Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt 9781501301476, 9780826465955

Citation preview

For my mother and brother, Marina and Lev

Ich habe die Escavessaden des Schicksals erfahren, Siege und Niederlagen, Revolutionen und Restaurationen, Inflationen und Deflationen, Ausbombungen, Diffamierungen, Regimewechsel und Rohrbrüche, Hunger und Kälte, Lager und Einzelhaft. Durch alles das bin ich hindurchgegangen, Und alles ist durch mich hindurchgegangen. Carl Schmitt, “Gesang des Sechzigjährigen” I have experienced the tribulations of fate, Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations, Inflations and deflations, bombings, Defamations, broken regimes and broken pipes, Hunger and cold, internment and solitary confinement. Through it all I have passed, And through me it all has passed. Carl Schmitt, from “Song of the Sexagenerian” translated by G. L. Ulmen

Acknowledgments

At the earliest stages of its composition, this book benefited from the comments of Hubertus Buchstein (Greifswald University); it was in the context of his seminar on “Carl Schmitt and Contemporary Political Theory” at the New School for Social Research in Spring 2005 that the idea of Groundless Existence was born. Members of the editorial group at Telos Press, including Russell Berman, David Pan, Joseph Bendersky, as well as the publisher of Telos, Mary Piccone, have been exceptionally enthusiastic about the project, parts of which appeared on the pages of this indispensable academic journal. My discussions with Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto) were crucial for the formulations of “the event of politics” in Chapter 3 of the book, while the exchanges with Alexandre Franco de Sá gave me new perspectives on Schmitt’s legal philosophy. Santiago Zabala shared his sharp insights on hermeneutics, substantially enriching Chapter 8 of the present study. I am also thankful to the Acquisitions Editor at Continuum Books, Marie-Claire Antoine, who has been unwavering in her support for Groundless Existence. Finally, um enorme obrigado à minha querida Patrícia. Sem ti, não conseguia. Washington, DC September 2009

ix

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Note: Modified versions of Chapters 2, 3, and 7 appeared as articles in the journal Telos. “From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics” was included in Telos 147, a special issue on “Carl Schmitt and the Event,” which I edited in Summer 2009 (pp. 55–76). “Carl Schmitt’s ‘Cosmopolitan Restaurant’: Culture, Multiculturalism, and the Complexio Oppositorum” was published in Telos, 142, Spring 2008, pp. 29–47, in a special issue on “Culture and Politics in Carl Schmitt.” “Carl Schmitt and the Risk of the Political” was featured in Telos, 132, Fall 2005, pp. 5–24, in a special section on Carl Schmitt. Finally, a version of Chapter 8 will appear as a chapter in a collection edited by Santiago Zabala & Jeff Malpas and titled Consequences of Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

List of Abbreviations: The Works of Carl Schmitt

CP:

The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). CPD: The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1986). CT: Constitutional Theory, trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008). D: Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Munich and Leipzig, 1921). EC: Ex Captivitate Salus: Efahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002). G: Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951, ed. E. Freiherr von Medem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991). HH: Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time 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). LST: The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996). NE: The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003). PR: Political Romanticism, trans. G. Oakes (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991).

xi

xii

PT: PTII: RC: TP:

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (London and New York: Polity, 2008). Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996). “Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (1963),” trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telos 127, Spring 2004, pp. 11–78.

Introduction On the Possibility of a Non-Objectivist Political Ontology Spring 1947 witnessed a momentous set of events: the recurrent interrogations of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) by his American captors at Nuremberg. The triptych of the transcripts of these examinations, gathered in the first special issue of the journal Telos (Summer 1987) devoted entirely to the German political thinker, gives the reader a vivid insight into Schmitt’s apologia in the course of which he was prompted to respond to the charges of providing a theoretical justification for Hitler’s Grossraum policy and of collaborating in preparation of the wars of aggression. The questioning by Robert Kempner bordered on the absurd, requesting the defendant to write up constitutional opinions and essay-form responses to the incriminations. But, more than anything, at the dusk of Western metaphysics, it inverted the judicial scene that occurred at the inception of this philosophical tradition: the trial of Socrates. What Schmitt went through was not a public trial—he was never formally charged with the allegations set before him, nor was he tried by his compatriots, nor was he sentenced to death as a result. While Socrates was accused, chiefly, of subverting the Athenian polis, Schmitt faced the charges of supporting and collaborating with the Nazi state. In the first case, the philosopher appeared to be a threat to public order, at odds with the democratic authorities of the day; in the second case, the political thinker was presented as the handmaid of Hitler’s regime, the agent who laid the groundwork for a new order. Whereas the fault of Socrates was, in a nutshell, that he dangerously exceeded the legal and custom-bound particularities of his city-state (trumpeting philosophy as a universal vocation), the crime of Schmitt was that, whether directly or indirectly, he aided and abetted German expansionism and its wars of aggression against what is universally human. 1

2

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

These differences are symptomatic of the epochal contrasts between ancient Greece and Nazi Germany—the contrasts thinkers like Heidegger preferred to see as the closest of affinities—as well as between the beginning and the end of Western metaphysics, when the Platonic politics of truth, guided by the eternal, objective light of Ideas, is supplanted by postmetaphysical political thought, deriving its meaning from the concreteness of human existence. The Socratic subversion is a metaphysical embrace of the world of pure thought at the expense of all historical contingencies; the Schmittian sedition consists in a series of post-metaphysical interventions described as occasionalist, if not opportunist. All too often, however, Schmitt has been read, precisely, as a political metaphysician, even by commentators as perceptive as Jacques Derrida. In a curious and bitterly ironic remark during the April 1947 interrogations, Schmitt reflected on the reception of his thought in response to Kempner’s assurance that he would examine the requested legal opinion of the former “very closely.” “I am happy to have found a reader once again,” Schmitt quipped, “In general, my writings have been read very poorly. I fear the superficial reader.”1 This reproach, addressed not solely to the immediate interrogator, rings true over the decades that have passed since then and is as fresh for us as it was over sixty years ago, partly because the 1947 interrogations have never really ended but have been leading posthumous existence years after the author’s death, and partly because Schmitt’s fears turned out to be warranted. What would it mean to read him “very closely” and in a way that is not superficial? Would there be any space left for a metaphysical interpretation were this demand satisfied? And, if not, which alternative intellectual resources and traditions could assist us in living up to such a demand? The recent resurgence of interest in Schmitt, among those on the Left and on the Right alike, that has made of him a prophet heralding the decline of classical Liberalism, leaves one reluctant to join the fray, even if it is to add a dissenting voice. Faced with the avalanche of “Schmitt scholarship” in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the goal of those who study his works should be to say less, rather than more, to subtract from the interpretive sediments that which suppresses and suffocates the original thinking of the political as political. To a certain extent, Schmitt’s preferred strategy of “the safety of silence,” die Sicherheit des Schweigens,2 ought to be transformed into the reticence of interpretation. This does not mean that we should ignore the rich history of reception, on both sides of the Atlantic, of writings that prove to be more and more relevant and influential today; what I am advocating is a reduction of this mass of primary

Introduction

3

and secondary sources, to the political philosophical architecture they sketch out. While Schmitt’s fundamental concepts of the sovereign decision, the state of exception, and the friend-enemy distinction, to name but a few, have become common currency in contemporary practical and theoretical analyses of texts and concrete political situations, their philosophical underpinnings and, more importantly, the impulse that gave birth to them have been largely ignored. The standard approach to the study of the genesis of these concepts is broadly historical, in that it pays painstaking attention to the context and circumstances of their emergence in the chaos of Weimar Germany, for example, prompting Schmitt to write an extensive critique of liberal constitutionalism collated in his influential Verfassunglehre (Constitutional Theory). The historicist methodology is, certainly, justified by the overtly polemical nature of his texts, by his professional training as a jurist, and by his insistently negative estimation of philosophy in general and of metaphysics in particular. One could even argue that, in the disparate writings stretching over a significant portion of the twentieth century, Schmitt produced neither political philosophy, nor political thought, in a conventional sense, but an engaged and somewhat fragmentary practical theory of politics. This argument, however, does a major disservice to what are, perhaps, the most ground-breaking political ideas of the past century, for at least three reasons. First, it treats their intuitions as mere reactions to historical circumstances; second, it is willing to concede to them an extremely limited scope of relevance, conditioned by the extent to which our situation is still that of Schmitt (or is, at least, analogously so); and, third, it veils the deeper motivations for his interventions in political thought and practice. To say less about these interventions is to distill from them the political philosophical architecture that definitively sets aside the classical Aristotelian foundations for the thinking of the political and that refuses to impose a prefabricated form onto the content of political life, which alone bestows meaning on what has been correctly identified as the practical theory of politics. This non-Aristotelian architectonics does not amount to a system of thought but to an ontology that inquires into the uniquely political mode of being, the ultimate goal of Schmitt’s analyses, which I will elucidate with reference to his writings of the early and late periods alike. Some will object, straightaway, that the emphasis on ontology is incongruous with political theology, which, instead of restricting the political sphere to a static systemic arrangement, considers it in the flux of its becoming—not of Being—as a history of secularization. The above objection will hold little sway as soon as we acknowledge that it revolves around a vague

4

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

understanding of ontology and an even more tentative grasp of what the real target of Schmitt’s criticism is, namely, the objectivist-metaphysical ontology of impersonal political structures and institutions, from which flesh-and-blood human beings have been either evacuated by a theoretical sleight of hand or rendered purely hypothetical, as in John Rawls’s conjectures about the “veil of ignorance,” leveling and equalizing the electoral processes. The new political ontology is not so much the ontology of power but of political subjectivity and, hence, of the concrete existence of embodied figures populating Schmitt’s oeuvre: the sovereign, the enemy, the friend, the partisan, and so on. In other words, politics is an experience— and the most intense one at that—of human beings, whose very humanness is defined by the possibility of undergoing it, while political ontology is an inquiry into this experiential field, lacking any predetermined structures, norms, or ground-rules. Although the relation between political existence and institutions is largely negative, one cannot afford to neglect this latter tier of politics. The non-normative description of political experience does not bar a meditation on the ways in which political structures overlay, predicate themselves on, and—let it be stated already—suffocate raw political experiences, thereby inadvertently undermining themselves. The descriptive and the critical trajectories of Schmitt’s thought combine to form the second facet of his political ontology—an applied hermeneutical phenomenology. The interpretation of human collective existence, of being-with and being-against others (I ask the reader to indulge me with this preliminary recoding of the friend-enemy distinction in onto-phenomenological terms), is complemented by a rigorous phenomenological reduction that strives to disclose the experiential sources of the political buried beneath multiple institutional strata and sealed by the bureaucratization and reification of the political. Describing these mutilated experiences, Schmitt wishes, in harmony with the phenomenological objectives of the late Edmund Husserl, to de-sediment, to reactivate, and to reorient them toward the future, with recourse to the “real possibility” that would impart a new sense of vitality, incompatible with the endorsement of a totalitarian state, to collective existence. But it is not only the critical-reductive inclination that unites Husserl and Schmitt against the bureaucratization and, hence, the “deadening” of life in modernity; in Constitutional Theory,3 the latter acknowledges his indebtedness to the early work of the former, or, more precisely, to his theory of identity worked out in Logical Investigations, which enriches our appreciation of the discussions of democratic identification in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and Legality and Legitimacy. To sum up, then,

Introduction

5

non-objectivist political ontology is an existential-phenomenological reinvention of political philosophy with an eye to the lived experience of politics and its corrosion in modernity. Most contemporary applications of political ontology are still shackled to the objectivist metaphysics of those structures and forces that are observable from “a bird’s eye-view” and are a posteriori accessible in the experience of actual political subjects.4 Other uses of the term, for instance, by Slavoj Žižek,5 place an exclusive emphasis on the subject, idealizing it, despite overt declarations of allegiance to materialism, dialectical or otherwise. The advantage of a existential-phenomenological political ontology is that it is capable of balancing a critical analysis of institutions and a descriptive characterization of subjective experiences. Among its adherents we might single out, in addition to Schmitt, two twentieth-century French theorists: Claude Lefort and Jean-Paul Sartre. Tackling the disincarnation of the political as a consequence of the French Revolution, Lefort successfully applied the phenomenological categories of his master, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, toward a philosophical analysis of democracy. At the core of the argument is the idea that the democratic body politic constitutes itself without a stable embodiment and that the participants in the democratic contest desire to occupy, though only temporarily, this empty place, without ever filling the ontological void of democracy. Given this promising conclusion, it is rather unfortunate that Lefort’s keen phenomenological sensibility is too abstract and totalizing, because it lacks an existential dimension, but, instead, foregrounds the most amorphous phenomenological concept of flesh, which Merleau-Ponty, too, favored.6 In turn, Sartre explored the political implications of both phenomenology and existentialism with reference to a particular political subject: the working class. Marrying Hegelian Marxism and Heideggerianism in Being and Nothingness, he came to the quintessentially Schmittian insight that the political distinction between “us” and “them” is built into political ontology from which the Third is absent.7 Nevertheless, the “Us-object” that struggles to cast off the neutralizing, oppressive Third and to constitute itself as a “We-subject” is nothing but the class-consciousness of the oppressed. The problem with Sartre is, therefore, diametrically opposed to Lefort’s theoretical shortcoming: where the latter chose an extremely abstract level of analysis for his political ontology, the former imposed on it a historical stricture of the proletarian collectivity that both trivialized other agonistic subjectivities and outlived, to a certain extent, its historical relevance. To be sure, in his private diaries, Schmitt often registered his impatience with, if not a disdain toward, phenomenology and existentialism.

6

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

In the postwar notebooks, he writes, “But the ‘I’ is not the friend, nor is the ‘non-I’ the enemy. It is not a matter of phenomenology; it is a matter of the accumulations of power in which one must assert oneself.”8 Martin Heidegger’s “ontological-existential method of interpretation” in Being and Time receives the appellation Kitschig-banal and “ethical-characteristic” (G 109–110). And, in the same notes collected in Glossarium, he calls Heidegger “my dear friend and my honored enemy” (G 263). That Schmitt underestimated the influence of phenomenology and existentialism on his own thinking has been noted by his contemporaries, such as Karl Löwith, who concludes that, “It is no accident if Heidegger’s existential ontology corresponds to a political ‘decisionism’ in Carl Schmitt, a decisionism that shifts the capacity for ‘Being-as-a-whole’ of the Dasein which is always on its own to the ‘totality’ of the state which is always one’s own.”9 What Löwith and Richard Wolin in his footsteps omit is that, in the course of human existence, this capacity is never actualized, except in the moment of death. Although the construction of the totality is the nagging obsession of Being and Time, Heidegger is mindful of how impossible such a project would be, in light of the ecstatic character of existence that does not coincide with itself due to its temporal lag behind (thrownness) and being ahead of (projection) itself. Wolin’s extension of this faulty argument to Schmitt’s writings is under a patently wrong impression that the existential preoccupation with wholeness results in political totalitarianism.10 Much ink and paper could have been saved were Heidegger’s existentialism and its consequences properly understood in terms of the impossibility of totalizing human existence in its temporal openness. Even if we are to entertain the hypothesis that Schmitt’s political thought comes into sharper relief against an extensive existential-phenomenological background, doubts will arise regarding the relevance of the proposed methodology, specifically, to a constructive theory of the political. “Existentialism and phenomenology,” writes Michael Gillespie, “live always in anticipation of a radical change that at its core may be unattainable . . . They are thus not likely to be the source of a lasting or stable politics, but they are likely to be a continuing voice of dissatisfaction with politics in its everyday incarnations.”11 It is true that one should not harbor the hope that “a lasting or stable politics” could come into being on the existentialphenomenological grounds of subjective political existence. And yet, this impossibility is not entirely negative, for it gives us a foretaste of Schmitt’s political ontology free from transcendentalist and objectivist-metaphysical

Introduction

7

prejudices. To ascertain that politics is ultimately grounded in concrete life and in collective existence is to deny that its foundations depend on any preset legal or normative parameters. The devaluation of the transcendental grounding for politics, perspicaciously observed by Mathias Schmitz,12 wakes us up to a postfoundational political ontology, the elements of which are discussed in Part I of this book. Setting the stage for this inquiry, Chapter 1 conceives of nomos, norms, and the law in terms of limiting lines and boundaries, as opposed to the exceptional point of the political, where the sovereign decision is made prior to and outside of these delineations. What Schmitt calls “the point of the political,” at which a certain quantity of antagonism qualitatively transforms and politicizes all other domains of human activity, likewise belongs in this geometry of the exception. The precariousness of the point detached from the line is rife with risk that, in the existential sense of the term, saturates all political actions and phenomena in Schmitt’s writings. The groundlessness of the political is poignantly expressed in the hopelessness of the partisan, who takes the risk of radical action and fights in the face of the overwhelming odds of defeat. It also inflects all political decisions and recognitions (of the enemy, for instance) with extreme uncertainty that liberal administrative escapism tries to eliminate by subjugating substantive questions to procedural exigencies (Chapter 2). Further accentuating the groundlessness of the political, Chapter 3 conceives of the event central to Schmitt’s political philosophy on the model of Derrida’s anti-metaphysical event of expropriation. The “purity” of the political, which is but a quantitative intensity of antagonism, hinges on the fact that—unlike economics, morality, and so on—it does not have a proper domain of its own. It, rather, ungrounds all other realms of human action, and since the possibility of politicization inheres in them, the political may be understood as their de- or expropriation. The difference and non-identity that inhabit the core of political identity, finally, take the form of a question: being put in question by the enemy as the first step toward political subjecthood and viewing the enemy as the shape of our own question. Casting existence and the human figure itself in terms of an open-ended question without a definitive, essentialist answer completes the vital elements of Schmitt’s non-objectivist political ontology (Chapter 4). The second part of Groundless Existence matches the pattern identified by Michael Gillespie, in that it presents a phenomenological critique of politics, the Schmittian “voice of dissatisfaction” with what goes under the name of politics in liberal modernity. What I call “the metonymic abuses of

8

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

modernity”—including the metonymization of the political by the state, of the constitution by constitutional laws as well as by the bourgeois constitutional framework, and of legitimacy by legality—are the substitutions of an empty and formal part for the whole, that pile layer upon layer of impersonal and dead political existence, whose historico-polemical potential has expired. Schmitt’s enterprise boils down to clearing away, by means of political-phenomenological reduction, these reified and oppressive strata in order to leave enough breathing space for the subjectivity that invests them with meaning (animates or activates them) and that is, at the same time, forgotten and lost underneath them (Chapter 5). In contrast to Gillespie’s thesis, this critical exercise is not fixated on a purely negative assessment of all actually existing and potentially plausible political arrangements but boasts a positive and constructive side, which I explore in the following chapter on “political reduction to constitutive subjectivity.” Here, I contend that the categories “political will” and “political consciousness” are much more than mere metaphysical vestiges; they are the products of postreductive attempts at theorizing the subjects, however obscured, who determine every political constellation (Chapter 6). It would not have been sufficient to outline the contours of Schmittian ontology and to recast his critique of political modernity in phenomenological terms without demonstrating how this ontology could inform political life in its actuality. In Chapter 7, I locate the living and substantive form in politics by rethinking multiculturalism on the basis of complexio oppositorum (the complex of opposites) that determines the political form of Catholicism in Schmitt’s early work. A reinvigorated multiculturalism, inspired by Schmitt, will neither predelineate the terrain for political engagements, nor project culturally specific attitudes and beliefs onto the contrived sphere of universality, but will grow out of a tense and agonistic negotiation of cultural coexistence, refusing to synthesize the radically pluralistic arrangement in one concept. In sum, these living forms of political existence owe their vivacity to their provenance from collective life that imparts to them its own plasticity and fluidity. The same sort of fluidity pertains to politics as a hermeneutic endeavor, whereby changes in political existence precipitate new determinations and interpretations of the vague evaluative concepts, such as “danger,” “emergency,” and so on. It is deeply erroneous to draw a strict line of demarcation between the active constitution-making capacity and the passive routine of interpretation, and, more specifically, to deplore those judges, whom certain American politicians dub “activist.” In doing so, one fails to realize that every interpretation is already an existential decision, which is necessarily

Introduction

9

active, transformative, and reconstituting. Since the law does not—indeed, cannot—interpret and apply itself, interpretation becomes one of the most crucial loci of the political, where the hermeneutical decisions of concrete subjects “activate” the impersonal legal and political structures, often transgressing the norm (Chapter 8). The multiplication of political interpretations self-legitimated by sovereign decisions denies the validity of positive legality, on the one hand, and the transhistorical truth of natural law, on the other. The collapse of the old transcendental certainties and the indefinite proliferation of hermeneutical acts in their place are signs of the postmetaphysical situation, since, in the words of Gianni Vattimo, “hermeneutics is not a philosophy but the enunciation of historical existence itself in the age of the end of metaphysics.”13 Political hermeneutics, in turn, does much more than enunciate the intensely political nature of historical existence; its boldness lies in the subsumption of the question concerning the meaning of Being—ontology as a whole—under the question of the specific meaning of the political. With Nietzschean flair, Schmitt will have subscribed to the claim that the hermeneutics of Being is not yet fully conscious of itself as the interpretation of the political relying, in keeping with Heidegger’s philosophy, on phenomenology and existentialism: phenomenology, since it is only through the appearing of individual beings that Being discloses itself, and existentialism, since Being gives itself to a particular kind of being— the existent human being, Dasein—for whom alone the meaning of Being presents itself as a question. Political phenomenology and political existentialism are, thus, the entwined “royal roads” to political ontology that, far from constituting an ontically circumscribed region, surpass the depth and the scope of Being as such.

Notes 1. Transcript No. 2161, “Interrogation of Carl Schmitt by Robert Kempner (III),” in Telos 72, Summer 1987, p. 105. 2. Jeffrey Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of the German Defeat (1943– 1949) (Evanston, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 306. Likewise, in the end of the last interrogation, answering Kempner’s question regarding his plans for the future, Schmitt replies, “I will retreat into the security of silence” (qtd. in PTII 1). 3. CT 265. 4. The most blatant example of this approach is Colin Wright, Agents, Structures, and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

10

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

5. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 2000). 6. For a helpful analysis on Lefort’s phenomenologically inspired political philosophy, see Bernard Flynn’s, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: 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, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 113. 9. Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 215. 10. Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State,” in The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, ed. Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 11. Michael Allen Gillespie, “The Search for Immediacy and the Problem of Political Life,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 543–544. 12. Mathias Schmitz, Die Freund-Feind-Theorie Carl Schmitts: Entwurf und Entfaltung (Köln: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1965). 13. Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in The Future of Religion, ed. S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 45.

1 Geometry of the Exception: The Point and the Line In what way, one might ask, is geometry relevant to the theory of the political built on existential and phenomenological foundations? Is it not far-fetched to appeal to this exact mathematical discipline in an effort to illuminate the messy reality and the lived experience of being-together with and against others? Appropriate as they might be, these questions take too much for granted when it comes to geometry and politics. For, what if it were possible to recast crucial political concepts, such as the decision on the exception and the political itself, not to mention the very architectonics of Schmittian ontology, in terms of a relation between the point and the line comprised of an infinite number of points? Schmitt’s texts, after all, abound in references to extreme and terminal points, points of indifference, decisive or crucial points, middle points, points of ascription, on the one hand, and borderlines, amity lines, lines of division and isolation, on the other, that come together in a kind of political topography, imperfectly overlapping the geometrical and geopolitical spatialities. Before proceeding, a few warnings should serve as the markers of the frontiers within which the spatial aspects of political ontology might be situated. On at least three occasions, Schmitt announces that he is weary of the abstraction inhering in the geometrical spirit, l’esprit géometrique (TP 69). With the emergence of the first global lines, for 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 for the spatial order of the earth to become substantive (inhalt-erfüllten), to fill in the bare outlines of the nascent geometrical abstraction (NE 86), and, concomitantly, to breathe life into

13

14

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

that political consciousness, whose object is the planet itself. Such weariness is understandable in the context of Schmitt’s philosophy that eschews abstract and “objective” political forms (e.g., the liberal Rechtsstaat) in favor of subjective sovereignty, wherein the decision on the exception abides. The geometricist impulse of the early modern philosophers who belong to the metaphysical stage of de-politicization, the impulse that led Baruch Spinoza to announce that his Ethics is Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata— “demonstrated in geometrical order”—right in the title of the book, is alien to Schmitt. Far from being a solution, the vulgarly scientific and expressly “modern” approach to politics, as much as to ethics, is a part of the problem: the meaning of the political withdraws from the modern grasp enthralled with calculations and a rational metaphysics that prides itself on having rid itself of its metaphysical origins.1 It appeals to the promoters of politics set apart from the world of experience, to “[n]arcisstic dogmatists, rendered incapable of any matter-of-fact experience as a result of their raison raisonnante” who “try to form the world according to the axioms of their political geometry” (PR 28). In a cunning, dematerializing inversion, geometrical notions are thus transformed into the ideal molds for the phenomenological, flesh-and-blood world of political experience. But that is not to say that the geometrical endeavor is simply synonymous with abstraction; the fault lines between Schmitt’s modernism and anti-modernism will pass through his opposition to the formal geometrical thinking and his equally strong insistence on the spatial dimensions of political existence. The overall project of The Nomos of the Earth is in sync with the Greek sense of geo-metria, the measurement of the earth, and, in this attunement, it resonates with Husserl’s investigations on the phenomenological origins of geometry in the subjective experience of lived space. While the genesis of the idea of a triangle lies in our encounters with concrete triangular things in the world only subsequently idealized and objectivated through repeated comparisons,2 the dry and ethereal concept of procedural justice originates from its tangible instantiation in the practical measurement and division of the earth that inflects the “root meaning” of nomos. Only a concrete geometrical consciousness prior to the machinations of objectivation is capable of operating with the primordial, earth-bound signification of nomos. Besides politicizing geometry in the conventional sense of the term by grafting it onto the acts of measuring and parceling the earth, Schmitt enunciates a uniquely political geometry, in which the point represents the exception, and the line—the rule. The unity of order and orientation in law (Recht) discussed in the first chapter of The Nomos

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

15

of the Earth is the place where the two geometries (one of them politicized, the other—intrinsically political) converge, without precluding the possibility of a certain disordering disorientation resulting from the act of deconstituting or dissolving the line back into the points it articulated. The line and the law are not simple unities but products of an aligned multitude of points and decisions that lend to them their coherence. Under the influence of this elementary geometrical tenet, no rule, no clear and precise demarcation of boundaries can do away with the disorder and the exception that persist in the irrepressible potentiality of the point, which both makes up and exceeds the line. And, conversely, the utopian project of liberalism, scornful toward the phenomenological principles of political topology, is to fabricate a disembedded linearity of law devoid of lacunae and points of rupture for sovereignty.

To the Point! Although much has been written on spatiality and, especially, on the function of lines in Schmitt’s work,3 commentators have paid virtually no attention to the invocations of the point (Punkt) that pepper his texts. This is not surprising, given that Schmitt neither accentuates nor thematizes the point left at the threshold of the perceptible and scattered throughout his textual output. We do not, for instance, hear of such a thing as the global point thinking, as opposed to the global linear thinking that has defined globalization since the first “discoveries” of the New World. I urge the reader to refrain from smiling at the strange and, perhaps, impossible endeavor of “point thinking”—Punktdenken, as Schmitt might have put it—which is immensely treacherous and uncertain and which, alone, corresponds to the radical thinking of the political. A great deal of uncertainty spawned by Punktdenken is attributable to the fact that point thinking involves two necessary and necessarily contradictory steps. On the one hand, it probes the political space below the linearity of globalization and appropriation, exposing their micrological, non-objective conditions of possibility comparable to the points that constitute the line. On the other hand, it undoes, punctuates, redraws the line, and, thereby, stands for an obstinate reminder that continuity lives off a repression of ruptures or, more concretely, that any given nomos (i.e., any given linear juridical order and orientation) destines to oblivion the point that existed before the line, the original decision for the partitioning of the earth that summoned nomos into being.

16

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

To compensate for the normative groundlessness of its origination, the line appeals, in the last instance, to definite divisions (bestimmte Einteilungen) and demarcations engraved in the literal ground, the soil: the firm line and nomos that flourishes from it can always fall back on the earth for their onto-phenomeno-political support.4 Rooted in such solidity, which Schmitt conjures up in protest to the modern predicament of rootlessness and displacement, are the acts of appropriation consonant with the most elemental sense of nomos as well as the “standards and rules,” die Maße und Regeln, for human conduct (NE 42) that, much later, will generate the abstractions of normativity forgetful of their grounding in the earth. The repression of the concrete similarly isolated by Husserl as the cause of the crisis plaguing European sciences and collective consciousness, is further exacerbated by the extension of linearity to the whole planet, whose image appears thanks to “a headlong leap into the nothingness [ein Absturz in das Nichts] of a universality lacking any grounding” (NE 237). The budding cold and uninhabitable abstraction of globality, which is but a geographic representation disengaged from the life-world of human beings, overrides the earth and the soil that bore the first lines of nomic demarcation. Yet, the extension of linearity is, in an equal measure, a rupture, a “headlong leap into the nothingness” that, strangely, mimics the accomplishments of decision-making. It punctuates that which it extends, unhinging and ungrounding the line removed from its material support in the soil. Comparable qualitative leaps and punctuations will, henceforth, accompany every attempt at redrawing the global lines and remaking the international order governed successively by the Spanish and Portuguese line of division, the English and French line of agonism and, finally, the American line of isolation. It is, therefore, in the headlong leaps of reordering that “point thinking” becomes apparent in its discontinuous, unbounded, unstable, and extranormative character. Such thinking is not predelineated or predictable because it precedes the line and dialectically accomplishes the first spatial negation of space, “a determinate, qualitative difference” of space from itself, as Hegel defines it.5 Akin to the decision that signals the end of indeterminacy and asserts its independence from infinite deliberations and rationalizations, the point is absolved from all relationality even as it negatively mediates the self-relatedness of space. This exceptional determination, this extra-normative eruption, this performative declaration that is not buoyed up by anything but itself, aptly illustrates the sovereign decision on the exception in Political Theology.

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

17

The point condensed from empty space geometrically mirrors the instant of the decision on the exception, which, besides making a mad leap, as it does in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, “[l]ooked at normatively . . . emanates from nothingness” (PT 31–32). It cannot be ascribed to any preexisting legal or political structures, despite the juristic delusions that see in the state “the terminal point of ascription [der Endpunkt der Zurechnung], the point at which the ascriptions, which constitute the essence of juristic consideration, ‘can stop’. This ‘point’ [Dieser ‘Punkt’] is simultaneously an ‘order that cannot be further derived’” (PT 19). The object of criticism in this passage is Hans Kelsen’s legal theory of imputation that uses the category “point of ascription,” Zurechnungspunkt, as a bridge between two component parts of the legal norm, the offense and the sanction. The terminal, non-derived point of ascription is the ground of legitimation for the rest of the political edifice, the “basic norm” (Grundnorm) that, Atlas-like, undergirds the entire juridical system constructed upon it. Interrupting this liberal idyll, a discerning critic will identify its irremediable flaw: positivist legal theory inverts the order of dependence when it interpolates the state, as a legal order, into the place of the terminal point. To Schmitt, the legislative state is not the source-point but something like a plane or the compound surface of the political, which is why he surrounds the word Punkt in Dieser ‘Punkt’ with quotation marks. The irony of Kelsen’s blunder does not escape him when he calls the conclusion that “a point must be an order as well as a system” an “interesting mathematical myth [der interessanten mathematischen Mythologie]”6 (PT 20), for there is a blatant contradiction in the quiet squaring of the point’s “simplicity” with the system’s complexity. As such, legality is the most derived construct and, therefore, the most superficial starting point for substantive ascription, at least in that genealogical inquiry which uncovers the non-normative origination of normativity in the sovereign decision. If 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 out the historical, changeable, and non-transcendental parameters for human actions and remains radically dependent upon the subject whose orientation infuses it with significance. In the logic of Kant’s Copernican turn, subjective orientation creates an objective order and signals “an ability to define the position of the objects by means of a subjective distinction.”7 It plays an important role in Husserlian phenomenology, too, in that there is no abstract geometrical space without the experience of spatiality and there is no experience of spatiality without an embodied orientation, an initial mapping of the things in the world as what is above and below, to

18

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

the right and to the left of my body. The sovereign decision in Schmitt is the absolutely modern subjective distinction, by means of which it is possible to define the position of political objects, or their normative ordering.8 Within the objective order, modern subjectivity, as well as the Kantian difference between the empirical and the transcendental subjects, amounts to nothing identifiable in “reality,” and so the “nothingness” attributed to the decision on the exception does not entail a positive metaphysical or mythological entity, but a subjective distinction spliced into the world of objects. Only a crisis of objectivity makes the nothingness of subjectivity and sovereignty palpable as what (or who) remains, negatively or reductively, in the wake of the upheaval, after the objective world of legality in which one had oriented oneself has collapsed, impotent to grant meaningful signposts for human action. To get back to the point from the positivist labyrinthine confusion one would need to reduce the lines and norms of the juridical order, however basic they might be, to the groundless existence of sovereign decisions. A crisis, be it economic or political, already plays the role of a historically induced reduction, which, nevertheless, awaits a theoretical elaboration. According to Schmitt’s polemic co-optation of Kelsen’s thesis, a genuine “point of ascription first determines [bestimmt] what a norm is and what normative rightness is [was eine Norm und was normative Richtigkeit ist]. A point of ascription cannot be derived from a norm” (PT 32). The underivable point turns into the catchword of existential political ontology. It first orients us toward and, in orienting, determines “what is” (was . . . ist) in the realm of law and right. A miraculous phenomenalization of empty space, a condensation of something out of the spatial or legal vacuum, it operates on the model of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of (what, from the normative standpoint, appears to be) nothing. Even in the face of its subsumption in the line, the point preserves this explosive potential. Hovering between the most precise determination and utter indeterminacy, between a single coordinate and the infinity of spatial extension it at once dialectically negates and condenses, between the isolated case of the exception and the non-formality of the logic that foregrounds it, the point verges on the erasure of the line or, at least, on the suspension of linearity. If the line traced on the ground enables the mechanisms of appropriation, then the point signals the possibility of expropriation, which is all the more grave, considering that it constitutes the line and, therefore, disturbs the workings of appropriation from within. The point’s indeterminate determination presides over everything that takes place in this essentially unstable political ontology.

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

19

Schmitt recovers the theoretical and practical significance of the decisive point through the desublimation of the line, the reversal of the Hegelian Aufhebung, and the political-phenomenological reduction of the founded planes, lines, and points of ascription to the founding, albeit groundless, level of the decision’s “positive determination”: “On what does the intellectual necessity and objectivity of the various ascriptions with the various points of ascription rest [beruht] if it does not rest on a positive determination, on a command?” (PT 20). That various ascriptions “rest” on the point (which is itself active, restless, and devoid of a substratum that could support them) does not betoken a systemic hierarchy of political ontology but the subjective groundwork of the objective order, the groundwork that is not of one piece with the system erected upon it. As a result, positive determination is accessible only negatively, by way of a reductive criticism of the founded abstractions and empty procedures that accumulate in political orders and institutions. As we shall see time and again, in his appeal to political subjectivity and in his insistence on the negative, reductive method of retrieving the positive nature of pouvoir constituant, Schmitt is fighting political modernity with its own weapons forged in the thought of 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 of his work that would be more nuanced than an oversimplified but all too common image of Schmitt-as-a-German-reactionary would permit. Let us revisit the dialectical reading of geometry in order to ascertain how the reduction of the line culminates in the point of the political. In the second volume of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Nature, just as the point dialectically negates—that is to say cancels, preserves, and elevates— indeterminate spatiality, so, in the line, the point negates itself in relation to itself as an other (or in relation to another point). The negation of the negation generates the line that annuls but also maintains and elevates the point infinitely reflected into itself. In Schmittian terms, the normalization of the exception in the norm does not do away with the exception but keeps it dormant, maintains it in a sublated form, and lives off (leibt . . . von) it (PT 15). The normalization of the exception may, at any moment, revert to the exceptionalization of the norm, as the lines of Right are undone into the points of sovereign decision-making. The contention that the legal norm is strong enough wholly to incorporate the exception is a building block in the ideal construction of the bourgeois Rechtsstaat, for which “at no point is the system ruptured, nor can it be influenced, either for the purpose or necessity of political existence” (CT 174). What liberal apologists disregard

20

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

is a straightforward geometrical axiom, according to which any line consists of an infinite number of points and is thus constituted as ruptured and discontinuous by them. The points of decision-making are the bonds as much as they are the fissures, in a word, the hinges (brisures, the Derridian “broken articulations”9), of the legal order that hangs in the balance of all political decisions, including those that reaffirm the normalcy of the situation. The bizarre liberal adherence to the non-derived simplicity of the line is, thus, a mirror image of Kelsen’s equally eccentric and anti-geometrical idea of the systematicity of the point. Regardless of what the proponents of abstract legalism might believe, the dialectic of the exception and the norm has no resolution and cannot move to a higher plane of the rule of law. A manifest lop-sidedness plagues what will have been the dialectical thesis and antithesis of the decision and the norm: when the latter prevails, the former is confined to a bare minimum, but when the former gains the upper hand, the latter is altogether destroyed (PT 12). The powers of negation are unequal and heterogeneous in the point that antecedes the line and in the line that negates, yet cannot continue to exist without, the point. The possibility of the sovereign decision on the exception, even where it concurs with the norm and deems the situation at hand to be normal, remains exceptional and non-synthetic to the extent that it stands on the brink of undoing the line into a set of disparate points. Seen in this light, Schmitt’s specification of sovereignty as a “borderline” concept, Grenzbegriff, deposits this concept, precisely, on the border, if such a thing is conceivable, between the line and the point and in the state of perpetual readiness to reduce the one to the other. As a concept “pertaining to the outermost sphere [äußersten Sphäre]” (PT 5) of political praxis and thought (the sphere that, at a distance from every plane and every system, is about to divest itself of its sphericality and to get condensed into a point), it augurs the state of exception—that dangerous point, which lies beyond and is, simultaneously, included in the line.

