tradition o political theology which grounds the relation betweena sovereign Church and a subject people in a Christian concept o mediation. Teconcept takes its energy rom the paradigm o redemptive reconciliation—between

concept takes its energy rom the paradigm o redemptive reconciliation—betweenhuman matter and divine orm, earthly body and heavenly spirit—accomplished by Christ in the moment o the Word made fesh. (p. 1082)


10. In his early perceptive analysis o Schmitt in Homo Sacer , Agamben writes,“Lie . . . can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere o law only through the presup-position o its inclusive exclusion, only in exceptio” (p. 27). A more radical possibility wouldbe that lie itsel is born o its exclusive inclusion in the complexio oppositorium, a orm thatalls on the same side as the exception rom the norm, or rom the “sphere o law.”

11. Emphasis added.12. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution

o Modern Greece (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 1996), p. 30.13. See the précis on the back cover o Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community ,

trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2000).14. argets o Opportunity , p. 40. Te reliance o lie’s vivacity on a “death-bearing

enemy” stands in contradiction to Weber’s assertion that the “model o the creation o lieout o nothing will assume a subtle but decisive importance” in Schmitt (p. 35). o accountor this contradiction it would be necessary to examine the particular perspective romwhich lie is created ex nihilo, a perspective that does not recognize the exception, that syn-thesizes opposites, and that depends on the principles o abstract representation.

15. Ibid., p. 32.16. John McCormick [“ranscending Weber’s Categories o Modernity? Te Early

Lukács and Schmitt on the Rationalization Tesis,” in New German Critique 75, Autumn1998, pp. 133–177] exhibits high theoretical sensitivity when he describes the ormality o Schmitt’s approach to Roman Catholicism with a double negative: “Roman Catholicism is aorm not indierent to content, nor is it an irrational elevation o content to an exalted level”(p. 163). Tese non-indierence and non-elevation are the hallmarks o the living orm.

17. According to Derrida’s reading o Schmitt, the discrimination between a riend andan enemy “cannot be reduced to mere dierence. It is a determined opposition, oppositionitsel” (Politics o Friendship, p. 85).

18. Tus, the ending o “Te Age o Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” could be inter-preted as a rejection o the ormally empty view that opposes pure lie to pure death in avor o a theory that situates the lie-death opposition within the “struggling lives” themselves.

19. A ew pages earlier, Schmitt wrote, “A result o human understanding and special-ized knowledge, such as discipline and in particular modern technology, also cannot bepresented as dead and soulless any more than can the religion o technicity be conusedwith technology itsel” (93–94). His point, then, is that culture and technology (as the con-temporary incarnation o culture) do not stand on the side o pure death.

20. Jacques Derrida [Te Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans. Alan Bass(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1987)] has eloquently called this unreconcilable,non-dialectizable tension “la vie la mort ,” “lie death” (p. 259).

21. “Te Church is neither the mechanically ormalistic entity scorned by Protestantsnor the haven o unconquered nature and irrational expression lauded by Romantics”(McCormick, “ranscending Weber’s Categories o Modernity?” p. 163). Yet, to say, asMcCormick does in the ollowing sentence, that the Church “stands above such antinomies,

McCormick does in the ollowing sentence, that the Church “stands above such antinomies,absorbs, maintains, and transcends them” is to equate the operations o the complexio withthe Hegelian Auebung .


22. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, Te Concept o the Political ,” p. 116.23. A notable exception rom this general rule is Nietzsche, who oreshadows Schmitt

in his accentuation o the living unity o content and orm in any given culture: “a peopleto whom one attributes culture has to be in all reality a single living unity and not allwretchedly apart into inner and outer, content and orm” [Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 80].

24. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology o Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxord and New York:Oxord University Press, 1977), p. 308.

25. Ibid., p. 309.26. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. . Dutoit (Stanord: Stanord University Press,

1993), p. 43.27. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, Te Concept o the Political ,” p. 104. Admittedly,

this language may be excessively organicist, but it is in sync with the Schmitt o RomanCatholicism who categorically states that the attitudes o mastery and domination are aliento the Catholic conceptions o nature (9).

28. Tat is not to say that Derrida’s and Strauss’s denitions o culture—“the very con-cept o culture may seem to be synonymous with the culture o death” and “culture is alwaysthe culture o nature”—are necessarily irreconcilable, or they eectively overlap i we areconscientious enough not to categorize nature as something purely living.

29. C. Enoch Padolsky, “Multiculturalism at the Millennium,” in Journal o CanadianStudies 35 (1), Spring 2000, pp. 138–161, as well as Danielle Juteau, “Te Sociology o Ethno-National Relations in Quebec,” in Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalismand Racism in ‘90s Canada, ed. V. Satzewich (Haliax: Fernwood, 1992), pp. 323–342.

30. Gayatri C. Spivak, A Critique o Postcolonial Reason: oward a History o theVanishing Present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 355.

31. In response to the counter-argument that European thought could not have usurpedthe idea o cosmopolitanism since it enunciated this idea in the rst place, I would say thatthe enunciation (that le an indelible trace on the subsequent history o the concept) hap-pened in the context o colonial usurpation and exploitation—the constant background orthe rst “cultural” encounters.

32. Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles or Recognition in the Democratic ConstitutionalState,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics o Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 131–132.

33. In Roman Catholicism and the Political Form, the secular paradigm o the complexiois jurisprudence: “In the social world, secular jurisprudence also maniests a certain complexio o competing interests and tendencies” (29). Tus, an extension o the argument tomulticulturalism could benet rom theorizing the conjunction between this contemporary permutation o the complexio and the juridical domain, or instance, in the constituting doc-uments o the doctrine, such as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and its predecessors.

8Political Hermeneutics:

The Necessity of Interpretation

Schmitt and Gadamer: Decision and Interpretation

In ruth and Method , Hans-Georg Gadamer explicitly mentions andengages with Schmitt’s work only once, on a singular occasion—whichis, itsel, a meditation on the notion o “occasionality”—o a contentiousreading o Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 Te object o Gadamer’s criticism inAppendix II to his masterpiece is Schmitt’s 1956 text, Hamlet or Hecuba:Te Irruption o ime into the Play , and especially its central claim that “it ispossible to recognize that ssure in the work through which contemporary reality shines and which reveals the contemporary unction o the work.”2 Guided by his preoccupation with the truth o art, Gadamer reproachesSchmitt, among other things, or constructing a series o oversimplied,lopsided, and irreconcilable antitheses o time and art,3 the “real” and the“imaginary,” the events surrounding King James’s accession to the throneand the literary creation o Hamlet . In a typical anti-Hegelian gesture o preventing the stando’s conciliatory resolution into a higher third term,such as the ascist aestheticization o politics or the communist politiciza-tion o art (avored by Walter Benjamin), the political philosopher bringsthe dialectic o art and politics to a standstill. Nonetheless, Gadamer isconvinced that Schmitt shares a certain erroneous presupposition with thedialectical way o thinking, according to which the two antithetical ele-ments to be reconciled are, to begin with, situated at a great conceptualdistance to one another. What his method misses is nothing less than “anew event o Being” predicated on the absolute proximity o the work o

170

new event o Being” predicated on the absolute proximity o the work o art to its presumed real reerent: “A work o art belongs so closely to what

Political Hermeneutics 171

it is related to that it enriches the being o that as i through a new event o Being.”4 Te event is not to be understood in terms o a sudden rupturingo the symbolic order by an element oreign to it but, rather, as the seamlesssupplementation o what is already in being with the work o art and withthe subsequent history o its interpretation.5 Te dialectic o aesthetics andpolitics at least aimed to reinstate the unity o reality and art, while Schmittmaintains the two strictly separate, save or those rare moments when thenon-identical real “irrupts” into a work o art, breaks through aestheticsublimations, and asserts its unconditional primacy.