Beyond the Line Grenz (border), it will be remembered, is Kant’s word for the positive lines, at the same time inwardly and outwardly directed, that define and enable what they encircle, in contrast to the purely negative limits (Schränken) unrelated to exteriority, the absolute barriers that cannot be overcome. The border is defined by its two-sidedness and, therefore, by the transgressability of the line that marks it: “Bounds [Grenzen] . . . always presuppose a space outside a certain definite place and enclosing it; limits [Schränken]

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

21

do not require this, but are mere negations which affect a quantity so far as it is not absolutely complete.”10 More intriguing still is the Schmittian borderline concept that necessitates not a simple crossing of the line but the transgression of linearity as such and the subsequent inauguration of the “outermost sphere,” not to be confused with an empty political space free of concrete points and determinations. This borderline concept, for Schmitt, is sovereignty, to which corresponds the most extreme, “outermost point” (äußersten Punkte) of the political, where the quantitative increase in antagonism yields the qualitative formation of friend-enemy groupings (CP 29). In a veiled argument against Aristotle, who looked for the ideal political regime in aristocracy since it occupied the middling and moderate position between the excesses of monarchy and democracy, Schmitt consistently advocates for the extreme politics of the exception, the politics on or of the edge that tends toward the outermost point and sphere, leaving the logic of linearity and mediation behind.11 The borderline concept falls beyond the line but refuses to vacate of all determinacy the space it opens up. It might be tempting to conclude that the undertakings “beyond the line,” jenseits der Linie, that gave “free rein for looting, especially to English ‘privateers’” (NE 93) took place in the realm of absolute freedom negatively construed as the freedom from determination and legal interference, where the line is either erased or altogether non-existent. The anarchy of the sea—the element of freedom— will symbolically correspond, on the one hand, to the state of nature that becomes a receptacle for everything that happens on the international arena, “an empty space, of sorts” (LST 49), in which the relations between independent states play themselves out and, on the other, to revolutionary upheavals within a given polity. That is why the “energies of sea power [England] stood on the side of the revolution” (LST 79). Greatly facilitated by the fact that “firm lines cannot be engraved [keine festen Linien eingraben]” on the sea (NE 42), where acts beyond the line were perpetrated in the absence of the law, this interpretation envisions an undifferentiated spatiality both literally and metaphorically expressed in the vast and lawless marine expanses stridently contrasted to the nomological stability of the land. The unlimited right of appropriation, which is an offshoot of the freedom of the sea, passes into total expropriation there, where the point is not sublated into the line, the concrete geo-phenomenological principle of taking possession. While Kant recognizes the unsustainable nature of such anarchic “liberty,” for which he offers the palliative of the categorical imperative, Hegel sees in unrestrained freedom the logical outcome of the march of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

22

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Neither as determinant as the line nor as void of determination as abstract spatiality, the point’s “indeterminate determination” is what is missing from this account of the devolution of linearity in the state of exception. It is indisputable that amity lines dividing the Old World from the New separated, in the same stroke, legality from the license to use force freely and ruthlessly in the area “that the line set aside” (NE 94). But the freedom entailed in the unlimited use of force is itself handed over to a double determination. First, a particular political decision taken on this side of the line consecrates, by setting aside, a specific area where the European legal order does not apply. The realm of absolute freedom of “[e]verything that occurred beyond the line [and] remained outside the legal, moral, and political values recognized on this side of the line [was ‘jenseits der Linie’ geschieht, überhaupt außerhalb der rechtlichen, moralischen und politischen Bewertungen bleibt, die diesseits der Linie anerkannt sind]” (NE 94) burgeoned from specific legal, moral, and political processes well within the confines of jus publicum Europaeum. It has been, in fact, but a geopolitical projection of the European fantasy or dread, depending on the perspective one adopts, beyond the continental frontiers. Second, and in a somewhat circular fashion, the permanent state of exception created by the acts of European sovereignty is not a limit but the Kantian boundary that positively and reciprocally determines everything locked within the lines of legality and right. The permanent state of war beyond the line guarantees the peace, security, and civility of law and morality that are valid within European borders. The bracketing (rationalization and humanization) of war within the lines of legality is achievable exclusively thanks to its unbracketing and the unleashing of total, inhuman or non-human, enmity at the point where European public law ceases.12 “Everything that occurred [geschieht] beyond the line,” the happenings that have not, in the eyes of Europeans, merited to be counted as, stricto sensu, historical are, therefore, transformed into the determining points of reference for the construction of European “values” and “history,” as much as the “two-sided” concept of the human.13 It is naïve to work toward an absolutization of the abstract ideal of humanity (and, by extension the empty discourse of human rights) that crucially requires a denigrated other for its construction and to demand the suspension of boundaries and limits that still define it. Such naïveté gives birth to eschatological hope, “the content of which is an homo absconditus who produces himself and, moreover, produces the conditions for his own possibility” (PTII 54).14 The self-production, or what in the introduction to Political Theology II Schmitt terms “auto-composition” (PTII 34), of the human as human, without any regard

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

23

to its constitutive sub-human (animal, if not beastly) and super-human (divine) others is, at once, the aspiration and the principle of modern selfconsciousness that refuses to heed what Nietzsche has to say on the subject of humanity, tarnished from its very origins, covered in blood. The bourgeois reverie of the “self-made man” is, perhaps, the most widespread ideological expression of this principle, which, more broadly, offers a simplistic and materialistic solution to the “Münchhausen problem” in philosophy—the problem of how spirit elevates itself, as it were, by its own bootstraps.15 The essence of atheism and of secular mentality, abstract humanism is, as Ludwig Feuerbach correctly noted, a permutation of traditional theology, positing the human as the new god, that is to say, as a self-given—better yet, self-drawn—line, which is not codetermined by everything that falls outside of it. The unintended outcome of the suspension of the law that energizes the apparatus of legality on this side of the line is the extension of sovereignty and, thus, of a new determination of the exception to everything that, or everyone who, is placed in a limbo on the hither side. In contrast to Giorgio Agamben’s appropriation of the state of exception, in which pure sovereignty confronts and directly forces itself upon bare life,16 I believe that the Midas touch of sovereignty entails its infinite selfreplication at the unstable point expelled outside the normative lines of Right and, consequently, allows for its ceaseless contestation. The changes in global linear thinking bear out this claim. The relegation of the New World to the realm “beyond the line,” where unlimited, extralegal appropriation is condoned, undergoes an almost symmetrical inversion in the drawing of the “line of the elect” (Auserwähltheitslinie) that separates the American continent from Europe, and the ideals of peace-freedomjustice from the condition of bondage and war in which the Old World is hopelessly mired (NE 289). In the state of exception, the point absolved from the mechanisms of legality and subject to raw force mimetically assumes sovereignty and propagates new lines of Right that contest and overwrite the old ones. On the hither side of the line, new decisions on the exception will be made, often in direct opposition to the past acts of sovereignty that, in a sort of enabling violence, demoted whole groups and continents to the precariousness of bare life. Although decisions on the exception galvanize sovereignty, they do so groundlessly, based on an impermanent foundation that may suddenly cave in under the feet of old sovereigns who have become too complacent and taken solace in glorifying the seemingly indestructible status quo.17 Stated more generally, the old global lines must be traced back to the very point they have

24

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

propelled into the uncharted territory beyond themselves for a fresh nomos to spring forth. Such is, also, the predicament of the partisan or guerilla fighter who, at the Leninist stage, “challenges not only a line [nicht nur eine Linie], but the whole structure [Gebände] of the political and social order” (TP 48). Taking on the risk of a hopeless fight and understanding the stakes of not being recognized as, nor being accorded the dignity of, an enemy combatant (the experience of the Guantanomo Bay detainees is only the latest exemplification of this), these political subjects place themselves beyond the line and, thereby, threaten the linearity and the “whole structure” they are fighting against. As in the most recent restitching of the nomos of the earth that has ended in the now overripe pax americana, the exceptional point engenders a new sovereign agency, with the main difference being that partisans stagger between the sovereign decision on the exception and their confinement to the exception as such, partaking of both extremes. The “irregular space of partisan warfare” is tantamount to the state of exception, in which the partisan is the “center-point [Mittelpunkt] of a new way to make war, whose meaning and goal was the destruction of the existing social order” (TP 61, 62). More will need to be said on the subject of this “center” that shares more traits with the excessiveness of the logical “excluded middle” than with the middling and moderate stance adopted by Aristotle. Be this as it may, the emergent sovereign agents bestow alternative meanings on the world now phenomenologically remapped in accordance with the experience of their new political bodies, so that the world as a whole cannot remain the same as it was before these acts of resignification. In keeping with the first two examples—the American line of the elect and the partisan challenge—of the nascent sovereign decisions made beyond the line in defiance of the already existing demarcations that denigrated them in the first place, the hypothetical construction of the human in the Hobbesian state of nature should produce an alternative, “beastly” kind of sovereignty, as I have referred to it elsewhere.18 Every venture that transgresses the nomic line encounters “man” as “nothing but a wolf among other men, just as ‘beyond the line’ man confronts other men as a wild animal [als wildes Tier]” (NE 95). This time, the line beyond which humanity is consumed in the abyss of wild animality is the onto-metaphysical and political boundary set in place in order to restrain, in the manner of the Katechon, beastly sovereignty that colludes with the sovereign decision on the exception at the point of extra-legality. Rather than a bastion of tamed, impassive, resigned bare life, the animalized state of nature, as much as

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

25

the state of exception which it allegorically duplicates,19 teems with overly active agents who confront one another as though they were disparate points scattered outside the confines of the law. It is the generic nightmare of the political state that establishes itself at a distance from this threat of disorder but, at the same time, never excludes the scenario of sliding back into the prepolitical pandemonium, which is supposed to be more terrifying than its own awesome glory, gloire shining with the borrowed light of the subdued chaos. The point of animality exiled outside human borders reciprocally determines the metaphysical content of “man,” even as, from a diametrically opposed side, the “superhuman” figure of the mortal god, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, confers on us our humanness by transforming “wolves into citizens” (LST 31). This is but one instance of the innumerable categorial transgressions between the human, the beastly, the divine, and the thingly-machinic, in which Schmitt revels while reading Hobbes. As a whole, they amount to what I term “mythical criticism”—the indictment of the nominalist-empiricist distinctions between “the human,” “the animal,” and “the thing” by the mythical totality of the Leviathan, which erases their borders and in which they fuse, passing into one another. The critique of modernity from the standpoint of myth should not appear strange from the perspective of Schmitt’s presentiment that the wholly modern notion of the state is but the shell that remains of the full mythical body. The modern state is an impoverished myth, a mythical body robbed of its sovereign soul, a machine expected to run on its own thanks to the magic of legal self-administration. In its totality, myth is condensed into a disruptive point that erases the onto-metaphysical lines drawn, since Aristotle, between the thing, the living thing (the animal), and the political animal (the human). Or, should we say, rather, that the line erases itself, because, likewise since Aristotle, it has contained and anticipated its own transgression, insofar as the animal is, at the same time, a thing, albeit an ensouled one, while the human is an animal, with the supplement of the political? If this is so, then, enacting a deconstruction of objectivist metaphysics, myth not only has a stronger purchase on truth than any species of modern nominalism, but also muthos is the truth of the discourse that pertains fully to logos and that, for the first time, calls itself “metaphysical.” It should be clear, however, that Hobbes does not—indeed, cannot— explicitly inscribe the anarchic point into “the irresistible and overpowering huge machine of the state.” One is admitted into this seductive mechanism only on the condition of being forever deprived of the right to resist the

26

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Leviathan by siding with the other beast of the abyss, the Behemoth, that symbolizes revolutionary upheavals, chaos, and anarchy: There are no points of departure for a right to resist . . . It has no place whatsoever in the space governed by the irresistible and overpowering huge machine of the state. It has no starting point, location, and viewpoint: It is “utopian” in the true sense of that word. (LST 46)20 The points of departure for the right to resist are absent from the terrain performatively created by the acts of the Leviathan. That is not to say that there will be no disturbances of state order, nor does it mean that the “mortal god” can withstand the dissolutions of political unity into the chaotic state of nature already visible in the broken mirror of civil war, with which Hobbes himself was painfully familiar. Schmitt suggests, instead, that, for Hobbes, successful resistance translates into a ground-shift, a change of political topology, a transmogrification of political space as a whole, not a rearrangement of points and lines within the old spatiality. A noncompromising choice pertains to the moment just before the birth of the Leviathan: either right without resistance, or resistance without right; either the political state, or the state of nature. The u-topia or the placelessness of the point of departure for the right of resistance implies that this point is impossible to attain within the state: it would cease to border on the absurd only in a different landscape of signification, one that is no longer or not yet shaped by the Leviathan. In a more colloquial sense of “utopia,” this aporetic right is but a liberal daydream meant to make the mechanicity of the administrative state more tolerable. If, in the dialectical scheme of things, the line is the negation of the negation that both cancels out and maintains the points comprising it, then Schmitt’s quasi-geometrical approach to politics follows Hegel no further, refusing to elevate the line into a higher plane by means of another negation. Schmitt recommends, instead, a suspension of the negation proper to linearity and a release of the active political point from the limits, wherein it has been deactivated. The state of exception is this explosive discharge of the point, when statutory norms are “set aside . . . for a certain time, so that the limitation of political action . . . does not apply for this period” (CT 156). The inapplicability of constitutional limitations should not give us the impression that the exceptional point of the political represents an exuberant positivity and unlimited freedom, since it is subject to the indeterminate determinations enumerated above. The simple fact that the sovereign decides on the exception puts a provisional end to indeterminacy, in that

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

27

every sovereign determination falls short of preventing the fluctuations of political existence, which, like all existence, privileges the virtual and the possible and is always ahead of itself and of the static legal-political order. That is why the hope for a borderless cosmopolitanism oblivious to the space and the exceptional points beyond the neo-liberal lines of Right (e.g., WTO) is misplaced. No attempt to redraw the global lines will eliminate them entirely: “new amity lines [neue Freudnschaftslinien] will be drawn beyond [jenseits] which atomic and hydrogen bombs will fall” to keep the promise of peace and security within them (NE 49).21 Beyond the line— the point: the dispersion of the state of nature and the New World, the extralegality of the partisan and wild animality, the explosions of atomic and hydrogen bombs, resembling the splitting of the unitary point. And beyond the point—post-atomic space. Asking himself in one of his diaries which “line” will become predominant after the atomic explosion, Schmitt responds: No global line in the sense of raya, amity line, or the line of the Western Hemisphere . . . and, in general, no line whatsoever, but only space [Keine globale Linie, im Sinne der Raya, Amity line oder Linie der westlichen Hemisphäre . . . sondern überhaupt keine Linie mehr, sondern ein Raum]. (G 180–181)

The Extremism of the Middle Point Nothing could be further away from the border or the edge than the middle point. This statement obtains in a conventional geometrical way of thinking, as well as in the juridical vindication of the “hierarchical order that is legally valid in the state [and that] rests on the premise that authorization and competences emanate from the uniform central point [einheitlichen Mittelpunkt] to the lowest point” (PT 19). The center regulates, moderates, and mediates between the extremes that, in turn, exchange their extremism for the diluted authority it delegates. Insofar as Schmitt takes interest in the middle point, however, he does not assign to it the power of moderation but the sort of excessiveness that forecloses all dialectical mediations. He takes the side of the French counter-revolutionary philosopher Louis de Bonald against Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and expresses his preference for the moral disjunctions (moralische Disjunktionen) of the “either-or” type over the polarities (Polaritäten) that can be dialectically manipulated into an indifference point (Indifferenzpunkt) or synthesized into the higher third (PT 54–55). Indifferenzpunkt, usually taken as the

28

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

center or the place of equilibrium, relieves the polarities of their antagonistic relation. But it is resourceless in the face of the either-or disjunctions that lack a middle ground and, as a result, maintain their oppositionality and non-indifference. As Schmitt reiterates in Roman Catholicism, the search for the indifference point of a polarity starts with a “real cleavage” of “an antithesis that calls for a synthesis,” passes through the moment of “profound indecision,” which could potentially precipitate the need for political decision-making, and ends with the escapism of “self-negation in order to arrive at [positive] positions” (RC 9). The coveted indifference point is, thus, not a point of rupture but, on the contrary, the fantasy of a sutured “real cleavage,” a point miraculously converted into a line. It is the by-product of a fictitious humanism, where Homo Homini Homo, Man is Man to Man—“Homo Homini Homo, das ist der Nullpunkt der reinen Indifferenz [Homo Homini Homo, this is the null-point of pure indifference]” (G 8222)—and where, consequently, extreme nihilism, a by-product of the absolute and intrinsic value of the human, reigns supreme. An absence of middle ground does not bar the existence of a groundless and disjunctive midpoint where decisions and other existential attributes come into their own. The line from Bonald cited by Schmitt—“Je me trouve constamment entre deux abîmes, je marche toujours entre l’être et le néant”23—turns the “I” itself into this middle point torn between two abysses and, in this torsion, converted into yet another abyss. The missing middle between the “either” and the “or” that do not converge under any circumstances is the logical excluded middle transplanted into existential spatiality. Schmitt’s own designation of the partisan as the “center-point [Mittelpunkt] of a new way to make war” might be interpreted, in this sense, in terms of a point excluded from everywhere, expelled beyond the furthest margins and peripheries, criminalized, and refused the modicum of respect that goes along with the status of the enemy. The exclusion, or, indeed, the self-exclusion of partisans from the sphere of Right charges with incontrovertible gravity Bonald’s statement that, otherwise, risks sliding into an idle metaphysical speculation. The partisans alone can rightly locate themselves between two precipices, as they face the choice between either the risk of a hopeless fight that desperately holds onto the shreds of political being or a quiet resignation and a soft descent into political nothingness. Although, from the perspective of state order, the partisan is less than nothing, from the vantage point of the political, this figure is at the centerstage or in the middle point (“our sure point of reference [Richtpunkt],” as Schmitt writes) that “frees us from general genealogies of the philosophy

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

29

of history and leads us back to the reality [Wirklichkeit] of revolutionary development” (TP 45). The partisan point of reference disentangles itself from “general genealogies,” that is to say, from the tendential lines that are always more or less ideal to the extent that they represent the rays eradiating from the Sun that is the philosophy of history. (If the reality of revolutionary development is non-linear or non-genealogical, how do we reconcile it with the Schmittian genealogy of the partisan that, in the same text, runs from Clausewitz to Lenin, from Lenin to Mao, and from Mao to Salan? Isn’t this somewhat despondent appeal to the “sure reference point” an attempt to transcend from within the very genealogy he has drafted?) In this disentanglement, in this freeing up of the point from the line that has neutralized and desiccated it, Schmitt encrusts a miniature image of the liberation of the political, the renaissance of politics from the excluded middle point, to which liberal ideology has consigned it. The extraction of the point from the line stages a clash between the purely economic principle of appropriation and the act of political expropriation. Whereas the lines defining the order of ownership along with the entire nomos of the earth are eco-nomic, in the broad sense of being a sine qua non for the act of appropriation, the point is incapable of safeguarding anything, given that it marks the moment of rupture in the linear order of limits and boundaries consecrating the right of possession. To secure the concept of property and private property simpliciter, liberal thought strives to replace the political point with the stability of the economic line: [L]iberal concepts typically move between ethics (intellectuality) [Geistigkeit] and economics (trade) [Geschäft]. From this polarity [polaren Seiten] they attempt to annihilate the political as a domain [as eine Sphäre] of conquering power and repression [Gewalt, violence, MM]. The concept of private law serves as a lever and the notion of private property forms the center of the globe [das Zentrum des Globes], whose poles—ethics and economics—are only the contrasting emissions from this central point [dieses Mittelpunktes]. (CP 71) In the polar contrast between ethical spirit and economic matter, there are no existential disjunctions, since these opposites are, in fact, modifications of the same notion, that is, private property. The political middle point (Mittelpunkt) is doubly overwritten with the center (Zentrum) of the globe, which enroots the sham contrast in metaphysical sameness, and with the absolutist point of indifference, Indifferenzpunkt, that was a “forerunner of the modern type of economic thinking and of a political state of affairs”

30

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

(RC 16).24 In the vernacular of Roman Catholicism and the Political Form, the political, condensed in “concrete representation,” shuttles between, without synthesizing or falling into either disjunction, the invisibility of spirit and the visibility of matter; it endures as the excluded middle between the visible and the invisible. Now, the liberal master plan for the annihilation of the political is a second-degree exclusion of the excluded middle, responsible for the atrophying of the point into the line of the meridian emitted from the center of the globe to its ethical and economic, spiritual and thingly, polarities. In this process, the political itself is understood as a domain or a sphere (Sphäre) modeled after the globality of the economic—a deleterious misconception that we will dispute on a later occasion. That the liberal conceptualization is misguided is already made plain by the description of the political as a realm of power and violence, since these phenomena are not purely political, unlike the friend-enemy distinction or the sovereign decision on the exception. The liberal attempt to destroy the political is a priori doomed, for the simple reason that it misses its target: the political is not a sphere but the outermost point, which does not coincide with those elements (power and violence) that are imputed to it. De-politicization fails to do away with the political; the exclusion of the excluded middle only deepens what it negates, instigating the unrest and the expropriating effects of the point. On the eighteenth-century metaphysical line (Linie) of progress, which “moved between two points [die Linie bewegte sich zwischen zwei Punkten]: from religious fanaticism to intellectual liberty, from dogma to criticism, from superstition to enlightenment, from darkness to light” (CP 73), this exclusion still retained an imprint of the political in the dualisms that did not admit a higher third and eschewed the power of mediation. Nineteenth-century dialectics triangulated and reconciled the polarities of the preceding century in the syntheses that diluted “the polemical punch” of the antinomies, contributing to their further neutralization (CP 74). The synthetic midpoint was the apex of de-politicization, where the middle became wholly interchangeable with moderation, even though the “restlessness of the negative” in the movement of the Notion rendered moderation itself immoderate by transmuting every middle point into an extreme thesis for the next dialectical stage. The twentieth century did not remorsefully retrieve eighteenth-century metaphysics but anachronistically read Kant after Hegel, projected Hegel onto Kant, or suspended dialectics at the threshold between the two philosophers (the best representatives of these trends were Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

31

Derrida’s Glas, and Walter Benjamin’s variations on “the dialectics at a standstill”). What, then, is the fate of the middle point in the suspension of dialectics? Heidegger’s political extremism is embroiled in his desire to reclaim the spiritual and ontological middle point, the nationalist analogue of which is Germany. In the “Rectorship Address,” resorting to what Geoff Waite fittingly identified as “the old pincers or convergence theory,”25 he locates spirit (Geist) in the geopolitico-metaphysical Germany, which is in the middle of the middle (hence, the pincers): the center of Europe, itself located between the two empires of the Soviet Union and the United States that stand for what is metaphysically the same (hence, the convergence). The extremism of the middle point relies on the “great decision,” die grosse Entscheidung, leading to the deployment of “new spiritual forces from this middle place [aus der Mitte].”26 For Heidegger, this standpoint is not accidental, in that it permits spirit to assemble entities under the auspices of Being. Spirit is, perhaps, nothing but a misnomer for the most crucial effects of Being, the gathering of beings into the One. The proximity of the Heideggerian alternative to Schmitt is unmistakable both in the timbre of the Address and in the elements of its textual economy, including the decision. In 1925, Schmitt, too, located Germany at the point of intersection (im Schnittpunkt) of the British world interests and the French continental-European interests.27 The difference is that, at this crossroads, the middle place of spirit was the locus of victimization evident in the post-war reparations, an international imposition Schmitt found reprehensible and juridically inexcusable. (It should be mentioned that he also rearticulated Heidegger’s idea in 1948, when he wrote that “Berlin lies in the flight path [literally, flight-line, Luftlinie] between New York and Moscow . . . but this line gives neither an orientation, nor an order [Berlin liegt in der Luftlinie zwischen New York und Moskau . . . [a]ber diese Linien ergeben keine Ortung und keine Ordnung]” (G 192). The clear allusion, in this passage, to the beginning of The Nomos of the Earth, with its emphasis on the unity of order and orientation, refuses the status of the new nomos to the line connecting two points that are metaphysically the same and, in this very move, reveals that Germany itself is hopelessly subsumed in the “meaningless” line.) Admittedly, the extremism of the unstable and unpredictable middle point may lead us along various blind alleys and monstrous venues but, despite this ever-present possibility, the wholesale identification of political rebirth, let alone of the rebirth of the political, with the

32

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

nationalist and National-Socialist legacy is indefensible. The point of the political is left vacant and radically inappropriable by this or that ideology because, as Schmitt soberly recognizes, it is always on the verge—or at the point—of immanent transcendence puncturing the status quo, the established order, and those domains of human action and thought that are not classified as political.

The Point of the Political Schmitt atomically splits the point of the political between the sovereign decision on the exception and the existential intensity of friend-enemy groupings. A lion’s share of what is thus divided pertains to the sovereign, who, along with deciding on the friend-enemy distinction, determines whether or not the extreme point has been reached: For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case—and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it—determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. (CP 49) In an analogy to Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology, the living source-point, the Augenblick of politicization, “breaks into two, detaches from itself, and—split against itself—becomes contrapuntal.”28 The moment of the decision is the “decisive point” (entscheidenden Punkt) that liberalism suspends “by denying that there was at all something [etwas] to be decided upon” (PT 61). The form of the decision is adjourned due to the denegation of the matter (something, etwas), on which it will have impressed itself at the point of the political. The indeterminacy of “something,” the Scholastic quodlibet ens, is delivered from its existential determination by the decision and handed over to a specification by the impersonal economic apparatus and the rule of law that, at bottom, cloak a dictatorial decision-making authority. Below the level of liberal de-politicization, the point of the political signals a coupling of the most decisive determination and an indeterminacy of “something.” The quality of determinate indetermination, which is so dissimilar to the definite divisions produced by the line, pertains to the point of the political in the nominalist philosophical method of Hobbes, who “seemed to be able to construct the unity of the state from any arbitrarily given point [von jedem beliebig gegeben Punkt]” (PT 34), as much as in Romantic occasionalism, which “makes it possible to take any concrete

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

33

point as a departure and stray into the infinite and the incomprehensible” (PR 19), and in the political-theological totality of spirit and matter, “potentially attainable from every standpoint” (PTII 44). The momentary incarnation of the universal in the singular dispenses with dialectical mediations and reflects the contemporary logic of the political. For a polemical instant, the point becomes metonymically interchangeable with the whole (e.g., when the bourgeois model of legality presents itself as the source of all legitimacy in the struggle against the old aristocracy or when undocumented immigrants in France are championed as the oppressed in the fight for their rights), yet it cannot hold onto such determinations of the totality without turning into the most rigid of lines. The non-dialectical intersections of the singular and the universal will be justified retrospectively, once the unity of the state or any other totality dissolves back into the point from which it was attained. When Schmitt marvels at the fact that, in practice and not just in Hobbesian theory, “from every ‘domain’ the point of the political is reached [vom jedem ‘Sachgebiet’ aus der Punkt des Politischen . . . erreicht ist]” (CP 62) as soon as the antagonisms structuring these domains surpass a certain threshold necessary for the formulation of the friend-enemy distinction, he, again, alludes to the determinate indetermination of the point, the precision of which derives from very “loose” origins (“every ‘domain’”). I will reread, shortly, this dense statement from The Concept of the Political, underlining the word “domain.” For now, suffice it to say that the notion of the political in Schmitt is existentially understood as the politicizability of human existence, as the possibility inherent in what is, stricto sensu, non-political. The conjunction of determinacy, at the precise threshold where antagonisms are politicized, and indeterminacy, at whatever point of departure for this movement, makes the political, at the same time, the most common and the most exceptional “thing,” the point to which all lines of human existence tend and at which they terminate, melting into pure intensities of antagonistic affect not to be confused with hatred. In this political geometry, the point and the line are not frozen in space; the unstable point, rather, makes every line into a vector lacking a teleological actualization in any particular regime or nomological order. Schmitt uses the same German verb erreichen, meaning “to arrive” or “to reach,” in his explanation of what happens when these trajectories do not come to fruition in the point but are arrested halfway. “It would be an indication,” he writes, “that these counterforces had not reached the decisive point of the political [den entscheidenden Punkt des Politischen nicht erreicht haben] if they turned out to be not sufficiently powerful to prevent

34

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

a war contrary to their interests or principles” (CP 39). The possibility of non-arrival and, thus, the impossible, is the very possibility of possibility that, in contrast to potentiality, does not epitomize a latent form of actuality. That the oppositions structuring non-political domains do not reach the point of the political, even though their politicization remains possible, is not an accidental deficiency but the existential aporia of politicizability. Were they to be successful and to “become the new substance of the political entity [die neue Substanz der politischen Einheit]” (CP 39), the existential form, which stands above this substance, would not have been altered and, independent of all actualizations, would have continued to be oriented by futural possibilities. (“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict,” Schmitt reminds us in the same paragraph.29) The extreme point of the political that exudes existential possibilities cannot be surpassed once and for all in any temporarily hypostatized oppositional grouping or sovereign decision. Since no one substantialization of the political is adequate, the point is dispersed into a multiplicity of points, where the figure of the enemy becomes phenomenally accessible: “The high points of big politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, spotted as the enemy [Die Höhepunkte der großen Politik sind zugleich die Augenblicke, in denen der Feind in konkreter Deutlichkeit als Feind erblickt wird]” (CP 67).30 The wordplay on Augenblick (the moment or, literally, the blink of an eye) and erblicken (to see or to spot) is, certainly, calculated and is intended to accentuate the concrete clarity and lucidity with which the enemy figure is apprehended. The phenomenological Augenblick in Husserl is the moment of pure and living present when I hear myself speak at the source of inner psychic life, while in Heidegger it is the instant of resoluteness, the conscious seizing of one’s finitude.31 The living present of the political, for Schmitt, is a disparate multiplicity of pointed moments in a properly existential dispersion, where the strange phenomenologization of the enemy, of the alien, of the other, breathes life and meaning into politics. Such high points are not dialectically negated in a line; on the contrary, they form the mountain peaks of Nietzsche’s “monumental history” with its demand that every “summit of such long-ago moment [Augenblick] shall be for me still living, bright, and great.”32 But it is this phenomenality that, finally, becomes problematic in contemporary politics for reasons that are both contingent and necessary. The partisans, for instance, are not granted recognition as enemies; their

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

35

criminalization by the authorities deadens the political existence that had come to life thanks to their actions. More irreparably still, partisan invisibility in the age of absolute enmity, when the figureless foe appears to be omnipresent, is a product of the dissolution of concrete contours that used to define the conventional enemy. Such dissolution is entirely consistent with the internal critique of presence and visibility in non-political phenomenology. Following Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, the Augenblick of pure phenomenality lapses into its literal sense and signifies the blink of an eye: a gaping absence, invisibility, or non-phenomenality in the midst of pure presence and the possibility of death that, incidentally, haunts the encounter with the enemy as the flipside of political life. When the linearity of the outlines melts into an infinite number of antagonistic points, when the refusal to recognize the enemy is rendered obsolete by the circumstances, in which this recognition is structurally impossible, then the core of the political turns into the indwelling of risk.

Notes 1. Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. T. Pangle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49. 2. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie: Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1886–1901) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002). As for a broader significance of geometry, in Ideas I, §72, Husserl asks “whether a phenomenology must be, or can be, constituted as a ‘geometry of mental processes’ ” (p. 161). 3. See, for example, Jari Kauppinen, “Law without Place: Topology and Decision. Questions of Line and Literature,” in Law and Critique 9 (2), 1998, pp. 225–248; William Rasch, “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 the Spaceless Universalism of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror,” in The International Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order, ed. L. Odysseos and F. Petito (London: Routledge, 2007). 4. That is why Deleuze and Guattari’s wager on “the lines of flight” in A Thousand Plateaus is doomed from the start. No line can flee from the definitive order it first originates. 5. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miler (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 2004, Paragraph 256, p. 31. 6. Translation modified. 7. Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 239. 8. In Political Romanticism Schmitt’s methodology hinges on the identification of the romantic subject, not on listing a series of romantic objects or themes: “The definition of

36

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

the romantic cannot proceed from any object or theme that is perceived as romantic, from the Middle Ages or from a ruin. On the contrary, it should proceed from the romantic subject” (p. 3). 9. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), the section titled “La Brisure” (p. 65 and ff ). 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 of moderation but also the tripartite classification of political regimes, which he replaces with the taxonomy of legislative, administrative, governmental, and jurisdiction states. Cf. the Introduction to Legality and Legitimacy titled “The Legislative State System of Legality Compared to Other State Types (Jurisdiction, Governmental, and Administrative States)” in LL 3–14. 12. So, also, when “war remains fundamentally bracketed, . . . the partisan ends up outside this bracketing [Hegung]” (TP 16–17). 13. “Bacon said the Indians were ‘proscribed by nature itself ’ as cannibals. By no means is it paradoxical that none other than humanists and humanitarians put forward such inhuman arguments, because the idea of humanity is two-sided and often lends itself to a surprising dialectic” (NE 103). 14. Simply put, “Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity. Even the murderer, at least as long as he lives, must be treated as a human being” [Carl Schmitt, “The Legal World Revolution,” Telos 72, Summer 1987, p. 88.] 15. Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 15. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 66. 17. Indeed, the point is symbolic of postfoundationalism in political theory and praxis. 18. Refer to my essay, “Taming the Beast: The Other Tradition in Political Theory,” in Mosaic 39 (4), December 2006, pp. 47–60. 19. Hence, Agamben: “The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process” (Homo Sacer, p. 37). 20. The third main consequence of the institution of the Commonwealth includes the following clause: For he voluntarily entered into the Congregation of them that were assembled, he sufficiently declared thereby his will (and therefore tacitly covenanted) to stand to what the major part should ordayne: and therefore if he refuse to stand thereto, or make Protestation against any of their Decrees, he does contrary to the Covenant, and therefore unjustly. [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 123] 21. This is one of the argumentative threads in my interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right titled “Given the Right—Of Giving (in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)” [Epoché 12, Fall 2007, pp. 93–108]: Our key task is to think right and line together . . . [W]e cannot exclude a real possibility of redrawing the lines of right . . . There is no reason to doubt that lines and

Geometry of the Exception: The Point and The Line

37

rights are indispensable to a world that is not entirely awry, undifferentiated, and chaotic. Strict ontological necessity puts their irreversible erasure out of question. This is not to say, however, that lines and rights ought to be impervious to interrogation, critique, and re-marcation. (p. 107) 22. Schmitt cites the same sentence from Vitoria in NE 95 and PTII 54. 23. “I find myself constantly between two abysses, I walk always between being and nothingness” (qtd. in PT 55). 24. “The absolute prince and his ‘mercantilism’ were the forerunners of the modern type of economic thinking and of a political state of affairs situated somewhere in the indifference point between dictatorship and anarchy” (RC 16). 25. Geoff Waite, “Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence,” in Cultural Critique 69, Spring 2008, p. 131. 26. Quoted in Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 45. 27. Carl Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe: im Kampf mit Weimer-Genf-Versaille, 1923– 1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), p. 40. 28. Michael Marder, The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 104. 29. It would be too facile to respond, in retrospect, to Schmitt’s interrogators at Nuremburg, who tried to ascertain his direct responsibility for war crimes, by insisting on the 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 phenomenologically described what happens in the case of war. That is because the emphasis on the existential notion of possibility—“What matters is only the possibility of conflict”—complicates the neat distinction between the normative and the ontological. The possible is not the normative Idea (in the Kantian sense) that should guide our conduct, but neither is it the actual, present, and objectifiable “reality” of war. Just as the existential conception disrupts the binary symmetry of the normative and the actual, so Schmitt’s concept of the political that hinges upon politicizability as a result of the shifting intensities of friend-enemy groupings is neither purely descriptive, nor entirely ideal. 30. Translation modified. 31. Rüdiger Safranski [Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001)] recognizes the conceptual connection between Heidegger’s moment of decisive resoluteness and Schmitt’s “moment of decision,” Augenblick der Entscheidung, as well as Paul Tillich’s Kairos, and other such “moments” traceable back to the philosophy of Kierkegaard (p. 199). 32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 68.

2 The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk The trope of risk holds an enormous potential for the development of the social sciences, the humanities, and the emergent supra-disciplinary field exceeding these traditional designations.1 Without claiming to compile a representative sample, it is enough to cast a glance at a few of these disciplines to detect the unifying, but still invisible thread that binds them. From the work of Ulrich Beck in sociology, to Susan Strange’s ground-breaking book in heterodox economics, to “the fourth dimension” of “the desire of philosophy” explored by Alain Badiou, “risk” comes to the forefront of research and of human life in late modernity.2 Yet, despite the forays of these and other authors into the themes that touch upon public policy and political philosophy, a distinctly political theory of risk that would break free from “zero-sum game” mentality is lacking. This gap, I insist, is not fortuitous, given the modern reactionary understanding of risk in a strictly economic context that impinges upon the more general sense of the term. Only an existential political theory, such as the one we find in Schmitt’s writings, is capable of grasping “risk” as an aneconomic, incalculable possibility and of handling it riskily, that is, without trying to diminish its intensity, without shying away from the uncertainty and permanent instability associated with it. Before extracting the highly promising, albeit somewhat marginal, invocations of risk in Schmitt’s writings, I wish to adumbrate the scope of such a task. On the one hand, it could be argued that this trope restores a certain “spiciness” to Schmitt’s theory of the political by way of bringing into a greater relief its distinguishing existential and experiential components.3 This claim would inscribe risk within a narrow range of significance. One might conclude, on the other hand, that risk is one of the organizing concepts for the category of the political,4 and, thus, attribute to it a much broader import. I propose to carve out an approach that does not coincide 38

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

39

with either of these positions but considers some of the Schmittian contributions to political theory with reference to risk, which is more than a mere theoretical ingredient and less than a conceptual cornerstone. A destabilizing and, at the same time, enabling factor in the politics of recognition and decision-making, it cultivates existential possibilities that populate the field of the political.

A Taxonomy of Risk Schmitt constructs his taxonomy of risk in Theory of the Partisan. Resisting the dissolution of the concept into an all-purpose, emptied out construct “that blurs all borders,” he differentiates between two modalities of risk, the “general” and the “pregnant” (TP 30). The former mode entails the “insecurity and danger” that permeate the zone of a military conflict, when “the area’s entire population turns out to be involved in a risky situation” (TP 28). It is, then, the kind of risk that is amenable to political management and manipulation skillfully exercised in the US-led War on Terror, where the vague promise of security warrants a perpetuation and an intensification of danger and insecurity for others (e.g., the Iraqi civilian population), or in the harnessing of the fear and trembling one feels when boarding a bus in Israel and translating these affects into votes for right-wing hardliners. The general sense of risk permeates the situation of peril that is socially diffuse, that does not depend on the will of those involved in it, and that gives a negative impetus to its participants, who want to avoid it even at the cost of their own “rights” and “freedoms.” The partisans who entertain “the risk of a hopeless fight,” conversely, know themselves to be “that cannon fodder used by great world powers for their armed conflicts” (TP 14). The pregnant sense of risk they experience cannot be manipulated because, in a state devoid of hope, the partisans do not anticipate a restoration of normalcy and security—at least not for themselves—and because they willingly assume the danger instead of evading it. Often, frustrated by their inability to exploit the effects of such risk, the “enlightened” Western leaders portray those who take it at their own peril and that of the others as barbarically disrespectful toward the absolute value of human life and, with this, relegate the enemy to the status of a non- or sub-human. For them, it is inconceivable that someone—a risktaking partisan and its contemporary avatar, the terrorist—could avoid risk-avoidance, sever one’s conatus essendi (the Spinozan “tie to being”), and throw oneself headlong into the future with its uncertainties, dangers, and difficulties. (We might note that “dangers and difficulties at sea” is one

40

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

of the earliest semantic layers of “risk” in Antiquity.) The partisan runs aground in the turbulence and uncertainty of the political, having refused to keep away from peril or to navigate around the extremes in an attempt to negotiate a safe middle route between the threat of biological death and the certainty of political annihilation in an emergency situation. The pregnant sense of risk condenses in itself the experience of groundlessness, but it is not to be conflated with the pessimist or fatalist attitudes toward politics that mark the contemporary nihilism of political nonparticipation. In an apparent paradox, what instigates partisan activity is the total renunciation of rights in the spirit of juridical passivity and in an extreme reaction that overflows the distinction between the active and the passive subjective comportments, the Nietzschean dichotomy of self-affirmation and ressentiment. At the same time that the partisan “acts in a risky way [in diesem Sinne riskant handeln . . .], exposes himself personally to the danger and also takes into account the eventual negative consequences of his actions,” he explicitly becomes the uninsurable par excellence and cannot appeal to the principles of justice—“so that he cannot consider it an injustice when these consequences hit him” (TP 29). The pregnant sense of risk diverges entirely from the juridico-economic logic, where reparations, settlements, and insurance compensations balance out the losses or the injustices, and veers on the side of the political. It is this renunciation of Right and of rights—the legal passivity of partisan subjects not precluding an active exercise of their political will—that renders their actions so potent and dangerous. Partisans risk their lives in the full knowledge that these lives, lived outside the order of legality, are neither legal, nor illegal, but extralegal. Political risk, then, is what we subject ourselves to when we step outside the bounds, limits, and lines that have defined Right ever since Kant and Hegel in German philosophy. It forms an experiential supplement to the “point of the political,” where to risk oneself is not just to live on the edge but to step over the line and the threshold, to thrust oneself into the abyss, to sneer at the arts of navigation and negotiation that are indispensable to the politics of “small tricks,” as Lenin derisively put it. The differences between the two usages of risk run much deeper still, and we will be able to gauge some of them if we pay close attention to the formal structure of the concept to which they belong. X risks Y for the sake of Z:5 in addition to corroborating the intentional specificity of risk, as opposed to the more diffuse associations of “threat” and “dangerousness,” the formula before us draws a sharp division between the two senses of the term. Where X (the partisan) and Z (telluric goals) remain constant across the dividing line, Y varies so that, in the first case, it stands

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

41

for the population at large, and, in the second, it symbolizes the partisan. In the partisan figure, in the barely perceptible—to the point of nearly merging with the background against which it stands—figure of those who put themselves at stake both as living beings and as legal subjects (TP 31), the risking and the risked coalesce. The pregnant sense of the concept will elude us unless we acknowledge the doubling of the risking and of the risked in the same figure and the sort of active passivity of those who identify, simultaneously, with the subject and with the object of risk. Stated in a somewhat drier academic manner, the gap between the two meanings of risk amounts to the grammatical distinction between risk as a noun and as a verb. But, nota bene, there is also the unnamed third category of risk lurking in the same text. With prognostic accuracy, Schmitt pinpoints the dangers that a “police functionary” in the occupied territory faces, insofar as “the occupying power expects him to maintain security and tranquility, which is what the partisans violate, while his nation-state expects his loyalty and, after the war, will hold him responsible for his actions” (TP 29). Over forty years after the first formulation of Theory of the Partisan, the newly constituted Iraqi army and police forces find themselves in this very predicament. To be more precise, local police functionaries live on the cusp of two overtly mentioned classes of risk. They form, on the one hand, the most insecure part of the general population, offered as a convenient target for various factions within the devastated polity and for the opposing parties to the overall conflict. On the other hand and despite frequently operating on the opposite side of the barricades, police functionaries share the partisan experiences of risk in the more “pregnant” sense of hopelessness, personal exposure to danger, telluric attachment, and inescapable responsibility. A scrupulous deconstructive study could readily utilize such theoretical semi-obscurity and pull on the loose third thread in the nascent taxonomy until it disclosed the disavowed conditions of possibility for the relative clarity of the other two strands. Another implication of Schmitt’s meditation on risk has to do with the age-old discussion of means and ends. In “Critique of Violence,” a text to which Schmitt will implicitly respond in Political Theology, Benjamin contextualizes the means-ends relationship within the discourses of natural and positive law, advocating, concomitantly, an analysis “which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve.”6 Although their extralegal status that was converted into the means, if not the weapon, in the hands of the partisans (TP 21) makes all references to law obsolete, Schmitt’s theory takes to heart the emphasis

42

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

on pure means severed from the ends: those who risk themselves turn themselves, as the embodiments of extra-legality, into such pure means in the struggle against the occupying force. In light of the overwhelming odds of failure that inform partisan struggles from the outset, the means-ends relationship and calculative rationality are drained of their meaning. In the pregnant sense of risk, extralegality, the logic of pure means, and active passivity are inextricably tied together. The reflection on the ends becomes necessary only there where risk refers to the odds of the action’s realization or non-realization in the overall political means-ends schema. Along the lines of Badiou’s philosophy of the event, the linkage of means and ends is accomplished through an undecidable wager, “a supplement committed to chance.”7 This linkage is, at the same time, a severing of the relation between the two, in that the conceptualization of truth as a gamble leaves space for the unpredictable and the incalculable. How does this stand with the partisans? Their wager is decidable with regard to its telluric attachment and the haunting “hopelessness” of the actively passive fighters. Telluric, defensive goals tie the partisans to the earth, give a voice to the ideals of enrootedness they fight for, and correspond to one of the etymological outlets of risk, the ancient Greek word riza, or root.8 But, in contradistinction to the Catholics indirectly portrayed in Roman Catholicism as the partisans of the soil with “their own ‘terrisme’” (RC 10), they are ultramodern insofar as they are uprooted, mobilized with the help of the latest technologies, and subjected to groundless existence thanks to the political risk they assume. They are cut off from the land they defend, in keeping with the second etymological channel of the same word, which, in the Latin permutation of risicus or resecare, means “to cut.” The wager is, thus, also undecidable due to the immanent destruction of telluric attachment, as well as the unleashing of traditional warfare by the ubiquitous and irregular partisan force, the total engagement of the civilian population, and the escalation of hostilities to the level of absolute enmity consistent with the emphasis on pure means and incalculability (TP 74). Akin to the “rootlessness of the romantic” (PR 51), the modern predicament of the partisan is that of a cut root, a deracination that cannot recover its organic origins in the soil (the object of a painfully nostalgic yearning) and that, consequently, translates the logic of the cut into the force of absolute negativity. The partisan wager combines in itself nothing less than the original nomos and the modern anomie of the earth. The fusion of the old nomos and anomie in the risky behavior of partisans is attributable to a massive shift from the institutional to the existential conception and practice of the political, which they spearhead.

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

43

Not coincidentally, the most lucid theoretical articulation of risk appears in Theory of the Partisan that proclaims the end of traditional state politics and places its bets on new, non-state actors. The state, to be sure, exerts a neutralizing influence on political life, but whatever slips its grasp poses “disturbing and confusing prekaritäten [risks]” (NE 202).9 The totally politicized population saturated with the experience of general risk is forced to choose sides, to discriminate friends from enemies in the absence of an acknowledged sovereign power that, otherwise, would have been responsible for the political choice. Something like a collective political subjectivity thrives in such precarious conditions. But the most remarkable twist in this transition is the denial of the partisans’ political standing by their enemies who criminalize them and depict them as vandals or, worse, as inhuman (TP 31). While this depiction is a belated attempt to compensate for the incapacity of the powers that be to manage and manipulate risk in the “pregnant” sense of the term, bearing in its deepest reserves a new model of subjectivity, its outcome is a topsy-turvy view of the political. The most blatant effect of political risk lies in the criminalization of those who assume it, that is to say, in the official de-politicization of those who are not recognized as the political subjects that they are in the most intense way imaginable. At the extreme, criminalization means that the criminals are denied their status as subjects and are treated as “objects to be rendered harmless and prosecuted” (NE 153). As soon as it is gained, political subjectivity is reified as a result of withholding the political designation from the criminalized partisans, who have renounced in advance their right to receive a just treatment, legal protections, and so on. But, from their perspective, from the standpoint of their lived experience, they have switched to a mode of being single-mindedly focused on the political and inflected by “pregnant risk.” For them, there is, literally, no other sphere to which they could retreat from the no-man’s-land of the political to which they are “existentially bound”10 and from which they are officially excluded, adding to the sentiment of hopelessness. Despite the absence of hope from partisan lives, their existence is temporally oriented toward the future. The futurity of risk fits well into the general pattern of Schmitt’s notion of the political, in which possibility functions as one of the leitmotifs, consistent with the existential-phenomenological commitments of Husserl and Heidegger. Risk, one might say, is the lived corollary to the formal sense of existential possibility that, at least in the work of the latter thinker, puts us face-to-face with our finitude and the inevitability of our impending death. The futurity of “no future,” of a possible closure and ineliminable finitude factored into the political, looms

44

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

on Schmitt’s horizon, now in the guise of that which passively moves or motivates the partisan and now in the guise of absolute enmity and the prospects of total annihilation it portends. Rather than foreclosing the future, the risk of a hopeless fight and the advance renunciation of the rights of guerilla fighters invest the futural modality of time with existential gravity. Whereas the structure of political subjectivity is temporal, the essence of political temporality is a finite, terminal future.