Gadamer’s main, albeit unarticulated, concern is that the ocus on the“irruption” (der Einbruch) o the real into the play would give the readero Shakespeare a license to bypass interpretation, to abandon all too easily the patient work o hermeneutics by pointing out the existence o some-thing exempt rom the exigencies o interpretation—as though such a thingwere possible—namely, a historical act. Te claim that a given historicalevent is the real reerent o the work o art into which it bursts is inherentto a naïve philosophy o history (prevented, by its blindness, rom recog-nizing that every historical act already orms a part o interpretation) andto an equally allacious ontology o art. Te seduction o the irruption isconsistent with the decisionist core o Schmitt’s legal and political theory,with its accentuation o the gure o the sovereign who decides on theexception that cannot be subsumed under the existing legislation. On this view, the irruption o the real into the play is unctionally parallel to thedeus ex machina o the decisive intervention o the sovereign in the politi-cal milieu, dispensing with the interpretive extension o existing laws toa previously unoreseen situation. Pure acts o sovereignty, like the realssure in the symbolic order o art, render all interpretive eorts utile.Although Gadamer does not reer to Schmitt by name in his discussion o legal hermeneutics, it is not di cult to iner who might be labeled as theproponent o absolutism posing an unsurpassable obstacle in the path o legal interpretation:

Tus it is an essential condition o the possibility o legal hermeneu-tics that law is binding on all members o the community in the sameway. Where this is not the case—or example, in an absolutist state,

way. Where this is not the case—or example, in an absolutist state,where the will o the absolute ruler is above the law—hermeneuticscannot exist.6

Te dissipation o sovereignty in the universal rule o law guarantees, inprinciple, that there is no standpoint transcendent to legality and that all


concrete cases are adjudicated through an indenite extension o whateveris immanent to this system. Te irruption o exteriority, conversely, destroysthe very conditions o possibility or hermeneutics and oreshadows a new transcendentalism along with the return o uncritical metaphysics. Tesovereign’s subjective intervention in the political milieu is, thus, not atall at odds with crass historical objectivism that releases “acts” rom thenecessity o interpretation.

Just as Gadamer would contend that, in a decisionist political philoso-phy, there is no room or interpretation, so Schmitt would insist that ahermeneutical ramework and its corollary, the Romantic ideal o “in-nite conversation”7 hijacked by liberal parliamentarism, dispenses withdecision-making and becomes indecisive; it is one o the verdicts o Political Romanticism that “the origin o romantic irony lies in this suspen-sion o every decision” (56). Or, more precisely, under the rule o law, actso sovereignty do not entirely disappear but retreat into a delegitimizedobscurity and become “apocryphal” (C 190). In an eort to dispense withthe exception, rule-bound logic thick with metaphysical assumptions8 only renders what it precludes more exceptional, or, in theological terms,miraculous. Where decisions without interpretation become the signpostso Schmittian political philosophy, interpretations devoid o the element o decision-making are proper to Gadamerian hermeneutics.9

Beore turning Schmitt into the absolute enemy o Gadamer, however, weshould ask whether or not these neatly dierentiated ideal types are exag-gerations, or worse, theoretical caricatures. Is it possible to decide withoutinterpreting what constitutes an exception,10 or instance, or to interpretwithout making a decision with regard to the meaning o the text, howevertentative, provisional, or open-ended this decision might be? Te very textGadamer scrutinizes in Appendix II evinces the act that Schmitt is not asallergic to interpretation as the master o hermeneutics is inclined to think. Inits preace and in the conclusion, Hamlet or Hecuba is enramed by positivereerences to the labyrinthine “superabundance” o interpretations proli-erating rom Shakespeare’s Hamlet , so that “historical objectivization couldnot put an end to the series o new interpretations o Hamlet either” (HH 9).Tat the “inexhaustible prousion o interpretations and possible interpreta-tions, always new” (HH 43) is not adversely aected by the invocation o adenite historical context to which the play supposedly responded and inwhich it was, in a certain sense, wrapped is a testimony to an intricate, non-antithetical relation between “reality” and “art” in Schmitt’s work.

antithetical relation between “reality” and “art” in Schmitt’s work.What Gadamer has overlooked in his criticism is a distinction, crucial

or Schmitt, between allusions (accessory reerences to historical reality


included in the play) and refections (composites o historical and imagi-nary characters and situations). In refections, as “in dreams people andrealities run into one another [and], so too, pictures and gures, situa-tions and events blend dream-like on the stage” (HH 23). But, as anyoneacquainted with psychoanalysis knows, dreams always exact complex actso interpretation that, in lieu o discovering straightorward causes orthe nocturnal images in “the real world,” descend to the overdeterminedwebs o causality comprising the dreamer’s psychic lie. More importantly still, refections are entirely congruous with Gadamer’s insistence on theco-belonging o the work o art with what is already in being. Tey rep-resent the “new event o Being” that binds aesthetic creations to reality in a supplementary mode, so that, through the work o art, reality couldinterpret itsel.

Te same work o hermeneutical “creative” supplementation is expectedo a jurist or a judge who aces the task o concretizing the law, applying it ineach specic case, and, thereby, “lling a kind o gap in the system o legaldogmatics.”11 Te contrast to Schmitt, who wishes, above all, to exploreand to deepen this gap and who insists, moreover, that the juristic ormis radically dierent rom the aesthetic one, “because the latter knows nodecision” (P 35), could not be any starker. And yet, surprisingly, Gadamerreports that his goal is not to strengthen legal dogmatics through herme-neutics “[]or the idea o a perect legal dogmatics, which would makeevery judgment a mere act o subsumption, is untenable.”12 Concomitantto the new event o Being eected through an aesthetic supplementation,legal hermeneutics produces the new event o the law by means o a “cre-ative supplement,” which escapes the mechanisms o subsumption into theexisting legal order. While Schmitt hardly aspires to supplement the legalsystem with the sovereign decision on the exception, he, too, argues notagainst law per se but against a perect system o legal dogmatics, which,ideally, would be capable o subsuming every singularity under a set o immutable generalities. Te sovereign decision-maker and the interpret-er—the one as the other—reveal the limits o a purely objective legal andpolitical apparatus, that is to say, the structural incapacity o the systemo laws and rules to administer and to interpret itsel in spite o Luther’sposition that the “[s]cripture is sui ipsus interpres”13—a theological preceptthat has been secularized and translated into the modern illusion o a sel-sustaining legalism.