Whence Political Risk? The Anthropological minus the Economic In Schmitt’s view, one of the preconditions for the injection of “risk” into political discourse is wresting this category from the economic domain. We could dispute this approach, of course, by pointing out that the process of exchange C-M-C’ (commodity-money-commodity) in Marx’s Capital is far from certain; in addition to the leap, the salto mortale, that value must perform in order to pass from the “body” of the commodity to the “body” of money in the first metamorphosis (C-M), there is always a chance that the process will not resume after the last metamorphosis (M-C’) of a given cycle.11 The risk inherent in any exchange is the foundation of Marxist crisis theory. Economic instability is greatly exacerbated in financial speculation, where the non-monetary commodity presumably disappears (or else, value is cut loose from its use-value component) and where profits are made on short-term investments and on the minutest variations of stock prices.12 Hence, exchange and speculation are two risky and contingent, though undoubtedly economic, ways of relating to the future. At times, Schmitt finds himself on the verge of concurring that economic behavior may be risky. It is conceivable, he writes, that “a consistent individualist is one who fights for himself, and if he is courageous, at his own risk [eigene Gefahr]. He then becomes his own partisan” (TP 23). Immediately qualifying this observation with the assertion that it only makes sense in a deplorably “indefinite symbolization,” or, alternatively, in an abstractly general treatment of the concept of the partisan, Schmitt enumerates the strict criteria delimiting the non-conceptual scope of partisanship: irregularity, increased mobility, heightened intensity of political engagement, and the telluric comportment (TP 22, 23).13 While a venture capitalist may play the role of an economic guerilla fighter, rapidly entering and exiting the market in the pursuit of “hit-and-run” interest, he is hardly a telluric, defensive figure. But what about piracy? At the furthest remove from the center of financial speculation, situated on the fringes of the economic, the clandestine

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

45

prototype of a venture capitalist—the pirate described in The Nomos of the Earth—was someone who “proceeded at [his] own risk (in the most dangerous sense of the word) and did not feel bound to any state” (NE 174). Later on Schmitt will regret this careless use of “risk,” which is, nonetheless, mindful of its complex maritime etymology: “If even once I characterized the pirates and the buccaneers of early capitalism as ‘partisans of the sea,’ today I would like to correct this terminological error” (TP 30). In light of the recent resurgence of piracy off the coast of Africa and elsewhere on high seas, this error should, indeed, be corrected, though for a different reason: there isn’t a linear progression from the buccaneers of early capitalism to venture capitalists; rather, the contemporary pirates are the anachronistic appendages of capitalist globalization. Whether in the center or on the margins of the global economic system, risk accompanies economic activity in today’s world. The only difference is that some pay with their lives for their actions, while others face bankruptcy, and still others pass the costs of their daring speculations on consumer debt to taxpayers. Against the background of his taxonomy of risk, Schmitt’s caution with regard to the economic is largely justified. A whole range of risks that fall under the heading of general risk may be taken on the economic arena, but the pregnant sense of the term is, of necessity, excluded. First, capitalists do not risk themselves (at least not directly), but endanger their investments, stocks, and other assets offered from the “uncontrollably risky” position of selling.14 That the bourgeois individual may be defined, at the extreme, by the fear of violent death is an idea uniting political philosophers as different as Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Hegel. Economic risk-taking does not at all invalidate the philosophers’ conclusion. Second, capitalists abstain from the risk of a hopeless fight, let alone the rejection of legal rights. The emergence of corporations with “limited responsibility” introduces the safeguards that are supposed to prevent any such personal risks, even as, in the sixteenth century, the middle-high-German Rysigo names a daring economic venture undertaken in the hopes of success. But consider the other part of the economic domain, comprised of wage-laborers who sell the only commodity in their possession, their labor power. The risking and the risked merge here, per definitionem. Uprooted and plunged into a risky position of selling nothing less than a part of themselves under the threat of being demoted to the industrial reserve army, wage-laborers come very close to the experience of risk in the pregnant sense of the term. This “other part of the economic” is a blind spot glossed over by Schmitt’s anti-economism, and yet, hinting at the unexplored potential of his implicit “risk theory” that puts flesh on the bones of the concept of the political.

46

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

The pivotal methodological maneuver, not to be missed behind the torrent of details and nuances, is not Schmitt’s cautious restriction of the semantic reach of the term, but his derivation of political risk by way of anthropological mediations and thanks to the evacuation of risk from the economic domain. The evidence in support of this claim is subtle, and few commentators have paid attention to it in discussing the Schmittian reading of Hegel in The Concept of the Political. Sifting through the list of Hegel’s innovations in political philosophy, Schmitt encounters “the first polemically political definition of the bourgeois” negatively related to risktaking: The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere [die Sphäre des unpolitisch risikolos-Privaten]. He rests in the possession of his private property . . . He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. (CP 62–63) Heinrich Meier, one of the few commentators who has not glossed over this passage, thinks that the “bourgeois has already been ‘sentenced’ insofar as he wants to avoid decision and seeks salvation” in the riskless private sphere.15 The point is well taken, but much more is at stake here than simple decision-avoidance on the part of the bourgeois. The first clue is the positive appraisal of Hegel’s definition as “polemically political,”16 given that the overall sense of the Hegelian gesture, as it is understood by Schmitt, is to deny the political traits of the bourgeoisie, and hence the very possibility of a distinctively political economy. Schmitt goes so far as to restrict economics to the private, riskless, apolitical sphere, such that the three adjectives, taken to be interchangeable, would safeguard, from the position of relative exteriority, the political sub-distinction between the public enemy (hostis) and the private one (inimicus). But the plausibility of the apolitical nature of the bourgeoisie is questionable even in Hegelian dialectics, where civil society, the placeholder for bourgeois activity and a transitional stage between the family and the state in the order of Sittlichkeit, or “ethical life,” is neither truly political, nor fully private.17 It is self-evident, furthermore, that a member of the bourgeoisie cannot afford to rest “in the possession of his private property,” as the superseded landed aristocracy did. Instead, the restlessness of constant reinvestment and reproduction of capital keeps capitalists on the treadmill of a free market. Is the Schmittian reading of

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

47

Hegel, then, but a foil for molding the relation between the economic and the political? The clues continue to abound when, at the very outset of the critique of parliamentary democracy, equality, the most economic of political concepts, sheds all ties to risk that are now reserved only for its opposite: “Equality is only interesting and valuable politically so long as it has substance, and for that reason at least the possibility and the risk of inequality” (CPD 9). Even though economic rationality encourages and, to an extent, predicates itself on major inequalities, these are, in principle, equalizable by monetary means. Alternatively, political inequality that, through a particular decision, may generate equality in the substantive sense hinges on the qualitative, uneconomic, and ultimately non-equalizable allocation of sovereignty. The risk of political inequality does not decrease in response to any palliative, corrective measures, such as the rule of law, itself heterogeneous and hierarchical because of the differentiation between the higher-constitutional and the lower-ordinary courts and systems of legalities. The risky possibility (Möglichkeit) of inequality has nothing in common with the potentialities of economic unevenness in the distribution of wealth. It is at least imaginable that such unevenness can be ironed out as a result of financial redistribution and that, in the end, it would not prevent the numerical actualization of equality. Finally, Schmitt does not point an accusing finger at the concept of economic equality per se; he, rather, indicts calculative rationality as detrimental to human life, in that it is not risky and in that it reduces risk to the likelihood of failure (the crisis) in the nuts and bolts of the state-economic machinery (LST 45). The next stage of the argument enjoins us to substitute the risklessness of the economic with the riskiness of the anthropological. For Schmitt, The problematic or unproblematic conception of man is decisive for the presupposition of every further political consideration, the answer to the question whether man is a dangerous being or not, a risky or a harmless [ein riskantes ode rein harmlos nicht-riskantes] creature. (CP 58) The question does not announce itself within the limits of economic reflection concerned with utility and profitability, that is to say, with the material interest of the human creature, as opposed to “the conception of man” as such. But would this criticism still be valid if economic theory were to challenge its traditional confines and to examine its subjects closer and in more detail than utility-maximizing units? Be this as it may, the anthropological

48

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

alternative is a Bonaldian either-or disjunction: the human is either risky, or harmless. (Within the economy of the quotation, the other of “risky” is both “non-risky,” nicht-riskantes, and “harmless,” harmlos. The latter word bears on the effects of risk, or absence thereof, on others and, therefore, foregrounds the general sense of the term.) Much of political theorizing is a comet tail of this elementary anthropological decision. Taking the side of the risky conception of the human, Schmitt approvingly cites his contemporary, German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, for whom human beings are not determined by any objective factors but are defined, 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, conceptualizing the state and market economy as machines that run by themselves, venture, if I may borrow Heidegger’s expression, to “de-distance” humans, to convert the subjects of the political into objects of statistical manipulation, to determine them by bridging their constitutive distance. In Chapter 4, I will come back to the role of questioning in preventing this modern transformation that makes human beings harmless by rendering them predictable. As Nietzsche would have it in On the Genealogy of Morality, the human is not a harmless creature but becomes one at the end of a long and grueling disciplining, culturing, taming, and regularization, thanks to which it receives the capacity to make promises. But, while for Nietzsche, the promising animals come to have a future, in Plessner and in Schmitt, the futurity of the human is eradicated along with the existential risk in the process of objectively determining the distance-making being. The ontological facet of the “problematic conception of man” as a question without a corresponding answer matches the epistemological dimension of a fluid, polemical, and ultimately non-dogmatic theorization that, in the best traditions of a rigorous phenomenological reduction, refuses to rest on the laurels of unexamined and examined presuppositions alike. In response to his interrogator’s question, “You have the blood of an intellectual adventurer?” posed in the Spring of 1947, Schmitt answers, “Yes, that is how thoughts and knowledge develop. I assume the risk.”18 This is why, regardless of his flirtation with Nazism that led to this questioning, Schmitt’s political philosophy has attracted both leftists and right-wing theorists who also assume the risk. That the onto-epistemological openness may welcome the futurity of the “no future,” as it happens in the case of the partisan or in the abovementioned Nazi embroilment; that a risk taken once may spell out the end of subsequent risk-taking; that a political decision may imperceptibly pass into economic administration—none of this invalidates or contradicts

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

49

the methodological radicality of espousing the groundless anthropological underpinnings of the political. Despite everything Lenin has done to institutionalize economic rationalism in Soviet Union, Schmitt does not lose his esteem for the partisan Lenin, the deeply political inheritor of Hegel (CP 63) who paved the way for this transformation. The radical openness of risk would have been a seductive but ultimately inane slogan if it did not keep itself open even to the possibility of its own closure. We will do well to recall that Schmitt not only envisages the possibility of a counter-transformation, for instance, from the economic into the political, but also construes the latter in terms of this possibility at the boiling point of extreme antagonism. Neither a purely quantitative, nor a strictly qualitative shift, the unrest of the political is the moment of Aufhebung that raises the intensity of antagonism to a substantially different level. To extend the purview of Schmitt’s “risk theory” is to argue that the index for the completion or incompletion of politicization in various domains of human activity is the type of risk besetting each concrete antagonism that shapes them. The vital sign of the political would be the presence of risk in the pregnant sense, while the mix of two types of risk, which we have discovered in the figure of the police functionary who collaborates with the occupying power, would signal either that the movement of politicization is well on its way, or that, conversely, it is succumbing to calculative economic rationality. At its most decisive, risk (in the pregnant sense of the word) is the reductive, de-sedimenting force that reverses the objectification of the human and that keeps the political alive by preventing its complacent addition to the list of other public spheres of activity.

Risky Recognitions Any basic dictionary of Hegelian, as well as liberal, thought is bound to include “recognition” among its entries. Although this notion does not enjoy the same privileged status in Schmitt’s political theory, it still performs much theoretical work behind the scenes. If the concept of the political rests on the articulation of friend-enemy distinctions, then it must account for the mechanisms of identifying friends and enemies. But, with this requirement, certain difficulties arise that, at first blush, appear insurmountable. What is the fate of recognition when it is applied to the human figure that is undetermined and unfathomable? If the enemy is the other, then how is it possible to identify, let alone to recognize, alterity? And, more concretely, what are the criteria for political recognition—that is, if there are any?

50

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

From two perspectives that hardly share a common ground, with the exception of the textual materials on which they elaborate, Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida lay the groundwork for the discussion of Schmittian recognition. The former 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 free line of fire, with a sweep of the hand they wave aside—without looking at—the neutral who lingers in the middle, interrupting the view of the enemy.19 Derrida, too, inquires into the conditions of possibility of the encounter. Thanks to the desire for recognition, the enemy would gain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable. The figure of the enemy would then be helpful—precisely as a figure—because of the features which allow it to be identified as such, still identical to what has always been determined under this name.20 The consensus is that the enemy functions as a perceptual figure. The apparition of the enemy figure, according to Strauss’s interpretation that resonates with Sartre’s analysis in Being and Nothingness, is indebted to the vanishing of neutrality,21 the disappearance of everything that stands between enemies and could soften or absorb the risk and the shock of the fatal encounter. But the swipe of the hand that prepares the unobstructed field of disjunctive vision is itself blind (“without looking at”) to that which “lingers in the middle” and contains the prospects of reconciliation. Visual recognition of the enemy enabled both by the intensity of the look and by preparatory blindness produces, at the extreme, a figure without the neutrality of the background. The long-term consequences of such blindness are risky in the pregnant sense, since they do not prompt the opponents to strategize for the end of hostilities but stem out the prospects of a future reconciliation that may follow the standoff and impregnate it with the spirit of active hopelessness. The Hegelian life-and-death struggle for recognition pales in comparison with this fatal confrontation. Now, Derrida is perhaps more attentive to the impossible figure without background. By virtue of remaining a figure, the enemy has not yet turned into the indeterminate prototype of absolute enmity, unlimited in time and in space, sublime, overflowing the finite representational capacity of human beings. In other words, the recognition of that which fits into the determinate figural contours and the bare fact of looking fine-tune and moderate

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

51

the risk unleashed in the Straussian interpretation. The contours of this figure are “reassuring” because they enclose the enemy in the perceptual field; they are “ultimately appeasing” because they forestall absolute enmity and, by the same token, do not obviate a future reconciliation. Besides the consensus on the figuration of the enemy, it would be fair to say that Derrida is closer to the later Schmitt who is apprehensive about the possibility of total annihilation, whereas Strauss approximates the early, uncompromising Schmitt of the Concept of the Political. The Straussian-Derridian solution does not touch upon the quandary generated by enemy recognition. It is true that, in the implicit phenomenology of Schmitt, the political begins with the cognitive-perceptual elimination of the neutral third—whose trace may still linger in the very contours that delimit the enemy—that, logically, precedes the possibility of the enemy’s existential elimination. But what remains after the reduction of the third? Is the enemy identifiable after the third has been removed from my confrontation with him? Does it, to put this bluntly, present an identity fit for recognition? And can one recognize something other than an identity, namely, otherness and difference “themselves”? The appellation “enemy” applies to “the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way existentially something different and alien [in einem besonders intensiven Sinne existenziell etwas anderes und Fremdes ist], so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (CP 27). Negatively defined, it is an alterity, not an identity. Still, nothing has been resolved by this conclusion because we do not yet know what Schmitt means by “identity” and how it is constructed. After enumerating various political identities—of “the governed and the governing,” “the state and the people,” and so on—Schmitt relates that “these identities [themselves] are not palpable reality, but rest on a recognition of the identity” (CPD 26, emphasis added). He thus exhibits a typical modern, post-Kantian sensibility that processes all claims to objectivity, such as the reality of an identity, through a prior determination by the subject who recognizes this reality. That is to say, the recognition of identity politically translated into friendship entails a series of mediations supporting the ideational representation and the subjective construction of something that will not be found in “palpable reality,” while the figure of the enemy triggers a present and immediate existential sensation of alterity as the threat of otherness. However visceral and immediate, the relation to the enemy cannot evade a double indeterminacy inscribed in his blurred figure: he is not only other, but also something indefinite, anything whatsoever, etwas. The undetectable partisan and the enemy who provokes absolute enmity

52

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

are the paragons of the enigmatic determinate indeterminacy characteristic of the foe in general. Aside from the degrees of immediacy and mediation, a more relevant cleft separates the logics of identity and non-identity. The recognition of the former is the prerogative of the governed who identify with the people, as the source of governing legitimacy, and with the state by means of complex ideological apparatuses. Such apparatuses, however, offer at best a superficial explanation of identity—a term Schmitt takes in a selfconsciously Husserlian way: “For the further justification of the word ‘identity’ . . . I gladly refer to E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II” (CT 265). Identity betokens, for Husserl, “the dynamic unity of expression and expressed intuition,” or, in other words, the mutual belonging in intuition of signifying acts and that which they signify. Such is the “consciousness of fulfillment,” the actuality of psychic life, wherein the seeing coincides with that which is seen, the feeling with the felt, the desiring with the desired, and so forth.22 The unity of the two elements is dynamic, precisely, because the expressed does not fulfill the expression once and for all but diverges from it as soon as the seen, the felt, the desired are no longer there, in flesh and blood, before the intuiting subject. In the felicitous moments of the regime, the identity of the governing and the governed results in the political “consciousness of fulfillment,” so that the coincidence is translated into the regime’s legitimacy. And yet, the temporal limits of the presence of the intuited imply that the identity of the two elements is never securely established; the synthetic unity will come undone as soon as the expression and the expressed intuition are at variance with one another, proving the inconstancy of the political-phenomenological identity. This is where the figure of the enemy becomes handy in a more mediated way. The sovereign decision deflects the internal risk of impermanent identification, externalizes the threat that, as a matter of fact, resides within the dynamism of the identitarian unity, and puts the blame on something or someone other that (or who) could endanger this identity or, in the extreme, “the existence of the state” (PT 6). It claims the right to recognize the enemy, but recognition has nothing in the present to cling to, except the vague sense of a future threat. The only guarantees of enemy recognition are the “future returns” of preparedness for impending conflicts and, speaking in the terms of the theory of performativity, the act of recognition itself. Especially in the cases of absolute enmity and the invisible enemy (but this equally applies to “the enemy” in general) there is no room for the consciousness of fulfillment because the expressed intuition—the enemy or the other as such—is not available for the expressing or signifying act that

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

53

aims at its blurred or non-existent contours. The identity within the political unit is assured by virtue of a permanent non-identity without this same unit. The enemies are constructed performatively, by the self-grounding, ergo ungrounded, act of recognition aimed at them, and, therefore, they are no more a part of “palpable reality” than various political identities constructed by the community of friends. A self-grounding phenomenon is inevitably fraught with risk, to the degree that it arises from a pronounced blindness, which Strauss underscores, to everything that surrounds or falls outside of it. The ensuing risks of recognition assume two forms: misrecognition and non-recognition. Misrecognition need not be understood as a deviation of representation from a separate reality it is supposed to represent, since palpable reality is no longer a part of the equation; rather, it is the upshot of the non-transparency and obliqueness of the political. Already in Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt expressed his adherence to arcana in politics and their manifestations, for example, in secret diplomacy (RC 34).23 In colloquial terms, one’s perceived and declared friend may furnish a presentable and reassuring façade of non-alterity and, at the same time, act maliciously “behind one’s back,” or be a friend in the name alone. Great powers that wrestle with one another “will be lost if they cannot correctly distinguish between friend and enemy,” but, for such distinctions and, by implication, for the survival of these powers “there are ‘no guarantees’” (LST 49). Secret diplomacy complicates the recognition of friends and enemies, splitting the political into the visible and the invisible. Its modus operandi is non-phenomenality, a withdrawal from public view, reviled by every thinker of the Enlightenment. That the same ineliminable obscurity affects domestic politics becomes evident in the critique of parliamentary democracy, where the principle of “openness” in the debates between various parties is but a naïve and unattainable ideal. Once again Schmitt reiterates the idea that “[a]rcana belong to every kind of politics” including domestic, cabinet dealings “conducted by a few people behind closed doors” (CPD 37–38). This non-transparency of the political process, both on the national and the international arenas, is the reality of our, post-Schmittian epoch. The relevance of the domestic veil of secrecy to the contemporary political processes is only likely to increase in the foreseeable future, as it is instigated by the legitimate and fictitious concerns with national security. Both secrets and risks will, paradoxically, survive and flourish in the so-called Information Age, not just in politics but also in economics where commercial secrets and patenting of everything from computer programs to medicines give their proprietors a competitive edge in the ludicrously uneven “open markets” closed

54

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

to everything but transnational flows of capital. The deficit of openness is palpable everywhere in the contemporary world. Shielded by Obama’s continuation of the Bush policies, the Pentagon will continue to destroy and withhold the documentary evidence of torture in the outsourced camps, while patented seeds will not yield renewable crops for the farmers who are forced to buy them every year. The second negative corollary of recognition is non-recognition fueled by the changing patterns of visibility in the political sphere. It is safe to say that non-recognition brings the dynamics of misrecognition to a dramatic conclusion. The actors who literally embody the great political arcana are the partisans who inhabit the “essential space of irregularity” and use secrecy and darkness as their “strongest weapons” (TP 35). Greatly magnified, the jaggedness of the political playing field turns into a full-blown asymmetry when the invisible partisan fights clearly identified “local police functionaries” or the occupying troops.24 The risk that the latter face is more pregnant than the Schmittian “pregnant sense” of risk (if such a thing is possible), because its version of incalculability is tied to the dissolution of the enemy figure in the absence of appeasing, albeit negative, outlines. The invisible, non-recognizable enemy opens the door to absolute enmity growing from the premonition, now classically associated with Donald Rumsfeld, that if the enemies are nowhere, then they are everywhere. And today’s War on Terror fought predominantly against invisible enemies has already stepped over the threshold of a lived political-phenomenological reduction, beyond which an identifiable enemy figure disappears, while enmity remains.

Risky Decisions “Decisionism” has become something of a hallmark of the debates surrounding Schmittian political theory.25 But what has gone relatively unnoticed is the fact that both the political decisions and the milieu in which they are taken are pervaded by risk. If the “decision on the exception is a decision in the true sense of the word” (PT 6), then it always stands in the shadow of crisis, danger, or the situation of “extreme peril” to which Schmitt refers on the same page. To decide on the exception is to assume the dangers one faces, without either fleeing from them, or submitting to them in a blind, fatalistic manner. Parallel to the conduct of partisans, the sovereign decision is a strangely telluric, actively passive phenomenon responding to what cannot be anticipated in advance and, much less, codified in legal statutes. Even so, it does not result in the outright renunciation of legality, as it happened in the case of the partisans whose extralegality

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

55

became their most potent weapon—but propels the sovereign to the outer limits of the legal system.26 In addition to the general theory of risk, the political configuration of decision-making calls for a more patient and meticulous “risk analysis.” Two profound disconnects characterize this configuration: first, between the process of coming to a decision and the momentary act of decisionmaking, and, second, between the indeterminacy of the subject matter and the determinacy of the form. The sundering apart of the process and the act replicates the divergence of means from ends in the gradations of partisan risk and performs Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” liberating itself from the discussions, deliberations, and calculations that prepare the ground for it. Inasmuch as they are liberated from these processes, the acts of decision-making are rife with arcana veiling the political with secrecy and non-transparency. The decision remains incalculable, subjective, absolute, and, therefore, risky in the pregnant sense of the term regardless of the field of meticulous calculations from which it takes off (PT 12). The immoderate, anti-Aristotelian either/or structure of decision-making minimizes the array of options that may have been juggled in the process of coming to a decision. It is, therefore, functionally comparable to the preparatory elimination of the neutral third, paving the way for political recognition. In the Sorelian vein, Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy turns on the impatience with the fruitless discussions that only infinitely delay decisive action. The will to intellectualization yields a watered down version of existential conflict sublimated into a more refined battle of ideas, as ridiculous as “the radiator of a modern central heating system” painted “with red flames in order to give the appearance of a blazing fire.”27 The reluctance of politicians and theorists to face the real and urgent political risk, their concentration on the risks of thinking and saying, does not mean that the risk of doing will disappear, as though it obeyed the disarming magic of their words and subjective intentions. The existential risk will continue to grow exponentially due to the insidious ignorance that wishes to neutralize it by means of thought and speech alone. The bitter fruitlessness of parliamentarism is what I call, in Schmitt’s footsteps, “the indecisive deracination of the political” that eschews the risks of acting and, in so doing, heralds the greatest risks—those of political nullification and, finally, the nullification of the political. The evasion of decision-making deferred by the interminable process of deliberation erases every clear line of demarcation between friend and enemy groupings without, at the same time, attaining the point of the political. And yet, Schmitt is loath to equate these deferrals with actual

56

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

de-politicization. Summing up his position, he writes in The Concept of the Political: Even less can a people hope to bring about a purely moral or purely economic condition of humanity by evading every political decision. If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear. (CP 53) The last sentence may smack of social Darwinism and a sort of political eugenics, a simple-minded application (of which Schmitt has been accused often enough) of “natural selection” and “self-preservation.”28 Upon closer scrutiny, however, we see that there is nothing “natural” in political selection and, furthermore, that the impetus for political action is not selfpreservation but a decisive risk inimical to the desire for the status quo and the Spinozan conatus. Decision-making is as irreducible as the political itself; behind a wide array of parliamentary articulations and debates hides the unarticulated decision not to decide. The indecisive deracination of the political consists in the lack of courage—in those who reactively strive toward and, in the same gesture, thwart their self-preservation—to acknowledge the decision not to decide as a political decision and in the subsequent loss of the last vestiges of sovereignty, or, at the very least, its apocryphalization, as Schmitt describes it in Constitutional Theory. Botched from the outset, political “risk analysis” weighs particular procedural risks, for instance, the danger of losing parliamentary majority, in order to distract its practitioners from the substantial risk decided a priori, in excess of any scales and measurements: the risk of not taking risks. The choice, which Schmitt leaves to his reader, is framed between, on the one hand, the risk of terminating the existence of a political entity as a consequence of sovereign decision to go to war that might end in defeat, and, on the other, the certainty of this entity’s dissolution in the atmosphere of indecisiveness that no longer holds in reserve the sovereign recourse to jus belli (CP 38). Risk-avoidance leads to the utmost risk bordering on the guarantee of failure, the withering away of the political, and the unequivocal closure of futural possibilities. The price paid for the selective blindness it induces is the inability to exercise political vision beyond a skillful manipulation of parliamentary and legalistic procedures. The formulation of this choice in Nazi Germany of the interwar period is chilling. But Schmitt’s assessment applies to other contexts of liberal parliamentarism, where the risk of not taking risks is the default attitude

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

57

ornamentally masked by discussions and debates. Risk-avoidance and the quest for neutrality are so far-reaching that they endow liberalism construed as a “metaphysical system” with unity and consistency, at the same time as they undermine its political standing. Whether it advocates the openness of the political field devoid of the secret, or a division of powers intended to “neutralize the concentration of power” (CPD 37); whether it promotes the value of social harmony sprinkled with “healthy” competition and debate (CPD 35)—liberalism adulterates political risk in the pools of moral speculation and economic enterprise. Its parliamentary variety is the “twilight of an intermediary state,” where the enjoyment of political influence parts ways with “the responsibility and the risk of the political [das Risiko des Politischen]” (LL 88). It is no wonder that liberalism failed to come up with a positive political model given that, under its influence, decision-making loses its substantive, institutional, material supports and sovereignty is viewed as a dangerous and illegitimate heritage of absolutist regimes. Schmitt’s liberal opponents may lambaste, ad nauseam, his theory of the political for its dictatorial tendencies but in their excessive zeal they deprive humans of more than the thrill and excitement promised by political risk-taking: they come to negate praxis, eloquently portrayed by Schmitt in terms of the existential “possibility of a rebirth” (LS 5) from the act of making a decision.

Notes 1. For a rather dense summary of the emergent “supra-disciplinary” field, see Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 2. Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986); Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth 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 of such an approach. In his commentary on The Concept of the Political, [“Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political” in The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996)] Strauss affirms Schmitt’s “thesis of the dangerousness of man as the ultimate presupposition of the position of the political” and implies that the illumination of this presupposition restores “the seriousness of human life,” pp. 96, 101. 4. Although I am not aware of any actual treatment of Schmitt’s political philosophy that would espouse this maximalist position, it is not outside the realm of possibility. 5. In a phenomenological mode of investigation, we could point out something like the intentional structure of risk (which makes sense only in the pregnant sense of the term) involving “the risking of the risked,” just like vision comprises “the seeing of the seen,” touch—“the touching of the touched,” and so on.

58

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

6. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 277. 7. Badiou, Infinite Thought, p. 62. 8. For the uncertain etymology of risk, see “Risque,” in Le Nouveau Petit Robert (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1994), p. 1990. 9. Schmitt continues this line of thought, describing the period of transition from feudal wars to the rise of the early modern state: “Everything that was not related to the state became unclear and precarious, and disappeared as soon as the closed and independent territorial state appeared with its clear-cut sovereignty” (NE 202). 10. For a more diluted version of the existential bond, see Schmitt’s remarks on taking an 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 of an idealizing philosophical analysis and does not view these criteria as transhistorically valid. Cf. Carl Schmitt, “Gespräche über den Partisanen,” 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: MIT Press, 1995), p. 117. 15. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. M. Brainard (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 13. 16. Note that in the same text, Schmitt contends that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (CP 30). 17. “The concrete person, who is himself the object of his particular aims, is . . . one principle of civil society. But the particular person is essentially so related to other particular persons that each establishes himself and finds satisfactions by means of the others.” G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 122–123. 18. Schmitt, Telos 72, pp. 103–104. Emphasis added. 19. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” p. 106. 20. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 83. Both quotations and my discussion of recognition pertain to hostis, the “public enemy.” 21. As a rule, Schmitt treats neutralization and politicization as two diametrically opposed processes. In light of this treatment, E.-W. Böckenförde’s [“The Concept of the Political: A Key to Understanding Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. D. Dyzenhaus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 48–49] deduction of “the necessity of a ‘pouvoir neutre’ within a state” unjustifiably postulates an abstraction based on the concrete Weimar context of Verfassungslehre. The “neutral power” which Schmitt found “in the public service and in Reich’s president” (p. 49) is, indeed, indispensable but only when the population fails to reduce the risk of internal

The Danger: Unavoidability of Risk

59

strife and to become unified in the face of the external public enemy. Otherwise, “pouvoir neutre” is utterly useless and artificial. 22. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume II (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 206. 23. For one of Schmitt’s earliest reflections on the political arcanum, refer to D 13. 24. Like complete visibility, complete invisibility is not conducive to the political. The administration of people by things, which is compatible with visibility, and purely abstract categories (humanity and the enemy of humanity) that render visible representations impossible equally deny the political its viability (RC 27, 35). Thus, Schmitt’s intervention in Roman Catholicism is geared toward balancing the visibility and the invisibility of the political on the model of the Church that is “in,” but not “of ” this world (RC 52). 25. For a concise enunciation of this issue, see Paul Hirst, “Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism,” in Telos 72, Summer 1987, pp. 15–26. 26. “Although he [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety” (PT 7). 27. “Many norms of contemporary parliamentary law . . . function as a result like a superfluous decoration, useless and even embarrassing, as though someone has painted the radiator of a modern central heating system with red flames in order to give the appearance of a blazing fire” (CPD 6). 28. “[D]espite the colorful existential rhetoric, there is no surmounting the fact that the fundamental political value we are left with is naked self-preservation.” Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State,” in Theory 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 of this chapter is a promise and a contract. In keeping with the titular undertaking that outlines a certain itinerary or a trajectory, the reader might expect to be guided from the abstract sterility of the concept to the concrete level of political events as they unfold in history, from a higher to a lower level of analysis, from the general to the singular, from the speculative (in the Hegelian sense) to the positively demonstrable.1 Let us be clear on the terms of the contract by noting that these expectations will be frustrated right from the outset for three reasons. First, the concept of the political in Schmitt is neither sterile nor abstract, given that it is existentially embodied and lived in a determinate enemy/friend opposition. Second, the meaning of the event diverges from the colloquial sense of a mere historical occurrence and hinges on the thinking of Ereignis and événement—the event of appropriation and expropriation in Heidegger and Derrida. Third, there is, strictly speaking, no transition from one to the other, but only an eventalization of the concept itself, a structural opening of the concept onto the event, a premonition of the ungraspable and the extraconceptual in the concept that remains “of the political” only inasmuch as it is not identical to itself, as Adorno would express it. It is doubtful, then, whether this presumed transition would ever leave its point of departure, or whether the emergence of the event in the concept would supplant the latter from the inside. If the second alternative applies, then the destination of this movement will have been already included in its point of departure in the guise of the concept of the political that does not ideally coincide with itself but anticipates its internal disarticulation by the event. 60

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 of the contemporary philosophies of the event, I propose to map them on the axis running from appropriation to expropriation. The paradigm cases for the two extremes of this continuum are Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who are, largely, responsible for the current interest in the notion of the event. Most emblematically, Heidegger’s second magnum opus, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), translated as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), both thematizes and traces its own sources back to the event (Ereignis). Heidegger breaks the German word for the event into Er-eignis only to supplement its strict etymology, its derivation from eräugen (“to bring into view or come into view”2), with the semantic, though not etymological, sense of that which is one’s own, eigen.3 Henceforth, the event will carry ownness within itself and will elliptically mean the event of appropriation. There are no significant contributions to philosophy that do not proceed from this event that appropriates the first, essentially Greek, philosophical origin born in the thought of the pre-Socratics, Plato, or Aristotle and, at the same time, brings into view the second origin, where conceptual philosophy reverts into “inceptual thinking,” which, alone, is in a position to encounter the first beginning.4 In Being and Time, the phenomenological dimension of the event of appropriation, of “bringing into view” and, thereby, providing a nontranscendental condition of possibility for phenomenality is interpretation (Auslegung), which dispenses to the faculty of understanding what is its own, since “in it the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it.”5 What this means is that, although phenomena, such as sights, sounds, and so forth, are given to us already imbued with meaning, the initial pre-interpretation is incomplete without the appropriative grasp of understanding that, recapturing its origins, consciously interprets the given and draws out what is implicit in it. Heidegger further recognizes that, more often than not in everyday life, the incipient preunderstanding does not pass into an explicit appropriative interpretation and, therefore, does not give rise to the event. His codeword for the inauthentic arrest of the phenomenological hermeneutic is Gerede, idle talk, which “is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.”6 In the public world of “the they” (das Man), knowledge circulates like an empty rumor that is on everyone’s lips but belongs to no one in particular. And it is this inauthenticity of Gerede that becomes one of the sites wherein deconstruction sets itself to work in an inversion of Ereignis into the event of expropriation, the displacement of

62

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

the very propriety of the proper, and the inflection of appropriation with the improper and the inappropriable. Derrida’s argument, if it is one, advances in a sequence of prudently planned steps. In order to prepare the stage for the inversion of the Heideggerian event, he reveals that the most proper is, at the same time, what is most singular, idiomatic, and, therefore, necessarily inappropriable, abyssal. Ereignis is, thus, delivered to the abyssal of singularity: “It is therefore in the abyss of the proper [dans l’abîme du propre] that we are going to try to recognize the impossible idiom of the signature.”7 Ereignis in abyss (Ereignis en abîme) seduces with “the allure of the inappropriable event [l’allure d’un événement inappropriable]”8 that indefinitely defers the situation, in which one would find oneself in absolute proximity to oneself, the situation every metaphysics of presence counts upon.9 The paradox is that the event of appropriation is immanently expropriated by its most radical instantiation—by the absolutely proper, singular, and idiomatic (hence, inappropriable) “thing.” The event, thus, can never be claimed as one’s own because of, both, its sheer uniqueness and utter generality. Although appropriation and expropriation are not bound together by a dialectical logic of antithetical co-belonging, the latter hypostatizes a particular moment of the former. In and of itself, Heidegger’s Ereignis does not grasp something definitively present but performatively creates the second beginning of philosophy in the “inceptual” leap that, instead of landing on an already formed terrain, finds a new grounding in itself. It follows that groundlessness, an abyssal and vertiginous bottomlessness, characterizes Ereignis well before its deliberate expropriation. A simple inversion or revalorization, already factored into that which is inverted, is not enough, which is why Derrida drowns the difference between the proper and the improper in the indifference of immemorial expropriation by the sponge, one of many deconstructive metaphors for writing: “Insofar as it ingests, absorbs, and interiorizes everything, proper or not [du propre comme du non-propre], the sponge is certainly ‘ignoble.’”10 The sponge, to be sure, does not entirely erase the difference between the proper and the improper but makes it unstable, porous, and undecidable. Its “ignobility” symbolizes the meta-impurity of the opposition between the pure and the impure, between the authentically grasped and the inauthentically pre-interpreted, and, finally, between the events of appropriation and expropriation.

There is No Such Thing as the “Political Sphere”! What presents itself as the unbounded versatility of the concept of the political, achievable from any other field (economic, religious, etc.) provided

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

63

that the intensity of antagonisms within it reaches a boiling point, coincides, precisely, with the kind of opening unto the event that I have begun to chart above. “The political can derive its energy,” Schmitt asserts, from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance [es bezeichnet kein eigenes Sachgebiet] but only the intensity [nur den Intensitätsgrad] of association or dissociation of human beings. (CP 38) George Schwab generally translates the German Sachgebiet as “domain,” but in this instance he favors its rendition as “substance,” and does so for obvious reasons. Is it conceivable that a book investigating the concept of the political would deny the existence of an autonomous political sphere, field, or domain? Isn’t it the explicit task of the text at hand to delimit such a sphere, separating it from what is not political? Or else, what are we to make of Schmitt’s odd contention that the political parasitically inhabits other regions of human activity but lacks a domain of its own? The difficulty with Schwab’s translation is that, on countless occasions, Schmitt defies the liberal evacuation of substance from politics and its offshoot, the obsession with formal proceduralism, both of which go hand-in-hand with de-politicization. Moreover, since he is interested in the concept of the political, it would be erroneous to equate this or any other concept with the sphere of activity it effectively enables. Even if we could segregate a properly political Sachgebiet, it would not coincide with its rigorously delineated concept. Deprived of a playing field of its own, the concept reaches the heights of anti-foundationalism, as it shuns clear topographical distinctions, transgresses ontological boundaries, and, as a result, acquires that plasticity which nourishes its ability to dwell in and to transmogrify all other domains. The political fails to establish either an internal economy, broadly understood as a domicile, or an external economy with the spheres it inflects. I would like to emphasize this asymmetry corroborating Schmitt’s antieconomism, which, as we shall see, extends much deeper than its overt formulations in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, where the economic represents a simple negation of the political, the administration of men by things. In return for giving up the right to a domain of its own, the political comes to reside in all other domains as a possibility related to the varying intensities of oppositions peculiar to them. In expropriating itself, it expropriates the spheres it inhabits, since above a certain degree of antagonism

64

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

they cease to be moral, religious, economic, and, instead, become political. That which has no proper terrain of its own spirits away the ground of other regional ontologies that are always economic inasmuch as they form separate regions or domiciles. De-politicization, rethought in this light, is not a historical accident that befalls the political, but its “truth,” an idiosyncratic expression of expropriation, to which the political non-sphere is not immune and to which the “homelessness” of the political attests. In Jacques Rancière’s ingenious writings, politics occurs when the unaccounted part, the “part that has no part,” such as the undocumented migrant workers, demands to be counted, disrupting the routines of policing.11 For Schmitt, it is not so much a group of political actors but politics in toto that stands for a “part that has no part” in the structural arrangement of human life, since it is a place of that which has no (delimited, circumscribed) place of its own. The political will not shrivel to a sphere antithetically related to the economic, social, cultural, and other associations,12 yet its aneconomic relation to various zones of human activity and the absence of a political topography proper should not lead us to believe that Schmitt’s thinking is sloppy or that it exhibits conceptual laxity. To the contrary, The Concept of the Political is a quest for the “specific meaning [spezifischen Sinnes]” of politics (CP 72). It proceeds in the spirit of Kant’s Copernican turn in modern philosophy and, mutatis mutandis, belongs in the rich phenomenological tradition extending from Husserl to Heidegger and Derrida. To concentrate on the meaning of Being, as Heidegger does, or to study the “specific meaning” of the political, as Schmitt proposes, is, first of all, to challenge the assumption that one could treat Being and the political objectively. More positively put, it is to sensitize oneself to the problems of interpretation (and, by implication, the appropriative Ereignis) pertaining to whatever comes under the light of investigation and to reassert the ultimate irreducibility of the interpreter, be it Dasein—a being who raises the question of Being—or the sovereign who gauges the levels of intensity and determines those critical points (not objectively set once and for all) where the quantitative surge in hostility accomplishes a qualitative shift toward politicization in the categories of collective existence. The law does not interpret itself, just as the keywords of politics (legitimacy, emergency, etc.) are not endowed with a univocal encyclopedic meaning. We will find ourselves perpetually returning to this insight, in one form or another. Thus, Schmitt inscribes his discussion of the political in a kind of negative ontology, in the non-space or, better yet, in the displacement of different domains of human action. As a result of this originary dislocation, that which is purely political—the carefully distilled intensity of antagonism—is

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

65

neither empirically accessible outside the spheres it eventually transforms, nor is it transcendentally given in the manner of Kant’s a priori conditions of possibility. That is not to say that “possibility” does not play a crucial role in Schmitt’s theory of the political with its presupposition of the real and ever-present possibility of war (die reale Möglichkeit des Kampfes) and the prospect of the physical annihilation of the enemy, and of oneself without which politics is insipid and meaningless (CP 32). Like Heidegger, who posits possibility “higher than actuality” in Being and Time,13 Schmitt substantiates the existential character of his philosophy by accentuating the possible.14 One implication of the political-existential stance is that there is no such thing as an actual political sphere because every sphere is potentially political or politicizable due to a possible increase in the intensities of association and dissociation structuring it. The fact of politicization will be retrieved only retrospectively, a posteriori, after the interpretive decision on the sphere’s transfiguration has been made.15 That is why no liberal depoliticization can do away entirely with the political, which is not a domain amenable to being supplanted, but the overarching principle of displacement and, hence, the dynamic governing de-politicization as well. At this point, it would be instructive to recall Schmitt’s famous statement in Political Theology that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (PT 38) and the one that echoes it in Political Theology II: “All de-theologized concepts carry the weight of their scientifically impure origins” (PTII 128). Along with the claim that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (CP 30) these invocations of the theological contribute to the structural displacement of political conceptuality in two distinct ways. First, political concepts do not spring up sui generis but derive from the theological sphere in a definite process of dislocation called “secularization.” The modern theory of the state—a designation that is, admittedly, much narrower than the concept of the political as such—is forced to take its terms on loan from the very pre-modern theological doctrine it ridiculed and all but invalidated. But, if this doctrine constitutes the first of the four historical stages of neutralization and de-politicization theorized in Schmitt’s 1929 essay, then their entire succession—though it is by no means clear that this is a question of a “succession”—commences with the restoration of the origin, a negation of the negation, de-secularization, and, therefore, a retreat from the political back to its displaced source. Thus, in a sweeping statement, Jacob Taubes confirms that the restoration of the source’s metaphysical purity is incompatible with the political. His analysis of the “gigantomachy around the word ‘pure’” leads him to

66

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

depict Schmitt as, so to speak, a partisan of the impure, battling against the neo-Kantian transcendental purity of the law divorced from what we will readily recognize as the cornerstones of phenomenology and concrete life itself: experience, language, and history. As Taubes states, “Schmitt s’est battu contre une chose: la pure théorie du droit [Schmitt fights against one thing: the pure theory of the law].”16 Political theology, on the other hand, recuperates the principal stage of de-politicization (the theological) in a way that is rife with ambiguity, that is faithful to the original impurity of political origins, and that produces such strange mutations as the figure of the partisan, at once politicized to the bone and criminalized, de-politicized. The glimmer of hope for re-politicization shines when the rigid modern distinction between the church and the state gets eroded, as Schmitt maintains in Political Theology II. The re-politicization of theological discourse is a direct outcome of its self-professed de-politicization: the theological “claim becomes politically more intense along with the degree to which theological authority claims to supersede political power” (PTII 113). The claim of a domain—in this case the theological—to absolute independence renders it only more political and, thus, not absolutely identical to itself. In the second moment of the structural displacement of political conceptuality, the polemical meaning of political concepts harkens back not to other concepts, such as the theological, but to the other of the concept that is the enemy of philosophy par excellence: the strategic, situational, even bellicose—if we are mindful of the fact that the Greek polemos alludes to war—polemical context, wherein we sustain concrete confrontations with the enemies or forge alliances and association with the friends. They arise, to put it simply, from the content of political life. One literally fights armed with political concepts and distinctions that, with respect to Hobbes, Schmitt calls “weapons in political struggle,” or, at times, “counterconcepts,” Gegenbegriffe.17 The Hegelian twist, however, is that the weapons are not extraneous, prosthetic implements but an expression of the one who uses them in a fight: “weapons convey the substance of the fighter himself ” (LST 85). The polemical means are the ends of the struggle; the “winning” concepts (e.g., legality) shed the vestiges of the context in which they served and are enthroned as the universal content of the political. The dislocations of the political by other concepts and by the other of the concept converge in the event both in the everyday sense of a singular happening or occurrence—of everything that may be categorized as a part of the polemical context—and in the special sense of expropriation that reduces to sheer nonsense all appeals to the “pure origination”

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

67

of the political, renders impossible its emplacement, circumscription, economization, or domestication, and undermines a permanently valid demarcation of the variegated fields of human activity. An imprint of the event of the political is discernable, also, in the quotation marks, to which Schmitt confines the domains transfigured by a quantitatively produced qualitative shift: The often quoted sentence of quantity transforming into quality has a thoroughly political meaning. It is an expression of the recognition that from every “domain” the point of the political is reached and with it a qualitative new intensity of human groupings [daß vom jedem “Sachgebiet” aus der Punkt des Politischen und damit eine qualitative neue Intensität menschlicher Gruppierung erreicht ist]. (CP 62, translation modified) The quotation marks around “Sachgebiet” that are missing from the English translation indicate the expropriation of every “domain” at the point of the political (Punkt des Politischen), where each sphere loses its linear identity qua the theological, the economic, the moral, and so on, and ceases to exist as a sphere the moment it becomes politically charged. Mirroring the transposition of the point beyond the line and the typology of risk, the event of expropriation aporetically combines the calculable level of intensity and the incalculable threshold where all measures and measured responses outlive their relevance in the face of the “qualitatively new.” It draws together extreme indeterminacy—insofar as it may be reached “from every ‘domain’ [vom jedem ‘Sachgebiet’]”—and utmost determination emanating from the exact turning point of politicization and from the particular criteria that distinguish the political from the “relatively independent endeavors [domains, MM] of human thought and action [relativ selbständigen Sachgebieten menschlichen Denkens und Handelns]” (CP 25). If Schmitt declares the relative independence of these non-political spheres, it is in order to point out that, at any moment, they may undergo a process of politicization and that they, therefore, rely on the political in the last instance. Of course, this reliance is exceptionally risky, in that instead of supplying a secure foundation, the political withholds even the least topographic supports from what is relatively independent of it.18 The point of the political, like the point of the decision that lies at its core, is an instant of the greatest risk, an experience of groundlessness. The political is not the most basic stratum propping up the rest of the edifice of human thought

68

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

and action, but a veritable earthquake that, in bestowing meaning on the categories of human existence, disarticulates, unhinges, or ungrounds the latter and, in this unhinging, absorbs every sphere of life (as Schmitt puts it in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, “incessant friend-enemy disputes . . . embrace every sphere of human activity” [18]), similarly to the Derridian sponge that expropriates everything it ingests. The groundless character of the political is, perhaps, best understood as a particular phase of nomos’s uncoupling from land-appropriation and its transposition onto the uncertainty of the sea. “Ships that sail across the sea leave no trace [hinterlassen keine Spur]. ‘On the waves there is nothing but waves’” (NE 42–43). As a disruption in the ideal co-implication of order and orientation (Ordnung and Ortung), the anarchic spatiality of marine trace-erasure, like the political itself, cannot be forced into a determinate system of enclosures, regional divisions, and appropriations. Better than the land, the sea lives up to the political event of radical expropriation. Notwithstanding the acute deconstructive sensibility he exhibits in The Politics of Friendship, Derrida misses the non-regional and, in some measure, extra-conceptual determination of the political in Schmitt. The French philosopher oversimplifies things when he writes that it [Schmitt’s discourse] offers a pure and rigorous conceptual theory of the political, of the specific region of that which is properly and without polemical rhetoric called the “political”, the politicity of the political. Within this region, in the enclosure proper to a theoretical discourse, all examples, all facts, all historical contents should thus issue in knowledge.19 Needless to say, in Schmitt’s discourse, the political does not and cannot be confined to a specific region, though it does have a specific meaning that revolves around the friend-enemy distinction. In addition to this obvious lapse in his interpretive vigilance, Derrida willfully forgets the impure and “improper” genealogy of the concept of the political issuing from its theological (thus, non-political) origins, with this impropriety magnified manifold by the subversive role of the political in the expropriation of the remaining domains of human action. As for the usual meta-accusation that the polemical gist of political images and concepts does not make itself known in a thinking of the political that glorifies polemics, it is not hard to read between the lines who Schmitt’s enemy is and against whom his theory is formulated, namely, the liberal-democratic model of state administration predicated on the practices of economic management.

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

69

In light of these corrections and rejoinders, how is it possible still to insist on the purity and propriety of something that lacks a particular domain and is, perhaps, allergic to the logic of appropriation as such? Pursuing this line of thought, we will uncover nothing more and nothing less than Derrida’s own polemical program. It is not by chance that in this, apparently innocent, depiction of Schmitt’s political philosophy he includes words with the heaviest metaphysical luggage, “pure” and “proper,” that he has submitted to a stringent deconstructive analysis, as early as in Of Grammatology and in Margins of Philosophy. But we will need to wait for a rather long time, more than one hundred pages of The Politics of Friendship to be exact, before he puts his cards on the table, disclosing the motivation for his imposition of these terms on Schmitt and for a violent imprisonment of his thought in the “enclosure proper to a theoretical discourse.” Without further ado, this motivation has to do with what Derrida puts forth as an “interesting hypothesis,” according to which “Schmitt would . . . become the last great metaphysician of politics, the last great spokesperson of European political metaphysics.”20 The enclosure of the political concept Derrida imputes to the non-place of the political will, thus, mirror the closure (clôture) of metaphysics, where Schmitt replaces Heidegger who occupies the place of Nietzsche as “the last great metaphysician” responsible for accomplishing, without ever completing, the final reversal of Platonism. This interested, invested reading ignores not only the clearest of indications that the political does not have a particular sphere of its own but also that Schmitt has compressed and slotted metaphysics in its entirety into the second stage of neutralization and de-politicization in his 1929 text. If the most basic way to transcend metaphysics is to historicize it, then the alleged last metaphysician has passed the test of post-metaphysical thought. I am not insinuating, however, that Schmitt is beyond reproach on the issue of metaphysics or that his grade for this test is “entirely satisfactory.” Derrida, to be fair to him, is partly correct in ascribing a metaphysical program to the theorist who radically expropriates the political, yet finally puts it in the service of guarding and protecting that which is one’s own for the purpose of preserving, at any price, “one’s own form of existence [der eigenen Art Existenz]” (CP 27), in spite of the existential threat stemming from the enemy. To peg the accuracy of the charges that Schmitt clandestinely practices a garden variety of metaphysics,21 one would need to contend with this mixed heritage. And to help him leave behind the last metaphysical vestiges, one would have to recommit Schmittian politics to the event of expropriation.

70

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Schmitt’s Anti-Economism Revisited: Nomos/Appropriation, Politics/Expropriation Schmitt’s anti-economism is, by now, a jaded topic that fails to surprise anyone versed in the arguments of Roman Catholicism and The Concept of the Political. In the mindset of liberal-democratic governance, the economic supplies a blueprint for the impersonal pursuit of politics drained of danger and risk, ostensibly free from the element of decision-making— which turns into another word for tyranny—and, at the extreme, devoid of the last shreds of representation it has disbanded into the sheer presence of things (RC 20). The catalogue of these merciless attacks on economism would not be complete without mentioning that, for Schmitt, the economic is the final and, perhaps, the most decisive stage of neutralization and depoliticization and that it is intimately tied to the despotism of technology that militates against the possibility of spiritual life. To sum up, his antieconomism reflects an anti-anti-political stance, an assault on everything that weakens political concepts and phenomena. A mere invocation of the critique of presence, directed against the economic predominance of things and warily moderated with the rejection of abstract, disembodied concepts (e.g., “humanity,” which lacks a body, either literal or figurative, thus forestalling the possibility of political phenomenology), should have sufficed for the first line of the defense of Schmitt against the charges that he has smuggled a heavy metaphysical luggage into his theory of the political. The notions of the human and the thing, two facets that, along with the animal, make up the architecture of Aristotle’s metaphysics,22 elicit some of the bitterest scorn from Schmitt in his early work. As though this were not enough, on the positive side, his thinly veiled attack on metaphysics entails the avowal of “concrete representation” and of its corollary, “invisible visibility,”23 which resembles the Derridian trace, an absent presence or present absence muddling the purity of philosophical constructs. Be this as it may, even if Schmitt could be interpreted as advocating a proto-Arendtian autonomy or primacy of the political vis-à-vis the social and the economic,24 he would not have been satisfied with a simple inversion of the Marxist base-superstructure model, given that the political is not one domain among others, crucial for the continuation of the life of spirit as it might be. We must, rather, assume the task of reconfiguring the relationship between the political and the economic, in a way that leaves direct determinations and even over-determinations behind. In the course of this reconfiguration, I will show that the lines of demarcation between the two also pass at the heart

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

71

of the Heideggerian and Derridian meditations on the event of appropriation and expropriation. Abstractly, then, politics is the antithesis of economy; the tacit goal of the analysis of economism is to rescue the realm of “spirit” from the predominance of things that triggers the all-too-familiar scheme of reification.25 Concretely, however, there are three obstacles in the path of this easy solution. 1. Economic oppositions can become political, if they are filled with an appropriate intensity of antagonism. As Schmitt puts it in The Concept of the Political, when it reaches a certain quantity, economic property, for example, becomes obviously social (or more correctly, political) power, propriété turns into pouvoir, and what is at first only an economically motivated class antagonism [Klassengegensatz] turns into a class struggle [Klassenkampf] of hostile groups. (CP 62). Note the refined irony of this example: the embodiment of the economic, the ultimate receptacle of appropriation—property—is expropriated qua property, becomes “improper,” and turns into power under the sway of the political transformation. This kind of expropriation does not facilitate the Hegelian synthesis of two previously antithetical terms but reveals that even the most neutralized category is amenable to a sudden politicization. The opposition of the political and the non-political is subordinate to the antagonism that, at the same time, characterizes the political and that erases this very opposition. 2. There can be no symmetry in the relation between economy and politics because, unlike the former, the latter has no domain of its own and, consequently, does not partake of the most basic and definitive economic operation, the act of appropriation. This absence of symmetry, once again, lends support to the conclusion that the political and the economic will not constitute an economy, not even the economy of oppositional relationality and mutual negation that inheres in every antithesis. Their antithetical interrelation will be understood as thoroughly historical and polemical, not as an ontological given. 3. The legal status of the non-European territory appropriated by Europeans testifies to the ambiguous mixture of the economic and the political at the origins of colonialism. The justification of colonial occupation in the writings of the sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher and jurist Francisco de Vitoria occupied a gray area between “imperium (or

72

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

jurisdictio) over human beings and the acquisition of dominium, i.e., private ownership of things” (NE 137). Subsequent legal thinkers have ignored this distinction between political right and economic right— which corresponds to the difference between Dasein and entities other than Dasein in Heidegger—and addressed only “the acquisition of things in general” (ibid.). It would be a crude error to conceptualize colonialism as a political phenomenon; at best, it is a vivid example of indecision and vacillation between the political and the economic; at worst, and at its most modern, it is a force of economic appropriation. The significance of the colonial omission is that the current victory of economism has been achieved at the price of erasing the complex interplay between the proprietary dominium and the non-economic imperium, a distinction that still carried some weight in early modernity. Before proceeding any further, it is important to realize that Schmitt does not take for granted the meaning of economy but, instead, approaches the subject matter in a meticulously philosophical manner guided by the question, “What is the economic?” In Greek, economy is a composite term conjoining the “nomos” and the “oikos” (the house) in a combination that is more or less tautological: “the unity of nomos is only the unity of the oikos” (NE 345). Much will depend, therefore, on the interpretation of nomos that holds the key to the unity and the essence of the economic. Schmitt contemplates the nomos of eco-nomy in the Materials for Constitutional Theory amassed between 1924 and 1954. He isolates three pertinent bases of the Greek noun, from nehmen (to take or appropriate) through teilen (to divide or distribute), to weiden (literally, pasturage, or productive work).26 Appropriation is the most fundamental etymological and conceptual stratum of the economic nomos, one that makes possible distribution and production alike in the tripartite economy of “economy.”27 By the same token, it is the most forgotten, to the point of utter repression, of the three meanings of nomos, and its descent into oblivion accelerates in the aftermath of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. So unrelenting is the tendency to omit this deepest layer that Schmitt himself drops appropriation from his critique of economy in Roman Catholicism, where he formulates its difference from the political and writes that “[b]y claiming to be something more than the economic, the political is obliged to base itself on categories other than production and consumption” (17). His silence apropos of appropriation could, to be sure, mean that the excluded term does not explain the excess of the political over the economic, but the contextual frame of the passage makes it clear that in 1923 Schmitt does

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

73

not yet view the latter as anything other than a combination of production and distribution. Parallel to the forgetting of Being in Heidegger, the question of appropriation, responsible for the event of the economic par excellence, migrates to the blind spot of utopian socialism (Proudhon) and to the outskirts of liberalism, for which the truncated and perverted sequence of the production and distribution of wealth exhausts the nature of economic reality.28 Marx’s ingenuity, on the other hand, lies in his recovery of this repressed economic stratum on the edge of its transformation into the political, that is, in the recuperation of the principle of appropriation and the demand for the expropriation of the expropriators that, alone, lends credibility to radical political economy: Marx . . . concentrates the whole weight of his attack on the expropriation of the expropriators, i.e., on the precedure of appropriation [Vorgang des Nehmens]. In place of the old right of plunder and the primitive land-appropriations of pre-industrial times, he substituted the appropriation of the total means of production.29 This more nuanced approach implies that the Schmittian onslaught against economism targets primarily those factors that trigger the impoverishment of the political potential of the economic, its reduction to the spheres of production and distribution, and, most recently, to heedless productivism fomented by technological demands and by instrumental rationality. What distinguishes production from distribution and, especially, from appropriation is that it does not require a great deal of decision-making but dissolves this capacity into the productive technological apparatus and into the general order of things. At the most “founded” (to resort to a Husserlian notion), ossified, and superficial level of production, which Marx deemed to be the “inner abode” and the deeply buried source of the capitalist self-valorization of value, economic rationality is at its most material, “concerned only with things” (RC 16), preoccupied with that which can be appropriated, yet indifferent to the act of appropriation itself. Conversely, the political entails Unsachlichkeit. The English translation of this word in terms of “a lack of objectivity” (CP 32) built into the decision-making capacity is an obvious and correct one, though another rendition is possible: in a variation on the negative determination of political immateriality, Unsachlichkeit can also mean “unthingliness.” The literal connotations of this term bolster the idea that the political does not have a domain of its own, its proper Sachgebiet, its circumscribed realm

74

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

of things (Sachen), for the sovereign and constitution-making decisions cannot be entirely diffused in an impersonal field but are concentrated in a concrete will, whether individual or collective. And if the political is unthingly, then it does not fall under the purview of the act of appropriation, which it sanctions, assuming that only a thing can be targeted by this act. Thus far, the trajectory of the argument easily falls prey to the tactical maneuvers Derrida finesses in Of Spirit that juxtaposes Heidegger’s definition of the thing as “worldless” to the world, which is always spiritual.30 On this view, Schmitt has succumbed to an unquestioned metaphysical distinction between the spiritual (politics) and the spiritless (the economy) and has unambiguously taken sides in this artificial theoretical matrix redolent of the crudest idealism. And yet, the idealist scenario is lopsided and cannot be attributed squarely to Schmitt; the political appears to be purely spiritual and immaterial only from the standpoint of economic rationality. A symptom of complexity in Schmitt’s examination of the relationship between spirit and the thing, representing the political and the economic respectively, is his refusal to consider it as a simple binary opposition, let alone as the point of friction between a thesis and an antithesis. As the penultimate sentence of “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” proclaims, life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness [und der Geist nicht mit der Geistlosigkeit]; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things [die Ordnung der menschlichen Dinge]. (CP 96) I underline just two aspects of this incredibly fertile passage, which invites an otherwise interminable analysis: first, there is never a standoff between spirit, the world, politics, on the one hand, and spiritlessness, the thing, the economy, on the other, seeing that the struggle they are involved in is asymmetrical and takes place as an inner division within spirit, the world, and so on, engulfing their opposite; and, second, these inner splits and fissures of spirit against itself—the splits and fissures that galvanize the friend-enemy distinction constitutive of the political and that include the divergence of the political from economic rationality—result in the order of human things, now transcribed not as Sachen but as Dinge. The barely perceptible linguistic shift from one appellation of the thing to the other signals that the political, too, possesses a material, “thingly” dimension and, furthermore,

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

75

conveys that the struggle of life against life and of spirit against spirit affects the thing itself, subject to the clash between the order of human Dinge and the impersonal, administrative arrangement of Sachen. Such is the event of the thing divided against itself and, therefore, no longer resting in the selfidentity of an inanimate entity abstractly opposed to spirit. It partakes of the event of politics, where the catalogue of what is expropriated includes, first and foremost, every stable and rigid identity of life, spirit, or the thing with itself and, additionally, the spatiality of the political devoid of its own region or proper domain. What is the place of the concept in this framework? The Hegelian dialectical concept longs for its identity with itself, awaiting that time outside of time when identity bridges and reconciles the identical and the non-identical across all the unrests and tribulations that befall Spirit in its historical instantiations. But the eventful expropriation of the firmly established conceptual identity infinitely postpones the moment of the concept’s final return to itself and, by implication, defers the end of the political division between friends and enemies, life and life, spirit and spirit, and so on. The concept of the political, der Begriff des Politischen, will not have been able to drive away this irreducible difference without, at the same time, annihilating the political “itself.” That of which it is a concept (the political) prevents its closure and absolute homecoming, puts it on the brink of the event, and fatefully entwines the concept with its own expropriation. Der Begriff des Politischen is uncanny because, instead of grasping (greifen) the political, it permits the latter to grasp us, to push us to the extremity of the limit, where the sovereign decision on the exception and the real possibility of killing and being killed by the enemy grips and unsettles us, making life both interesting and dangerous, as Leo Strauss observes in his influential commentary on Schmitt. The existential concept is nothing if it is not an outlet for the event foretokening the possibility of 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 “fidelity to the event,” that germination of the subject who performatively attains the level of subjecthood by affirming his or her allegiance to the event.31 Badiou’s “fidelity” still clings to the modality of the event that equally appropriates the subject and the “thinking of the situation”: “To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking . . . the situation ‘according to’ the event.”32 The situation is the ontological superdomain, indifferent and indeterminate,

76

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

where the paths of the fourfold event of art, science, politics, and love are differentiated and charted. To be faithful, to stay on these paths, is to exercise the interpretive appropriation of the otherwise neutral situation thought “‘according to’ the event.” Returning to Schmitt, we face a much more difficult dilemma if we ask how it is possible to harness, at the level of concrete material practices, the potential of the expropriative event that blasts open the concept of the political. Does Schmitt himself succeed in the task of transferring the ungrounded notion of the political, which does not belong in any particular sphere, to political practices that concretely embrace this non-belonging? This is where his political philosophy is vulnerable before the Derridian diagnosis of its metaphysical entrenchment. We could say that Schmitt retreats from the structural displacement of the concept of the political and vacillates to the other extreme of the event (appropriation) when he subjects the friend-enemy distinction to the exigencies of preserving “one’s own form of existence.” In so doing, he perpetuates the intellectual inheritance, which Spinoza, that scandalous seventeenth-century metaphysician, bequeathed to Western philosophy by embedding the abstract principle of identity in the concrete predicament of the living desire to maintain oneself in existence.33 In what follows I will advance a somewhat counterintuitive argument that, in the applications of his theory, Schmitt does not abandon the political event of expropriation, though he does misconstrue the concept of expropriation as nothing but the negative mode of appropriation. The misconstrual I am referring to occurs in the 1953 text on the basic questions of any social and economic order and, in particular, in the reflections on the Marxist “expropriation of the expropriators,” die Expropriation der Expropriateure. “If the essence of imperialism,” writes Schmitt, “lies in the precedence of appropriation over distribution and production, then a doctrine such as the expropriation of expropriators is obviously the strongest imperialism because it is the most modern [offenbar stärkster, weil modernster Imperialismus].”34 Besides exhibiting a narrow understanding of expropriation as the underside of appropriation, this passage fails to ask whether the event of the expropriation of the expropriators leaves the dynamics of appropriation intact, or whether this dynamics is fatefully altered and stripped of all imperialist overtones. Does appropriation remain the same before and after the expropriation of expropriators has taken place? I believe that it does not, if expropriation is not taken as a reapportionment of what was previously appropriated but as a momentary paralysis of the economic order and the radical displacement of ownness as such in a way that remains faithful to the event of politics.

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

77

Despite a hurried dismissal of Marxist expropriation as “the most modern” form of imperialism, Schmitt’s political philosophy falls on the Derridian side of the event articulated in the suspension of the “proper.” The exigencies of preserving “one’s own form of existence” against the threat of the enemy (in appealing to these exigencies, doesn’t Schmitt solicit support from the Spinozan conatus essendi, and does he not contravene his prior adherence to the political purged of various neutralizations and depoliticizations, including the metaphysical ones?) need to be re-embedded within the framework of The Concept of the Political, from which they issue. Immediately before he adopts this defensive attitude, Schmitt places an accent on the absence of a neutral third party that could adjudicate the existential conflict with the other: “These [conflicts] can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm [in vorhaus getroffene generelle Normierung] nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party [eines ‘unbeteiligten’ und daher ‘unparteiischen’ Dritten]” (CP 27). The decision lies exclusively with the actual participants in the conflict and their judgment—“Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict” (CP 27)—that remains existentially groundless, insofar as it hinges neither on the externality of the general norm nor on the whim of a neutral third party. The unambiguous rejection of the norm, which stands for sham neutrality that surreptitiously caters to particular interests, cannot open an exception for the conatus, or the law of perseverance in one’s being, without, at the same time, stripping the parties to the conflict of their decision-making ability and re-establishing the primacy of the impersonal metaphysics of “substance.” In contrast to Spinoza, Schmitt cannot exempt the question concerning the preservation of one’s own form of existence from the practices of decisionmaking. Although the decision not to preserve this form is a dangerous one, as it may spell out the end of further political decisions, in the absence of a possibility to make this choice, a determinate general norm (e.g., the “natural law” of self-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 pregnant sense; it admits even the possibility of its own closure, proscribing a series of future existential decisions. Regardless of the content of what is decided in each case, the existential decision will have singled out and subscribed to one of at least two options. Otherwise, obeying the dictate of natural law, we are left with the “either” divorced from the “or,” that is to say, with a predetermined program of action that is no longer political—for example, the normative and “necessarily antagonistic exclusion of concrete others.”36

78

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

From the existential point of view, while the objective outcome of a decision might be the same, the different paths that have led to its actualization are crucial for its evaluation. When Schmitt derides pacifist indecision, crystallized in the proclamation that a “people has nothing but friends,” he concludes, in an extremely disconcerting manner, that such political exhaustion will cause a “weak people [ein schwaches Volk]” to disappear (CP 53). But it, certainly, matters whether this disappearance has come about as a result of indecision and risk-avoidance discussed in Chapter 2, or thanks to a deliberate choice not to preserve one’s own form of existence—to expropriate oneself.37 If the latter is the case, then the same outcome must be interpreted as a sign of strength, not of weakness, a sign that, in the long run, this form is renewed thanks to its self-expropriation and that the political decision remains meaningful, having been given a choice between two distinct alternatives. In the spirit of Schmitt’s political philosophy, which occasionally clashes with the letter of his texts, commentators need to tackle not only the metaphysical-nationalist but also the moral residue in the foreboding value judgment he passed on ein schwaches Volk by restricting it to instances of political fatigue that do not encompass the decision to let go of one’s form of collective existence or to disclaim its nationalist character. An obvious, and patently Spinozan, objection that might arise at this point would be that no one in the right frame of mind (i.e., having the good clearly in sight) is prepared consciously to give up one’s conatus essendi, or that which keeps one fast to existence. And, assuming that this deliberate decision were possible, would the event of the political be an elaborate façade for a political suicide? This is the direction in which Derrida takes the thought of the event in Rogues, where he exposes the aporiae haunting the binaries of heteronomy and autonomy, absolute hospitality and sovereignty, the host’s self-expropriating openness to alterity and the desire to occupy one’s spot under the sun. The general heading for these aporiae is “autoimmunity”: the capacity of a living entity to “destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it against the other.”38 With this biological allusion, Derrida illustrates how, in the process of defending itself from the other, an entity can autonomously effectuate its own heteronomy and expose itself to alterity. And, conversely, what a skeptic might dub “political suicide,” the autonomous choice to expropriate oneself, breathes life and meaning into the political decision on the form of one’s own existence. (I contend that the concept of the political is itself suicidal, in that, as a concept, it strives toward identity and reconciliation, negating the agonistic and uncompromising potentialities of the

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

79

political which it, nevertheless, cannot erase.) The autonomous transition to heteronomy marks the maximal sense of the event of expropriation. If we are attentive to the fine grain of Schmitt’s text, we will observe that it is not political existence as such but the form (Art) of this existence that is preserved or rejected in the decisive confrontation with the enemy. To cling to an outmoded form of existence is to keep the old status quo on artificial respiration, long after the content from which it had arisen withered away. A regular revisiting of the decision prevents the dissociation of the content of existence from its form, in that it measures and assesses the changes in the former to ensure that the latter has not petrified. Here, the event of expropriation is diluted to its minimal sense of shedding the old form of political existence that no longer corresponds to its content in order to assume a new, existentially substantiated form. This minimal event of expropriation provides for a certain continuity between the second and the third “absolute meanings” of the constitution in Constitutional Theory: between the constitution as a living form or a “special type of political and social order . . . not detachable from . . . political existence” and as “the principle of the dynamic emergence of political unity, of the process of constantly renewed formation and emergence of this unity from a fundamental or ultimately effective power and energy” (CT 60–61). In the process of renewal that adumbrates the living connection between the form and the content of politics, expropriation facilitates the “emergence” and “formation” of new unities (forms of political existence) and functions as the inalienable aspect of decisions on the constitution as a whole. It is necessitated by the fact that there is no proper, ideal, transhistorical mode of life perfectly befitting a concrete political unity once and for all. Or, from the methodological perspective, the issue is whether or not existence and, above all, political existence is grasped existentially, that is, not in keeping with the objective and seemingly ever-present metaphysical categories but at the level of what Schmitt, somewhat awkwardly, labels “concrete life,” immanently changeable and abounding in futural possibilities. Does the concept, on its part, escape the fate of those unities that form and dissolve in the process of renewal? When Schmitt revisits the intuitions of his 1932 work, The Concept of the Political, after World War II and outlines the shifts of political focus from clearly identifiable state actors to irregular partisan formations, he warns against what he calls Begriffsauflösung, “concept dissolution,” in the treatment of the figure of the partisan: In some cases, this alteration of meaning becomes exhausted in an indefinite symbolization [allgemeinen Symbolisierung und Begriffsauflösung]

80

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

that ends up dissolving the original concept. The result is that every nonconformist individual who acts as he sees fit can be called a partisan . . . Such conceptual dissolutions are a sign of the times, which should not be ignored and would deserve a separate examination. (TP 22–23) The process of concept dissolution that sees the partisan turn into everything and nothing in particular is most salient at a time of transition and, hence, in the emergence of a new conceptual unity. The minimal sense of ontological expropriation is epistemologically relevant to the concept of the political as well, permitting its form to adjust to the increasingly more significant partisan content and interspersing this period of adjustment with hyperbolic extensions and overvaluations of the partisan. More importantly, the maximal sense of expropriation that goes along with the concept’s dissolution exceeds Schmitt’s disparaging rhetoric. Far from being a mere “sign of the times,”39 this dissolution, which depicts the event of expropriation, is folded into the concept of the political that refuses to insulate itself in stable identities, constantly falls apart and, thereby, channels the event of politics. Although it might appear that the concrete features of the partisan, including irregularity, greater mobility, and increased intensity of engagement, threaten to replace the rigorously conceptual form with an obscure, energetic, and embodied figure, whose outlines are essentially blurred, they are, to the contrary, a sign of the utmost fidelity to the concept that feeds off the logic of displacement, lacks a clearly identifiable domain of its own, and transgresses the boundaries of all other domains. With the partisan’s rise to prominence, the concept of the political expropriates itself, autonomously effectuates its heteronomy, and welcomes the event of politics. And it is this self-expropriation that supplants all positive, constative pronouncements on political ontology with an open-ended question.

Notes 1. On the historical background of the much debated distinction between politics and “the political,” see Kari Palonen, “Politics or the Political? An Historical Perspective on a Contemporary Non-Debate,” in European Political Science 6, 2007, pp. 69–78. I concur with Palonen that the abstract privileging of the political “provides the scholar with an excuse to retain a pro-political attitude while remaining disinterested in the actions of politicians” (p. 78). This disengagement, however, does not mark Schmitt’s political philosophy discussed in the article. 2. Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 73.

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

81

3. “[T]he er- in Ereignis has the function of stressing and putting forth the movement of eignen in -eignis.” Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, “Translators’ Foreword,” in Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. xx. See also Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 117. 4. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 40. 5. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: 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. Thus, in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology [trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)] the property of representamen “is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen” (p. 50). See also Derrida’s “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), especially the part titled “The Flowers of Rhetoric,” pp. 245–257. 10. Derrida, Signsponge, p. 72. 11. Cf. Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 12. Schmitt denounces “the nineteenth-century antitheses” that place the political on the hither side of every other sphere of human activity as evidence of “liberal depoliticization.” 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 of Minnesota Press, 1997)] hurries to distance the latter from the former, with the excuse that political theology does not go far enough in the direction of “a rigorous deconstruction of the categories of ontotheology and politics” (p. 72). As we shall see, Derrida perpetuates this way of treating Schmitt that remains oblivious to the existential character of his political thought, which is not shackled to its “Catholic” sources. 15. Joseph Bendersky [Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)] notes that this potential politicizability of every sphere is intended to combat the liberal contention that there are neutral or apolitical spheres (p. 88). 16. Jacob Taubes, En Divergent Accord: À Propos de Carl Schmitt (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2003), p. 90. 17. See, for instance, NE 73. 18. While Heinrich Meier [Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. H. Lomax (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995)] is right to distinguish the political from all other “relatively independent domains,” he is somewhat careless in

82

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

attributing a “fundamental” (p. 16) dimension to it, a dimension which ought to be taken with more than one grain of salt, as the present analysis shows. 19. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 117. 20. Ibid., p. 247. 21. These charges are echoed by Andrew Norris in his paper “Sovereignty, Exception, Norm,” in Journal of Law and Society 34 (1), March 2007, pp. 31–45. 22. To put it briefly, the notion of the thing is a cornerstone of the Aristotelian metaphysical edifice, where the animal is “the living thing” and the human is “the political animal,” or, by implication, “the political living thing.” 23. Cf. “The Visibility of the Church: A Scholastic Consideration,” an appendix to Roman Catholicism and the Political Form, pp. 47–59. 24. This is the position Eckard Bolsinger defends in his The Autonomy of the Political: Carl Schmitt’s and Lenin’s Political Realism (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2001). 25. John McCormick [Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. p. 57] does well to compare Schmitt’s critique of economic rationality with the Lukácsian notion of reification, even if this comparison overlooks some of the complexities involved in the anti-economism of the former thinker. 26. Carl Schmitt, “Appropriation/Distribution/Production: Toward a Proper Formulation of Basic Questions of Any Social and Economic Order,” trans. G. Ulmen, Telos 95, Spring 1993, pp. 54–55. Much of these reflections on the meaning of nomos are a condensed form of the systematic and monumental effort preserved in The Nomos of the Earth. The semantic list of the meanings of nomos is far from exhausted here, for it can have a plethora of “derived” senses, from “a mere rule” to the opposite of phusis. Cf. NE 67. 27. It is surprising that in his essay “Tradition of the Immemorial,” included in Potentialities, Agamben takes these three economic principles to be Schmitt’s articulations of the political (p. 112). Only this baffling confusion allows him to separate Ur-teilung from appropriation 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, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 47–48. 31. In a different context, Colin Wright [“Event or Exception? Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or Towards a Politics of the Void,” in Theory and Event 11 (2), 2008] distances Badiou’s event from Schmitt’s exception. 32. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of 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 self-preservation’ is the prerequisite of all further discussions; it attempts, above all, to maintain itself in existence, ‘in suo esse perseverare’ (Spinoza)” (CT 76). 34. Schmitt, “Appropriation/Distribution/Production,” p. 63.

Non-Ground: From the Concept to the Event

83

35. Schmitt does not oppose pacifism to the natural law, as Robert Howse [“From Legitimacy to Dictatorship—and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. D. Dyzenhaus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 66] claims, but to the decision on whether one should maintain one’s form of existence. 36. In his recent article, Matthias Fritsch [“Antagonism and Democratic Citizenship (Schmitt, Mouffe, 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: Two Essays on Reason, trans. M. Naas and P.-A. Brault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 125. 39. Preparing the ground for the argument advanced in “Theory of the Partisan,” Schmitt writes in Constitutional Theory: “One may generally say that the concept renders itself relative and pluralistic as soon as the consciousness of political existence undermines itself ” (95). But what if, instead of being a symptom of such self-undermining, the relativization (and, indeed, the dissolution) of political concepts is necessary for their adjustment to a new content of such existence? After all, isn’t it his contention that all concepts in the spiritual 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 much and too little. Too much, because of the expression’s plurivocity, its rich semantic potential tapped, for instance, in a suggestion that politics, deprived of a sphere of its own, inheres in an open-ended question that, like human existence itself, lacks a response, a strict closure (though not finitude), a universally valid and positive, let alone normative, injunction. This syntagma might also intimate to us that politics is endangered and fragile, so much so that its existence is often doubtful, put in question, placed under erasure, in the manner of Heidegger’s Being. Or, is it the case that the second interpretation tacitly draws on the first, in that the fragility of politics, its placement under erasure, is due to the fact that it finds a domicile, however uncertain, in the form of the question? We could mention an additional rendition of the syntagma that sees in politics in question a questionable politics—something that Schmitt and his interpreters are acquainted with all too well. This third possibility is a fully legitimate one until, that is, it slides into moralizing judgments passed on this politics as unquestionably reactionary or, worse still, evil. In light of this last hermeneutical possibility, the opening of the question is immediately converted into its closure that, emboldened by the self-righteousness of such judgments, in one breath, extinguishes the questioning impulse and the promise of the political. It should be remarked that the vigilance of the question does not consist in a desire to propagate pure indeterminacy and, thus, to dodge all judgments, all matters of responsibility, decisions and definitive pronouncements. It awakens, instead, an aspiration toward justice, the ancient 84

Politics in Question

85

desideratum to dispense to each her or his own, or, more specifically, to give back to the political a groundless, endangered existence that, with the intensification of antagonisms in other spheres of human life, puts the existents so politicized in question. If, as we have already seen, the political does not have a clearly circumscribed domain of its own, if it is fluid and subversive enough to politicize all other domains of human activity, then it is more fitting to think about it along the lines of ultimately unanswerable questions than in terms of one-dimensional replies. And it is at this point, in the existential wager par excellence, that “politics in question” means too little because, rather than turning the political into an object of inquiry or a target for interrogation, it puts us in question, disconcerts, unhinges, and unsettles us. When one abides in the mode of questioning, raising a question that does not come to rest in any consensual response, one does not remain in control of what is thus unleashed, but experiences a sense of being haunted by the question, of being driven ever deeper into its abyss. Following a hypermodern sensibility, the putting of the human subject in question is not a disturbance of a preexisting identity; it is her very identity. In a preliminary way, I suggest, then, that we experience a political-existential crisis whenever we are put into question in our very being and that this crisis is not a merely fleeting, temporary, singular occurrence but the shape and being of the human being who is inexorably unhinged, questioned, targeted by the other, whom I call “my enemy” but without whom I lose my human countenance.