I a hermetically sealed system o legal dogmatics is impossible, then

I a hermetically sealed system o legal dogmatics is impossible, then judicial interpretation will not be entirely passive, as opposed to the realmo political activity, nor will it all on the side o pure theory, replicating


the old ri between the theoretical and the practical aspects o humanexistence. It will, rather, include elements o a vigorous intervention in thesystem o legality, which is unavoidable, despite the liberal attribution o priority to the statute as “a guarantee o judicial independence” (LL 19). Inthe United States, an outdated nineteenth-century legalism, which reusesto recognize the Schmittian-hermeneutical conclusion is still expressedin a demand or the clear-cut separation o judicial interpretations romactive decision-making, a demand that was at the core o George W. Bush’sattack on the so-called activist judges who, in the case o same-sex mar-riages, presumably modied the law instead o merely interpreting it. AsBush said in his 2004 State o the Union Address:

Activist judges . . . have begun redening marriage by court order,without regard or the will o the people and their elected representa-tives. On an issue o such great consequence, the people’s voice mustbe heard. I judges insist on orcing their arbitrary will upon the peo-ple, the only alternative le to the people would be the constitutionalprocess. Our nation must deend the sanctity o marriage.14

Troughout the US election campaign o 2008, the Republican can-didates constantly insinuated that Obama and Clinton would appointactivist judges to the Supreme Court. And the conrmation hearings o Sonya Sotomayor in 2009 were rie with allegations that she was a perectspecimen o an activist judge. Te absurdity o such accusations hingeson the ailure o the proponents o classical liberalism to saeguard thetheoretical separation o powers, among them “judicial independence,”in concrete political lie. Schmitt oresaw this problem as early as 1912, inhis rst publication titled Law and Judgment (Gesetz und Urteil ), wherehe hypothesized that the indeterminate gray areas o statutory law oughtto be lled with the quasi-legislative discretion exercised by the judi-ciary. Tis is, by no means, an arbitrary solution, given that the judge ismotivated by the spirit o the law, so that the mixed Kantian-Weberiancriterion or the veracity o her “activist” decision-interpretation would bethe certainty that other judges would have reached the same verdict in anidentical case: “A judge’s decision can today be taken or correct when wecan predict that another judge would have decided the matter in exactly the same way.”15 Legality is only strengthened with every judicial interven-tion that holds ast to proessional guidelines and achieves just the right

tion that holds ast to proessional guidelines and achieves just the rightbalance between active decisions and passive interpretations, betweenlegal transcendence and immanence.


Aside rom Schmitt’s early theory o jurisprudence, with which the English-speaking readers are not yet amiliar, what are the broader parameters orthe permeation o his “decisionism” by the hermeneutical spirit? My claimwith regard to the importance o hermeneutics or Schmitt is threeold: (1)politics is unavoidably a practice o interpretation; (2) the interpretation o politics raises the question o the meaning o politics, challenging all politi-cal oundationalisms and essentialisms; and (3) political interpretations andthe interpretation o politics may be ultimately traced back to the theologicalsphere, where political concepts are born and where the co-imbrication o tran-scendence and immanence demands an extreme hermeneutical vigilance.

Politics as Interpretation

Insoar as something like political interpretation (or politics qua interpre-tation) may be gleaned rom Schmitt’s work, it will be a matter o lie anddeath imbued with existential signicance, not a mere scholarly exercise.From the outset, political interpretation does not all under the rubric o the rule o law, or it is a privilege o those who hold power, or what both in1932 and in 1978 Schmitt called the “political premium,” politische Prämie,which ineluctably undermines one o the cornerstones o parliamentary democracy, the equal chance o everyone to be elected to a political o ce.16 Te beneciaries o this premium are entitled to make

concrete interpretation [konkreten Auslegung ] and use o undeterminedevaluative concepts, such as “public security and order,” “danger,”“emergency,” “necessary measures” . . . etc. Such concepts, withoutwhich no state type could survive, are distinctive in that they are bounddirectly to the momentary situation [ jeweilige Situation], that they receive their specic content initially through concrete application,and, most o all, that their concrete application and execution are alonedecisive in di cult and politically important times. (LL 32)17

Te political premium gives the sovereign the right to interpret , which, likepower, is not equally distributed across society. In contrast to the sover-eign decision on the exception that springs orth miraculously, ex nihilo, inPolitical Teology , prompting a widespread misreading o Schmittian sover-eignty as voluntarism (i.e., as the expression o a purely subjective discharge o the will), this right pertains to the interpretive assessment o the momentary

the will), this right pertains to the interpretive assessment o the momentary situation—hence, something pregiven18—wherein undetermined evalu-ative concepts receive their nite and pliable meaning anew each time it is


exercised. Tis is not to say that, or those who are denied access to the right tointerpret, the world is inherently meaningless, but rather—in a hermeneuti-cal take on Hegel’s “alienation,” Marx’s “alse consciousness,” and Heidegger’s“inauthenticity”—that their world is eectively construed through an inter-pretation which is not their own, which is not conducive to their survival butwhich, instead, saeguards the survival o various “state types.”

Deprived o the right to interpret, human beings are worldless, yet theirdeprivation is not an immutable political given so long as this right remainscontestable. o paraphrase slightly Schmitt’s characterization o politicalconcepts as essentially polemical: political history as a whole is a history o struggle or the right to interpretation, and metaphysical legitimiza-tions along with mythical oundational narratives are polemical meansin this struggle.19 Te historical horizon o interpretation in the present isnever homogeneous but ractured and split against itsel, handed over topolemical appropriations, expropriations, and reappropriations.20 Tis isthe political core o hermeneutics.21

It is worth pointing out that the immediate situation, on the one hand,and abstract concepts, on the other, do not have an inherent, objectivemeaning; instead, they are codetermined in the act o concrete inter-pretation. We nd Schmitt to be in agreement with Hume’s conviction,ormulated in the infuential essay “O the Standard o aste,” that, in ando themselves, abstractions such as “justice” or “beauty” do not igniteany controversy; what initiates the disagreement is their mediation withconcrete instances o the just, the beautiul, etc., conduct or thing.22 Temediated concreteness o situational interpretation does not exhaust theindeterminacy o the evaluative terms, called upon to describe it, once andor all. On the contrary, it polemically broadens the hermeneutical horizon,since the depletion o indeterminacy would spell out the end o politicsunderstood as dissensus, an ongoing existential contestation o meaningbetween various riend and enemy groupings. Te decisiveness o any given interpretation, which may mutate into an attempt to preserve the sta-tus quo with the state as the embodiment o this status guaranteed by actso sovereignty that lie “in determining denitively what constitutes publicorder and security” (P 9),23 does not rule out the idea that the art o thepolitical consists in deciding on the undecidable without diminishing itsundecidability. Te competing claims o the innitely open (o de-cision asthe “open . . . clearing or the still un-decided”24) and the nite are respon-sible or the paradox o politics and the predicament o interpretation.

sible or the paradox o politics and the predicament o interpretation.Like a good hermeneutical philosopher, Schmitt cannot endorse a clear

correspondence between the “subjective” interpretation and the “objective”


situation at hand. Each interpretation is not “a truly objective mirror o how things really are”25 but a place where the otherwise abstract political termsrst become meaningul in a political and, hence, historical way. Tere isno apolitical “higher third,” whether human or non-human (e.g., universalreason, Culture as such), exempt rom the historical-hermeneutical hori-zon and capable o giving rise to objective knowledge. Robustly opposed tothe untenable liberal thesis on the neutrality o interpretation, the recogni-tion o interpretation’s partisan character acilitates a constant revaluationo indeterminate political categories. Interpretations are singular decisionssanctioning the undetermined concepts they interpret in such a way thatthe political belonging o the interpreters, their identication with andagainst certain riend-enemy groupings, and propensity to take sides in aspecic historical situation26 bear directly upon these concepts’ polemicalconcretization.

Te “aerlie” o Schmitt’s own political concepts abounds with polemicalreappropriations practiced by the heterogeneous group o “le Schmittians”(Benjamin, Derrida, Moue, Žižek, to name a ew). Te most amous exam-ple, in this respect, is Tesis VIII in “Teses on the Philosophy o History,”where Benjamin redetermines “the state o emergency” based on the acto seizing the right to interpret rom below, rom within “the tradition o the oppressed” who will now decide on the meaning o “the real state o emergency,” the perpetual crisis, they live through every single day, notonly during the recession o 2009.27 Te reerence to the tradition o theoppressed suggests that this hermeneutical act is not an arbitrary decisionbut an attempt to render politically relevant that meaning which derivesrom preexisting experiential and textual rameworks obscured by the hege-monic interpretation o emergency in terms o a threat to “national security.”Claiming the right to interpret or the oppressed is not only the rst step inthe direction o restituting their world and making it meaningul based ontheir own historical experiences, but it is also an act o sovereignty con-ditioned by a declaration o the state o emergency. In response to Marx’seleventh thesis on Feuerbach, to interpret (or to reinterpret) the world andto change it may, aer all, reer to one and the same thing.

An examination o political hermeneutics is one o the pillars or theproject o enunciating a post-metaphysical view o politics and counteringthe reading o Schmitt as a metaphysician, indeed as the “last great meta-physician” o the political, in the words o Derrida’s Politics o Friendship. But doesn’t Schmitt conjure up the specter o metaphysical oundations or

But doesn’t Schmitt conjure up the specter o metaphysical oundations orinterpretation when he writes in Constitutional Teory that the “substantivemeaning o the constitution has completely receded because the constitution


was rendered relative by its transormation into constitutional law and by the ormalization o constitutional law?” (73). We have been already sen-sitized to the meaning o “substance,” which Schmitt transgured rom oneo the most entrenched metaphysical categories, trivializing lived history as a series o supercial accidents, into an existential notion, an indicatoro variable collective existence concentrated in a historical decision on thepolitical orm. But what is the substance o meaning , or “substantive mean-ing,” as the object o political hermeneutics? It is, evidently, the stratum o signicance that alls victim to the process o relativization, whereby thereduction o Constitution to a set o legal statutes gives way to ormaliza-tion in an eort to detach the text o the law rom the concrete historicalhorizon o its meaning, violating the event o Being, as Gadamer would say,in the legal domain. Conversely, that meaning is substantive which carriesa decision within itsel, or which prompts “existential, comprehensive deci-sions” on the orm o political existence to “constitute the substance o theconstitution” (C 78). Hermeneutically traced back to such decisions, theConstitution discloses itsel as the event o political Being, with the textinseparable rom the lived historicity o the decision that interprets itsel asthe place o “substantive meaning.”

In the Gadamerian vein, the word “event” should bespeak an intrinsicconnection between the substantive meaning o the constitution, concreteexistence, and the decision on the orm o collective existence, so that eacho the three items on the list is not superadded to political ontology, but isdirectly identied with the very being o the constitution. Schmitt writes:“A constitution is not based on a norm, whose justness would be the oun-dation o its validity. It is based on a political decision concerning the typeand orm o its own being, which stems rom its political being [aus poli-tischem Sein hervorgegangenen]” (C 125), and displays the strength o hishermeneutical commitment, his willingness to equate political Being withthe existential meaning o politics. Te conceptual circle, where the politi-cal decision on the orm o political Being stems rom this very Being, isa promising indication that Schmitt has chosen the hermeneutical pathor his political philosophy. Tat is one o the reasons why he eels suchantipathy to institutional approaches to politics and, especially, to proce-duralism with its normative, rule-bound imposition o political method.As in Heidegger and Gadamer, the method o political hermeneutics willissue rom the matters themselves; oregoing a reliance on a preabricatednormative basis and on sui generis metaphysical oundations, it will be

normative basis and on sui generis metaphysical oundations, it will becoordinated with the sel-grounding (thereore, the groundlessness) o political lie.


Interpreting the Meaning of the Political

While political activity is inherently interpretive, Schmitt himsel is anuntiring interpreter o the political, who, in all sobriety, recognizes thatthis second-level interpretation, replete with a history and traditiono its own, is exquisitely polemical and, thereore, political. Needless tosay, the acknowledgement o the polemical nature o political thought,too, is an interpretation and a sel-interpretation that interacts with thehistorical circumstances in which it nds itsel, or, in Schmitt’s case, theperceived exhaustion o political potential at the end o a long history o de-politicization. It is this situational, occasional nature o Schmitt’s politi-cal thought, its acute awareness o the ssured horizon o its present, thathas oen been mistaken or the wildest opportunism.28 For instance, theemphasis on the political tradition o Roman Catholicism, valorized overthe Protestant rationalization o politics, coexists in it, on the model o complexio oppositorum, with the admiration or Lenin’s capacity to polarizeriend-enemy groupings against the backdrop o parliamentary stupor andsublimation o enmity into discursive disagreement. Tis is not a case o opportunism but the occasionality o a political hermeneutics committedto those rare historical sites, oen incompatible with one another, wherethe distinction between riends and enemies still maniests itsel. Anythingless than that would be mere prejudice.