Posing the Question Much of Schmitt’s political thought may be positioned between two dicta, one of them poetic, the other—philosophico-anthropological. Not only do these statements pertain to disciplines and spheres of cultural production other than political philosophy, but they are also quotations that have their provenance in authors other than Schmitt, who polemically takes over their meaning and, hence, politicizes them. Unevenly distributed across the Schmittian oeuvre (one statement is cited only once, while the other winds like Ariadne’s thread, in many guises, through writings of different periods), in their heterogeneous ways, both shed light on the role of the question in political ontology. Let us put these textual fragments side-by-side in order to allow them to communicate to one another, to relate in a faint whisper everything that is going on between them, namely, an existential politics. We are already abreast of the first of these: “Man, for Plessner, is ‘primarily a being capable of creating distance’ who in his

86

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

essence [in seinem Wesen] is undetermined, unfathomable, and remains ‘an open question’ [unbestimmt, unergründlich und ‘offene Frage’ bleibt]” (CP 60). In the second fragment Schmitt cites the German poet Theodor Däubler, “The enemy is our own question as Gestalt [Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt. Alternatively: The enemy is a figure for our own question]” (G 243). While, from Meier to Derrida, commentators have generated a veritable exegetical genealogy of this last sentence, I want to hear it with a slightly different ear, an ear attuned neither to the enemy, nor to the figure but to the question that imparts sense to both. The openness of the question investing the essence of “man,” the lack of closure and the indeterminacy of finite human existence, is not an automatic endorsement of passive and unconditional hospitality to the other celebrated in the second half of the twentieth century, most notably, by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. To be sure, the two currents of thought (that of Levinas and that of Schmitt) may share a common source in an attempt at rethinking classical theological doctrine, according to which humans are, from the first, situated in a dialogue with God to whom they respond and whom they question, on account of the freedom of atheism— what Levinas terms in Totality and Infinity “created freedom” or “absolute separation”—harking back to the secular attitude woven into the fabric of theism. Whereas the reelaboration of this doctrine led Levinas toward an ethical philosophy of welcoming the other, who may even be my enemy, for Schmitt, it served as the condition of possibility for an ongoing polemical, political-theological contestation of what it means to be human, a contestation that occurs at the level of concrete, embodied, historical human beings, not at the level of humanity as an “all-embracing social ideal” (CP 55). If the human being is unfathomable, or literally ungrounded, unergründlich, that is because its determination is a self-determination1 which, if it is not to yield a monstrosity of yet another essentialism and belie the openness of finite existence, must maintain a high degree of plasticity and indeterminacy. (Let it be said, in passing, that Plessner’s statement powerfully resonates not only with Schmitt but also with Heidegger, for whom human essence is nothing but existence and, therefore, a certain “ecstatic” openness of the finite oriented by its possibilities.2 In other words, all three authors concur that human essence is existence and that the rhetorical form of the latter is a question.) This existential definition does not call for an extreme solipsism permeating the tradition of radical humanism: the self-determination and the self-contestation of the human is, in rather Hegelian terms, the genesis of identity in opposition to otherness, or, more concretely, a polemical

Politics in Question

87

determination of one human collectivity vis-à-vis another such collectivity. Nor can we afford to ignore the other source of heteronomy, of which Schmitt is keenly aware: the dimension of human corporeality, our “facticity” that makes us vulnerable—even ontologically so—and “naked,” nackt, especially when we feel that we are clothed in the armor of the latest technologies (EC 79, 85). The autonomy of self-determination is not the last word of the political; it is as if the centerpiece of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology solicited the poetic conclusion concerning the enemy as our own question, in that the enemy accomplishes, without ever completing, the real work of heteronomy, unhinging and maintaining undone the figure of the human conceived as “an open question.” The enemy metes out to us the principle of our existence, so much so that the friend-enemy distinction—the unbridgeable distance constitutive of the political—is itself constituted by him as the prototype of all difference, the mechanism of distantiation (including self-distantiation), defining the spacing around which “man” constructs himself as “a being capable of creating distance.” What this implies is that the question is the essence of the political, while the political is the essence of the human. The source of the paradoxical dispensation of what makes us human, its emanation from the concept of the enemy, becomes exceptionally clear in Ex Captivitate Salus, where Schmitt repeats the poetic formula, with a barely perceptible hermeneutical variation: Who may I finally recognize as my enemy? Manifestly, he alone who can put me in question [der mich in Frage stellen kann]. Insofar as I recognize him as my enemy, I recognize that he can put me in question. And who can effectively put me in question? Only myself. Or my brother. That’s it. The other is my brother. The other is revealed as my brother and the brother reveals himself as my enemy . . . The enemy is our own question as figure. (EC 89–90)3 Two observations are in order here. First, if the enemy is the only one who can put me in question and if, moreover, the human being is understood as an open question, then the enemy grants me my humanity—a word we should register without a tinge of humanism—by way of activating the uniquely human existential stance of finding oneself enduringly put in question. For the first time in human history, the concept of the human is not anthropomorphic, in that the living human being is no longer “modeled on [an abstract image of] humanity” (PTII 57). The full weight and the dangerousness

88

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

of this non-humanist idea of the human should not escape our attention: the enemy who existentially puts me in question, who is defined by this very act, and who doles out my identity to me does so concretely as a death-bearing adversary. As Schmitt unambiguously specifies, “The friend, the enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing . . . War is the existential negation [seinsmäßige Negierung] of the enemy” (CP 33). We will, no doubt, return to the uncanny negation that, instead of denying or saying “no” to the enemy as our own question, emphatically affirms this figure, along with the possibility of death it carries. The real possibility of death is preferable, in Schmittian terms, to the certainty of nihilism, the boredom and revulsion instilled in us by the decay of the dangerous and risky core of the human. An orientation toward death, as the possible outcome of enmity, does not glorify what it orients itself toward, does not take its cues from the hither side of life. Rather, the detour through the tangle of the enemy, the existential question, the imminent threat of mortality, and hence a finite life, puts me face-toface with myself and, in so doing, fuels the liveliness, the vivacity, of my life, in the same way that Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” gives one a chance to live otherwise, holding onto the promise of authenticity, however errant and ephemeral. Finally, one more element needs to be added to this tangle, namely, philosophy as the meta-experience of questioning, the questioning about that question which outlines the contours of the human being.4 Second, there is a strange slippage in the passage quoted above. While the enemy puts me in question, he, in turn, is treated as “our own question.” What has changed between the two invocations of the question in this dense text? What allows Schmitt to oscillate so lightly between the private and the public, to shift from the first-person singular to the first-person plural in this confrontation with the enemy? To be sure, the encounter with the political enemy is never private, even if I have the impression that it concerns only the two of us. The politically engaged enemy is, according to Schmitt’s insistence, a public, not a private adversary: hostis, not inimicus (CP 29). But the lines of demarcation between the public and the private have never been more blurred. In a hypothetical situation in which I find myself alone, I am still, or already, with my enemy, who has the exclusive right to put me in question. I am with myself, put into question by myself as my own enemy; a human being’s “relation ad se ipsum is not possible without a relation ad alterum” (RC 51). Paradigmatically, by maintaining distance from myself, in a slight variation on Plessner’s definition of the

Politics in Question

89

human, I dispense my humanity to myself as other and bestow a measure of recognition upon myself by becoming my own enemy even in the “privacy” of my prison cell. So, when I am in a face-to-face situation with an external enemy, we are not two, but already form a crowd. It remains to be decided to what extent this train of thought is motivated by the desire to put philosophy in the service of therapeutic ends, given Schmitt’s own imprisonment at the end of World War II—the predicament in which this text was composed—and to what extent it is applicable to the human condition as such. What is clear, nevertheless, is that the simultaneous fissuring and unity of the I, its psychic-political makeup, is an afterglow of the theological paradox of the Trinity, which fosters stasis in the speculative dialectical sense of “quiescence, tranquility, standpoint, status” and, at the same time, “unrest, movement, uproar, civil war” (PTII 123). The slippage between “me” and “our” in Schmitt is a political reflection of the theological problem of the unity and multiplicity of the Trinity that would baffle the ancient dialecticians of the one and the many or, more pertinently for us, would derail the efforts to set the public enemy apart from the private one. Further complicating things, Schmitt tacitly makes the I interchangeable with the other who is my brother. The exclusive right of putting oneself in question (“Only myself ”) is immediately followed by an alternative that should 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) myself as my own potential enemy; and (3) the virtual supplement of my brother who can stand in for me in the same capacity. It is for this infinitesimal political community that the enemy represents our own question as figure. But what does it mean to say that the enemy is “ours”? In declaring it “my own” or “our own,” do I preclude the possibility of absolute animosity, even if the enemy is mine or ours only as a question? Do I, as it were, domesticate and appropriate this problematic figure both conceptually and experientially? Admittedly, the enemy is the one who figures or even prefigures us, gives us a determinate shape, but he does so by putting us in question, expropriating us, destining us to perpetual disquietude. To say that the figure of the enemy entirely overlaps that of the question is to attest to the fact that the enemy (or the other) is invisible, essentially hidden, and unrecognizable. It is also a way of reinforcing Plessner’s anthropologicophilosophical definition of the human, which amounts to a way of speaking about the essence of man that is exquisitely reticent and that most closely approximates not speaking about it, at least from the vantage point of those who expect a fully elaborated answer at the end of a series of questions concerning the object of inquiry. What is questioned

90

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

about is, itself, a question; the question inquiring into the essence of the human being discovers that the latter is an open question, incompatible with the presumed open-endedness of a parliamentary discussion, and, as such, does not tolerate the finality of a response. Such is the “formal structure” of the abyss, which may be glimpsed when I reflectively ask myself, “Wer bist du? Tu quis es? [Who are you?],” posing “eine abgründige Frage [an abyssal question]” (EC 9). Who questions and who or what is questioned about makes a tremendous difference, especially because this chasm between the “who” and the “what” retraces the initial cleft between “the I” and “myself ” in the genesis of the enemy. To sum up, the enemy is a concrete and embodied figure, indeed a living symbol, of questioning that animates political life and makes us human in the first place, with all the risks and dangers pertaining to the courageous anthropology, which, instead of breeding unexamined presuppositions, reaches a political decision to endorse the undecidability of human nature. I have been also arguing that the line borrowed from Däubler implies that the enemy is our question as our own figure. That is to say, what forms us is the other, who puts us in question, whether creating in us a sense of solidarity in the face of the common threat, or introducing a fissure between “the I” and “myself,” who is my first enemy. But, in discussing the figuration of the collectivity that claims the question of the enemy as its own, it would be unforgivable to neglect another word rife with a vast number of semantic inflections. This word is Gestalt—figure or form; better yet, a formed figure—situated, vis-à-vis the enemy and the question, on the other side of the copula in “The enemy is our own question as Gestalt.” Neither Däubler nor Schmitt use the word Form derived from Latin and reserved by Schmitt for the situation of war, in the course of which one attempts to ward off the enemy, to defend oneself from being put in question by the other, to eliminate “the existential threat to one’s own way of life [Existenzform]” (CP 49). The expression Existenzform translated as “a way of life” literally refers to the form of existence chosen in an almost consumerist way from among a wide array of available options. These diverse “ways of life,” including “the American way of life” tirelessly elegized by George Bush in the eight years of his presidency and, presumably, threatened by terrorism, superficially overlay the more basic, figural form of collectivity as the source of their cultural-political nourishment. The substantive distinction between the two forms of form explains why I can attempt to kill the enemy, who undermines my usual, everyday form of existence, even though I am unable to eliminate his formed figure, Gestalt, which defines and defies the figural form of our (the friends’) collective

Politics in Question

91

existence. The task of the political-phenomenological hermeneutics Schmitt clandestinely spins out of Däubler’s pithy statement is, precisely, to interpret the formation of our question as Gestalt that deepens, extends, and elaborates on the question without yielding a response. It would be advisable to read the word “as,” als, in the Heideggerian fashion, that is, as an apophantic “as,” which, in Being and Time, does not descriptively add anything new to the phenomenon but reveals the phenomenon’s ownmost structure—in this case, the formative quality of the question. The assertion that ‘the enemy is the question as Gestalt’ views the liminal and uncanny phenomenon of the enemy as the founding figure of political life functionally homologous to the question’s animation of all philosophical pursuits. The question and Gestalt, in their open-endedness and plasticity, are the echoes of existence oriented not toward the actual, but toward the possible. The existential approach to human essence might be thought of as speaking to what constitutes the human, not of it, even where the outcome of such a dialogical formation is the non-ideal negation of the other through physical killing. The reticence of the political question may give us an impression that it abjures speech altogether, in that the “enemy is not a debating adversary [Diskussionsgegner]” (CP 28). Like the French syndicalist George Sorel, Schmitt reacts, in the first instance, against the liberal-parliamentary inflation of speech that interrelates and reconciles all differences on preordained, procedural grounds. Every question in a deliberation merely awaits its resolution and the consensus that ensues from it; it is an answer not yet given. Those who narrow discussion down to polite deliberation aiming at consensus do not want to admit that one can fight with words, engage in polemics. The romantic ideal of an endless conversation is still worse than a consensual conclusion because it covers up sovereignty, or else defers the moment of coming to a decision. The very meaning of “discussion” atrophies when, in the impoverished form of deliberation and consensus, culminating in deliberative democracy, it is bound to parliamentary procedures, deployed to safeguard political regimes against tyranny and dictatorship. “‘Discussion’,” according to Schmitt, “here has a particular meaning and does not simply mean negotiation. Whoever characterizes every possible kind of deliberation and agreement as parliamentarism and everything else as dictatorship or tyranny . . . avoids the real question” (CPD 4–5). The avoidance of “the real question” that does not anticipate a potential answer is the prerogative of administration, as opposed to the political-existential espousal of the figure of questioning in its unfulfillable possibility.

92

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Interlude: Yes or No? One of the most palpable instances of questioning in political life is the occasion of a referendum. Schmitt touches on the subject of referenda in Legality and Legitimacy and in Constitutional Theory displaying what seems to be a certain ambivalence with respect to the decision-making capacity of the citizens involved in them. On the one hand, the participants in a referendum do not permit the questions to unsettle them; they protect themselves from its disconcerting power by making the minimal decision, or by voting “yes,” which, for Schmitt, is tantamount to the same thing: “The majority of state citizens are generally inclined to leave political decisions to others and to respond to questions posed always such that the answer contains a minimum of decision” (CT 134). Or, again, “Today, consequently, it is the case that the participants in a referendum are only those who vote ‘yes’” (LL 64). On the other hand, even if they have a determinative will only in less definitive moments and express themselves recognizably, they [the people] are nevertheless capable of and in a position for such willing and are able to say yes or no to the fundamental questions of their political existence . . . [T]he people can always say yes or no, consent or reject, and their yes or no becomes all the more simple and elementary, the more it is a matter of a fundamental decision on their existence in its entirety. (CT 131–132) What is Schmitt’s position, then? Are the respondents passive yea-sayers, or do they make their collective voice resound, by consenting to or rejecting the proposed measures? In order to solve the puzzle of the sudden about-face that happens in the span of two or three pages in Constitutional Theory, I propose to retrace, with diligence, the differences between the two passages. In the first fragment I cited, Schmitt writes about an indeterminate question posed in the course of a referendum. He accuses his contemporaries (“Today, consequently . . .”) of political irresponsibility expressed in the propensity to leave decisions to others, but there is still no sense of the extreme urgency of the fundamental existential decision that is apparent in the second quotation. Perhaps, in their capacity as citizens, fine-tuning the details of the existing civil order, the respondents will forego their responsibility and, above all, will treat the question lightly. The ensuing default decision (not to decide) is tethered, at the affective level,5 to the citizens’ essentially conservative

Politics in Question

93

desire for civil peace and security they associate with the status quo. The path of least resistance is preferable in this case. Nevertheless, the desire for security often contravenes the demands of political reality and undermines itself when the default decision fails to bolster the existing order. To “leave political decisions to others,” in these circumstance, is to run a risk, which is much more grave than that of tackling the existential question head on. At stake in the second passage, where the capacity of the people (“capable of such willing,” “can always say yes or no”) to reach a political decision is unequivocally affirmed, are, precisely, these questions of collective existence “in its entirety.” Not only is it impossible to evade them, but also such questions exceed the legal-discursive scope of their enunciation for a referendum. In the aftermath of the Quebec referenda of 1980 and 1995, for example, the rejection of Quebec sovereignty had a tremendous impact on the collective existence of Quebecers “in its entirety,” eroding their national consciousness. Yet, in the fifteen years that elapsed between the two polls, the formulation of the issue changed. The questioning impulse was all but lacking in a long descriptive statement that was posed as a “question” before the voters in the first referendum. This absence explains why the defeat of the separatists left the door open for another chance to put the issue before the voters in a much more decisive way. The second question was more recognizable as such and the subsequent negative response quelled the separatist movement for the foreseeable future.6 The caveat is that, insofar as the fundamental questions of political existence affect the onto-existential core of those who must answer them, they compel the respondents to give “simple and elementary” responses, yes or no, that overflow whatever is said or written and pertain, instead, to the level of saying,7 the living nucleus of language that bestows meaning upon the said. The said, Levinas contends, ought to be reduced to the saying, if we are to approximate ethical life; Schmitt insists on the reduction of a response at a referendum to the basic political drive that precedes and animates it. It is precisely this reduction that unfolds between the two ostensibly contradictory passages: the political subject is converted from a civic personality (the citizen) to the people entrusted with the fateful decision. Guided by their partial interests, the citizens are unable to face the basic existential question or to attune themselves to the political saying. But, when political existence “in its entirety” is threatened, a corresponding subjectivity is molded, for better or for worse, by this threat that awakens it from a dogmatic slumber in civil society and that overflows the dogmatism of the said. From its incipience, political subjectivity is a collective response to the unflagging question of its existence.

94

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

In Place of a Response . . . We could end this chapter here, with the elementary response given to the all-encompassing existential question, were it not for Schmitt’s thoroughgoing dedication to a questioning that does not accept the finality of any response. After all, far from eviscerating the crucial questions, the basic “yes” or “no,” which exceeds all discursive constructions, only further instigates them. And so, faced with the unusual nature of these replies, we should consider what affirmation and negation really signify in this instance and how sovereign decisions enter into an alliance with the questioning impulse. If, as Schmitt stipulates, the enemy is not a “debating adversary,” then she or he puts me in question silently, non-argumentatively, and, hence, without giving me a chance to respond by verbally defending myself. Resorting to Levinasian terms, this meaningful silence is the saying without anything said. The onto-existential questioning, which does not require vocalization, let alone engagement in a discussion, and which disturbs me to the core of my being, derives from the other who puts me in question simply by virtue of being my enemy. Of course, there is nothing natural about this “being,” which is identified by virtue of a sovereign decision. Still, when, in Theory of the Partisan, Schmitt revisits the issue of the genealogy of the enemy, reiterating his favorite line from Däubler, the apparently unmediated and intrusive stance of the enemy situated “on my own plane,” the mere fact or facticity of the enemy’s being, raises the non-discursive question that simultaneously challenges and shapes my own Gestalt. He writes: The enemy is our own question as Gestalt. If we are determined as to our own Gestalt, where does this double enemy come from? The enemy is not something to be done away with on any grounds whatsoever, something to be annihilated as worthless [Unwertes vernichtet werden muß]. The enemy stands on my own plane [steht auf meiner eigenen Ebene]. For this reason, I must contend with him in battle, in order to assure my own standard, my own borders, my own Gestalt. (TP 71–72)8 The enemy-question is not to be “done away with,” but is to be preserved— even nurtured—within the logic of Gestalt in which this passage is set up. On the one hand, the form (Gestalt) of our own question, that is to say, the form of our own existence, is the enemy; on the other hand, it is my own Gestalt, along with my standard (Maß) and my borders (Grenze),

Politics in Question

95

that I protect in a life-and-death confrontation with the enemy. The question, paradoxically, needs to be kept alive so that I could face its bearer in combat without endeavoring to annihilate or negate him. But what about the “real possibility” of killing and being killed? The annihilation Schmitt proscribes is conceptual and figural, not physical; the enemy should not be eliminated from our life-world, whose horizon he forms, nor become a target of absolute enmity, which threatens to eliminate the question he raises and, coextensively, to erase my own figure. I cannot say “no” to the question raised by the enemy. I can only affirm it (as my own), even when we are locked in a potentially deadly combat. The Nazi final solution as a response to the “Jewish question” is positively unpolitical, if we judge it by Schmittian standards. There are no victors in the field of absolute enmity because when I achieve my goal and prevail over the enemy, negating him or her, I lose myself, taking leave of my figure. A final response to the question of the enemy causes the degeneration of all questioning impulses and the dissipation of politics into a pure negation: “absolute enmity is Fichte’s ‘own question as Gestalt,’ that is a non-I created by his own I as his counterimage in a process of ideological self-alienation.”9 Schmitt’s depiction of Fichte as the philosopher of absolute enmity hardly conceals the process of his own self-alienation in the prison cell and the creation of the other, as his “own counter-image,” who puts him in question in the course of the splitting of the I. Fichte, though, stands accused of an immoderate idealism that, armed with pure negativity, does not permit the tension between the I and the other to subsist in a productive and symmetrical deadlock. For Schmitt, Hegel’s definition of the enemy would be much more effective in this instance, since the Hegelian enemy is not only “a negated otherness” but also a participant in the mutual negation, preserving the political tension in the form of a “relation of two nothingnesses” (CP 63). A relation such as this can only take place in the encounter between two open questions that are nothing within the purview of objective ontology and everything in the order of existence. “This mutuality of negations,” Schmitt concludes, “has its own concrete existence” (CP 63), which is sorely missing from the idealism of absolute enmity. Mutual negation and negation in general are inconsistent with the denial of the enemy. The two main ways of denying the enemies are their criminalization, aiming at de-politicization, and the pacifist affirmation that there are no enemies, that “we are all friends.” Regardless of the route chosen, denial is always conceptual, not existential: when we deny them, we deprive ourselves of the category of the enemy and put an end to an

96

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

existential engagement with them. Or, rather, we engage with them by disengaging ourselves from them, neutralizing their threatening figure either in misrecognizing them as friends or in treating them as outlaws who should be thrown behind bars. And, if the enemy is our own question as Gestalt, in denying enemy, we strip ourselves of the form of a question (a properly human form) and, therefore, disavow ourselves. The answer without a question marking an uncritical mode of thinking as much as a de-politicized life takes the place of the question without an answer characteristic of the philosophical approach, Plessner’s anthropology, and Schmitt’s politicized existence. What is the role of the sovereign decision in this political anthropology that favors the absolute openness of the question? And does Schmitt’s infamous decisionism invalidate the association of the question and the political, bringing to an end the essential undecidability of the question? Once again, a patient and meticulous analysis will shadow very closely the fracture at the heart of the philosophical question divided between two modalities: “who” and “what.” In its quiddity or “whatness,” sovereignty is a decision on the exception, but a decision that does not tolerate the finality of determination because what it decides upon is something unstable and ultimately undecidable, so much so that undecidability turns into the underside of sovereignty. As long as extralegal situations ungraspable within the established legal order continue to present themselves, a sovereign decision will be needed to grapple with them. Observe, however, that in Political Theology Schmitt treats the “question of sovereignty,” die Frage der Souveränität, as “the question of the decision on the exception [die Frage nach der Entscheidung über Ausnahmefall]” (PT 9). As though it were not enough that sovereign decisions are incapable of arresting what they decide upon, sovereignty itself is a question pervading the writings of “the seventeenth-century authors of natural law” and Schmitt’s own Die Diktatur. Viewed in this light, Schmitt’s texts are exercises in metapolitical questioning, raising the question concerning the questions of sovereignty, the essence of the political, and so forth. As such, they cannot be read with a purely political eye, but invite the participation of theology, philosophy, and anthropology, among other disciplines. Only “[i]f the theological and the political are two substantially separate spheres—toto caelo different—then a political question can only be dealt with politically” (PTII 113). But this conditional clause will not stand because these are not “two substantially separate spheres”; the political is a secularized version of the theological, is not a “sphere” and, as a pure intensity of antagonism, it is unfettered from any substance. Political questions cannot be dealt with only politically.

Politics in Question

97

Now, the who-modality of the question is always nestled in its whatmodality. To give two most telling illustrations, the “answer” to the question, “What is the concept of the political?” is “Who is recognized as an enemy, and who as a friend?,” while the “response” to the query, “What is sovereignty?” is another question, “Who decides on the exception?” It is not difficult to see how Schmitt will accomplish a phenomenological reduction of this structure to the constitutive political subjectivity, extracting, in each case, the second question from the first and demonstrating that the essence of the political is the embodied existence of figures that correspond to the who-modality—the sovereign, the enemy, and so forth. That is why, to come back to the issue of sovereignty, “the question is always aimed at the subject of sovereignty [immer ist die Frage auf das Subjekt der Souveränität gerichtet]” (PT 10), where the directedness, the targeting, the intentionality of the question delineates a reductive itinerary from “what” the phenomenon is to “who” interprets and understands it as what it is. “The question [of sovereignty],” Schmitt further specifies in the same text, “is that of competence, a question that cannot be raised by, and much less answered from, the content of the legal quality of a maxim. To answer questions of competence by referring to the material is to assume that one’s audience is a fool” (PT 33). If these questions cannot be answered from the content, the political form holds the answer, provided that by “form” we mean a living, creative, shaping force of Gestalt that has already announced itself in the question of the enemy. In other words, the formal question of competence does not fall within the what-modality of “legal qualities.” Normative content needs to be bracketed (set aside, though not entirely done away with) for us to expose the subjective kernel it blanketed, and the best way to do so is to imagine the collapse of a legal order and to ask which authority remains in its aftermath. Schmitt applies to this order Husserl’s theoretical feigning of the destruction of the world in Ideas I, where the latter philosopher proved that the “pure consciousness” of constitutive subjectivity ineluctably survives this destruction.10 The sovereign, we might add, is the one who outlives the disintegration of the legal universe. The who-modality that emerges from this bracketing is identical to “the whole question of sovereignty”: “It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question of sovereignty [Frage nach dem Subjekt der Souveränität, das heißt die Frage nach der Souveränität]” (PT 6). Not a mere auxiliary problem, the issue of competence, the question “Who may decide on the exception?” is, in its magnitude and significance, equal to the concept of sovereignty as a whole.

98

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Setting aside the question of content and its correctness, [die] Frage nach der inhaltlichen Richtigkeit, Schmitt concludes that what matters for the reality of legal life is who decides. Alongside the question of substantive correctness stands the question of competence. In the contrast between the subject and the content of a decision and in the proper meaning of the subject lies the problem of the juristic form. (PT 34–35) The contrast he evokes is not pre-given but may be accessed exclusively through a reductive-phenomenological retrieval of the question of the “who” (the subject) occluded by the question of the “what” (the content). The juristic form obtained from this contrast and involved in the question concerning the proper meaning of the subject of sovereignty is, itself, not different from the subject who makes the decision. The questions multiply, resembling a series of Russian dolls: behind the question of the “what,” we have uncovered the question of the “who,” which, in turn, harbors the problem of the juristic form. But, if the precision of the content, substantive correctness, or (dare we say?) truth is no longer relevant to political life, what does Schmitt mean by the “proper meaning of the subject,” Eigenbedeutung des Subjekts, who will make the sovereign decision? How is this “propriety” to be ascertained, when all objective evidence is rejected? The difficulty of ascertaining it is one of the catalysts for the controversy surrounding the question of sovereignty that lingers in the absence of a fully determinate response that would outline the objective conditions for its exercise. “The controversy always centered on the question, who assumes authority concerning those matters for which there are no positive stipulations, for example, a capitulation?” (PT 10). The only way to live up to the indefatigable source of questioning dwelling in this controversy is to flesh out the proper meaning of the subject of sovereignty with reference to the particular instances, where the possibility of deciding on the exception is partially actualized, accomplishing a transitus de potentia ad actum,11 without ever being depleted in any one of these instances. Schmitt’s radical “contextualism,” his unwillingness to entrust political life to impersonal structures and mechanisms, ought not to be mistaken for a failure to develop a coherent (and abstract) political philosophy.12 The existential evidence for sovereignty is in tandem with the political and metapolitical questions allergic to the finality of an answer, the questions that, at the same time, reduce the entire legal-administrative apparatus to the deeper stratum of the political.

Politics in Question

99

Notes 1. Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland, p. 235. 2. “Our comments on the preliminary conception of 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 phenomenology only by seizing it as a possibility [im Ergreifen ihrer als Möglichkeit],” Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 38. 3. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida undertakes a close reading of this passage, focusing on the figure of the brother and fratricidal war. When it comes to the question, he writes: The enemy would then be the figure of our own question, or rather if you prefer this formulation, our own question in the figure of the enemy . . . The brother or the enemy, the brother enemy, is the question, the questioning form of the question, this question that I ask because it is first of all put to me. I ask it from the moment it descends upon me, with blunt violence, in an offensive and in an offence . . . The question injures me; it is a wound within myself. I pose this question only, I pose it effectively, only when I am called into question by the question. (p. 150) While much of the deconstructive thinking on the issue of the question motivates the current text, I would suggest that Derrida is slightly careless when it comes to this figure in Schmitt’s work because (1) he treats the quotation from Däubler as reversible, not respecting the precise arrangement of the words surrounding the copula and (2) he fails to couple this citation with the crucial idea drawn from Plessner who proposes a view of the human being “originarily” constituted (not breached) by the question. 4. On this point, consult Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 17. 5. For an elaboration of the affective dimension of the political in Schmitt, see Kam Schapiro, Sovereign Nations, Carnal States (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2003). 6. The “question” in the 1980 referendum was: The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations abroad—in other words, sovereignty—and at the same time to maintain with Canada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms, do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada? The second question asked: Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?

100

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

7. On the notion of “saying” that animates and underlies “the said,” refer to Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973), passim. 8. Translation modified. 9. Carl Schmitt, “Clausewitz als politische Denker,” Der Staat 6 (4), 1967, pp. 495. 10. “In these studies we shall go as far as necessary to effect the insight at which we are aiming, namely the insight that consciousness has, in itself, a being of its own which in its own absolute essence, is not touched by the phenomenological exclusion [i.e., reduction].” Husserl, Ideas I, p. 65. 11. Agamben has noted the inexhaustibility of potentiality in sovereignty in his Homo Sacer (refer esp. to pp. 61–62). In particular, his thought of inoperativeness confirms the irreducibility of the question, with its infinite potentialities, to any actual answer. 12. See Alexandre Franco de Sá, “The Event of Order in Carl Schmitt’s Thought and the Weight of the Circumstances,” in Telos 147, Summer 2009, pp. 14–33.

5 Metonymic Abuses of Modernity The experience of modernity in aesthetics, politics, and philosophy is defined by a certain purposeful and calculated minimalism. At times, in some of its most self-reflective moments, it performs a veritable autoreduction, which is more potent than a critique and which has the potential to cut through strata of metaphysical obscurities and baroque ontologies to reveal its own conditions of possibility in the most lucid way imaginable. Such is the modus operandi of modern art that, in exploring the nature of color, the trajectory of a line, and the very material from which it arises, reduces the voluptuous and sensory richness of premodern aesthetics to essential mereness or bareness. Yet, often enough, modern minimalism is more detrimental to the domain it transforms than the insidious ontometaphysical legacy of the tradition, against which it conspires. When the fourfold approach to causality Aristotle develops in Book II of Physics and Book V of Metaphysics is dramatically diminished, so that only one of its facets (the efficient cause) survives, thought itself becomes as formal and mechanistic as the shipwreck of ancient Greek philosophy washed ashore in modernity. There is no doubt that Aristotle’s structure of causality is ontologically fraught and embroiled in an outmoded hierarchical and teleological world molded by formal, material, and final causes. But the modern system of efficient causality, where all cause-effect relations take their cue from the case of a billiard ball that, having been struck, produces a predetermined result in another such ball that happens to be in its path, is not devoid of metaphysical presuppositions that shore up the emergent scientific-experimental paradigm. What passes itself off as the deontological and universal element of thinking is, indeed, the most formal and the emptiest crust of the old metaphysics that, instead of vanishing completely, perdures in modern philosophy, scarred and mutilated. Despite its 103

104

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

universalist pretense, the mechanicity of efficient causality fails to encompass the conceptual whole and exhibits a deplorable impoverishment of thinking in modernity. I am dwelling on the fate of Aristotelian causality at some length because it is relevant to the modern experience of politics, where, too, one calls upon a decontextualized, disembedded, hollowed out part of the metaphysical whole to stand in for this whole in a relation of representation. Rhetorically, this process goes by the name “synechdoche” (a part substituting for the whole from which it issues), which, in turn, is a subclass of “metonymy,” literally meaning “a change of name,” whereby “the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself.”1 Just as a partial aspect of what Aristotle understands by a “cause” comes to monopolize the modern understanding of causality as such, so in the modern political order a hypostatized part stands in for the whole when bourgeois legality metonymically signifies legitimacy in general, constitutional law and the Rechtsstaat constitution denote the constitution and the constitutional regime, and the state appears as the incarnation of the political. The rampant abuses of metonymy and synechdoche in modern political thought polemically raise a particular type of legitimacy, a specific kind of constitution, and one of the loci of the political to the status and the dignity of the genus, in a way that is intended to de-legitimize their rivals. In an effort to curb the metonymic abuses of modernity, would we need to rehabilitate the teleological suppleness of Aristotelian metaphysics, or, going even further, to endorse dictatorial rule as, in its own way, legitimate? This misguided question may be found, in one form or another, in the arsenal of Schmitt’s critics who not only impute a reactionary, antimodern character to his political philosophy, but also fail to see that there is an alternative to reinstating an objective political ontology. Instead of harking back to Aristotle, Schmitt avails himself of Husserl’s methodological innovation, particularly the phenomenological reduction (epoché) that brackets the uppermost, vacuous crusts of political reality—that is, the metonymies—to reveal the concrete motives, presuppositions, subjectivities, and decisions that bring them forth. In this exercise, reduction plays the role of an ultra- or hyper-modernity that confronts the feigned minimalism of the synechdoche with a more radical minimalism that isolates the activating principles of political ontology. If the experience of modernity is the impoverishment of experience (be it purposeful or unintended), then the political variety of phenomenological reduction practiced by Schmitt brings this development to its logical conclusion, laying bare the conditions of possibility for political existence.

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

105

In the Name of the Law . . . By aligning the three metonymic abuses of modernity, this chapter reconstructs the multilayered edifice of contemporary politics and, at the same time, shows how Schmitt chisels away its fixed and desiccated building blocks, resorting to a technique of political reduction. While the constitutive subjectivity that underpins the rest of the edifice and makes up the irreducible residue of this enterprise will be treated in the next chapter, here I point out the necessary interconnection between the structure’s building blocks. In the vertical arrangement of various metonymies, legality, which usurps the place of legitimacy, is the most superficial, de-personalized, “dead” stratum, while the political metonymized by the state is the most profound and animating source, defaced by everything that is predicated upon it. Finally, the metonymy of the constitution and constitutional law is the intermediate step between the state that does not merely have but is its constitution and legitimacy assumed on the grounds of the existing constitutional order. Although legality is correctly understood as the lifeless and most depersonalized crust of the modern political edifice, Schmitt excavates the special polemical intention of the original anchoring of all legitimacy in legality. “Legality,” set in its original historical context, “has the meaning and purpose of making superfluous and negating [überflüssig zu machen und zu verneinen] the legitimacy of either the monarch or the people’s plebiscitarian will” (LL 9). Admittedly, historicization is not a panacea against the metonymic abuses of modernity. But a mere invocation of the term’s historically situated and polemical sources dusts away the veneer of neutrality and universality it has strategically adopted in the fight against competing models of legitimacy and further augmented in the aftermath of its victory in this struggle.2 Where consensus has been long established, it uncovers the still smoldering cinders of a conflict—and, hence, of a political phenomenon—that has been naturalized not without the help of that triumphant historiography which Benjamin so vividly depicted in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” If “the dominant concept of legitimacy today is in fact democratic” legality (CPD 30), then those regimes that do not conform to this trend are proclaimed to be the illegal and illegitimate rogue states. The non-democratic political leaders of countries such as Iran, Russia, and Zimbabwe grasp and, even, subscribe to the rules of the game as well as, if not better than, anyone else. They stage farcical elections coupled with the intimidation and suppression of their political opponents by means

106

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

of brute force, all the while consistently acting “in the name of the law,” for nowadays not even the most autocratic head of state will admit to governing on the basis of his (most often, his) personal voluntas. PutinMedvedev, Bush, Mugabe, and Ahmedinejad can equally appeal to the legality of the process that got them “elected” and even disavow various forms of non-democratic legitimacy. They can declare their domestic opponents illegal to the point of “excluding them from the democratic homogeneity of the people” (LL 30), metonymically identifying the dubious majority they command not with their party, but with the state itself. With the main oppositional figures, including Kasparov, Kas’yanov, and especially Khodorkovsky legally barred from participating in the most recent Russian presidential elections (and, in the case of Kasparov and Khodorkovsky, put in jail), the Russian state officials took a leaf from Schmitt’s critique of the purely legislative state, in which the majority can “treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door” (LL 30). The political crisis in Zimbabwe saw Mugabe unwilling to cancel the second round of the a priori rigged elections after his sole opponent, Tsvingarai, had withdrawn from the race. The turmoil in Iran’s “illiberal democracy” was the product of a systemic miscalculation that turned voting into a semiforbidden fruit; once the voters were given a taste of it, they clamored for more—much more than the Islamic Republic was able to offer. In this last case, the “revolutionary” government’s insistence that it would not go even one step beyond the law in sorting out the results of the 2009 presidential election spoke volumes to the ideologically versatile deployment of legality used to shield the most despicable acts of violence and injustice perpetrated by the “law-abiding” rulers. In gaining the upper hand over, making superfluous, and, at times, physically obliterating its adversaries, the ideal of legality negates itself, deprives itself of all political energy and raison d’être.3 Having achieved juridical and political hegemony, the structure of legality and the abstractly universal idea of humanity that emerged in the eighteenth century as a part of the agonistic denial of feudal aristocracy (CP 55), outlive their polemical and historical purposes and give voice to legitimacy, as it were, by inertia, in a peculiarly vacuous and formal way that allows anyone who is eager to maintain the status quo to join the chorus of its supporters. The “successful” entrenchment of legality produces the first inversion in the political edifice, such that legitimacy becomes “only an expression of legality and derived from it” (LL 9), belying the derivation of legality from the legitimacy of a law-making action. More generally, it proves that metonymization is a

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

107

sure path toward de-politicization, the extinction of antagonisms in a complex and self-contradictory whole that now allows itself to be expressed by one of its parts. The historical decision to opt for the legislative state had been undoubtedly political, regardless of the various neutral and apolitical masks it has donned ever since; conversely, the metonymy of legality and legitimacy evidences the devolution of the decision to the default setting. The ideal of the legislative state that goes so far as to affirm its equivalence to justice extends a concrete decision on the form of collective existence into an abstract norm indifferently applicable to all other political unities. A blatant contemporary example of this normative imposition is Iraq, where the decision on the political form of the state has not arisen from the content of collective existence but has been dictated by normative regulative ideals and reinforced by the Allied surges. The subsequent emphasis on “the rule of law” as the centerpiece of legality is misguided and absurd if one takes it literally. Time and again, Schmitt explains that “laws do not rule . . . Whoever exercises power and government acts ‘on the basis of law’ or ‘in the name of the law’ [‘auf Grund eines Gesetzes’ oder ‘in Namen des Gesetzes’]” (LL 4).4 A dangerously innocent belief to the contrary is comparable to other instances of not taking figuratively, as a trope or as a metonymy, the expressions “the Crown rules” or “the Bench decides.” Reifying machinations notwithstanding, the law does not have an inherent capacity for self-interpretation, just as the bench, on which a judge sits, lacks the ability to proliferate judgments out of its wooden body. Still, under the rubric of legality, the most reified forces of modernity are deemed to be the most spiritual ones, as is the case in the work of Hugo Krabbe, who declares in The Modern Idea of the State that “[w]e no longer live under the authority of persons, be they natural or artificial (legal) persons, but under the rule of law, (spiritual) forces” (qtd. in PT 22). Pretending to demystify authority, to rid it of personalism, whether natural-unmediated (the divine right of kings) or artificial-mediated (Hobbes’s Leviathan), the rhetoric of the rule of law claims for itself the realm of absolute spirituality, the non-thingly and impersonal ground of legitimacy. Nonetheless, the spiritual forces emanating from the vacuous category of the human and taking shape in the legal order of the state introduce into a wholly “modern idea” a slew of metaphysical presuppositions that are even more bizarre than the fictions of personalism. To put it differently: Krabbe, in his celebration of the rule of law, is heedless to the insidious mystification, which is proper to modernity itself. To thematize the metonymic abuses of modernity is to disenchant the rational, wholly enlightened disenchantment that, as Adorno and Horkheimer

108

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

would confirm, practices a magic of its own. It is to negate the negation of the “iron cage” where absolute calculability and dispassionate rationality precipitate the world of Kafka’s The Process that mangles, overdetermines, and conceals the threads of actions (the effects) pointing back to subjective intentions and decisions.5 Or, as Schmitt soberly notes in Constitutional Theory, “the ‘rule of law’ means nothing more than the rule of the offices entrusted with legislation” (186), thereby elucidating the rhetorical dissimulation of authority in its very products. In de-mythologizing the claim that decisions are taken “in the name of the law,” what he offers us is a palliative against the kind of fetishism that subordinates all claims of legitimacy to legality. The hypotheses Schmitt has put forth on the subject of the name and naming in The Nomos of the Earth and related writings will be useful for our assessment of the expression “in the name of the law.”6 On the one hand, in names and name-giving, he detects “the tendency to visibility, publicity, and ceremony,” that is to say, an aspiration toward phenomenality that would no longer keep power “invisible, anonymous, and secret” (NE 349).7 In spite of, or thanks to, its etymological connection to nomos, the name is a tendency to the destruction of politics that does not subsist without a certain measure of invisibility and secrecy, the great arcana, to which Schmitt appeals in his earlier writings. On the other hand, this tendency is all but stopped in its tracks, given that the power to name has disappeared and it is no longer obvious what a name is. Total visibility and publicity (in a word, phenomenality) are imaginable only in the impossible situation where the name does not verge on de-substantialized nominalism but directly expresses the essence of the thing it refers to. That is why, for Schmitt, politics will straddle the visible and the invisible, the public and the intensely private, the open and the withdrawn, without dissolving in pure presence or in pure absence. Those who act “in the name of the law” skillfully exploit both extremes when they conceal personal acts of interpretation and decisions beneath the demand for a thoroughgoing openness of the legalistic procedure. Based on the name—something especially baseless and debased in modernity—a tie between legality and legitimacy is forged, only to erase itself from the metonymization of the latter by the former. The political ideal of openness and transparency reverts into its very opposite when acts “in the name of the law” create an additional ruse and, therefore, another level of concealment and obscurity that do not characterize other modes of legitimation. Jean-Toussaint Desanti has referred to this feature of speaking “in the name of ” as speech that redoubles speech,

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

109

which both presupposes and conceals its subjective substratum.8 Schmitt calls such speech a bluff when he writes that it would be obviously grotesque if one announced court decisions in the “name of a measure,” instead of that of the king, of the people, or of the law, or if one would swear an oath to measures or affirm “loyalty to administrative directives.” (LL 11) However absurd, the last affirmation of loyalty was at the heart of Medvedev’s 2008 “election campaign” in Russia, in that he swore allegiance to the course (read, the administrative directives) of the Putin Plan for the country’s future development. Action “in the name of the law” interposes a screen between the sovereign political subject who delivers the decision and those who are expected to recognize its legitimacy. The screen will become translucent upon a discovery of who it is that speaks and acts “in the name of . . . ,” veiling and obfuscating him- or herself in the impersonal system of legality, where “the law” elliptically means positive law. (This ellipsis, we might add, is not accidental, for it carries on a long tradition of conceptual abuse and mistranslation, starting with Cicero’s rendition of the Greek nomos as the Latin lex, an event that “is one of the heaviest burdens that the conceptual and linguistic culture of the Occident has had to bear” (NE 342). With this, Schmitt’s reproach resonates with the Heideggerian analysis of Latinization that has amplified the forgetting of Being in Western philosophy.9) The partitions will fall only when we reduce the formally legal superstructure to the political “life-world” of decisionmaking and polemical engagement undergirding it and, at the same time, betrayed by it.10 The empty name of the law, which may be filled with any positive content whatsoever, remains essentially ambiguous. While, overtly, it sets itself to work as the vanishing mediator between the legality it evokes and the legitimacy that ought to derive from this evocation, the name of the law structures one of the dominant and decisive contradictions of modern politics. Apropos of this contradiction, Schmitt writes, “the normative fiction of a closed system of legality [die normativistische Fiktion eines geschlossenen Legalitätssystems] emerges in a striking and undeniable opposition to the legitimacy of an instance of will that is actually present and in conformity with law [rechtmäßigen Willens]” (LL 6). The closure of the system of legality is an attempt to debar all remnants of political subjectivity and to accomplish the modern transformation of political form into its purely objective variety.11 The normative fiction born in this

110

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

closure is that the system of legality is void of all subjective elements, and it is this triumph of pure objectivity that glues together legality and legitimacy in modernity. In the second half of the statement, however, Schmitt immanently undermines the untenable results of the legal closure. What, he seems to ask, do the proponents of this closed system have to say about the will (whether directly expressed at a referendum or mediated through a representative assembly) that arises in conformity with the law? Clearly, for Hegel, the instance of such a will trumps the objective and formal legalism, because it marks the moment when the law is self-given at a higher level of synthesis reuniting the subject and the object of Right. This is not the case in the normative fiction, according to which, after the objectivization of the political form, only the law itself is sovereign and legitimate. In the name of the law, the will that actually conforms to it becomes irrelevant, thus contributing to the “motivational deficit” said to beleaguer contemporary democracies. The most effective way to expose the fiction of normativity is to subject it to the test of immanent criticism that does not arise from the absolute exteriority of a dissenting will but from that which concurs with the law in a non-objective fashion. Instead of strengthening the existing method of legitimation, the excess of legitimacy subverts itself from within. Even if the same legal outcome is reached in the name of the law and as a result of exercising an actual political will, which finds itself in tandem with this law, a competing model of legitimacy surfaces in this exercise as a signal that the operations of metonymization (and, by implication, de-politicization) are incomplete and that the system of legality is but a synechdoche of the totality that is legitimacy. This is the argumentative core of Schmitt’s 1932 text that revels in the contradictions of the uneven, striated character of the legislative state, with its differentiations between the higher and lower orders of legality, the simple and the constitution-amending majority, and the provisions for the “extraordinary lawgivers” (außerordentlichen Gesetzgeber), be they presidential decrees or plebiscitary referenda, that give rise to extralegal legitimacy. Extraordinary lawgivers, especially, seal the failure of legality that, at its inception, has been polemically oriented against their legitimacy. A purely legalistic framework of legitimacy, then, requires various extralegal prostheses, on which it can rely in the substantive decisions and actions comprising its political life. Some of these prosthetic devices are equally formal and empty, including the formula “in the name of the law” that puts the name on the side of nominalism, altogether detaching it from that which it names and permitting even the opposing factions in a civil

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

111

war to “reject the right of the opponent, but in the name of the law” (EC 56). Others (e.g., the extraordinary lawgivers) are exemplars of politicalexistential richness and, as such, they militate against the metonymic reduction of legitimacy to legality. Others still, imitate in their flowery rhetoric the extraordinary lawgiver, only to make a legalistic universe more livable and tolerable. Be this as it may, the process of metonymization would have been impossible were it not for the mutation of the formal element of legality, gradually severed from the content of political existence. When, revisiting Legality and Legitimacy more than a quarter of the century after the text’s initial composition, Schmitt stresses that “legality was originally an essential piece of occidental rationalism and a form of legitimacy, rather than its absolute opposite” (LL 96), he hints at the fact that, at that point in history, the very form of form was different from its emaciated, general, and abstract modern counterpart. As a form of legitimacy, legality is at once (1) its species or subtype, hence, a part of a much vaster framework of legitimacy, and (2) an integral, though antagonistic, part of the whole in which it participates, a form that is still tethered to the content from which it arises and to which it returns, in the last instance, subject to the decision-making power. In this sense, the substantive form of form is akin to what, in the 1920s, Schmitt couched in terms of complexio oppositorum, the complex of opposites, where a living formation brings together the most contradictory contents, without nullifying the tensions between them. That this arrangement is more politically viable is made plain by the persistence of antagonism between the competing models of legitimacy included in it and handed over to sovereign decision-making. The heyday of “occidental rationalism” is the republican version of legality that “proves to have the much stronger validity . . . [of] the rational, progressive and only modern form; in a word, the highest form of legitimacy [die höchste Form der Legitimität]” (TP 70). But, unfortunately, the “highest form” is only one step away from the crudest formalism, where the inflated generality of legality passes into a pure form that, in the best case scenario, delegates the messiness of the political content to legitimacy, and in the worst, subjugates and shapes legitimacy in its own image. It is in this slippage from the “highest” to the “purest” form bereft of any content whatsoever and in the subsequent inversion of the relation between legality and legitimacy that the metonymic abuse of modernity accomplishes itself. The pure form is a pale reflection of complexio oppositorum, in that it is indifferent to the content on which it imposes itself. As a consequence of this parody, contemporary bourgeois legality does not need a determinate political arrangement and, hence, does not necessarily have

112

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

to be democratic; the legislative Rechtsstaat component of the constitution “contains no state form” (CT 235), while the state “confined exclusively to producing law . . . does not . . . produce the content of the law” (PT 23). Modern political form is twice removed from that which it encompasses and dominates from the position of relative exteriority, as opposed to the living form of complexio oppositorum that grows from the antagonistic content itself. This, in nuce, is the difference between the systemic impulse interrelating the content and the extraneous form thrust upon it and the totalizing drive replete with an “organic,” though by no means harmonious, connection between the two. The confusion of the highest and the purest, most general form allows legality, as a particular mode of legitimacy, to seize the place of the whole in an indelible metonymic displacement.12 The fictitious generality that has no intrinsic links to any given state form, nonetheless, singles out a particular state type in order to confer upon it the mantle of exclusive legitimacy. It is not difficult to guess that this type refers to the legislative state: In the general legality [allgemeinen Legalität] of all state exercise of power lies the justification of one such state type [eines solchen Staatswesens] . . . In this regard, the specific manifestation of the law is the statute, while legality is the particular justification of state coercion. (LL 4) To recap: as a particular kind of legitimacy, legality claimed for itself the niche of generality and neutrality only to legitimate a particular (“one such”) type of state. Its claim, therefore, will not transfigure the general into the universal because it is nothing but a detour from one particularity to another in a desperate effort to deny the force of performative selflegitimation to the act of sovereign decision-making.13 The dictate of the law will be experienced as coercively imposed on us, crushing the KantianHegelian dreams of reconciling freedom and legal obligation. But the chain of metonymizations does not stop there; for the adventure of legitimation, another metonymic abuse serves as a goldmine. Although it is, prima facie, banal and tautological, the manifestation of the law in the statute delegitimates its other historical instantiations, for instance, in the word of the king. When Schmitt reveals the obfuscated presuppositions of modern legality,14 it turns out that statutory law is a synechdoche of the law, while legal coercion, meant to lead humanity toward emancipation, is on the par with other systems of oppression, including those that are typical

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

113

of administrative and governmental states. As we shall see, Schmitt’s excavation of these hidden presuppositions does not only shake up the logical bases of hegemonic political theory but also reductively aims at the deeper lived, active, phenomenological foundations. He will show that legality does not contain within itself the source of its own meaning, but relies on the Husserlian meaning-bestowal (Sinnsgebung) by “an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law first is made meaningful [sinnvoll]” (NE 73).

Constitutional Unity, Constitutional Details When it comes to the constitution, the metonymic abuses of modernity intensify to the extent that they occasion mystifications at once ontological and historical. The most serious of these at the ontological level is a positivist and empiricist reduction of the constitution to constitutional law: “the constitution (as unity) and constitutional law (as detail) are tacitly rendered equivalent and confused with one another” (CT 68). This conflation of the whole and its part is a monstrous synechdoche that runs parallel to, and often intersects with, the substitution of legality for a much broader framework of legitimacy. As it was the case in the metonymy of common law and positive legalism, “constitutional law” signifies a collection of disparate statutes that satisfy the demand for a written constitution (CT 69). The formal concept of the constitution becomes attached to a fundamental collection of written statutes, dissolving the existential unity of pouvoir constituant in a haphazard conglomeration of empirically identifiable, objective details. It could be argued that, in his criticism, Schmitt fails to question the dichotomy of the spirit and the letter of the text and, predictably, prioritizes the ideality of the former over the materiality of the latter. In this disparagement of the written constitution, Derridian deconstruction will, undoubtedly, detect a barefaced denigration of writing: that purposeful forgetting of the signifier’s body which has been prevalent in the history of Western philosophy since its very beginnings. But the point is not that Schmitt scorns writing; rather, he is interested in the existential conditions of possibility for the textual production of the constitution thanks to the decision on the form of the state’s political life or, in general, constitution-making power that is irreducible, unobjectifiable, and empirically inaccessible. It is impossible to discover what constitutes the constitution as a unity, without reducing, phenomenologically, the written statute to the “founding” stratum of the political decision presupposed in every

114

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

single detail that overlays it. “For its validity as a normative regulation, every statute, even constitutional law, ultimately needs a political decision that is prior to it, a decision that is reached by a power or authority that exists politically” (CT 76). The priority of the decision that determines the constitution in the absolute sense15 (and, by extension, the statutes that agree with it) merits theoretical consideration. I want to suggest that the political decision is prior temporally, logically, and phenomenologically, which is to say that it is chronologically precedent to its constitutional codification, functions as a sine qua non for statutory inscription, and furnishes the founding existential layer for these founded stipulations. The rule of law does not adjudicate itself; the constitution, too, does not establish itself but is, like an artwork, the creation of an active political subjectivity. Here, again, we come across a reductive unearthing of the suppositions that have been conveniently covered over by the proponents of the metonymic and fetishistic “sovereignty of the constitution,” suppositions, such as, “The people must be present and presupposed as political unity if it is to be the subject of a constitution-making power” (CT 112), or “Political existence was presupposed in this fundamental process, in which a people acts consciously in a political manner” (CT 102), or “The constitution is valid by virtue of the existing political will that establishes it” (CT 76).16 Nineteenth-century thinkers variously conceded that it was only human, all too human to credit the products of our collective thoughts and endeavors (God, capital, science, etc.) with independent existence. Schmitt upholds their thesis in the juridical sphere but also tries to rectify this delusion by de-metonymizing the liberal equation of the constitution and constitutional law. His “demetonymization” anchors the constitution in “political unity,” “political existence,” or “the existing political will,” and so restitutes to the constitution its political character that, alone, may account for its unity and order. When, conversely, constitutional details overstep their limits and turn into a synechdoche for constitutional unity, when the system of law aspires to take over the totality of political existence, the constitution disintegrates, or, at the very least, gradually exhausts itself in everything that springs forth from it. Constitution-making power renders possible the very constitutional arrangement that violates its own conditions of possibility. Faced with this problem, Schmitt resolves to reanimate this dying impulse in a perpetual reconstitution of the political unit “as something emerging, as something always arising anew” (CT 61)17 and, therefore, in politics as a realm of becoming. Given that, in the absolute sense, the state does not have a constitution, which would be detachable from its political existence,

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

115

but is its constitution (CT 60), the recurrent re-activation of the original decision and the state structures it subtends is, simultaneously, a reconstitution of the constitution itself. By “reconstitution,” then, I do not mean an unavoidable change in the basic decision on the form of political life, swapping a monarchist constitution for a liberal-bourgeois once every four years. Although it might sometimes call for a total overhaul of the basic principles of the old regime, reconstitution revisits the original political decision, which is the “substance of the constitution” (CT 78), with the view to reconfirming or rejecting it. This is one of the modalities of what I’ve termed “the event of politics,” where political unities are always open to the possibility of their self-expropriation. The political epoché is a reduction of metonymy and of the formal legal minimalism that narrows the constitution down to constitutional law. As in Husserl’s phenomenology, this reductive movement terminates at the essence (Wesen) of the phenomenon in question, demonstrating that, in the case of Constitution, the metonymy with constitutional law is inappropriate, precisely, because “the essence of the constitution is not contained in a statute or a norm” (CT 77) but in the political existence of the constitution-making subject. Once deconstituted or reduced, even the very formal concepts of constitutional law appear as “essentially [wesentlich] political concepts” (LL 17). Now, if the essence of the constitution lies in the existential categories (e.g., the decision) that undergird it, then Schmitt’s political philosophy echoes the Heideggerian conception of Dasein, whose essence, quid est, is existence, quod est, being-there, or not-being-simply-present-at-hand.18 More crucially still, the grounding of essence (say, the essence of the constitution) in existence (the decision regarding its political form) is itself groundless, in that it does not rely for support upon a stable metaphysical or ontological scaffold. For those who hold onto various essentialisms, this is a shaky construction, since it does not draw legitimacy outside of the subject who exists politically in a mode of being, which is yet to be specified. In response to Richard Wolin, then, it should be said that Schmitt’s political ontology is essentially existential, since it is not merely adorned with the ornamental, voguish, and ultimately expendable vocabulary of existentialism but receives its critical strength from the irreducibility of the political subject. As though to embrace this groundless grounding, Constitutional Theory wears the risk associated with it as a badge of honor in asserting that the “[c]onstitution in the positive sense means essentially definition of its own form of existence” (CT 121). The technical word for the “definition of its own form of existence” is “performativity,”19 and no reduction can accompany this

116

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

forever precarious, self-referential, self-grounded and hence ungrounded predication any further. Political existence, at which the Schmittian epoché arrives, is irreducible, though it can be denied as soon as its fluid subjective forms and decision-making capacities are objectified. The second kind of constitutional metonymy is historical, peaking in the ideology of nineteenth-century liberalism. A particular type of constitution here presents itself as the constitution in general in an unabashed polemical denial of the rivaling political arrangements. Schmitt writes: The principles of the modern, bourgeois-Rechtsstaat constitution correspond to the constitutional ideal of bourgeois individualism, so much, indeed, that these principles are often equated with the constitution as such and “constitutional state” is given the same meaning as the “bourgeois Rechtsstaat.” (CT 169) This metonymic abuse that swaps a part of the constitutional taxonomy for the whole is yet another attempt to generalize the particular and to interject its abstract form prior to the singular instances of decision-making on behalf of the political subject. It deprives the constitution of its substance— the political decision—and essence that lies in the existential entity capable of making this decision. The de-substantialization of the political is, thus, mediated through the replacement of existential ontology with an ostensibly de-ontological emphasis on normativity that projects the principles of bourgeois individualism onto the very idea of constitutionality. In contrast to the metonymy of legality and legitimacy, a mere generalization does not suffice for the identification of the bourgeois constitution with the constitutional state; the process of idealization comes to its aid, in the same sense of ideality, to which the title of Paragraph 4 of Constitutional Theory alludes, namely, “Ideal Concept of the Constitution (‘Constitution’ in an exemplary sense, thus named because of a certain content).” The ideal concept renders “a certain content”—the Rechtsstaat constitution— exemplary, facilitates its generalization, and contributes a recalcitrant conceptual jumble to the metonymic abuses of modern political thought. “In the nineteenth century,” Schmitt writes on the subject of conceptual indetermination, “the definition of the concept of the constitution is made more difficult by the fact that the ideal concept of the bourgeois Rechtsstaat is lumped in with the concept of the constitution” (CT 95). Political theory cannot move forward before resolving this difficulty. The positive goal of political reduction is, therefore, to disentangle the webs of the muddled concepts, first, by highlighting the metonymic abuses and flimsy

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

117

generalizations that imbue the historically specific with an air of universality and, second, by honing conceptual specificity, chiseling away that which does not “essentially” belong to it, for instance, in the derivation of the “absolute sense” of the constitution. Concerning the second positive moment of reduction, it will be remembered that the final purity of the concept does not coincide with its most abstract form (the political stands for the concrete friend-enemy distinction), nor even with the metaphysical priority of “ownness” (what is purely political has no domain of its own and expropriates all other domains), but with the existential basis, the groundless ground of political subjectivity and decision-making. It is this basis that is sorely missing from, or else is cleverly disguised in, the metonymic and fetishistic “sovereignty of the constitution.” The synechdoche of political subjectivity is, arguably, the cornerstone of the revolutionary French constitution, in which “among the commissioned representatives of the three estates (nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie), those of the third estate constituted themselves as the constitution-making National Assembly on 17 June 1789” (CT 134). One of the three estates constituted itself as the whole in what I venture to call “a self-transcendence of the particular,” providing a blueprint for the Marxist theory of the proletariat as the universal class that will rise above and nullify the structure of class society. It was transformed into the decisive political subjectivity, camouflaged by the discourse of the universal rights and the sovereign function of the constitution-making National Assembly. The fateful case of the French constitution casts new light on the issue of political representation. Isn’t representation, after all, a kind of synechdoche, where a part speaks, more or less directly, for the whole? Does the ideal of the bourgeois Rechtsstaat constitution deny outright constitutional legitimacy to other political regimes, or does it claim to represent and mediate constitutionality in general? The political theories of Rancière, Badiou, and Žižek are united in an effort to rethink politics and representation itself as an explosive synechdoche, where a singularity momentarily steps into the place of the universal, causing something like a short circuit in the dialectical machinery of mediations. (This will have been the rhetorical definition of Badiou’s event, to which Žižek wholeheartedly subscribes.) That is not to say that the three theorists indulge in the metonymic abuses of modernity, since they drop the pretense of abstractly universal representation, gear much of their philosophical energy toward the life-world of political existence and subjectivity, and (implicitly) side with Schmitt in their rejection of legalism and liberal de-politicization. There is a marked difference between openly advocating for the synechdoche of Rancière’s

118

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

“part that has no part” in the vacant place of political subjectivity, on the one hand, and surreptitiously slipping an imperialistically generalized and abstract particularity in for the universal, on the other. A deliberately adopted rhetorical strategy of the synechdoche that, in lieu of becoming institutionalized, retains a markedly volatile status may, potentially, reinvigorate political representation wrested from the procedural formalism of liberal constitutional democracies and imbued with non-metaphysical substance. Still at the historical level, The Nomos of the Earth summarizes the prereductive confusion and abusive metonymization of one constitutional type exceptionally well: At the end of the 19th century, until the Hague land war conventions were established, liberal constitutionalism was synonymous with “constitution” and “civilization” in the European sense [galt der liberale Konstitutionalismus als identisch mit Verfassung und Zivilisation im europäischen Sinne]. (NE 208) The achievement of liberal hegemony is, more precisely, that the two terms are not synonymous, as the German original testifies, but “identical” (identisch), due to the synechdoche we have been considering above. Accordingly, to uncover their non-identity is an undeniably political task, for which, besides political reduction, a meticulous linguistic analysis proves to be indispensable. Anticipating Schmitt’s disapproval of the tendency to latinize the Greek nomos as lex, the non-identity of liberal constitutionalism and the constitution in general is already discernable in the usage of the Latin root in Konstitutionalismus, as opposed to the Germanic root in Verfassung. Perhaps somewhat poetically, we could say that it is an old quarrel between the Greek “pure” origin and its Latin violation that goes on in the guise of liberal constitutionalism that globalizes the stakes by laying claim to the constitution and civilization “in the European sense.” This globalatinization, as Derrida sometimes calls it, is one of the entrenched metonymic abuses of late modernity.

The Fragility of the Status and the Irreducibility of the Political The final catachresis of political modernity is the consummation of the political in the concept of the state. Within the gradations of Schmittian reduction, the state is certainly more “fundamental” than the order of legality, to which Kelsen and other legal theorists equate it. If, in addition

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

119

to helping to define sovereignty, the exception has an auxiliary role to play in Political Theology, then it practically reduces the legal order and shows that the state is the irreducible residue of this suspension, for “it is clear that the state remains, whereas the law recedes” (PT 12). Crudely put, the state of exception is a lawless state but it is a state nonetheless—an existential political plane for the exercise of sovereignty. That does not mean, however, that the state is axiomatically irreducible. The first sentence in The Concept of the Political—“The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political [Der Begriff des Staates setzt den Begriff des Politischen voraus]” (CP 19)—disputes exactly such an unwarranted conclusion and sets the tone for the rest of the book that gleans the political not only from various moral, economic, and other antagonisms but also from the bracketing of state structures that depend upon it. Remarkably, the first verb in the book is “presupposes,” “setzt . . . voraus,” and the presupposition Schmitt uncovers is not merely logical, but phenomenological. The state is founded upon the concept of the political, which conditions it to the same extent as the life-world that supports the very scientific paradigms that suppress it. The equation “state = politics” is “erroneous and deceptive [unrichtig und irreführend]” (CP 22), or, in our terms, is an instantiation of the most injurious metonymic abuse of modernity.20 Concerning the “altogether incomparable, singular historical particularity of this phenomenon [Erscheinung] called ‘state’,” Schmitt asserts that “‘statehood’ is not a universal concept valid for all times and all peoples” (NE 127) and, more damningly still, that the seventeenth-century state is the first product of the age of technology (LST 34). As with the notion of legality, the historicizing gesture serves the purpose of reducing this phenomenon by reconnecting it with the specificity of the “people” (or, more broadly, with the constitutive political subjectivity that generates it) and by scraping off the veneer of neutrality that overlays it, not to mention the various mechanisms of naturalization that paralyze it. Yet, the claim that statehood is not a universal concept is not to be conflated with the concept’s liberal relativization. The latter does not dare historicize the state but only uncritically interprets it as one human association among, and on the par with, many others, as well as an outlet for “the merely normative, and therefore judgeless” ethics.21 Liberal relativization, initially motivated by the desire to dismember the unitary and sovereign body of the monarchical state, perversely renders the defaced entity absolute again, by proxy with the abstract universality of rational normativity. Let us, then, submit the phenomenological priority of the political to a practical test similar to the one that positive law underwent (and failed) in

120

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

the state of exception. We might ask, first: What if Theory of the Partisan as a whole were read as a reductive experiment, in which the political, in the figure of the partisan, survived a parenthesization of the state?22 When the policy is no longer existentially primary, when “other groups or associations, especially the contemporary state, are no longer able to bind their own members in such a definitive way, as is the case with the fighters of a party engaged in a revolutionary struggle” (TP 20), then the elusive locus of the political shifts to partisan, non-state actors. It is not that the state is unbound from the political which it necessarily presupposes, nor is partisan activity inherently and universally more political than that of the state. Rather, the implications of Schmitt’s condemnation of the contemporary state situated (and this is the mainstay of the “associationist theory of the state”) on the same level as other consensual groups are that (1) it does not have a monopoly on the political and, therefore, will be interrelated with the political only thanks to a misleading synechdoche; (2) it may be identified with the overarching background of human actions and concerns as their ultima ratio (PT 25) but this inflation of the state will not vitiate the political as the first and the last non-objective ground of collective existence; and (3) it is amenable to being politically reactivated if, for whatever reason, it becomes decisive again for such existence.23 For the second test case for the reduction of the state one must look to The Concept of the Political, where Schmitt writes that “[i]f within the state there are organized parties capable of according their members more protection than the state, then the latter becomes at best an annex of such parties, and the individual citizen knows whom he has to obey” (CP 52). The historical creations of “a state within a state” are plentiful and well known, from the Sicilian organized mafia to the quasi-feudal lords of the Brazilian favelas. Schmitt cites this hypothetical situation while contemplating Hobbes’s political philosophy that views the state as the medium wherein the citizens exchange their obedience for protection: unless the political unit is able to exercise its capacity to provide security, there is no reason for its members to continue obeying its decrees. The point, however, is that the enervation of the state’s protective function does not preclude a formation of other existentially intense friend-enemy groupings that assume a political character, become decisive, and reduce the state to their “annex.” This is scrupulously in line with Schmitt’s theory, in which a political entity does not need to be a state, as long as the intensity of association and antagonism within it reaches the qualitative “boiling point” of the political. Even the prerogative to declare the state of exception or to wield a real possibility of war (jus belli) is no longer the exclusive right of the state. In 2007, for instance, favela leaders in Rio de Janeiro issued

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

121

a warning to the inhabitants of the city, to observe the days of mourning for their killed comrades, thereby exceeding the role of criminals and effectively announcing the state of exception. (The warning was followed by organized attacks on police stations around the city that day.) The total existential embroilment of the extra-state group members in a political entity that can exact from them “the readiness to die and to unhesitatingly kill enemies” (CP 46), thus confers upon them a certain political decisiveness that, in Schmitt’s view, is not reserved for the state alone. Perhaps more obviously, a reduction of the state and the concomitant animation of the concept of the political marks revolutionary upheavals. While many uprisings, notably the French Revolution, do not produce a new political formation (CT 127), in a more restrictive scope of the term state, which Schmitt favors, even the French Revolution could be seen as a practical reduction of the state, though not of the political principle. A revolutionary overthrow of monarchy negates the state, which is inseparable from the monarchical constitution, provided that the latter does not stand for a bare and externally imposed form but adheres to the “absolute sense,” according to which the being of the state and that of the constitution are one and the same. (To put this statement of identity in Aristotelian vernacular, while the constitution is the state’s formal cause, the political is its material cause.) Like Hobbes, who harbored no illusions with regard to the permanence of any institutional organization and who was frank about the nature of the Leviathan as a “mortal god,” Schmitt highlights the finitude of the state that is not dispelled by the status into which it congeals. The rigidity of the status quo is a defense mechanism of political reaction formation—to borrow a psychoanalytic notion—that, dissimulating itself in the notion of peace, which is in truth nothing more than the Kantian “peace of the cemeteries,” bespeaks its fragility and reducibility. Making such fragility apparent, a “successful revolution directly establishes a new status and eo ipso a new constitution” (CT 61) as soon as it overturns the old status quo. When Schmitt reiterates the etymological connection of the state and status on the first page of The Concept of the Political—“the state is a political status [Staat ist . . . der politische Status] of an organized people” (CP 19)—and later on in his “intermediate commentary” on the political—“Linguistic parallels with a general term like status, which can suddenly mean state [wie status, das plötzlich Staat bedeuten kann], are obvious” (TP 20)24—he adds luster to the theory of the state’s reducibility. The status is that which can and ought to be reduced after it has become stable and static, bringing to a halt the unrest of the political that was responsible for its issuance in the first place.25 (Still, this unrest can

122

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

never be wholly subdued, given the other sense of the Greek stasis, meaning not just quiescence but also the exact opposite, tumult. The status and, by implication, the state are essentially self-undermining entities.) The stable façade of the status hides the extreme vulnerability of everything that suppresses its sources, be it capital with its pretense of being independent from the labor power it exploits, or the state that disavows its political footing and presents itself as a neutral legal order. Faced with the fragility of the status, Schmitt will not evade the exigencies of deconstituting or reconstituting the state and the need to overthrow the status quo that drains its political sources of their vitality. Fourthly, Political Theology ends with a nod of approval to French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, in whose cited remarks we can also see a reduction of the state to the moment of the decision [eine Reduzierung des Staates auf das Moment der Entscheidung], to a pure [reine] decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothing. (PT 66) That Schmitt uses the word “reduction,” Reduzierung, in this instance is significant because the decision that becomes accessible at the end of the reductive trajectory is absolute and, above all, “pure,” distilled to the existential essence of the political. The reduction of the state does not obliterate the principle of the political but, to the contrary, sets it free, renders it absolute, and reveals it in its eidetic-phenomenological “purity.” The fact that the decision is not based on anything else (either reason or discussion), which in Schmittian political-theological lingua franca corresponds to creation out of nothing, phenomenologically means that it is that postreductive residue which, unlike the state, remains irreducible. The quadruple test we have performed above confirms the catachresis, or the polemical-rhetorical abuse, at the heart of the metonymy joining together the reducible state and the irreducible politics. Nothing would be further from the truth than a deduction, from this reducibility, of the claim that Schmitt is a closeted anarchist who celebrates the withering away or the overthrow of the state. All he shows is that this institution is neither the deepest nor the exclusive source of political life, but that it, too, derives its vitality from the political. As a result, the thesis, “That the state is an entity [ein Einheit] and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character [beruht auf seinem politischen Charakter]” (CP 44), indicates that the deprivation of the state’s logical and phenomenological “foundations”

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

123

simultaneously strips it of its decisiveness and, indeed, of its unity as a norm, a procedure, or a legal order. After the dismantling of the old status, the political is not eliminated but merely relocates elsewhere, withdrawing, for instance, to the secretive and scarcely perceptible position of the partisan. This dislodgement does not annul the politicity of the political but, rather, validates it as a principle of dislocation and expropriation that lacks a sphere of its own.

Notes 1. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 510. The privileged examples of a metonymy here are legalistic-political: the Crown standing for the monarchy, and the Bench representing the judiciary. 2. The political underside of this veneer is, also, exposed in every instance of the application of the law: “Legal normativity [in Schmitt’s view] hid political conflict from sight but did not make it disappear. Conflict re-emerged every time the law was to be applied” [Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentler Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 428]. 3. In part, this negation is produced as a temporal fissure between the “modern” and the “traditional” that is supposed to afford the modern a chance of self-founding. Hans Blumenberg [The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1983)] summarizes this implicit aspect of Schmitt’s position well when he writes, “It must seem paradoxical to Carl Schmitt that the legitimacy of an epoch is supposed to consist in its discontinuity in relation to its pre-history” (p. 97). 4. In a similar vein, the constant refrain of Constitutional Theory is that the constitution is not sovereign. See, for instance, CT 238. 5. “[M]odern legality, above all, is the functional mode of a state bureaucracy, which has no interest in the right of its origin” (NE 82). 6. See, especially, “Nomos-Nahme-Name,” in Der Beständige Aufbruch: Festschrift für Erich Przywara, ed. Siegfried Behn (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz, 1957), pp. 92–105 and Thomas Schestag, “Namen nehmen: Zur Theorie des Namens bei Carl Schmitt,” MLN 122 (3), April 2007, pp. 544–564. 7. On the same page, he immediately adds: Even the elevation of impersonal laws to general norms, even the rationalistic claim to pure legality, which as the expression of reason, every legitimacy wants to surpass, even this classical human creation of 1789 did not abandon the name, and sought to rule “in the name of the law.” 8. The original French expression is “cette parole qui redouble parole.” Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Une Destin Philosophique (Paris: Hachette, 2008), p. 61. 9. Yet, for Schmitt, Being itself is reducible to power. As he writes in his prison diaries, “Power is Being; Being is Power; this is concealed behind every word of Being [Macht ist

124

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

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 life-world,” I am referring to Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 137]. Husserl thinks that the way to tackle the crisis of objectification is to recover the non-scientific and experiential foundations of science in the life-world, Lebenswelt. Mutatis mutandis, Schmitt suggests the same solution in an attempt to resolve the crises of parliamentary democracy and the subsumption of the political impulse in abstract systems of legality. 11. In Political Theology, Schmitt clearly identifies this transformation as follows: “One thing is certain to be recognized in this modern theory of the state: The form should be transferred from the subjective to the objective” (29). 12. This befuddlement is a part of “the confusion of legal positivism, in particular the muddle of words and concepts characteristic of 19th century jurisprudence” (NE 69). 13. Judith Butler highlights the performativity of the sovereign exception in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p. 61. 14. For instance, apropos of legal positivism: “This thoroughly dominant theory was no longer conscious of its own historical and theoretical presuppositions” (LL 96). 15. Gopal Balakrishnan considers this sense to be “meta-legal” (The Enemy, p. 94). 16. Although Schmitt, by default, imputes a national and nationalist form to political existence, this form is not the sine qua non of such existence, but its modern, historically specific appellation. 17. More recently, Eric Santner [On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)] has drawn inspiration from this political enlivening that comprises Schmitt’s existentialism: What I am calling creaturely life is the life that is, so to speak, called into being, ex-cited, by exposure to the peculiar “creativity” association with this threshold of law and non-law; it is the life that has been delivered over to the space of the sovereign’s “ecstasy-belonging”, or what we might simply call “sovereign jouissance.” (p. 15) 18. Similarly, the partisan stands outside all bracketed, moderated conflict “in his essence as much as in his existence [sogar sein Wesen und sein Existenz]” (TP 19, translation modified). This statement needs to be complemented by a reading of Paragraph 9 of Heidegger’s Being and Time in conjunction with Proposition 6.44 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. 19. Slavoj Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject, inches close to the definition of self-definition as “performative”: The exemplary case, of course, is Carl Schmitt’s decisionist claim that the rule of law ultimately hinges on an abyssal act of violence (violent imposition) grounded only in itself: every positive statute to which this act refers in order to legitimize itself is self-referentially posited by this act itself. (pp. 113–114)

Metonymic Abuses of Modernity

125

20. Those commentators who categorize Schmitt as a “statist” are either unaware of or choose to ignore his political reduction of the state. Two examples will suffice here. 1. “Schmitt is a conspicuous representative of this statist tradition in the twentieth century; he radicalizes the antinomy between the heterogeneity of society . . . on the one hand, and the unifying force of a sovereign power . . . on the other” [Ulrich Preuss, “Political Order and Democracy: Carl Schmitt and His Influence, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. S. Mouffe (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 176]. 2. The argumentative thrust of Renato Cristi’s Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998). Regarding (1), let it be said that the radicalization of the antimony between state unity and social heterogeneity fails to recognize the importance of de-politicization that permits the administrative state to subsume society itself and remains impervious to the polemical usage of the term state. 21. Carl Schmitt, “Ethic of State and Pluralistic State,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, p. 196. 22. This would illustrate Susan Buck-Morss’ [“Sovereign Right and Global Left,” in Rethinking Marxism 19 (4), Fall 2007] fruitful intuition that “[s]overeign power exists before and beside the state, and can never be subsumed as immanent within it” (p. 438). 23. Despite what one might expect here, Schmitt does not frame this decisiveness in terms of the “total state” that “becomes ‘total’ out of weakness, not out of strength and power” (LL 92). We could, for instance, conceive of this re-engagement of the state along the lines of radical democracy, where the involvement of the citizens in environmental, economic, and other issues becomes an integral part of political reality. 24. See also NE 133: “every state sought to create (by means of specific treaties) a positive jus publicum Europaeum that would give it a juridical advantage by stabilizing a favorable status quo.” 25. At the level of international politics, it has the function of bracketing bellicose conflicts in the form of state wars (NE 141).

6 Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity Schmitt and Husserl: From the Crisis The destruction of the state holds in store two considerable consequences for Schmittian reduction. First, the exposure of the state-politics metonymy triggers a process of politicization that continues the trend started in the disclosure of the forms of legitimacy other than legality and in the correction of the ontological and historical inflation of constitutional law in conjunction with the liberal-bourgeois constitution. The uniqueness of the final de-metonymization in comparison to the ones preceding it is that it sparks off the movement of pure politicization, in which neither legitimacy, nor the constitution, nor, for that matter, any other political element but the political as such is released into its own from the static grasp of the state. The “release” of the political is the second consequence of the Schmittian epoché. If secrecy, darkness, and silence are the partisan’s weapons, then the reduction of state structures to political principles verges on non-phenomenality and non-visibility in a clear inversion of the disingenuous liberal-bourgeois ideal of total transparency.1 Partisan inconspicuousness accounts for nothing less than a fresh start of the political, the newly found strength to hold in reserve that, in Schmitt’s view, defines every beginning. “The moment of brilliant [glanzvoller] representation,” on the contrary, “is also and at once the moment in which every link to the secret, non-apparent [geheimen, unscheinbaren] beginning is endangered” (CP 94).2 The phenomenal brilliance of representation— which, perhaps, does not apply to the early Schmittian notion of “concrete representation”—violates the non-phenomenality of the secret and drifts 126

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

127

away from the prospects of reviving the political encoded in the word “beginning.” It is left up to the partisan to suture the silent, invisible link to the beginning.3 At the bottom of the reduced edifice, therefore, one does not encounter the Husserlian shining “thing itself,” “that which is self-evidently given,”4 but partisan obscurity that retraces the non-negative withdrawal of the political replete with that which is evidently not given, the arcana. The elusiveness and fugitive character of the post-reductive remainder will explain Schmitt’s enthusiasm for the “very beautiful sentences” in Heidegger’s Being and Time, such as “silence is the essential possibility of speech” (G 109), or his reproach directed to Machiavelli, who “spoke at all about power, making it into an object of idle chatter” (G 49). If we wanted to be more Schmittian than Schmitt himself, we would have asserted that all acts of sovereignty are esoteric and “apocryphal” (cf. CT 155), not just those undertaken in the liberal-bourgeois state that disowns the idea of sovereignty or assigns it to the impersonality of the law. The ineffable “ground” of non-phenomenality finally blurs the distinction between political theology, on the one hand, and existential political ontology, on the other, and bestows meaning on every form of collective life, while keeping itself obstinately insulated against all exegetic overtures. The remark, “[p]olitical being preceded constitution-making” (CT 102) that, in turn, was prior to the formalization of the constitution and the normative regimes of legitimation erected around it, is worthy of becoming one of the key theses of Schmitt’s unwritten onto-existential political manifesto. We reduced this structure from the top down, cataloging, at each step of the way, the metonymic abuses to which its essential elements were subjected in the “onslaught against the political [der Kampf gegen das Politische]” that describes modernity.5 It goes without saying that the fight (der Kampf) against the political is itself eminently political. But the reductive release of political being has raised more questions than it has answered. The last demystification contributed to a new mystery of the political that cannot be pinned down and that is allegorically expressed in the elusive figure of the partisan. The reason for this is that political being is not, in the last instance, a statute, a norm, or a state apparatus, but the non-objectifiable, immanent,6 constitutive subjectivity that mirrors the ontological predicament of Heidegger’s Dasein (neither present-at-hand, nor ready-to-hand) and of Husserl’s “pure consciousness.” The existential-phenomenological query that suggests itself to us is, thus, not, “What is the structure of Schmitt’s political ontology?” but “Who is its subject?”

128

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Before addressing or, rather, raising more explicitly this question, we need to acknowledge that, aside from his interest in political invisibility, Schmitt’s methodological conclusions and the sociocultural diagnosis of modernity converge with those of Husserl’s phenomenology. The formal analogy comprises various channels of inquiry concerned with the problem of modernity and with the possibilities of its resolution. Phenomenologically envisaged, the oppressive layers of bureaucratized and neutralized institutions, including the law and the state, are an extension of what in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl terms “sedimentation” (Sedimentierung). Husserlian sedimentation involves a forgetting of the concrete foundations of abstract knowledge in lived human experience, along with the founding impulse itself, thanks to the preponderance of abstractions founded, instituted, or established on that which has been forgotten.7 Taking the logic of sedimentation to heart, the goal of the preceding chapter was to argue that the experience of the political at the founding level of Lebenswelt, the life-world, has been suppressed by the founded institutionalization of politics that, paradoxically, presupposes and extirpates this lived, embodied, existential basis. For Husserl, the crisis erupts, precisely, when founded abstractions tend toward an excessive separation from their phenomenological foundations and when what we know about the world assumes the character of familiarity or obviousness. On the political side of things, the crisis evinces a divergence between the institutional arrangement, such as the state, and its existential premises—collective decisions on the form of political existence, formations of the community of friends against enemy groupings, and so on—and it is these “groundless,” existentially self-legitimating political foundations that fall prey to neutralization. We witness, as a result, the objectivization of the political in modernity, its divestment of any subjective underpinnings uncritically dismissed as archaic despotism. The objective legal order comes unglued from the subjective orientation, thereby, shuttering the unity of nomos and ushering the age of political nihilism. A particularly pernicious aspect of institutionalization is extreme formalization, leading to the persistence of that which had taken root in the political life-world long after its existential raison d’être has become antiquated and irrelevant. The difficulty in dealing with formalization has to do with its inevitability and, therefore, the unfeasibility of its wholesale eradication. If there is a “solution” to the problem of modernity, it does not dictate a complete rejection of abstract thought, which as Adorno and Derrida have taught us, is the pharmakon (remedy and poison) of freedom, nor does it succumb to the anarchist temptation to abolish all formal

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

129

political structures. The stress Schmitt places on the exception should, likewise, alert us on the fact that it is an exception to the rule, which is not rescinded but, on the contrary, preserved and strengthened thanks to a re-valorization of its telos embedded in the political life-world. In lieu of prescribing an easy way to overcome the problem of modernity, Husserlian reduction and Heideggerian de-formalization impose the exigency of a patient, if not Sisyphean, theoretical and practical work of discarding layers of sedimentation that are bound to regrow, given that their accumulation constitutes the weight of history. This, then, is the other dimension of the crisis: the survival of an empty organizational or legal form at the expense of the decision that gave rise to it. Schmitt writes, “the issuance of a constitution can exhaust, absorb, or consume [erschöpfen, absorbieren oder konsumieren] the constitution-making power” (CT 125), immediately adding, however, that this exhaustion neither invalidates nor renders irrelevant the political will. In a move that is patently phenomenological, Schmitt confronts the loss of the political life-world and the abrogation of the animating impulse in the objectivized statutory structures that betray it, in the double sense of expressing and exhibiting disloyalty to it. Constitution-making power is worn out in that which is constituted by it; existentially vibrant meaning gives way to legalistic abstractions. Because this power is so vital for political life, its absorption and exhaustion in the constitution only deepens the crisis and demands a new decision on the political form. One sign of the crisis of formalization is the dissolution of a unified constitution into a set of particular laws (CT 69), an early warning that the will, from which the unity of the constitution stemmed, is no longer expressed in its own objectification. The statute stays behind as an empty shell, an abstraction no longer linked to concrete existence, a sediment disengaged from political being. The resources of critical thinking are, then, mobilized against the crisis of modernity. Like Husserl, who harnesses philosophy to the task of reactivating the forgotten origins of knowing, learning to see the enigmatic core of the familiar, and “accomplishing for oneself that which has originally given rise to what one is now aware of as ‘ready-made,’”8 Schmitt is committed to an archaeological reactivation of the “living sources” of politics buried deep beneath the ossified institutional structures. It is important to realize that, given Schmitt’s polemical and highly situational usage of political concepts, his accentuation of the elemental experience of the political is also contextually and historically ensconced in a reaction to the crisis of modernity threatening with a complete de-politicization, neutralization, and formalization of human existence. Piercing through ready-made

130

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

institutional reality, political reduction has in view the same goal as Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, namely, reviving politics as a lived experience and as a concrete, deformalized phenomenon (in a qualified sense that excludes something like the pure self-evidence and the absolute visibility of the political). The advantage of this phenomenological elaboration on Schmitt’s project is that it avoids imputing to his methodology a mishmash of heterogeneous “modes of unmasking, historicization, ideational reconstruction and decontestation”9 and, thus, endorses theoretical coherence without compromising on historical sensitivity. This is what steers us to the conclusion that the philosophical underpinnings of his method dovetail with the variations on Husserlian reduction in Heidegger’s destruction (Abbau, Destruktion) and Derrida’s deconstruction. Who or what remains after the political-phenomenological reduction has bracketed various abstractions and “obvious” descriptions of the political? Here, too, a reference to Husserl will prove useful. According to Volume I of Ideas, what survives the operations of reduction is that which is purely immanent to consciousness, “intentionality,” or the directedness of consciousness toward something. As intentional, consciousness is, in each instance, conscious of something (perceiving of the perceived, desiring of the desired, thinking of the thought), in a double sense of the genitive; consciousness both bestows meaning on phenomena and is co-produced with whatever it is conscious of. Reduction gives us access to a whole region of Being, which, while it is a part of the world, construes this world as meaningful. Transposed from Husserl’s phenomenology onto Schmitt’s political philosophy, constitutive subjectivity can equip the reader with a model for understanding the collective and the individual subjects of the political and the permutations of the irreducible pouvoir constituant from which constitutional forms first emanated. While the irreducibility of the subjective element has been often associated with the old metaphysical notion of the will that seems to have percolated into Schmitt’s theory, the reductive-phenomenological take on the issue makes recourse to metaphysical explanations less plausible. But what, exactly, allows us to make a case for a post-metaphysical, existential-ontological interpretation of constitutive political subjectivity in Schmitt’s political philosophy?