Te only political philosophy worthy o the name is a hermeneuti-cal explication o the presupposed concept o the political it aims tobring to a historically sensitive and sel-conscious understanding. Anuncritical dissolution o this concept in the institution o the state, tothe contrary, aborts the hermeneutical injunction and traps politicaltheorists at the level o pre-understanding and “ore-meaning” o thepolitical. I we are to supersede this utile and unphilosophical pursuit,we must revisit our earlier conclusion that the decline o the state doesnot portend the eclipse o the political. In Political Teology II , Schmittcites this development with a measure o approbation, writing that “[t]he time o change came when the state lost its monopoly on the political ”(PII 44). It is not by chance that he applauds the decline o the state inthe course o deending the paradigm o political theology; aer all, the“historical specicity” o the state was bound up with the “secularizationo European lie as a whole” (NE 128). Far rom being the pinnacle o de-politicization, the loss o state monopoly on politics, recently exem-

de-politicization, the loss o state monopoly on politics, recently exem-plied in the phenomena o piracy and terrorism, translates into thehistorical end o the centuries-long process o secularization and, more


positively, works as a catalyst in the surging up o questions concern-ing the meaning o the political no longer precomprehended as a vaguesynonym o the state.

What, then, is the meaning o the political? And, rst o all, what doesthis question signiy? Have we learnt to hear it yet? My hypothesis is thatHeidegger’s question o Being, Seinsrage, recoils into Schmitt’s ques-tion o the political and cannot but present itsel in the orm o the latter.Henceorth, the meaning o Being, which boils down to the meaning o the being o Dasein or whom Being becomes an issue, is to be sought inthe interrogation o the hermeneutical-existential sense o politics,29 whilethe orgetting o Being, the abandonment o and the inability to hear thequestion regarding its meaning, goes hand-in-hand with the theoreticalerasure o the concept o the political, its identication with state institu-tions, and the historical tendency toward de-politicization that culminatesin Western liberalism.o recap: It is no mystery that the “specic meaning” o the political

resides in the riend-enemy distinction reached by means o an existentialinterpretation o the situation at hand. Te state may, certainly, harnessand e ciently organize this distinction in an eort to single out publicenemies, but the specic meaning o the political thrives outside the sphereo state control. In interpreting this meaning, Schmitt does not imposeabstract conceptual categories onto political practice; rather, he wantsto draw upon concrete political experiences and to discover their innerlogic. It is, perhaps, ba ing that, in its specicity , the dierence betweenriends and enemies is not at all separate rom those meaningul distinc-tions that structure the economic, aesthetic, moral, and other spheres. AsI have observed with reerence to the event o politics, Schmitt’s thesis isthat the boiling point o the political, when the pull o oppositionality isso powerul that it lapses into sheer antagonism and prompts the trans-ormation o the other into an enemy, is reachable rom any other domaino human activity, which, as a consequence, will be politicized, losing itsspecic delineation as the “aesthetic,” the “economic,” and so on. In otherwords, the meaning o the political is already inherent in human existenceas a whole, whereas the meaning o aesthetic and other endeavors is, in thelast instance, political.

Now, or Heidegger in Being and ime, the question that inquiresinto the meaning o Being unolds as an interrogation o the being o Dasein, which takes the orm o the hermeneutic o acticity, or a pains-

Dasein, which takes the orm o the hermeneutic o acticity, or a pains-taking interpretation o Dasein’s everydayness. Tere is no question o


objective Being in Heidegger (as there is, or instance, in Hegel’s Scienceo Logic), since Being is always meaningul or someone, rom a particu-lar interested perspective awaiting interpretation. Ontically, within theramework o Division I o Being and ime that details the worldly dis-persion o Dasein, the assertion that every region o its everyday activity,every mode o concern (Besorge) later ormalized as a “domain,” is poten-tially politicizable is indicative o the act that the meaning o Dasein’sbeing, and hence the meaning o Being as such, is political, or at least, potentially political. In Division II o the text, Dasein nds its being as awhole overshadowed by the possibility o death triggering, rom a dier-ent standpoint, the question o the meaning o Being. Te one or whomBeing is meaningul is a mortal, nite Dasein who is strong enough notto evade the apodictic certainty that its time is bound to run out. Temeaning o the political, too, is an inescapable question or someonewhose whole existence is dened and endangered by her or his politi-cal belonging or activity—someone like a political prisoner or a partisanepitomizing an engaged subject in the era o the state’s neutralizationand de-politicization. Perspectivalism, the essential interestedness o any given interpretation, inherited by twentieth-century hermeneutics romNietzsche and marking the meaning o Being as much as the meaningo the political, is here existentially substantiated. From the perspectiveo a “hopeless” partisan ght, as Schmitt describes it in Teory o thePartisan, and rom the standpoint o being-toward-death anticipatingone’s possibility o no-longer-being, the meditation on the meaning o Being imposes itsel with an irrecusable weight.

Considered in the context o the ontological problematic, de-politicization corroborates the conclusions, though not the premises, o Strauss’s exposé o Te Concept o the Political : what is endangered inde-politicization is the very being o human beings, that is to say, themeaning o Being as such. It is intuitively clear that de-politicization isthe side eect o nihilism (the apathy to and meaninglessness o humanexistence) and that liberalism, with its current motivational decit,chases the political still urther into concealment. Te interest in thepolitical ades when the potential or politicization immanent to every-day existence is stunted and when pervasive concerns with security thatfare up when we are aced with our nitude and vulnerability prompt usto evade the orientation toward death. But, in addition to the empiricalde-politicization summed up here, there is, what we might name, “onto-logical de-politicization,” pertaining to the history o Being itsel. Te

logical de-politicization,” pertaining to the history o Being itsel. Te


advantage o the Heideggerian approach is that it calls our attention tothis second tendency, more precisely, to a certain necessity behind theretreat o Being and, hence, behind “the retreat o the political” dely diagnosed by French thinkers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Lacoue-Labarthe.30 o propose, as Strauss does, that “[t]he political must rst bebrought out o its concealment into which liberalism has cast it”31 is toneglect its ontological dimension that cannot be made to appear, directly and immediately, in the ontic reality it subtends. It is or this reason thatthe ontic hermeneutic o politicization stands in need o the ontologicalsupplement that would conceptually convert ontico-ontological dier-ence into the dierence between politics and the political, so that thepolitical would be the condition o possibility or, indeed, the presuppo-sition o politics without being demonstrable in an “objective” or even“phenomenal” way. Te retreat o the political would, consequently, mark a political event, regardless o liberalism’s involvement in the empiricalhistory o its concealment. Strauss underestimates the severity o thispredicament when he speculates that the political could be easily broughtout o its concealment as soon as liberalism withers away, since he doesnot entertain the possibility that liberalism is a peripheral symptom orthe closure o the epochal history o the political.

As a principle o displacement aecting all other spheres o humanlie, the political is not immune to its own expropriatory power, whichmeans that de-politicization is produced as an internal displacement inthe political and that it, thereore, partakes in the meaning o the politi-cal. It stands in the same relation to the political, as the inauthentic relatesto the authentic in Heidegger, that is to say, as a decient modality, amodication, which is not exempt rom the logic governing the posi-tive term and which, moreover, expresses the truth o what it modies.Another complication in this rough schema is that political concepts,or Schmitt, are secularized theological categories, while secularization,as a testimony to “the liberty o the children o God,”32 is an internaldisplacement in the theological sphere. Tose who wish to arrive at thespecic meaning o the political (but how specic can it be, given thedisarticulations the political produces and, at the same time, undergoes?)will have no choice but to make a triple detour through the interpreta-tion o the transormations within other spheres o human activity thatget organized along riend-enemy lines, through de-politicization as theinalienable mode o the political, and through the theological sources o the political vernacular

the political vernacular.


Political Theology as a Hermeneutic Endeavor

Political hermeneutics is, at once, political and theological; its acts o interpretation discover that the reerent is deerred, drawn back to the tra-ditional object o hermeneutical concern, the “prehistory,” in Gadamer’sterms, o philosophical hermeneutics. Aside rom the divine connotationso concepts such as sovereignty shimmering with the borrowed light o thesupreme power o God, political hermeneutics is shored up by “an ethoso belie” and, thereore, by a thoroughly Christian theology, wherein theproblems o psychic interiority, subjectivity, and belie rst take root. AsSchmitt states in Roman Catholicism and Political Form,

no political system can survive even a generation with only nakedtechniques o holding power. o the political belongs the idea becausethere is no politics without authority and no authority without anethos o belie. (17)

Despite the virulent anti-economism o this early treatise, the attribution o “the idea” to the political is not an attempt to idealize it in order to counter-act raw economic materialism. Nothing could be urther rom rationalismand idealism than an idea wholly reliant on the ethos o belie, which isresponsible or the more or less enduring construction o political reality.We may, perhaps, declare this construction to be “ideological,” except thatthis paleonym wrongly takes or granted the existence o an objective, non-ideological, “scientic” truth comprised o acts that are absolved rom thenecessity o interpretation.33

Much o the discussion o political-theological hermeneutics in Schmittrevolves around the notion o the world that connotes much more than itstheological sense reerring to the secular, non-transcendent realm. As inthe philosophy o Gadamer, or whom language is the experience o theworld, Schmitt’s “world” is intimately tied to speech and, thereore, to theinsuperable horizon o sociality, so much so that,

whoever speaks is no longer alone in the world . . . Man is either aloneor in the world. As long as he is truly alone, he is not in the world, thatis he is no longer even a man, and as long as he is a man and in thisworld, he is not alone. (RC 48)

Being in the world is already being with others, in a linguistic commu-

Being in the world is already being with others, in a linguistic commu-nity, which humanizes the one who is in it not by virtue o its inherent


universality but thanks to an association o riends sharing the nite hori-zon o a particular language. Yet, the institution o the Church is irreducibleto the visible word in which it is ound; “the Church can be in but not o this world” (RC 52). Does Schmitt’s claim with respect to the immanently transcendent status o the Church suggest that it participates in the mean-ingul paradigms o the worldly linguistic community but does not deriveits meaning rom them? Te Church is, admittedly, a structure o transcen-dence in immanence, with its visibility engendered by something invisibleand unspeakable (divine solitude in the absence o riends or enemies) inthe same way that the phenomenality o the political is based on the greatnon-phenomenal arcanum, as Schmitt insists throughout his writings. Teworld, however, has been specied in terms o the linguistic being-with-others o a human being. An entity located “in” it is assigned a particularplace and, thereore, makes sense within the webs o signication romwhich it is woven but, i the same entity is not “o” it, then the source o meaning is not exhausted by the semantic network, in which it is caughtup. In spite o being emplaced, it is the possibility o any experience o place, o existential spatiality, and o phenomenality or visibility.34

At bottom, the invisibility o the Church and o the political, or which the visible Church and the state are but the signs, need not be imbricated withmetaphysical transcendence that would coner upon earthly clericalism andstatism the mantle o divine authority. Rather, it is the ethos o belie—and,with it, subjective interiority as such—that is invisible, and it is the ideathat “obtains its visibility in the Word, just as a breath o air becomes soundwhen it is orced through a reed” (RC 57). In disclosing the non-phenome-nal conditions o possibility or phenomenality, Schmitt recommends thatwe read the visible or the invisible, that is to say, that we interpret “acts”as açades hiding interpretive rameworks o belie whence they issue in therst place. It is impossible to fee rom the world, because, i such a fightwere successul, the one who would accomplish it would no longer remainhuman in the absolute silence and solitude o gods and beasts that the eva-sion would bring with it. It is uneasible, thereore, to grasp the invisible orthe non-phenomenal directly, without the patient passage through the vis-ible, to insist on the pure interiority o belie without the practice in which itmaniests and, at the same time, encrypts itsel. Interpretation must proceedas the interpretation o the invisible in the visible, not as the interpretationo the invisible qua invisible. And, conversely, one must rigorously “distin-guish between true visibility and actual concreteness” (RC 53), given that

guish between true visibility and actual concreteness” (RC 53), given thatthe latter puts up a pretense o autonomy rom interpretation, whereas theormer is the end result o rigorous hermeneutical activity. (How shouldwe take Schmitt’s positive reerences to the invisibility o the partisan aer


the state’s political potential has been depleted? Doesn’t the political comeinto its own in the gure o the partisan and nally dwells in the invisible as invisible? And how does the reduction o the visible state aect the status o the Church? Were Schmitt to extend the theory o the partisan to the theo-logical sphere, would he, despite himsel, nd himsel arguing or the key tenets o the Reormation, to which he was so hostile?35 For, aren’t Lutherand Calvin the partisans o the theological?)

Te Church is not alone in its ambiguous standing between the visibleand the invisible, in that the idea o nomos as “the political and social ordero a people becomes spatially visible” (NE 70), or the rst time, in the ormo a line that divides the pastures in the process o land-appropriation.Concretized in a line, the idea o order oers its adherents a determinatespatial orientation; the very link between “objective” order and “subjective”orientation that is a veritable guiding thread in Te Nomos o the Earth isa conjunction o the visible and the invisible, not unlike the one orged inthe institution o the Church. Te precarious balance between these dis-parate elements is entirely upset in modernity with its positivist ideology,where the visible survives its detachment rom the invisible, where the lineoutlasts the logic that drew it, and where the idea recedes while the institu-tional structure that gave it phenomenal shape remains.