The Ontology of Political Will The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most controversial, instantiation of constitutive subjectivity in politics is the sovereign will. A political philosophy that seeks, at any cost, to avoid the trappings of modern positivism is

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

131

likely to appeal to this notion, despite running the risk of inheriting the old metaphysical quandaries associated with it. Schmitt, nevertheless, is careful enough to skirt the positivist Scylla and the metaphysical Charybdis by resorting to the will—the paradigm case of pure psychic inwardness—so as to ingeniously destroy the master distinction of traditional metaphysics between interiority and exteriority. The “word ‘will’,” he maintains, “denotes an actually existing power as the origin of a command. The will is existentially present [vorhanden]; its power or authority lies in its Being [seine Macht oder Autorität liegt in seinem Sein]” (CT 64). This definition, worked out early on in Constitutional Theory, does not mean that a purely interior, psychic entity, which exists a priori, only subsequently actualizes itself either as Hegel’s Geist that passes through world-history, or as Nietzsche’s will-to-power. Nor is political will coterminous with the psychic will of the immediate person, even when this person alone is responsible for deciding on the constitutional form of political life. Schmitt’s “will” is, merely, power in its actuality, an always already exteriorized expression of political existence, while power is an appellation for the effectivity of the will, which is not a withdrawn, noumenal cause10 but an active intervention in a given state of affairs (actually existing power as the command’s origin). Ten years after the publication of Constitutional Theory, in his book on Hobbes, Schmitt will reaffirm the destruction of the key distinction of traditional metaphysics, politically converted into the contrast between public and private reason at the threshold of liberalism. There, he will criticize Hobbes’s proto-liberal discrimination between fides and confessio, faith and confession, a discrimination that created the private sphere, where one can entertain the illusion of exercising one’s own judgment, free from all political constraints (LST 56). But already in 1928, this destruction paved the way for a certain continuity between the will, the command, and the law. Succinctly put, while the law is a formalized expression of the command, the command is an extension of the actually existing power (the will) from which it derives. Upon close examination, the will should be discernable in the law, notwithstanding the extreme formalization that befuddles the intrinsic connection between the two. And the instances of the sovereign decision on the exception, far from being transcendental intrusions, facilitate this non-empirical discernability, deformalizing or reducing the legal expression of the will forgetful of what it was to express in the first place. The existential presence and actuality of the will does not, in point of fact, betoken Schmitt’s secret inclination toward positivism,11 since the being of the will, wherein power lies, is not positively demonstrable. Although Heidegger, too, aimed to erase the artificial divide between psychic

132

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

interiority and the outside world using a completely different pretext of the ecstatic constitution of Dasein, he did so by foregrounding another opposition—between the analytics of existence and the analytics of nonexistential categories. The price paid for the political deconstruction of the pivotal metaphysical distinction is blatant disrespect for the basic theoretical move of Being and Time, where the existential problematic of Dasein is warily protected against the commonplace tendency to comprehend human beings in terms of the categories that befit things, namely, Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) and Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand). Schmitt’s depiction of the will, with its mix of actuality, presence, and existence, vitiates the efforts to purify existential terms of all categorial overtones, or so a Heideggerian complaint would go. But what if, rather than disregard the existential primacy of possibility, to which he tirelessly attested throughout his life, the political philosopher described the sovereign will from its own phenomenological standpoint? What if the existential presence of the will actually accorded with Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein’s facticity, that is, the idea that Dasein is necessarily spatialized, or embodied, and that it is not “a spiritual Thing which subsequently gets misplaced ‘into’ a space”?12 It is equally detrimental to consider the will as “a spiritual Thing,” provided that it has a facticity of its own, a political facticity, we might say. The political will must have an existential substratum—not to be confused with the modern sense of body politic—to which it is related not as something “misplaced” but as a matter of fact inseparable from its being: “only something existing in concrete terms can properly be sovereign. A merely valid norm cannot be sovereign” (CT 63). This onto-existential ambit of sovereignty impels further analysis and elaboration. With the assertion that the power of the will resides in its Being (in seinem Sein), Schmitt brackets, parenthesizes, or reduces a long history of legitimizations that depended either on a direct theologico-metaphysical anchoring of authority (in the divine right of kings, for instance), or on a more circuitous secularization of previous religious concepts (the sacred sovereignty of the people as a modified version of God’s supreme authority). If the power of the will is grounded in its Being, then it is self-grounded in such a way that its ontic manifestations, known as monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic regimes—as well as the three degenerate forms Aristotle matches them with in The Politics—offer a very superficial and incomplete explanation for political reality, glossing over its ontological grounding in the decision on the form of political existence. Underneath mythological covers, the sovereign will is existentially self-justifying and self-validating, in other words, “the word ‘will’ denotes the essentially existential character

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

133

of this ground of validity [wesentlich Existenzielle dieses Geltungsgrundes]. The constitution-making power is political will, more specifically, concrete political being [konkretes politisches Sein]” (CT 125). As in the earlier citation from Constitutional Theory, the will is practically identical to the existential nature of political being, that is, the Being of political beings, as opposed to a set of basic laws or state structures. Moreover, it is not something in being, a spiritual “thing” misplaced into political space, to paraphrase Heidegger, much less an identifiable regime with its statutory, institutional accoutrements and representatives. It is, rather, political Being as such. The semantic equivalence of Being, will, and power—each term interchangeable with the other two—hints at Schmitt’s ultimate innovation in political philosophy, his discovery of the field of onto-existential politics. Despite the binding of the will to concrete, embodied existence, constitution-making power is not restricted to its monarchic or autocratic variety given that every “systematic unity and order” arises out of “a preestablished unified will” (CT 65). Having reduced (deconstituted) the liberal-democratic state and the Rechtsstaat constitution to the founding decision on the form of political life, Schmitt not only peers behind various forms of constitution, but also reconstructs ontic political reality on the newly discovered ontological basis. Before Schmitt, Hegel, also, conceded that all sovereignty originated in the shape of subjectivity, albeit conceiving of the will’s self-determination as an abstraction: Sovereignty . . . comes into existence only as subjectivity sure of itself, as the will’s abstract and to that extent ungrounded self-determination in which finality of decision is rooted . . . The truth of subjectivity, however, is attained only in a subject.13 Hegel’s naïvety lies in his hope that the groundless self-determination of the will could acquire an objective grounding in the bourgeois state, where universal reason gets actualized. This dialectical expectation testifies to a perversion of the relation between the founding and the founded, so that the most inessential part of the political edifice passes itself off as the most fundamental. This gross error is further compounded by the all too metaphysical assumption that existence, whether political or not, can be initially abstract and that its historical display is a process of concretization, a well-grounded self-determination. The political sequence in dialectics that extends from the abstract to the concrete and reaches an apex in the universal subject-object synthesis, undergoes an inversion in

134

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

Husserl’s phenomenology and Schmitt’s political philosophy, both of which berate the accelerating abstraction and forgetting of the concrete foundations of knowledge and political life. Even if, methodologically, political and phenomenological reductions are to begin with abstractions, they will do so not in order to flesh them out in concrete existence but for the sake of tracing these uppermost crusts of the political and cognitive edifices back to their roots in the life-world. What Hegel celebrates as the subject-object synthesis of political history, whose pinnacle is the nineteenth-century Prussian state, is, for Schmitt, both an accurate metaphysical picture of reality two centuries old (NE 149) and a false concretization of the will, in a word, personification. In the preceding chapters I have grouped the personifications of the law, the constitution, and the state, as the supposed seats of modern sovereignty, under the heading of fetishism. The credo that the laws, not the persons making or administering them, rule throws a ruse over existentially vigorous sovereignty, rendering it apocryphal, amid the ever more sophisticated transposition of human categories onto the products of human activity. While in Hobbes’s appropriation of the myth of Leviathan, “the state is not in its entirety a person” but a combination of the Cartesian body-machine and a sovereign soul, the liberal alteration of this image of the state retains solely the mechanized body, having discarded its sovereign kernel. The political machine has lost its organic overtones and gives the impression that it is a self-propelling automaton. “The process of mechanization,” Schmitt observes, “is not, however, arrested but completed by this personification” (LST 34) that makes a depoliticized life more dramatic, if not more interesting, and therefore more tolerable for those who find the spectacle of duels (wars) between the personified entities fascinating. But the elements of personhood, now assigned to the mechanized state, are a poor consolation for its soullessness and impersonality; such an assignation results in a contrived concretization of the will and in the illusion of neutral sovereignty dissolved, as though by osmosis, in various state structures. A “remarkable personification [Personifizierung] of the law” elevated “over every political power” (CT 63) does not describe the Hegelian Aufhebung of abstract universal reason in the tangible written statute, or the incarnation of rational law in positive legality,14 but a polemical, and often extralegal, legitimation of the law that lends a formal voice to political will. Personification, the political legacy of the baroque, superimposes a further neutralizing sediment onto the political life-world, in that it silences the debate over pouvoir constituant with reference to “the will of the state.”15 It resorts to a mixed strategy of filling the void of the modern “disincarnation

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

135

of society,” in the words of Claude Lefort, and recalling the political to its existential and phenomenological foundations without investing power in the person of the monarch. What it really personifies, however, is not “society” but society’s disincarnation, the nihilistic void at the core of modern politics, its disembodiment that neither should nor can be resolved into the abstract figure of humanity, or into the concrete order of things. Are we to learn to live with a vacuous political ontology, or can we imagine other modes of embodiment, concretization, phenomenological appearing on the political scene, if only in those rare moments when sovereignty is exercised? Schmitt certainly wishes to fill out the void of the political, but he does not intend to do so once and for all, postulating a new objective metaphysical structure as the final point of ascription. The political-phenomenological project is motivated by a desire to aid the flourishing of concrete political incarnations that will be as changeable as political existence itself and that will derive from the dense texture of this existence. The nihilistic void at the center of modern political ontology gapes only when this ontology is preconstituted from an abstract vantage point that reifies the field of political activity and, then, retrospectively, breathes the “spiritualism” of the law into the deformed corpse of the political. The empty (and, therefore, contestable) place of sovereignty might as well stay unoccupied in general but, in the concreteness of political life, Lefortian “disincarnation” shelters specific interests and political actors. The link between personhood and authority has not disintegrated altogether; no longer subject to the exigencies of the spectacle and, more specifically, the spectacularization of authority, it is merely withdrawn from public sight and, thus, politicized as the greatest arcanum of modernity. As though mocking Hegel’s political philosophy, personification persists in the long-awaited synthesis of the rational and the actual in the modern liberal-democratic state. A well-functioning political embodiment of reason should have absorbed—negated and preserved: dialectically sublated—all remnants of contingent personalism, such as the principle of revenge in the administration of justice. But nothing corresponds to this dialectical expectation in political reality: the personification of states on the international arena, which is a relic of the “allegorical tendency of the Renaissance” (NE 144), continues well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Hegel himself modeling international relations and, especially, interstate wars on the life-and-death struggle for recognition in the intersubjective sphere.16 The anthropomorphism of political thought that sees wars as duels between magni homines and that fantasizes about the state as “a legal subject and a sovereign ‘person’” (NE 142, 145) stands

136

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

halfway between the majestic sovereignty of the monarch’s absolute will and the routinized sovereignty of state machinery, trying to convey that the latter is a direct inheritor of the former. Distinct from such personification, Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty as a decision on the exception is a veritable synthesis, if there ever was one, of the personal thesis and the impersonal antithesis. Instead of wistfully looking back to the premodern, not yet secularized figure of sovereignty, the decision on the exception responds 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 of the category “presenceat-hand” in Heidegger (in Being and Time things become present-at-hand, reduced to their “mereness,” when they break or when they lose the quality of inconspicuous familiarity, that is, when we no longer know what to do with them). All law might be situational but so are the sovereign decision and the will that—not unlike the worldhood (the Being) of the world that first becomes accessible through the gap in the totality of significations opened by the unworkable, present-at-hand thing—represent political being, which shines through this break in the body-machine of legality and of the state. The truth of the political mechanism does not reside “in its technological perfection” (LST 45) but in the breaking points where its limits are revealed. It remains to be explained what Schmitt means by “a preestablished unified will.”17 In citing this entity, does he revivify metaphysical foundationalism that thrives on explaining concrete reality by means of a priori transcendental causation (the Idea, the thing-in-itself, the will—terms that orchestrate everything in the world from which they are absent)? Does the insistence on the unity of constitution-making power throw us back onto the old, tried and tested terrain of metaphysics? The “pre-establishment” of the will does not happen in a transcendental realm outside of history but is, itself, a political fabrication, which, in democracies, cannot come to pass without an extreme homogenization of citizenry, or what Noam Chomsky calls “a manufacturing of consent.” The metaphysical concept of the general will obfuscates a very practical question as to “who has control over the means with which the will of the people is to be constructed: military and political force, propaganda, control of public opinion through the press, party organizations, assemblies, public education, and schools” (CPD 29). Leftist political thinkers, including French philosopher Louis Althusser, refer to these institutions as “Ideological State Apparatuses” responsible for the orderly production of docile subjects in the image of the master Subject of ideology, a secularized

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

137

figure of God. For our purposes, it is enough to highlight the historicoideological construction of the will of the people, which is forged through a series of fraudulent identifications. In the process of setting up the collective that is not reliant upon the organicity of Gemeinschaft or upon a purely political consolidation in the face of an enemy threat, the voting majority gets identified with the people in general and, hence, also, the will of the “outvoted minority” is absorbed into that of the majority (CDP 25). The will of the parliament is, in its turn, translated into the will of the homogenized people (LL 24) and, thus, into the metaphysical construct of volonté générale. That is to say, the unity of the will in democracy, be it direct or representative, is not a simple, non-analyzable unity distinguishing all metaphysical concepts, but a oneness that overlays and suppresses difference and heterogeneity. Political reduction exposes the vertical layering of identifications only to point out that at the bottom of the ideological construction we shall not detect a forgotten atomic unity of the will; rather we shall stumble upon the smoldering cinders of a conflict resolved through a successful imposition of the political will of the victorious party on the vanquished who interiorize it as their own. Both in the formation of the general will and in the exploitative dynamics of capitalism, basic inequalities persist under the mask of absolute and total equality. Through an intricate process of identification, the struggle of particular wills is quelled, if only temporarily, and a fragile civil peace descends upon past adversaries. Yet, despite all appearances to the contrary, Schmitt’s version of the cessation of hostilities paving the way to the formation of the people’s will has nothing in common with what social contract and state of nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls) have to say on the subject. Perhaps, it would have still been possible to rehabilitate these much-maligned—with the exception of Rawls—theories of the origin of the state that, despite their shortcomings, recognized the irreducibility of the will, were it not for three essential shortcomings. First, instead of reducing the existing political arrangements to their constitutive underpinnings, all theories of the state of nature are imaginary projections of anthropological assumptions onto a hypothetical historical period before the rise of the state. (At the outset of The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau devastatingly criticized the general methodology of the earlier “state of nature” theories, only to project a contrasting anthropological presupposition onto the human origins.18) Second, although the will, which announces itself in the nascent social contract, limits itself to calculative rationality, this will does not denote an “actually existing power” but, to the contrary, delegates political clout to a new, presumably neutral,

138

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

authority of the state said to be at its behest. And, third, regardless of the fundamental differences among them, social contract theories postulate consensus and, consequently, utter de-politicization at the source of political institutions. Surely, the consensual drive in the formation of a constitution is conceivable, but solely under exceptional circumstances: When a constitution is at issue, a compromise will only be possible when the will to political unity and state consciousness strongly and decisively outweighs all religious and class-based oppositions, so that these religious and social differences are rendered relative. (CT 83) Whether a unified political will is forged under the aegis of compromise or, whether conflicts between various intensely antagonistic groups continue to brew, the political maintains its primacy over other spheres of human activity because, in both cases, it assumes the highest existential relevance. The deepest fault line passes not between unity and disunity but between affectively invested—Freud would say, cathected—modes of being with and against others and a nihilistic indifference to one’s group identity. If this is so, then “the will to political unity” cannot be motivated by a vague appeal to bipartisanship or by a yearning for an unchangeable and non-political common substance of the American nation, upon which the ideology of Barack Obama is heavily reliant. For the political to outweigh all other oppositions and induce a unity, the figure of the enemy must loom large on the horizon of national, infranational, or transnational collectivities. Originary consensus is especially pertinent to the formation of federations that come about as a consequence of an agreement, approximating most closely the social contract scheme. Still, the contractual model cannot hope for equality among those who have achieved such a compromise, because the assessment and interpretation of the adherence to and the violations of the terms of the contract are the prerogatives of sovereign decision-making. “Who decides whether there is a valid contract, whether the grounds to dispute it are persuasive, whether the right to withdraw is provided, etc.?” (CT 120). Thus formulated, the question of constitutive political subjectivity comes back to haunt that which has been constituted, demanding a constant reconstitution of political forms in every “application” of rules and in each act of overseeing and judging procedural “correctness.” However potent it may be, the criticism of “the will of the people” does not solve the problem of the sovereign will in other, non-democratic political regimes. The second rejoinder to the allegation that, in Schmitt, the will

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

139

reeks of old metaphysics has to do with the notions of unity and indivisibility of sovereignty in general. The key consideration here is whether the will as such, irrespective of the political regime it institutes, is a ready-made “entity,” or whether, with phenomenological flair, it comes into being with that which is willed. According to Nietzsche’s daring assertion in On the Genealogy of Morality and, especially, in The Will to Power, there is no subjective doer behind the deed. The agent is a later, a posteriori, and, to a large extent, fictitious interpellation into the action.19 Schmitt and Husserl do not subscribe to this, for all intents and purposes, scandalous conclusion, yet it is my hypothesis that political will and the sovereign qua sovereign come about as a result of the decision on the exception; that is to say, they do not precede the moment of the decision but are decided into existence in this very moment. The production of the sovereign and of the will by the decision is a self-production, in that, in the absence of any transcendental supports, the sovereign is decided into existence by him- or herself, by the act of sovereignty, which, from the standpoint of the existing legalpolitical order, is null and groundless. The unity of the will is the upshot of the unity of action (that decides on the exception, that gives a particular constitutional form to political being, etc.) so that, in each case, the action constitutes the will not as an abstract and undetermined spiritual entity, but as a specific willing to . . . But since action is temporally finite, the will must also exhibit the same quality. Its existential finitude requires a constant reactivation, a rebinding of its ties to what is willed, if the process of sedimentation and the crisis whereby the willed separates from the willing is to be managed, if not outright overcome. To pursue further the analogy with Husserlian phenomenology, where all consciousness is a consciousness of something (the perceiving of that which is perceived, etc.), Schmitt’s political will is not an amorphous, abstract potentiality but a power, the constitution-making power to be exact, that “activates itself through the act of the fundamental political decision” (CT 140). The political decision, therefore, determines the will, and not vice versa. Its unity is, decidedly, not an expression of the “monistic metaphysics” distinctive of mainstream jurisprudence, where normative “[u]nity and purity are easily attained when the basic difficulty is emphatically ignored and when, for formal reasons, everything that contradicts the system is excluded as impure” (PT 21). In contrast to the sovereign will, the unity of normative and legal system, initially built upon it, is metaphysical both due to the ideal of purity it upholds and due to its totalizing impulse emphatically ignoring the heterogeneity of the exception. To the extent that “freedom of the will” still makes sense, it is not to be taken as a

140

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

simple lack of determinations in the aftermath of a stale metaphysical quarrel between the proponents of “free will” and “determinism” but is to be understood, at best, in the Kantian vein of freedom as self-determination, albeit without the reliance on the transcendental subject of reason. This explains the auto-production of the sovereign will, which appears to have originated miraculously, ex nihilo, but, which actually, “generates its own unity [Einheit]” (CT 70)—the unity that, as we shall see, subsists on difference—by temporarily gathering itself up in the instant of the decision. That the unity of the will, whose auto-production is at once a heteroproduction, is never simple or atomic is true even for non-democratic political regimes. In an important 1970 treatise, largely neglected in secondary scholarship, Schmitt articulated his views on unity in the context of his analysis of Trinitarian political theology. Bitterly disagreeing with Erik Peterson’s assessment of the contemporary prospects for political theology elaborated in Der Monotheismus als Politisches Problem (1935), Schmitt exposed the partiality of “one God—one King” formula that shackled the political problem of monotheism to monarchism. Given the Jewish monotheistic slogan “one God—one people” and the principle of the Roman Empire “one God—one World—one Empire,” the real conundrum for political theology is “political unity and its presence or representation” (PTII 72), not a simple, non-derived, unproduced oneness. The inference that the synthetic nature of any unity logically entails an anterior plurality promises a fresh approach to the institution of monarchy (literally, “a single arché or origin”), the very site where Christian political theology has been Aristotelianized. “The politico-theological question of monarchy becomes more complex,” Schmitt explains, through the fact that neither Origen and the Alexandrian theologians nor St. Athanasius use the word monarchy; they talk of divine monas instead. The word “mon-archy” implies the Aristotelian mia arche, the principle of the One, whereas the word monas relates to the Pythagorean-Platonic unity of the number. (PTII 72–73) While the principle of the One is the metaphysical axiom par excellence, the ideal unity of number does not bar the possibility of differentiation and division of what has been gathered up into it (i.e., Platonic dialectics). Were the Pythagorean-Platonic influence on Christianity to gain an upper hand, monarchy would have been habitually read as monas-archy consistent with Trinitarian plurality of the One in the constant process of consolidating its unity, but also falling apart, becoming divided against itself. It is by no

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

141

means certain either that the unified (as opposed to the single) will is in accord with itself, or that the economy of the Trinity is governed by the ideal of perpetual peace, or, again, that, in the depths of my psychic economy, when I am alone with myself, I face no enemies. Just as the solitude of the prison cell may prompt me to put myself into question, to become my own enemy, so divine solitude is not without its frictions, especially in light of the doctrine of the Trinity as a “politico-theological stasiology,” where, as we know, stasis entails both the condition of quiescence and an uproar or tumult (Aufruhr) of civil strife (PTII 123). Indeed, the intriguing interpretation of stasis is given both in Ex Captivitate Salus and in Political Theology II, texts that extend the basic political opposition between friends and enemies to psychic economy and theological dogma, respectively. If God himself can be his own enemy, not to mention all the conscious and unconscious ways in which human beings consistently undermine themselves, then the sovereignty of the political will can act against itself, thereby precipitating the event of political self-expropriation.

P.S.: On Political Consciousness The analysis of constitutive subjectivity in The Nomos of the Earth deserves a special treatment because it interjects “consciousness” in the place of “will.” While the doxa of Schmitt scholarship holds that, in the period after World War II, he abandoned decisionism and subscribed to an institutional analysis of politics, the recurrent references to the latter term in the most emblematic work of “later Schmitt” indicate that he did not forsake the methodology of reducing political structures to the subjectivity that constitutes them. At first glance, the desire to attribute the origination of nomos to the land and its earliest divisions is a leap back to an objectivist—some would say feudal or bucolic—political metaphysics. After all, what is “groundless,” literally and figuratively, about the suggestion that “[e]very ontonomous and ontological judgment [ontonome, seinsgerechte Urteil] derives from the land” and that, “[f]or this reason, we will begin with land-appropriation as the primeval act in founding law” (NE 45)? Schmitt’s neologism “ontonomy,” meaning the nomos of Being and semantically playing on “autonomy,” is anything but endorsing an autonomous subjectivity, since subjective judgment is doubly dependent on the order of Being and a derivation from the land. A conceptual divide thus stretches between the early deduction of the state and the law from an existential decision on political form that reflects the unity of the will, and the conditioning of nomos by land-appropriation. Thanks to this partitioning of

142

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

his body of work, Schmitt is reintegrated into the pantheon of modern philosophy, which, in his words, “is governed by a schism between thought and being, concept and reality, mind and nature, subject and object” (PR 52), a schism whose political vicissitudes would include a spectacular split between order and orientation and, therefore, the impossibility of recovering the unity of nomos. The bad news for the proponents of an epistemological break between the early and the late Schmitt is that there is ample evidence for the prominence of constitutive subjectivity in the postwar writings as well. If law is first founded on the basis of land-appropriation, then the subjectivity of the appropriator needs to be theoretically addressed, for all appropriation is appropriation by someone. An appropriator of the land, whether individual or collective, must operate with a historical consciousness (in Husserl’s vernacular, noesis) of the object (noema) to be appropriated. The first appropriations guided by myth and treating the earth as sacred did not have the same historical object “land” in sight, as did the Europeans in the Age of Discoveries. Even more, for centuries, humanity had a mythical image of the earth, but no scientific understanding of it as a whole. There was no concept of a planet, of human compass and orientation common to all peoples. In this sense, there was no global consciousness [globale Bewußtsein] and thus no political goal oriented to a common hope. (NE 50) This is not to say that the “mythical image of the earth” was not a species of knowledge, albeit not of the scientific kind; Schmitt would not object to the emblematic statement of Adorno and Horkheimer, “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” The absence of a noematic object “earth” on the planetary scale reflected a deficiency of conceptual knowledge and an inability to grasp the earth as a whole. A circumscribed object of knowledge invited an equally limited orientation to (and ordering of) this object, which amounted to the exclusion of the sea from the first nomos. It is a phenomenologico-political axiom that the earliest global order arose from the first global consciousness of the earth as a whole and, furthermore, that every new nomos of the earth developed from “a new stage of human spatial consciousness [Raumbewußtsein] and global order” (NE 48). Whereas Marx argued, against the adherents of German Idealism, that consciousness does not determine Being, but, vice versa, Being determines consciousness, political Being, in Schmitt, is a coimbrication of the

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

143

subjective conscious orientation and the objective order wherein it orients itself. Since, according to Husserl’s fundamental discovery already anticipated by his teacher, Franz Brentano, all consciousness is a consciousness of something, the noesis and its noema are entwined, so that the global political consciousness is, in and of itself, a consciousness of the global spatiality, with which it co-originated and which was inaccessible to the mythical imagistic awareness of the earth.20 Political consciousness is not reducible either to a passive contemplation of its object or to an active “creation” of the world. It shapes and is, in turn, shaped by that of which it is conscious: the nomological ensemble of order and orientation is Husserl’s noetic-noematic unity translated into the categories of political ontology. The historical transmutations of political consciousness prevent its belonging with its object from rigidifying into an abstract metaphysical entity. The positive impact of the crisis that rends the unity of order and orientation and thrusts disoriented subjects into a nihilistic attitude is that it instigates the imagination of another order and the formulation of a new nomos. For the phenomenological consciousness, the crisis takes the shape of an empty intentionality, an act of noesis that does not reach its noema or fails to achieve fulfillment in its object: this is how Husserl perceived the structure of mere signification, which does not touch upon that which is signified and falls short of bringing what it targets to perceptual presence. However, the cleavages between consciousness and that of which it is conscious as well as between orientation and the order in which one orients oneself, need not signal the dead-end of pure abstraction but a transition to a new object, which is yet to be found. The disintegration of the old nomos redirects political energy from actuality to the historical possibility of “a new stage of human spatial consciousness”; nihilist indifference would be, following Nietzsche, a turning point in this redirection, a hiatus between different regimes of motivation. The promise of the crisis lies in what I have called the “auto-reduction” or the self-deconstruction of nomos calling for its subsequent reactivation in a different configuration of order and orientation. One of the momentous messages of The Nomos of the Earth is that political consciousness is not always compatible with state consciousness, or, to resort to the terms of Constitutional Theory, that the will to give form to political being through the act of establishing a state is but a singular and somewhat peculiar moment in the history of political consciousness. “France,” Schmitt writes, “was the leading power and the first state to become sovereign in terms of its juridical consciousness” (NE 127). The theoretical noematic objectivity of sovereignty is inconceivable without the

144

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

noetic consciousness of sovereignty, which Schmitt terms “juridical.” But, since sovereignty is not an object but a subjective-existential stance, this consciousness had to be raised to self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein) first “attained in the thinking of two jurists: Bodin and Gentili” (NE 159). The historicity of political consciousness and self-consciousness implies not only that the actuality of the will and its pouvoir constituant are formed from a limited range of historical possibilities available in a given timeframe but also that political ontology is essentially historical and that the meaning of political Being is time.

Notes 1. In “Nomos—Nahme—Name,” Schmitt cites approvingly Carl Joachim Friedrich’s statement “All power hides,” reminiscent of the ancient Greek, “Phusis (nature) loves to hide,” and Hannah Arendt’s thesis that “Real power begins where secrecy begins” (NE 336). 2. Translation modified. 3. Thus, Rodolph Gasché [“The Partisan and the Philosopher,” in The New Centennial Review 4 (3), Winter 2004, pp. 9–34] is somewhat careless in referring to “partisan war” as a “phenomenon” (p. 10) and, more generally, to “the phenomenon of the partisan” (p. 11), or “the chameleon-like phenomenon of partisanship” (p. 12). 4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 127. 5. “Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political [Heute ist nichts moderner als der Kampf gegen das Politische]” (PT 65). 6. David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 81. 7. Refer to Paragraph 9, “Galileo’s Mathematization of Nature” in Husserl’s The Crisis, pp. 23–59, and especially Section H, “The Life-World as a Forgotten Fundament of Science,” pp. 48–53. 8. James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), p. 134. 9. Jan Müller, “Carl Schmitt’s Method: Between Ideology, Demonology, and Myth,” in Journal of Political Ideologies 4 (1), 1999, pp. 61–85. 10. Schmitt deems Romantic occasionalism to be a negation of “the concept of causa, in other words, the force of a calculable causality, and thus also every binding norm” (PR 17). If this is the case, then the political will in Schmitt, too, is “Romantic” since it finds itself at home in such a negation. 11. The “positivism of my time oppressed me,” Schmitt admits in Ex Captivitate Salus (pp. 63–64). 12. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 83.

Political Reduction to Constitutive Subjectivity

145

13. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 181. Hegel soon comes back to this idea, stressing the ungrounded character of the subjective (“the will’s ultimate ungrounded self ”) and objective (“its similarly ungrounded objective existence”) aspects of sovereignty, which he readily identifies with the “‘majesty’ of 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 principled opposition to the idea that positive and rational law are essentially different, Schmitt reduces the rational to the positive, thereby acknowledging substantial continuity between the two systems of legality (p. 34). Of course, the reasons for this conclusion are drastically divergent in the two cases: while Hegel sees positive law as a concretion of the rational, Schmitt views rational law in terms of a rationalization of the existing positive law, which is parallel to the false concretization of the will in the personification of the state. 15. “They [jurists of positive law] find it meaningful to trace all legality back to the constitution or the will of the state, which is conceived of as a person. However, they have an immediate answer for the further question regarding the origin of this constitution or the origin of the state; they say it is a mere fact” (NE 82). 16. Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, “Sovereignty vis-à-vis Foreign States,” p. 208. 17. Likewise, the “constitution is valid by virtue of the existing political will of that which establishes it. Every type of legal norm, even constitutional law, presupposes that such a will already exists” (CT 76). 18. In Rousseau, the “‘state of nature’ of earlier philosophy, which was treated as an intentional abstraction or a historical fact, becomes a concrete idyll that takes place in forest and field, a ‘romantic fantasy’” (PR 57). 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), esp. “The Will to Power as Knowledge,” p. 262. 20. “The idea of a coexistence of true empires, or independent Großräume in a common space, lacked any ordering power, because it lacked the idea of a common spatial order encompassing the whole earth” (NE 55).

This page intentionally left blank

7 Living Forms: Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum Disentangling Complexio Oppositorum Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) features a term, the importance of which political philosophy is yet to fathom. This notion, complexio oppositorum, describes Catholicism as “a complex of opposites,” because, as Schmitt observes, there appears to be no antithesis it [Roman Catholicism] does not embrace. It has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government . . . But this complexio oppositorum also holds sway over everything theological. (RC 7) Having survived the metonymic reductions of modernity, the complexio’s elastic form—and more needs to be said on the subject of the exceptional, miraculous features of this form—knows no exceptions, since it encompasses every antithesis within itself and brings together “all forms” of political organization. Its inclusiveness notwithstanding, the complexio does not name a vacuous form of forms and even less does it envisage a complete dialectical synthesis; the accommodation of mutually exclusive entities does not synthesize them into a Hegelian unity but leaves enough space for them to retain the tension of oppositionality, which ought to be rigorously distinguished from the temporary torsion of a contradiction awaiting a resolution. So receptive is the complexio to the pressures of political antagonism, that an alternative version of the book on Roman Catholicism, titled “The Necessity of Politics,” begins with the postulation 149

150

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

of its ghostly double, “an anti-Roman ‘complex’”1 joining together unlikely allies—Protestants and orthodox Christians—against the dreaded elasticity of the Catholic political form. In his model of the complexio, Schmitt refrains from invoking a higher third that would mediate between the thesis and the antithesis. Upon rejecting the Hegelian method, he shows how the complex of opposites—in the vernacular of Political Theology, a conglomeration of disjunctions, not of polarities—occasions a breakdown of dialectics, which routinely brings to naught the contradiction that impels it and positivizes negativity.2 Instead of neutralizing the antagonisms it houses, the complex of opposites nurtures and accentuates them; instead of totalizing or inserting the particulars under the umbrella of a single concept, it permits them to clash and derives its political energy from this enduring standoff. But, above all, it defies the logic of the actualization of potentialities, where “all political forms and possibilities become nothing more than tools for the realization of an idea” (RC 5). It is this defiance that bestows an existential character on the complex that grasps possibilities qua possibilities without subjugating them to the “categorial” ontology of the ready-to-hand (Heidegger), or turning them into mere “tools.” Resistance to dialectics is woven into the, prima facie, anti-modern fabric of the complexio. When in eighteenth-century metaphysics, God “became a concept and ceased to be an essence,” He “was removed from the world and reduced to a neutral instance vis-à-vis the struggles and antagonisms of real life [des wirklichen Lebens]” (CP 90). Philosophy and its birthright (conceptualization), therefore, idealize the actuality of life, prompting an increasingly abstract epistemology to supplant practical ontology. Only the complex’s rejection of the neutralizing and, by implication, deadening subsumption of antagonisms in a conceptual unity preserves that of which they are but meager symptoms: within itself, it maintains life’s actuality (Wirklichkeit) that, in order to remain alive, must be compatible with its disjunctive other—the virtuality of inexhaustible existential and futural possibilities, particularly those pertaining to finitude and death. (Let us remark, parenthetically, that Schmitt himself is quite unambiguous with regard to the anti-Hegelian position of his early work,3 in light of which the gloriously Hegelian language of his various commentators is all the more surprising.4 Be this as it may, the promise of a form that embraces all antitheses, without extinguishing them, is nothing less than the promise of the political as such.) The virtual actuality of life is a counterpoint to

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

151

the actualization of (the virtual) Spirit fallen into history and forming the world here-below. Whereas the width of the complex is measured by its applicability to those who, in effect, oppose its theological source, the reference to the becoming-conceptual of the God of the philosophers intimates the complex’s profundity, its inordinate depth. Not only does it revitalize the political dunamis inherent in unalloyed, disjunctive oppositions, but it also “holds sway over everything theological.” Considered against the theoretical backdrop of Political Theology, according to which political concepts derive from theological origins,5 complexio oppositorum is, at the same time, one of such concepts and a more general link in the transition from the theological to the political, signaled in the very title of the 1923 text that combines a singular religious doctrine with the universality of political form. Indeed, if books aspire to live up to their titles, Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form is a superb example of this aspiration, in that it announces the immediate conjunction of matter and form, the theological and the political, the singular and the universal, which, itself, becomes possible within the framework of the religion it evokes and the form generated by this religion. That complexio oppositorum envelops all oppositions without exception would have been a trite comment if its form were abstractly universal; however, the form of the institution that embodies it—Roman Catholicism—is itself exceptional: From the standpoint of the political idea of Catholicism, the essence of the Roman Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a specific, formal superiority over the matter of human life [in einer spezifisch formalen Überlegenheit über die Materie des menschlichen Lebens] such as no other imperium has ever known. (RC 8, emphasis added) For now, I would like to defer the discussion of this extraordinary form and will return to it after pointing out the consequences of the special status of the Catholic imperium. It is common knowledge in contemporary political philosophy that Schmitt’s sovereign is “he who decides on the exception” (PT 5). But the relation of complexio oppositorum to sovereignty complicates this definition, given that it is an exceptional arrangement that, like the Platonic khōra, receives everything without exception. The complex politicizes its contents not by singling them out and, in a sovereign manner, decisively

152

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

bestowing upon them the (formal) status of an exception but by drawing out a uniquely political form immanent to them. In other words, thanks to the mere incorporation of all antagonisms into this imperium, their political nature comes to the fore, and this, precisely, calls for a detour through the miraculous, an anti-modern reenchantment of the world that does not conform to the empty mold of an ideal form, “an empty vessel filled with contents that change from case to case” (PR 30), but propagates “formality” from the content of life itself. The theological correlate to the juridical concept of exception (Ausnahme) is a “miracle” (Wunder PT 5), and complexio oppositorum is nothing short of miraculous. One cannot help but experience a sense of wonder when faced with the unmediated way, in which it brings together mutually exclusive ideas and institutions. Besides this recovery of immediacy, another piece of evidence for the extraordinariness of the complexio is that the origins of this term, which “in Schmitt’s lifetime was employed by the great Protestant historian Adolf von Harnack, who used it to explain, if not justify, the ‘anti-Roman affect’,” go back to alchemy.6 Schmitt’s polemical co-optation and revamping of a syntagma used by a Protestant thinker who shared the antagonistic “affect” diagnosed in the first line of the 1923 text is a methodological accomplishment consistent with his commitment to the polemical possibilities of all political concepts. What interests me in the genealogy of the complexio, however, is its alchemical anchoring, which, I believe, is neither an idle curiosity, nor a sign of the pining for the irrational said to haunt Catholic thought. Having traversed the desert of modernity, the reenchantment of the world does not slide down into myth;7 were it to do so, it would have surrendered itself wholeheartedly to unknowable, overwhelming otherness and would not have fought the other as the enemy. Schmitt himself staunchly resists the romanticizing views of Roman Catholicism and the “dubious honor,” bestowed upon it, of serving as a temporary shelter from the iron cage of modernity. Why, then, even mention the esoteric alchemical roots of a somewhat neglected Schmittian concept that goes the greatest distance toward describing his political and theological ideal? If we could designate a companion book to Roman Catholicism, no other candidate would stand out more than Carl Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, which, as a supplement to Schmitt, has the potential of triggering a renaissance of the classical psychopolitics Plato formulates in The Republic. At the cusp of alchemical, psychological, and Christian symbolism, Jung echoes Schmitt’s insights into the equal inclusion of masculine and feminine authority figures in Roman Catholicism that “is already a complexio

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

153

oppositorum.”8 The psychoanalyst further insists that the oppositions structuring the psychological sphere must be concretely personified, while the political philosopher subjectivizes the categories of sovereignty, enmity, and so on. Concertization of psychological forces is at the heart of Jungian “archetypes” (the complexio is explicitly mentioned in the politically germane chapter titled, “Rex and Regina,” “King and Queen”), just as the felt need for a re-subjectivization of sovereignty prompts Schmitt’s rethinking of “representation.” That is not to say that subjectivation is the same as personification; as I indicated in Chapter 5, much of the confusion surrounding Schmittian “decisionism” dissipates as soon as the two processes are sharply distinguished. The writings of Schmitt and Jung are the sites of the convergence between the psyche populated with archetypal figures, theatrically allegorizing mental life, and the art of politics, entailing an ability to juggle the abstract and the concrete elements included in any representation without sacrificing one of them for the sake of the other. The idea that the “pope is not the Prophet but the Vicar of Christ” reveals that, “[i]n contradistinction to the modern official, his position is not impersonal, because his office is part of the unbroken chain linked with the personal mandate and concrete person of Christ. This is truly the most astounding complexio oppositorum” (RC 14). In a vicarious relation of power, the abstract and the concrete, the same and the other, are not mediately reconciled; they, rather, enter into a permanent standoff that generates the form of a concrete representation, which, in the secularized political realm, finds embodiment in the figures of the sovereign, the enemy, the friend, and, perhaps, the jurist.9

The Living Forms of Politics We are now ready to face the marked “alchemical” origin of complexio oppositorum, a way of thinking that fascinates Schmitt because it succeeds in the search for a living form (or else, “the philosopher’s stone”) in which the philosophical tradition, arguably, has failed. The living, existential form that gifts Roman Catholicism with remarkable elasticity and that becomes transmuted into the political as such, is neither a posteriori imposed onto dead contents in a sort of dialectical magic infusing inert matter with spirit, nor does it mirror the disquietude of life from a contemplative standpoint external to it. Its emphatically non-modern “alchemy” bypasses all mediations and demonstrates that the Catholic complexio oppositorum, “despite its formal character, retains its concrete existence at once vital and yet rational to the nth degree [die trotz ihres formalen Charakters in der

154

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

konkreten Existenz bleibt, lebensvoll und doch im höchsten Maße rational ist]” (RC 8). In a direct union of the signifier and the signified, it is life itself and, simultaneously, a concrete representation of life in excess of what it represents.10 Like the coveted “elixir of life,” the living form—an oxymoron, when considered from the perspective of modern thought—is capable of rescinding the historical tendency toward an abstracting neutralization of all substantive concepts. From Kant’s transcendental philosophy to Max Weber’s sociology of law, the hollowing out of form, its becoming procedural, calculable, transcendental, “pure,” has presented itself as a necessity to Western thought (PT 26–28). At its most refined, dead formalism is the key to the organizational structure of democracy that, along with technicity itself, is robbed of its substantive content, for, “if one regarded it from the perspective of some political program that one hoped to achieve with the help of democracy, then one had to ask oneself what value democracy itself had merely as a form” (CPD 24).11 The answer to this question is that, as an emptied out—hence, dead—form, democratic political organization possesses only an instrumental value devoid of any inherent, substantive ends. Following the lead of modern science in focusing on pure means divorced from all substantive goals, it either lapses into extreme opportunism and populism, mimicking the plasticity of the complexio, or ruthlessly stamps this voided mold onto contents that would not have assumed it otherwise. More often than not, these alternatives are combined with Machiavellian cunning, as they are in Obama’s technocratic populism enamored of strict proceduralism and presiding over the most staggering redistribution of wealth, through bailouts favoring the rich, in human history. The argument of Political Theology is sophisticated enough to construe the form’s living character negatively, as a counterthrust of the full and thick “form in its substantive sense [der Form im substanziellen Sinne]” (PT 26) that defies its modern “emptying out” without nostalgically reclaiming the positive Aristotelian teleology of formal causality. As we have discovered in the case of the Constitution, its substantive definition did not resurrect a metaphysically fixed, atemporal notion of substance, but transcribed it into the existential decision on the political form. Political life per se is both subject and substance, if we are willing to borrow a morsel of Hegel’s argument in Phenomenology of Spirit, while applying it to the political and modifying it to reflect the absence of a higher unity of Spirit that would reconcile these concepts converted from traditional metaphysics to existentialism. Or, to turn this proposition around, substantiveness connotes something living, namely, that the “state thus becomes a form in the sense of a living formation [Der Staat wird also zu einer Form im Sinne einer

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

155

Lebensgestaltung]” (PT 25). Harking back to the difference between the figure of the enemy as shaping the first-person plural of those who confront it and the forms of life this collectivity of friends wants to protect, the “living formation” (Lebensgestaltung) of the state is not the same as its form (Form). The significant distinction between the two forms of “form” signaled by the deliberately differentiated usage of the Latin-derived Form and the Germanic Gestalt almost vanishes from the English translation. Qua formation or figuration, the static form is set in motion, such that this setting-in-motion itself becomes the definitive moment of a fragile, finite life, hinging on a form that is always on the brink of freezing into static formalism. In the world of an artisan, the process of forming or figuring is the act of shaping the materials on which one works without ignoring the peculiarity of their content. But the inverse is also true: in art as much as in politics, the subjects themselves are molded by their materials. Subjects are formed (better yet, forming) substances: “Substances must first of all have found their form; they must have been brought into a formation before they can actually encounter each other as contesting subjects in a conflict” (PTII 114). Substance becomes something living, is enlivened, when it is organized in formations and counterformations of opposing groups, that is to say, when it is subjectivized and politicized. Nietzsche’s “terrible artists of existence” and Schmitt’s sovereign were familiar with the dangers and demands of figuration; after all, they trafficked in those determinations of political life that held the potential to backfire and reshape those who gave them their original form. The complexio, of course, is less personal than that. It is a field of forces—to resort to a Nietzschean term once again— where “shaping” proceeds as the determination of oppositions by pitting its various component parts against each other. So potent is the form or the field of forces proper to the complexio oppositorum that it will precipitate and encompass, among other things, the opposition between matter and form that will further invest it with substantiveness and liveliness. Its potency does not derive from the form’s hollow and abstract capacity to contain anything whatsoever, but from its impurity, its affectation with the matter-form dualism that is responsible for the complexio’s “specific, formal superiority over the matter of human life” (RC 8), the very life, in which it is, nonetheless, encrusted. The existential significance of the living form is that it is beholden to the possibilities, not the actuality, of political life. One practical implication of its attachment to the possible is that Schmitt’s treatment of the national entity is neither nationalist nor essentialist, precisely because its political

156

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

existence flourishes “without ever subordinating itself . . . to a conclusive formation” (CT 128). Unlike those modernist thinkers who turned the nation into a form, as Stathis Gourgouris convincingly argues in Dream Nation,12 Schmitt reads the nation as a source of various political formations, with which it will never fully coincide. In his intriguing enunciation, the nation “has the complete freedom of political self-determination” and, thus, “can be the ‘formless formative [formlos Formende] capacity’” (CT 129). As an ontological capacity, the nation is an existentially palpable possibility, a figuration inexhaustible by any particular form it might assume. And it is formlessly formative in the sense that it engenders forms of collective existence, without thereby turning into a totalizing “form of forms” or into a transcendental “mere form,” anterior to its empirical and historical instantiations. It may be accessed only by way of bracketing the actual forms of communal life, or, better yet, by their imaginative variation— recommended by Husserl—that would extend the constitutional form to political regimes other than the bourgeois Rechtsstaat, which esteems itself as the exclusive constitutionally legitimate form of government. Schmitt’s nations, as sets of political-existential possibilities that cannot be entombed in the form of nationalism, anticipate various theoretical constructs in late twentieth-century social and political philosophy, including Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Giorgio Agamben’s “coming community,” which, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, is “not a community of essence” but “a being-together of existence.”13 These are, to be sure, post-nationalist approaches to politics that seem to be remote from that of Schmitt: the reader may be rightly suspicious of the word “nationalism” peppering the pages of Constitutional Theory, a negatively charged word that substantially limits any sort of openness in the political constitution of the community as a “formless formative capacity.” But, while Schmitt operated within the confines of the political vocabulary of the European modernity, which predominates in his political philosophy despite his forays into ancient Greek and Latin texts and etymologies, he recoded its nomenclature in sync with his existential-phenomenological program. The living form of the nation (and one could easily substitute “the political community” for this term) is the formative capacity of a community of friends to determine itself as such vis-à-vis an oppositional grouping, to give itself a determinate, though changeable, shape in the world of nations without nationalism. The deep source of this capability is the formless, messy, and, from the aesthetic standpoint, perhaps, ugly content of political existence, indeed of life itself, which abounds in antagonisms but also in countless possibilities for new forms and configurations of the polity.