Signicant as the intersections o the visible and the invisible in theChurch and in nomos itsel might be, one cannot aord to “circumvent themixed nature o the spiritual-worldly [Geistlich-Weltlich] combination o any specically historical event” (PII 92).36 Te ambiguity o the “mixednature” o historical events has nothing to do with the perect mediationso Hegel’s world spirit. For an interpretation to be eective, it would haveto disentangle the knot o the visible and the invisible, to decipher the work o spirit in the world, to read, as it were, “in historico-political events thenger o God and his providence” (PII 92), and to attribute sovereignty to this divine source o authority. Here Schmitt is, once again, on the vergeo imputing a massive metaphysical program to hermeneutics and only the so-called question o competence haunting his writings on sovereignty (Political Teology , Constitutional Teory , among others), saves him romthis. Insoar as our ate is to be in the world, the question o competence—o political existence as opposed to essence—cannot be denitively resolved.Te nal meta-interpretation and the meta-decision as to who should beable to interpret and to decide are innitely delayed or, at the very least,

able to interpret and to decide are innitely delayed or, at the very least,postponed “to the Day o Judgement,” as Schmitt writes with a measureo sarcasm: “Until the Day o Judgement, the Augustinian teaching on thetwo kingdoms will have to ace the twoold open question: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabur? [Who will decide? Who will interpret?]” (PII 115).


Te double question o competence stays unanswered because the twoAugustinian kingdoms have been neither reconciled nor denitively setapart rom one other. Te historical impurity o the distinction betweenthem is what Schmitt calls political theology ensuring the openness o interpretation in the indenite but nite delay “until the Day o Judgment,”wherein the history o the secular world unravels.37

Keeping in mind the trenchancy o interpretation in Schmitt’s corpus,what is the status o “the irruption o time into the play,” the idea thatunsettled Gadamer to such an extent that he elt the need to devote aseparate appendix to ruth and Method to its critique? Halway throughhis 1956 essay on Shakespeare, Schmitt writes, “A terriying reality shed aaint light through the masks and costumes o a theatre play. No interpre-tation, whether philological, philosophical or aesthetic, however subtle,can change that” (HH 18). Notwithstanding the reasonable rejoinderthat historical reality is constituted solely through interpretation, I wantto ocus on the ne grain o Schmitt’s text. ime breaks into the play asreality and reality is terriyingly traumatic, bound up with death, whichwill beall those who dare to speculate on the circumstances surroundingJames’s accession without engaging in aesthetic sublimation. Faced withthe equation “time = the real = trauma,” the hermeneutical act is powerless,ineective, weak, unable to produce a real change in what it interprets. Ina proto-Lacanian key, the real and trauma are the limits o interpretationtoward which all hermeneutical activity tends. But how does this standwith time? Is the play itsel, both in the process o its composition andacross the range o its perormances, insulated rom the temporal order itwill exhibit only as an après-coup? What is time that it could break into awork o art, as though by burglary—one o the connotations o the GermanEinbruch—allowing reality to shed “a aint light” through the strangely spatial cle it would create? ending toward an unreachable limit, be ittrauma or the real, nite interpretation becomes innite, interminable, asFreud would have it, but such interminability is the very opening o timein the delay, in the postponement, or instance, to the Day o Judgement.Te powerlessness o interpretation is not a mere illusion o brute his-torical realism; its truth is that, in addition to unolding as a history or asa tradition, interpretation is the virtual condition o possibility not only or history but also or time, which it “temporalizes” in and as this delay.Neither immanently included in nor transcendentally excluded rom tem-

Neither immanently included in nor transcendentally excluded rom tem-porality, it is utterly weak in the order o the actual but, in its absence, thisorder would not be what it is (or, more precisely, it would not be at all). Ina word, interpretation “is” diérance:38 the temporalization o the spatial


opening in the work o art and the spatialization o the temporal fow o the tradition in the visibility o institutions, such as the Church. Finally, i all political activity is hermeneutical, and i interpretation is diérantial ,then the meaning o political Being is time—the history o heterogeneousnomoi, their ormalization, institutionalization, and decline; the ssuredhorizon o the present in the conrontation with the enemy; and the utu-rity o nite existence expressed in risk and in the question that lacks anal, determinate response.

Given that the meaning o political Being is time, political ontology ishere delineated in terms o “groundless existence,” precisely because it is nolonger tethered only to spatial models but hinges upon the nite tempo-rality o historically situated collective and individual subjects. Existenceis always groundless; it is the experience o groundlessness, o spinningthe web o time out o onesel—be it in the shape o utural possibilities,present actions, or fashbacks to the past one cannot ully reclaim—in theabsence o mooring points that would saely secure this dynamic mesh o experiences. Suspended over what, in spatial terms, could be called “theabyss,” existence is lived temporality, incapable o mastering its incipienceand o grasping, with any degree o certainty, its terminus ad quem. Only apolitics that does not recoil rom the temporal sense o Being but, rather,plunges headlong into groundless existence will be capable o overcom-ing the crises and metaphysical impasses o transcendentally legitimatedregimes and institutions. Ceaseless practical and theoretical interpretationo the assertion that “the meaning o political Being is time” is the preroga-tive o such politics.

Notes

1. Schmitt considers occasio to be the core o Romanticism understood as “subjectiedoccasionalism” (PR 17).

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ruth and Method , Second Revised Edition (New York andLondon: Continuum Press, 2004), p. 497. I am using the Romanticist, hermeneutical (anddeconstructive) insights into “occasionalism,” that is, their “tendency to see in the mostinsignicant things an ‘occasion’ or the most ar-reaching and universalist speculation”as a guideline or discussing the conceptual relation between decisions and interpreta-tions based on Gadamer’s singular criticism o Schmitt’s book on Shakespeare. C. F. R.Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2005), p.428, n. 12.

“For the play itsel there is no antithesis o time and art, as Schmitt assumes.” Gadamer,

3. “For the play itsel there is no antithesis o time and art, as Schmitt assumes.” Gadamer,ruth and Method , p. 498.

4. Gadamer, ruth and Method , p. 147.


5. Gianni Vattimo [ Art’s Claim to ruth, ed. S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)] lucidly elaborates on this point:

Te historian belongs as much to the tradition that makes up the document orevent that he must interpretatively reconstruct, as the interpreter and the con-sumer o the work o art belong to the play that the work itsel is . . . Te event to beinterpreted is present only in interpretation. (p. 146)

6. Gadamer, ruth and Method , p. 329.7. “German romantics possess an odd trait: everlasting conversation” (P 53).8. “Whether one has condence and hope that it [the state o exception] can be elimi-

nated depends on philosophical, especially on philosophical-historical or metaphysical,convictions” (P 7).

9. I am aware o but a miniscule parenthesis in an article by Geo Waite [“RadioNietzsche, or, How to Fall Short o Philosophy,” in Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University o Caliornia Press, 2004), pp. 169–211], where this divide is erased: “Both undamentalontology (Heidegger) and philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer) are—more or less tacitor encrypted—modes o decisionism. (Carl Schmitt might have said shameaced modes,but that qualication need not distract us here.)” (p. 175).

10. Michael Hoeltzl and Graham Ward, the translators o Political Teology II , recog-nize the signicance o hermeneutics in Schmitt but immediately drown it in “metaphysicalspeculation”:

Te questions [Who will decide? Who will interpret?] arise rom, and the answersoered are responses to, situations o immediate practical import. Tey are the key questions o Realpolitik. On the other hand, because they concern hermeneutics,these questions invite metaphysical speculation. For they are about judgement,authority, and legitimacy. [“Editors’ Introduction,” in Political Teology II: Te Myth o the Closure o Any Political Teology (London and New York: Polity, 2008),p. 2, emphasis added]

11. Gadamer, ruth and Method , pp. 329, 324.12. Ibid., p. 330.13. “Sel-interpreted.” Ibid., p. 174.14. “ext o President Bush’s State o the Union Address,” 2004. <http://www.washing-

tonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/transcripts/bushtext_012004.html>15. Carl Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil: Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis

(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1969), p. 71.16. Schmitt returns to this idea rst introduced in Legality and Legitimacy in a 1978

text, “Te Legal World Revolution”: “State legality concerns the unavoidable political pre-miums o the legal holding o state power” (elos 72, Summer 1987, p. 74).

17. Schmitt expresses the same thought in Constitutional Teory :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/transcripts/bushtext_012004.html










17. Schmitt expresses the same thought in Constitutional Teory :

When parties with contradictory opinions and convictions achieve political infu-ence, they express their political power by giving concrete content to the concepts


o state lie, such as reedom, justice, public order, and security, all o which arenecessarily undened. (pp. 89–90)

Te “political premium” here turns into an expression o political power.18. Te limits o voluntarism in Schmitt bleed into the “passive” or, rather, pathos-laden

enactment o understanding in Gadamer. Hence, Richard Bernstein [Beyond Objectivismand Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University o PennsylvaniaPress, 1983)] writes: “We will see that, or Gadamer, understanding is misconceived when itis thought o as an a activity o a subject ; it is a ‘happening,’ an ‘event,’ a pathos” (p. 113).

19. I reiterate that metaphysics as such and as a whole is limited to the second stagein the history o de-politicization outlined in the 1929 text on “Te Age o Neutralizationand Depoliticization” and leading up to extreme economism. Insoar as they survive inSchmitt’s own writings, metaphysical concepts and problems are restricted to serving as thepolemical means in his politically infected —polemical—political philosophy.

20. Te ssuring o the horizon in the present does not invalidate Gadamer’s thesison the usion o horizons. As Gadamer observes, “In act the horizon o the present iscontinually in the process o being ormed because we are continually having to test allour prejudices” (ruth and Method , p. 306). Te continual ormation o the horizon o thepresent—which is not identical to itsel, given its unavoidable reerence to the past—is apolemical process. Its complexity will not be ully subsumed in any resulting usion.

21. Hans Herbet Kögler [Te Power o Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics aer Gadamer and Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MI Press, 1999)] does well to note that, more oen thannot, “the radical will to avoid symbolic violence [that] shapes historical as well as intercul-tural hermeneutics” contributes to “the complete methodological concealment o powerrelations behind the backs o the interpreter and the interpretandum” (p. 218). It is thisconcealment that political hermeneutics must overcome.

22. “About an abstract concept there will be in general no argument, least o all in thehistory o sovereignty. What is argued about is the concrete application, and that meanswho decides in a situation o confict what constitutes the public interest or interest o thestate, public saety and order, le salut public, and so on” (P 6).

23. Emphasis added.24. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy , p. 61.25. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to ruth, p. 81.26. Schmitt’s immediate concern is with the Kellogg Pact o 1928 and the historical

drama in which a “group o powers plays the higher third and itsel interprets and sanctionsthe indeterminate concepts o the pact, including especially the concept ‘war’” (LL 35).

27. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Refections (New York: Schocken Books,1969), p. 257.

28. For an excellent critique o the reading o Schmitt as an opportunist, see AlexandreFranco de Sá’s, “Te Event o Order,” pp. 14–33. Te same criticism, according to Schmitt,has been advanced against the Catholic policy understood as “nothing more or less than

a boundless opportunism” (Schmitt, “Te Necessity o Politics,” p. 24). Te reason or thisparallel is that Schmitt is transposing the experience o the Catholic political orm, complexio oppositorum, onto the sphere o secularized political existence.


29. Schmitt expresses this thought ormulaically, in a quasi-Nietzschean ashion, as“ Macht ist Sein; Sein ist Macht [Power is Being; Being is Power]” (G 242).

30. Philip Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political , ed. S. Sparks(London: Routledge, 1997).

31. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, Te Concept o the Political ,” p. 8432. aubes, En Divergent Accord , p. 54.33. In turn, hermeneutics may be likened to a critique o ideology:

Tus, hermeneutics is not only aware o hidden dimensions o meaning and notonly itsel capable o revealing them; in act, the task o revealing hidden dimen-sions o meaning and, hence, o exposing ideology is precisely its own. [GeorgiaWarnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, radition, and Reason (Stanord: Stanord Uni- versity Press, 1987), p. 115]

34. “Te church o Christ is not o this world and its history, but it is in this world. Tatmeans: it is localized and opens up a space; and space here means impermeability, visibility and the public sphere” (PII 65).

35. Tis, indeed, is the case according to Te Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait , a biogra-phy o Schmitt written by Gopal Balakrishnan (p. 62).

36. ranslation modied, emphasis added.37. On the signicance o the Christian conception o history as a “nite delay” or

Schmitt, see aubes, En Divergent Accord , p. 44.38. It might appear extravagant to end the chapter on Schmitt’s hermeneutics with a

nod o approval in the direction o Derrida. But could it be the case that deconstructionis what allows Schmitt to be considered i not as a riend then, at least, as a non-enemy o Gadamer? O course, this “solution” poses a new set o problems that carry over romthe rictions between deconstruction and hermeneutics. For a ecund summary o these,consult Dialogue and Deconstruction: Te Gadamer-Derrida Encounter , ed. Diane P.Michelelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). Especially noteworthy is Gadamer’s text “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism”, included in this volume, where heacknowledges that Selbstverständnis, sel-understanding, already contains a kernel o di- érance, in that it requires a constant putting onesel in question, becoming other to onesel (p. 119). From this insight, one needs to take but a small step to the nal conclusion o thepresent chapter.

michael marder groundless existence the political ontology of carl schmitt 2010

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