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

157

In addition to undercutting abstract formalism, the expression “living form” invites a meditation on the notion of life: What is life and how to conceive of its opposite? What is the meaning of coming to life, or being “enlivened”? How does the process of “deadening” occur in the sphere of the political? Most recently, Samuel Weber has poignantly suggested in Targets of Opportunity that what appears to be the opposite of life—a “deathbearing enemy”—is, in effect, its condition of possibility, the guarantor of the tense vitality proper to the (at least) bipolar political world of friends and enemies.14 In the same book, he, nevertheless, chided Schmitt for falling back on a traditional opposition of “man versus machine, which he also associates with the opposition of life versus death.”15 Schmitt’s treatment of the phenomenon “life” is, in Weber’s view, simultaneously nuanced and crude, veritably exemplifying his subject matter, complexio oppositorum. Helpful as this analysis might be, it leaves undisturbed the meaning of life in Schmitt’s (early) writings. The immediate and intuitive equation of the living with the inner and the dead with the outer is a trademark of the modern attitude, where the living organism and the dead machine are perceived as opposites. It would be inaccurate to ascribe this thought to Schmitt—as Weber has tried to do—who alerts the readers that the premodern, mythical concept of the machine was not at all at odds with the living organism (LST 37). The book on Roman Catholicism as a whole learns from myth while taking precautions not to fall into its nets; its two main trajectories deal with the life of the form and the substantive formalism of living that radically departs from the relative immanence and immediacy of mythic life. At the point of intersection between the two trajectories, to enliven is, in a certain sense, to formalize, to draw out the form that was already implicit in the “messy” and inexact content, all the while minimizing opportunities for the betrayal of their “messiness” and inexactitude. The pulsion of drawing out is, by the same token, tantamount to drawing these contents into the embrace of complexio oppositorum that provisionally determines their oppositionality. The mechanism that does the dual work of externalization and internalization is concrete representation and, in particular, its rhetorical, discursive manifestations. One could say that, ultimately, the complexio is produced in speech or, as Schmitt put it, [T]he power of speech and discourse—rhetoric in its greatest sense—is a criterion of human life . . . It moves in antitheses. But these are not contradictions; they are the various and sundry elements molded into a complexio and thus give life to discourse. (RC 23)

158

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

We must rigorously contrast this rhetorical production, utilizing what Heidegger might refer to as the hidden power of “primal words,” to the deliberative empty talk of an infinite parliamentary discussion, which Schmitt denounced in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. The formal potency of words lies not in the metaphysically obscure inception of language in Being and of Being in language, but in the antithetical movement, which traverses the complex of determinate oppositions and from which the life of discourse derives. Concrete representation remains faithful to the polemical-political ground of discourse and to life itself. Whereas the substantive form is both living and enlivening, deformalization deadens, in that it depoliticizes, deforms, disfigures, and neutralizes all determinate oppositions, making them lose their determinate figuration (Gestalt), as a consequence. As always in Schmitt, deformalization that disbands the complex of oppositions is doubly menacing: it promises, on the one hand, a reversion into the absolute difference of atomized, formless content that cannot be mustered into an oppositional arrangement and, on the other, a conversion of living forms into the absolute indifference of a purely abstract form or concept, such as “humanity.”16 “Universality at any price would necessarily have to mean total depoliticization” (CP 55), and particularity at any cost produces the same effect because it dissolves political oppositions into mere difference.17 Death, therefore, also arrives in two ways: (1) the rigor mortis of abstract contradiction, hyperformalism, hyperdetermination; or (2) decomposition into pure difference and complete indeterminacy (to be fair, in contrast to the first, the second kind of death is a storehouse of possibilities, a catalyst of new oppositional formations that crystallize from unformed difference). It follows that Schmitt’s conception of life is non-vitalist and nonorganicist. Life is not an impersonal force of sheer immanence that sweeps every organic entity into its midst: that which is most living in it is complexio oppositorum, which is to say that the most fateful, the most potent, and ultramodern standoff, in which modernity and its other, too, are embroiled, transpires between life and death within the living life itself.18 A living form worthy of the name holds in itself this constitutive finitude, regardless of the occasional Schmittian criticism of mechanization and its external relation to death, aired by Weber. It is enough to take a glance at “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” to realize that what Schmitt calls “the pluralism of spiritual life [Pluralismus des geistigen Lebens]” is nothing other than the secularized complexio that accommodates both life and death: [I]t is wrong to solve a political problem with the antithesis of organic and mechanistic, life and death. A life which has only death as its

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

159

antithesis [Ein Leben, das gegenüber sich selbst nichts mehr hat als den Tod] is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness. (CP 95)19 Life does not face death and mechanization as external possibilities but, as a living form, harbors its opposites within itself.20 The alchemicalpolitical quest for this form cannot afford to disregard the mechanistic and the inorganic, much less exclude them from the non-conceptual, evental “pluralism” that extends its welcome to all determinate oppositions. In the same way that the living form of the complexio internalizes the antinomy of form and content, life, which specifies this form, contains within itself the difference between life and death, sheds its identity as purely living, and, thus, paves the way for the event of politics. We might project these existential theses back onto Schmitt’s refusal to romanticize Roman Catholicism by allying it with the “soulful polarity” of the contrived “dichotomy between a rationalistic-mechanistic world of human labor and a romantic-virginal state of nature” (RC 10).21 Catholicism does not fit the position of the higher third, in which the opposites are finally reconciled and it should not be accorded the partial status of a polarity (the “soulful polarity”) relative to instrumental rationality. However monstrous or deadening it is, the soullessness of the rationalistic-mechanistic world, taken to be emblematic of modern culture, is an offshoot of life, perhaps, one that defines life’s very liveliness in setting off its inner antagonisms. (Despite all appearances to the contrary, here, too, “life struggles with life,” as Schmitt writes at the end of his essay on de-politicization). The infatuation with and the idealization of the premodern are reactive upshots of the very culture they wish to evade; they are culture’s unsuccessful attempts at self-forgetting, falsely transcendent movements that get all the more entangled in the webs of antagonistic immanence. This inner splitting of life will elucidate an alternate meaning of “culture,” which, throughout the history of Western philosophy, has been equated with death, and it will set the stage for a reconsideration of its contemporary avatar, multiculturalism, in terms of a mutation in the structure of complexio oppositorum, as one of the historical possibilities available for co-optation by pouvoir constituant today.

A Virtuous Circle: The Mutual Invigoration of Culture and Politics In keeping with the process of neutralization, where political intensity ebbs away from the institutions that previously drew sustenance from it, the emptiness of abstract form is a historical by-product of every depoliticized domain, be it theology, metaphysics, or economics. But the cumulative

160

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

effects of this hollowing out ultimately threaten culture itself, which emerges as the fifth, albeit unnamed, stage of de-politicization: “Once everything had been abstracted from religion and technology, then from metaphysics and the state, everything appeared to have been abstracted above all from culture, ending in the neutrality of cultural death [die Neutralität des kulturellen Todes]” (CP 93). Absolute neutrality, for Schmitt, is tantamount to nihilism, or to what, on the next page of the 1929 text, he calls “the fear of cultural and social nothingness [die Furcht vor dem kulturellen und sozialen Nichts]” (CP 94). A cogent response to this fear should not struggle to recuperate, on an individual basis, formerly politicized domains; it should, rather, reinvigorate the cultural form that has gathered up in itself the previous spheres and that has been gradually eroded with every successive wave of de-politicization. In other words, the goal is to politicize culture in toto by allowing cultural life, in the sense of the antagonistic complexio oppositorum, to flourish in the place claimed by the neutrality of death. Only then will we be able to make an existential choice between two abysses of nothingness: the sociocultural neutrality of nihilism, on the one hand, and the sovereign decision on the exception, on the other. Given this choice, Schmitt tends to view his own political philosophy as a katechon (or the restrainer) against the first abyss, even if its success depends not on appealing to any firm normative foundation but on plunging headlong into the second abyss of the decision made ex nihilo. For those who concentrate on Schmitt’s dismissive attitude to culture in The Concept of the Political and on the traditional ties of culture to death, engrained in the history of Western thought, the proposed rehabilitation of a living form will be dubious, to say the least. After imagining the complete disappearance or leveling of enemy-friend distinctions, “[w]hat remains is neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc.” (CP 53). The open-ended list of the wreckages of liberal modernity is by no means haphazard, since depoliticized culture translates seamlessly into a kind of civilization where the false dilemma of choosing between economic rationality and a legally codified morality is the only “serious” alternative to the danger-free and light (but, ultimately, boring) human existence in a perpetual search for new sources of entertainment. Stated unsympathetically, culture is entertainment—something hopelessly inadequate to the task of breathing new life into the political. To this accusation, Strauss’s astute analysis offers the best retort: Schmitt paints a historically specific image of impoverished culture that, as such, does “not have to be entertainment, but . . . can become entertainment.”22 The uncomplimentary depiction of cultural bankruptcy is

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

161

not a definitional necessity, but a possibility that comes to pass in its empty formalization throughout the recent stages of neutralization. Entertainment gains an upper hand when the “pluralism of spiritual life” is trimmed down to a one-dimensional monoculture disseminated on a mass and, later on, on a global scale. The position Strauss champions is, probably, prejudiced by an elitist valorization of high over low culture, so that all seriousness pertains to the former and an empty, “nauseating” curiosity—to the latter. In and of itself, however, culture is not allergic to politics. But what about the incontrovertible fact that, up to the present, philosophy has insistently identified culture with death?23 Does the traditional philosophical treatment of the concept still allow us to consider it under the rubric of a “living form”? Already for Hegel, culture as “self-alienated spirit” is instituted thanks to “the true sacrifice of being-for-self . . . that . . . surrenders itself as completely as in death.”24 In the medium of language, consciousness sacrifices itself to a desire to make sense to the other, a desire whose fulfillment indicates that my “real existence dies away.”25 The death of individual consciousness is a miniature version of spirit’s sacrifice of its being-for-self (“ . . . surrenders itself as completely as . . . ”) on the altar of sociality erected by language and culture (in making sense, my “real existence dies away”). More recently and more explicitly, Jacques Derrida has maintained that there is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice . . . The very concept of culture may seem to be synonymous with the culture of death, as if the expression “culture of death” were ultimately a pleonasm or a tautology.26 The stakes of the close connection between culture and death are high; if, as Derrida submits, the two terms are nearly synonymous, then culture might connote pacification and a dissolution of all contradictions, in a word, de-politicization. Upon closer scrutiny, this conclusion proves to be unwarranted or, at least, too crude in its uncritical acceptance of the terms’ meaning. In Hegel as well as in Derrida, death is not a finality abstractly opposed to life but a part of the concrete, living life itself. The “culture of death” that ritualizes mourning cares for the double survival—the excess of life over and above itself—of those whose memory is institutionally monumentalized and of those who cultivate this memory. Similarly, the dying away of “real existence” in language is not the last word of subjects who get a new purchase on life in their discursively mediated intersubjective relations. We shape

162

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

cultural life in an intimate relation to death and, further, we live it on a different plane than a mere biological existence. Even the expression “culture of death” is ambiguously polyvocal thanks to the genitive form that could name one type of culture (the culture of death versus the culture of life), or the essence of culture as such, its being of one piece with death. In an exegesis of Schmitt’s work, Strauss experiments with a more decisive break with the philosophical equation culture = death, noting that “‘culture’ always presupposes something that is cultivated: culture is always the culture of nature. This expression means, primarily, that culture develops the natural predisposition . . . ; it thus obeys the orders that nature itself gives.”27 Culture, in his rendition, is the self-relation of nature, an instantiation of the living form that is not imposed on its contents but grows out of them, “obeys the orders” of what it cultivates.28 The uncanny affinity of this definition of culture to the living, substantial formation of complexio oppositorum is not coincidental. The shaping of determinate oppositions, in accord with the shaped content, comes into its own in the idea of cultivation that, in addition to nature, incorporates the difference between nature and culture into itself. In the last instance, the cultivation of human and nonhuman, as well as organic and inorganic, nature is the arche-political act of deciding the internal form of oppositions and setting them in motion as a living formation (Lebensgestaltung), while the creation of cults—be they of the dead or of nature itself—may be conducive to the consolidation of a static cultural form (Form) and an arbitrary imposition of foreign abstractions on the “cultivated” content. Culture, therefore, becomes animated by virtue of its participation in the logic of living forms that sketches out the outlines of complexio oppositorum; in its substantive manifestations, it is always already politically loaded. But Schmitt is, above all, a thinker of the crisis of the political that rarifies this substantive dimension. A form of forms victimized to the greatest extent in the age of neutralizations and depleted to the point of merging with entertainment, culture holds the highest potential among the other “shipwrecks” of de-politicization (economics, morality, technicity, etc.) to resist this dominant trend and to give a new impetus to the political.

Multiculturalism: A New Complexio Oppositorum? The contemporary reality of multiculturalism fuses everything Schmitt found to be reprehensible about liberalism: it coincides with an ideal type of administrative politics that pretends to abandon enemy-friend distinctions in favor of a much more indeterminate “cultural difference,” as long as

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

163

it poses no tangible threat to the regime. Historically, however, the reasons behind adopting multiculturalism as an official policy have been political in the distinctly Schmittian sense. In 1971, Pierre Trudeau’s Canadian Liberal cabinet put together the precursor to the 1988 Multiculturalism Act in the hope of luring the votes of the increasing “New Canadian” immigrant population and, more importantly, of thwarting the aspirations of Quebec nationalists, whose insistence on the province’s unique status was diluted with reference to the cultural specificity of other ethnic communities.29 As a result of the “Policy of Multiculturalism within the Bilingual Framework,” the separatist movement was indirectly designated as the abstract enemy of “cultural diversity,” masking its status as the concrete adversary of the federal state. The difference of Quebec was no longer different enough, because it stood, at most, for one example among others of the miscellany of cultural backgrounds and traditions that Canada was composed of. I cite the Canadian case in order to illustrate the political possibilities of multiculturalism well in excess of its objectives explicitly avowed by a liberal polity. Although a Schmittian reading of this historical instance is plausible, it will be necessary to elaborate a more general way of politicizing and, hence, polemically co-opting, a term that has become something of a catchword in today’s politically correct discourse. Asking a patently philosophical question, “What is multiculturalism?,” will lead us to a realization that it is the truth of culture that knows itself as such, that is, as a plurality. Let me unpack this polemical definition with an eye to Schmitt’s text. In 1929, he writes, all concepts in the spiritual sphere, including the concept of spirit, are pluralistic in themselves [sind in sich pluralistisch] and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence . . . [E]very culture and cultural epoch has its own concept of culture. (CP 85) Like “all concepts in the spiritual sphere,” culture is not a totalizing synthesis of diverse, often antithetical, moments. The unstated negative reference to Hegel in this passage is quite blatant, given that his philosophy of history hypostatizes a particular culture, raises it to the dignity of the concept in its concrete universality, and, therefore, entrusts it with the task of being a yardstick for its counterparts. Schmitt’s radical historicism, on the contrary, operates in the field of non-synthesizable pluralism, which inheres in every “spiritual concept” and generates a form based on the particular historical content of “concrete political existence.” Within this framework, to affirm that multiculturalism is the truth of culture is not to make a

164

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

transcendental-metaphysical claim. Quite the opposite is the case: this affirmation implies that no one culture can legitimately posit itself as the gold standard of Culture, since it must negotiate its living form with the internal resources and historically limited understanding at its disposal. In the epoch of multiculturalism, the plurality of culture renders the pluralism of spiritual concepts phenomenally apparent, but, in so doing, it seeks to present and represent these concepts as such, tangibly, in flesh and blood, divesting them of their immaterial, non-empirical, “spiritual” dimension. Multiculturalism’s popular and trivializing underside that has earned it such a bad reputation should not be dismissed, precisely, because its political-phenomenological vulgarity is a pale reflection of what I called “the truth of culture.” Commenting on the Janus-faced structure of multiculturalism, Gayatri Spivak takes stock of its complexity and draws from it a lesson for postcolonial strategy: If the multiculturalists’ many cultures cannot be captured by some notebook definition, nor can Rorty’s Enlightenment culture . . . Our task is to look at the two strategies: culture as a battle cry against one culture’s claim to Reason as such, by insider as well as outsider; and culture as a nice name for the exoticism of the outsiders.30 This succinct formulation is political in the best of Schmittian traditions. Spivak acknowledges the existence of two cultural modalities, one of which retains a certain substantive and political richness of the “battle cry,” while the other, seemingly depoliticized in the capacity of “a nice name for the exoticism of the outsiders” and trimmed down to entertainment, pursues politics by other means. Although she echoes Schmitt’s criticism of a totalized concept of culture (“captured by some notebook definition”) put forth in the name of Reason, it is at this point, at the apotheosis of the political, that Spivak both continues and ceases to follow Schmitt. She overtly identifies the enemy—“one culture’s claim to Reason as such,” in other words, an institution that presents itself as the dispassionate arbiter of all conflicts—in a gesture that remains indispensable to any political practice. This enemy, however, is not an external foe or an internal adversary, but a unilateral (in this case, Eurocentric) usurpation of the cosmopolitan idea,31 against which insiders fight shoulder-to-shoulder with outsiders. Still, the postcolonial theorist is careful not to turn the enemy into an abstraction but to bestow this appellation on those who promulgate an abstract, albeit contextually specific, cultural form in the guise of a decontextualized, disembedded universal, practicing yet another metonymic abuse of modernity.

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

165

The alliance of insiders and outsiders is a part of the multicultural predicament, where the living forms of various cultures must be co-negotiated, considering that they coexist within the same political space. The outcome of this process will not be an automatic consensus, because cultural coexistence means incalculably more than “ensuring every citizen the opportunity to grow up within the world of a cultural heritage . . . without suffering discrimination because of it.”32 It escapes the liberal politics of recognition and, particularly, Jürgen Habermas’s minimalism that the only way to make multiculturalism politically relevant is to transform the cultural sphere into a playground for antagonism. In the course of this transformation, the figure of the enemy needs to be sharply outlined, and I hurry to reassure the liberal skeptics that its contours will not capture a particular demonized cultural subgroup. The enemies, then, are those who practice a blown-up and standardized projection of particularity that, under the cover of Reason, endeavors to impress itself if not on the other cultural particulars, then on the normative ground upon which antagonisms surface and get resolved. For a different, political avatar of multiculturalism to achieve some measure of success in a confrontation with the cunning force of liberal “tolerance” (which masks an intransigent totalitarianism) it would need to debunk the myth of neutral and abstract rationality used stealthily by its practionars to pursue their political objectives. In addition to welcoming oppositions in its midst, it would retrace the inner split at the heart of the phenomenon “multiculturalism,” analogous to Schmitt’s enunciation of the struggle of life with life, spirit with spirit, and so on. The features of complexio oppositorum come through in this portrayal of multiculturalism, as though in a photographic negative.33 Unlike its liberal counterpart, which cleverly passes totalitarian rigidity for the tolerance of “otherness” and “diversity,” the proposed Schmittian multiculturalism does not predelineate the terrain for political engagements, nor does it project culturally specific attitudes and beliefs onto the contrived sphere of universality. On the positive side of things, it embraces sometimes-contradictory cultural particularities in a non-totalizable fashion, keeps open the space for political antagonism, furnishes a radically pluralistic living form, and nontranscendentally expresses the truth of culture. This correlation between the complexio and a revised multiculturalism, consequently, inscribes the two terms in the long list of theological concepts and their secularized political manifestations. It could be objected, of course, that the ascription of these revolutionary features to an institution so steeped in the rhetoric of de-politicization and neutralization is a figment of theoretical imagination or a product of

166

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

wishful thinking that bears little resemblance to multiculturalism’s liberal instantiation and risks deteriorating into the very totalitarianism it criticizes. I offer two ripostes to this recrimination. First, even if the blueprint for a different kind of multiculturalism sketches out a hopelessly untenable utopian ideal, the sheer contestation of the institution’s officially accepted version partially realizes the so-called utopia. Putting forth an oppositional multicultural strategy, as Spivak does, challenges a deadening, institutionalized, desiccated form and induces a standoff irresolvable on the old procedural grounds. Regardless of its empirical existence or nonexistence, a rigorously theorized multiculturalism indebted to Schmitt’s political concepts makes existentially vibrant and repoliticizes a stale keyword of liberal discourse. It, roughly, accomplishes what Schmitt himself has done to the notion of complexio oppositorum, which he polemically inherited from an anti-Catholic thinker for the purpose of illuminating the innermost essence of Roman Catholicism. My second retort is not unrelated to the first: we should unlearn the principal ideological lesson of liberalism that presents the scarecrow of totalitarianism as the sole alternative to its own “tolerant” and “representative” approach. Neither the repoliticized multiculturalism, nor the complex of opposites it emulates is compatible with totalitarian politics. According to Schmitt, the demand for a total state “which potentially embraces every domain” is an ill-advised reaction to the great neutralizations and de-politicizations of the nineteenth century (CP 22). Although the same verb—embracing, ergreifende—crops up here to encapsulate both the activity of the total state and that of complexio oppositorum, the gap between them is unbridgeable. Whereas, basing itself on the erroneous equation state = politics, the former actually intensifies de-politicization (CP 22), the latter wrests intense oppositions from the deadening grip of neutrality and delivers them to their political Being. Unwittingly adhering to the logic of Roman Catholicism, multiculturalism is not a higher third, the neutral ground for the resolution of disputes, but it is, also, not the soulful polarity of soulless totalitarianism. A reinvigorated conception of multiculturalism launches a critique of its liberal double from a perspective far removed from totalitarianism, which will never espouse a living form.

Notes 1. Carl Schmitt, “The Necessity of Politics,” in Vital Realities: Schmitt, Berdyaev, de la Bedoyère (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 23. Compare the first sentence of this text: “There

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

167

is an anti-Roman ‘complex’” with its counterpart in Roman Catholicism and Political Form: “There is an anti-Roman temper” (p. 3). 2. One could express this breakdown with the help of Benjamin’s term “dialectics at a standstill,” except that, in Schmitt, the halt of dialectics is not equivalent to the Messianic cessation of all activity, but to its political unfolding outside the confines of resolvable contradictions. 3. “Out of a spiritual promiscuity which seeks a Romantic or Hegelian brotherhood with Catholicism, as with so many other ideas and individuals, a person could make the Catholic complexio into one of many syntheses and rashly conclude that he had thereby construed the essence of Catholicism” (RC 8–9). 4. For example, “The Church’s complexio oppositorum thus incorporated a boundless adaptability . . . The Church was a model of balance and moderation. It could allow the widest and most varied expression of ideas and forms, since it was assured of an absolute unity at its apex” [Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism, p. 91]. 5. One is tempted to note here that another famously “programmatic” statement of Schmitt is that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (CP 30). After putting the two statements side-by-side, we cannot help but witness a spectacular complexio oppositorum in Schmitt’s own understanding of the political both as enchained to a determinate theological content, however transformed it might become, and freed for the indeterminacy of polemics. 6. Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 28. 7. The closest Schmitt gets to “sliding down into myth” is his indulgence in a kind of mytho-logy, a prudent and diagnostic thematization of, what I term, the logos of muthos in works as diverse as his book on The Leviathan, the two volumes of Political Theology, and essays such as the 1923 “Die politische Theorie des Mythus,” in Positionen und Begriffe: im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versaille, 1923–1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), pp. 9–18. 8. Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, trans. R. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 374. Compare this to Schmitt’s statement: The pope is called the Father; the Church is the Mother of Believers and the Bride of Christ. This is a marvelous union of the patriarchal and the matriarchal, able to direct both streams of the most elemental complexes and instincts—respect for the father and love for the mother—toward Rome. (RC 8) 9. This is the point that Sarah Pourciau [“Bodily Negation: Carl Schmitt and the Meaning of Meaning,” MLN 120, 2005, pp. 1066–1090] misses when she writes that to propound an alternative theory of qualitative representation, he [Schmitt] draws on a Roman Catholic tradition of political theology which grounds the relation between a sovereign Church and a subject people in a Christian concept of mediation. The concept takes its energy from the paradigm of redemptive reconciliation—between human matter and divine form, earthly body and heavenly spirit—accomplished by Christ in the moment of the Word made flesh. (p. 1082)

168

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

10. In his early perceptive analysis of Schmitt in Homo Sacer, Agamben writes, “Life . . . can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere of law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion, only in exceptio” (p. 27). A more radical possibility would be that life itself is born of its exclusive inclusion in the complexio oppositorium, a form that falls on the same side as the exception from the norm, or from the “sphere of law.” 11. Emphasis added. 12. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 30. 13. See the précis on the back cover of Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 14. Targets of Opportunity, p. 40. The reliance of life’s vivacity on a “death-bearing enemy” stands in contradiction to Weber’s assertion that the “model of the creation of life out of nothing will assume a subtle but decisive importance” in Schmitt (p. 35). To account for this contradiction it would be necessary to examine the particular perspective from which life is created ex nihilo, a perspective that does not recognize the exception, that synthesizes opposites, and that depends on the principles of abstract representation. 15. Ibid., p. 32. 16. John McCormick [“Transcending Weber’s Categories of Modernity? The Early Lukács and Schmitt on the Rationalization Thesis,” in New German Critique 75, Autumn 1998, pp. 133–177] exhibits high theoretical sensitivity when he describes the formality of Schmitt’s approach to Roman Catholicism with a double negative: “Roman Catholicism is a form not indifferent to content, nor is it an irrational elevation of content to an exalted level” (p. 163). These non-indifference and non-elevation are the hallmarks of the living form. 17. According to Derrida’s reading of Schmitt, the discrimination between a friend and an enemy “cannot be reduced to mere difference. It is a determined opposition, opposition itself ” (Politics of Friendship, p. 85). 18. Thus, the ending of “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” could be interpreted as a rejection of the formally empty view that opposes pure life to pure death in favor of a theory that situates the life-death opposition within the “struggling lives” themselves. 19. A few pages earlier, Schmitt wrote, “A result of human understanding and specialized knowledge, such as discipline and in particular modern technology, also cannot be presented as dead and soulless any more than can the religion of technicity be confused with technology itself ” (93–94). His point, then, is that culture and technology (as the contemporary incarnation of culture) do not stand on the side of pure death. 20. Jacques Derrida [The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)] has eloquently called this unreconcilable, non-dialectizable tension “la vie la mort,” “life death” (p. 259). 21. “The Church is neither the mechanically formalistic entity scorned by Protestants nor the haven of unconquered nature and irrational expression lauded by Romantics” (McCormick, “Transcending Weber’s Categories of Modernity?” p. 163). Yet, to say, as McCormick does in the following sentence, that the Church “stands above such antinomies, absorbs, maintains, and transcends them” is to equate the operations of the complexio with the Hegelian Aufhebung.

Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum

169

22. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” p. 116. 23. A notable exception from this general rule is Nietzsche, who foreshadows Schmitt in his accentuation of the living unity of content and form in any given culture: “a people to whom one attributes culture has to be in all reality a single living unity and not fall wretchedly apart into inner and outer, content and form” [Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 80]. 24. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 308. 25. Ibid., p. 309. 26. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 43. 27. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” p. 104. Admittedly, this language may be excessively organicist, but it is in sync with the Schmitt of Roman Catholicism who categorically states that the attitudes of mastery and domination are alien to the Catholic conceptions of nature (9). 28. That is not to say that Derrida’s and Strauss’s definitions of culture—“the very concept of culture may seem to be synonymous with the culture of death” and “culture is always the culture of nature”—are necessarily irreconcilable, for they effectively overlap if we are conscientious enough not to categorize nature as something purely living. 29. Cf. Enoch Padolsky, “Multiculturalism at the Millennium,” in Journal of Canadian Studies 35 (1), Spring 2000, pp. 138–161, as well as Danielle Juteau, “The Sociology of EthnoNational Relations in Quebec,” in Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in ‘90s Canada, ed. V. Satzewich (Halifax: Fernwood, 1992), pp. 323–342. 30. Gayatri C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 355. 31. In response to the counter-argument that European thought could not have usurped the idea of cosmopolitanism since it enunciated this idea in the first place, I would say that the enunciation (that left an indelible trace on the subsequent history of the concept) happened in the context of colonial usurpation and exploitation—the constant background for the first “cultural” encounters. 32. Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 131–132. 33. In Roman Catholicism and the Political Form, the secular paradigm of the complexio is jurisprudence: “In the social world, secular jurisprudence also manifests a certain complexio of competing interests and tendencies” (29). Thus, an extension of the argument to multiculturalism could benefit from theorizing the conjunction between this contemporary permutation of the complexio and the juridical domain, for instance, in the constituting documents of the doctrine, such as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and its predecessors.

8 Political Hermeneutics: The Necessity of Interpretation Schmitt and Gadamer: Decision and Interpretation In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer explicitly mentions and engages with Schmitt’s work only once, on a singular occasion—which is, itself, a meditation on the notion of “occasionality”—of a contentious reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 The object of Gadamer’s criticism in Appendix II to his masterpiece is Schmitt’s 1956 text, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time into the Play, and especially its central claim that “it is possible to recognize that fissure in the work through which contemporary reality shines and which reveals the contemporary function of the work.”2 Guided by his preoccupation with the truth of art, Gadamer reproaches Schmitt, among other things, for constructing a series of oversimplified, lopsided, and irreconcilable antitheses of time and art,3 the “real” and the “imaginary,” the events surrounding King James’s accession to the throne and the literary creation of Hamlet. In a typical anti-Hegelian gesture of preventing the standoff ’s conciliatory resolution into a higher third term, such as the fascist aestheticization of politics or the communist politicization of art (favored by Walter Benjamin), the political philosopher brings the dialectic of art and politics to a standstill. Nonetheless, Gadamer is convinced that Schmitt shares a certain erroneous presupposition with the dialectical way of thinking, according to which the two antithetical elements to be reconciled are, to begin with, situated at a great conceptual distance to one another. What his method misses is nothing less than “a new event of Being” predicated on the absolute proximity of the work of art to its presumed real referent: “A work of art belongs so closely to what 170

Political Hermeneutics

171

it is related to that it enriches the being of that as if through a new event of Being.”4 The event is not to be understood in terms of a sudden rupturing of the symbolic order by an element foreign to it but, rather, as the seamless supplementation of what is already in being with the work of art and with the subsequent history of its interpretation.5 The dialectic of aesthetics and politics at least aimed to reinstate the unity of reality and art, while Schmitt maintains the two strictly separate, save for those rare moments when the non-identical real “irrupts” into a work of art, breaks through aesthetic sublimations, and asserts its unconditional primacy. Gadamer’s main, albeit unarticulated, concern is that the focus on the “irruption” (der Einbruch) of the real into the play would give the reader of Shakespeare a license to bypass interpretation, to abandon all too easily the patient work of hermeneutics by pointing out the existence of something exempt from the exigencies of interpretation—as though such a thing were possible—namely, a historical fact. The claim that a given historical event is the real referent of the work of art into which it bursts is inherent to a naïve philosophy of history (prevented, by its blindness, from recognizing that every historical fact already forms a part of interpretation) and to an equally fallacious ontology of art. The seduction of the irruption is consistent with the decisionist core of Schmitt’s legal and political theory, with its accentuation of the figure of the sovereign who decides on the exception that cannot be subsumed under the existing legislation. On this view, the irruption of the real into the play is functionally parallel to the deus ex machina of the decisive intervention of the sovereign in the political milieu, dispensing with the interpretive extension of existing laws to a previously unforeseen situation. Pure acts of sovereignty, like the real fissure in the symbolic order of art, render all interpretive efforts futile. Although Gadamer does not refer to Schmitt by name in his discussion of legal hermeneutics, it is not difficult to infer who might be labeled as the proponent of absolutism posing an unsurpassable obstacle in the path of legal interpretation: Thus it is an essential condition of the possibility of legal hermeneutics that law is binding on all members of the community in the same way. Where this is not the case—for example, in an absolutist state, where the will of the absolute ruler is above the law—hermeneutics cannot exist.6 The dissipation of sovereignty in the universal rule of law guarantees, in principle, that there is no standpoint transcendent to legality and that all

172

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

concrete cases are adjudicated through an indefinite extension of whatever is immanent to this system. The irruption of exteriority, conversely, destroys the very conditions of possibility for hermeneutics and foreshadows a new transcendentalism along with the return of uncritical metaphysics. The sovereign’s subjective intervention in the political milieu is, thus, not at all at odds with crass historical objectivism that releases “facts” from the necessity of interpretation. Just as Gadamer would contend that, in a decisionist political philosophy, there is no room for interpretation, so Schmitt would insist that a hermeneutical framework and its corollary, the Romantic ideal of “infinite conversation”7 hijacked by liberal parliamentarism, dispenses with decision-making and becomes indecisive; it is one of the verdicts of Political Romanticism that “the origin of romantic irony lies in this suspension of every decision” (56). Or, more precisely, under the rule of law, acts of sovereignty do not entirely disappear but retreat into a delegitimized obscurity and become “apocryphal” (CT 190). In an effort to dispense with the 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 signposts of Schmittian political philosophy, interpretations devoid of the element of decision-making are proper to Gadamerian hermeneutics.9 Before turning Schmitt into the absolute enemy of Gadamer, however, we should ask whether or not these neatly differentiated ideal types are exaggerations, or worse, theoretical caricatures. Is it possible to decide without interpreting what constitutes an exception,10 for instance, or to interpret without making a decision with regard to the meaning of the text, however tentative, provisional, or open-ended this decision might be? The very text Gadamer scrutinizes in Appendix II evinces the fact that Schmitt is not as allergic to interpretation as the master of hermeneutics is inclined to think. In its preface and in the conclusion, Hamlet or Hecuba is enframed by positive references to the labyrinthine “superabundance” of interpretations proliferating from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so that “historical objectivization could not put an end to the series of new interpretations of Hamlet either” (HH 9). That the “inexhaustible profusion of interpretations and possible interpretations, always new” (HH 43) is not adversely affected by the invocation of a definite historical context to which the play supposedly responded and in which it was, in a certain sense, wrapped is a testimony to an intricate, nonantithetical relation between “reality” and “art” in Schmitt’s work. What Gadamer has overlooked in his criticism is a distinction, crucial for Schmitt, between allusions (accessory references to historical reality

Political Hermeneutics

173

included in the play) and reflections (composites of historical and imaginary characters and situations). In reflections, as “in dreams people and realities run into one another [and], so too, pictures and figures, situations and events blend dream-like on the stage” (HH 23). But, as anyone acquainted with psychoanalysis knows, dreams always exact complex acts of interpretation that, in lieu of discovering straightforward causes for the nocturnal images in “the real world,” descend to the overdetermined webs of causality comprising the dreamer’s psychic life. More importantly still, reflections are entirely congruous with Gadamer’s insistence on the co-belonging of the work of art with what is already in being. They represent the “new event of Being” that binds aesthetic creations to reality in a supplementary mode, so that, through the work of art, reality could interpret itself. The same work of hermeneutical “creative” supplementation is expected of a jurist or a judge who faces the task of concretizing the law, applying it in each specific case, and, thereby, “filling a kind of gap in the system of legal dogmatics.”11 The contrast to Schmitt, who wishes, above all, to explore and to deepen this gap and who insists, moreover, that the juristic form is radically different from the aesthetic one, “because the latter knows no decision” (PT 35), could not be any starker. And yet, surprisingly, Gadamer reports that his goal is not to strengthen legal dogmatics through hermeneutics “[f]or the idea of a perfect legal dogmatics, which would make every judgment a mere act of subsumption, is untenable.”12 Concomitant to the new event of Being effected through an aesthetic supplementation, legal hermeneutics produces the new event of the law by means of a “creative supplement,” which escapes the mechanisms of subsumption into the existing legal order. While Schmitt hardly aspires to supplement the legal system with the sovereign decision on the exception, he, too, argues not against law per se but against a perfect system of legal dogmatics, which, ideally, would be capable of subsuming every singularity under a set of immutable generalities. The sovereign decision-maker and the interpreter—the one as the other—reveal the limits of a purely objective legal and political apparatus, that is to say, the structural incapacity of the system of laws and rules to administer and to interpret itself in spite of Luther’s position that the “[s]cripture is sui ipsus interpres”13—a theological precept that has been secularized and translated into the modern illusion of a selfsustaining legalism. If a hermetically sealed system of legal dogmatics is impossible, then judicial interpretation will not be entirely passive, as opposed to the realm of political activity, nor will it fall on the side of pure theory, replicating

174

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

the old rift between the theoretical and the practical aspects of human existence. It will, rather, include elements of a vigorous intervention in the system of legality, which is unavoidable, despite the liberal attribution of priority to the statute as “a guarantee of judicial independence” (LL 19). In the United States, an outdated nineteenth-century legalism, which refuses to recognize the Schmittian-hermeneutical conclusion is still expressed in a demand for the clear-cut separation of judicial interpretations from active decision-making, a demand that was at the core of George W. Bush’s attack on the so-called activist judges who, in the case of same-sex marriages, presumably modified the law instead of merely interpreting it. As Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union Address: Activist judges . . . have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people’s voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.14 Throughout the US election campaign of 2008, the Republican candidates constantly insinuated that Obama and Clinton would appoint activist judges to the Supreme Court. And the confirmation hearings of Sonya Sotomayor in 2009 were rife with allegations that she was a perfect specimen of an activist judge. The absurdity of such accusations hinges on the failure of the proponents of classical liberalism to safeguard the theoretical separation of powers, among them “judicial independence,” in concrete political life. Schmitt foresaw this problem as early as 1912, in his first publication titled Law and Judgment (Gesetz und Urteil), where he hypothesized that the indeterminate gray areas of statutory law ought to be filled with the quasi-legislative discretion exercised by the judiciary. This is, by no means, an arbitrary solution, given that the judge is motivated by the spirit of the law, so that the mixed Kantian-Weberian criterion for the veracity of her “activist” decision-interpretation would be the certainty that other judges would have reached the same verdict in an identical case: “A judge’s decision can today be taken for correct when we can predict that another judge would have decided the matter in exactly the same way.”15 Legality is only strengthened with every judicial intervention that holds fast to professional guidelines and achieves just the right balance between active decisions and passive interpretations, between legal transcendence and immanence.

Political Hermeneutics

175

Aside from Schmitt’s early theory of jurisprudence, with which the Englishspeaking readers are not yet familiar, what are the broader parameters for the permeation of his “decisionism” by the hermeneutical spirit? My claim with regard to the importance of hermeneutics for Schmitt is threefold: (1) politics is unavoidably a practice of interpretation; (2) the interpretation of politics raises the question of the meaning of politics, challenging all political foundationalisms and essentialisms; and (3) political interpretations and the interpretation of politics may be ultimately traced back to the theological sphere, where political concepts are born and where the co-imbrication of transcendence and immanence demands an extreme hermeneutical vigilance.

Politics as Interpretation Insofar as something like political interpretation (or politics qua interpretation) may be gleaned from Schmitt’s work, it will be a matter of life and death imbued with existential significance, not a mere scholarly exercise. From the outset, political interpretation does not fall under the rubric of the rule of law, for it is a privilege of those who hold power, or what both in 1932 and in 1978 Schmitt called the “political premium,” politische Prämie, which ineluctably undermines one of the cornerstones of parliamentary democracy, the equal chance of everyone to be elected to a political office.16 The beneficiaries of this premium are entitled to make concrete interpretation [konkreten Auslegung] and use of undetermined evaluative concepts, such as “public security and order,” “danger,” “emergency,” “necessary measures” . . . etc. Such concepts, without which no state type could survive, are distinctive in that they are bound directly to the momentary situation [jeweilige Situation], that they receive their specific content initially through concrete application, and, most of all, that their concrete application and execution are alone decisive in difficult and politically important times. (LL 32)17 The political premium gives the sovereign the right to interpret, which, like power, is not equally distributed across society. In contrast to the sovereign decision on the exception that springs forth miraculously, ex nihilo, in Political Theology, prompting a widespread misreading of Schmittian sovereignty as voluntarism (i.e., as the expression of a purely subjective discharge of the will), this right pertains to the interpretive assessment of the momentary situation—hence, something pregiven18—wherein undetermined evaluative concepts receive their finite and pliable meaning anew each time it is

176

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

exercised. This is not to say that, for those who are denied access to the right to interpret, the world is inherently meaningless, but rather—in a hermeneutical take on Hegel’s “alienation,” Marx’s “false consciousness,” and Heidegger’s “inauthenticity”—that their world is effectively construed through an interpretation which is not their own, which is not conducive to their survival but which, instead, safeguards the survival of various “state types.” Deprived of the right to interpret, human beings are worldless, yet their deprivation is not an immutable political given so long as this right remains contestable. To paraphrase slightly Schmitt’s characterization of political concepts as essentially polemical: political history as a whole is a history of struggle for the right to interpretation, and metaphysical legitimizations along with mythical foundational narratives are polemical means in this struggle.19 The historical horizon of interpretation in the present is never homogeneous but fractured and split against itself, handed over to polemical appropriations, expropriations, and reappropriations.20 This is the political core of 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, objective meaning; instead, they are codetermined in the act of concrete interpretation. We find Schmitt to be in agreement with Hume’s conviction, formulated in the influential essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” that, in and of themselves, abstractions such as “justice” or “beauty” do not ignite any controversy; what initiates the disagreement is their mediation with concrete instances of the just, the beautiful, etc., conduct or thing.22 The mediated concreteness of situational interpretation does not exhaust the indeterminacy of the evaluative terms, called upon to describe it, once and for all. On the contrary, it polemically broadens the hermeneutical horizon, since the depletion of indeterminacy would spell out the end of politics understood as dissensus, an ongoing existential contestation of meaning between various friend and enemy groupings. The decisiveness of any given interpretation, which may mutate into an attempt to preserve the status quo with the state as the embodiment of this status guaranteed by acts of sovereignty that lie “in determining definitively what constitutes public order and security” (PT 9),23 does not rule out the idea that the art of the political consists in deciding on the undecidable without diminishing its undecidability. The competing claims of the infinitely open (of de-cision as the “open . . . clearing for the still un-decided”24) and the finite are responsible for the paradox of politics and the predicament of interpretation. Like a good hermeneutical philosopher, Schmitt cannot endorse a clear correspondence between the “subjective” interpretation and the “objective”

Political Hermeneutics

177

situation at hand. Each interpretation is not “a truly objective mirror of how things really are”25 but a place where the otherwise abstract political terms first become meaningful in a political and, hence, historical way. There is no apolitical “higher third,” whether human or non-human (e.g., universal reason, Culture as such), exempt from the historical-hermeneutical horizon and capable of giving rise to objective knowledge. Robustly opposed to the untenable liberal thesis on the neutrality of interpretation, the recognition of interpretation’s partisan character facilitates a constant revaluation of indeterminate political categories. Interpretations are singular decisions sanctioning the undetermined concepts they interpret in such a way that the political belonging of the interpreters, their identification with and against certain friend-enemy groupings, and propensity to take sides in a specific historical situation26 bear directly upon these concepts’ polemical concretization. The “afterlife” of Schmitt’s own political concepts abounds with polemical reappropriations practiced by the heterogeneous group of “left Schmittians” (Benjamin, Derrida, Mouffe, Žižek, to name a few). The most famous example, in this respect, is Thesis VIII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where Benjamin redetermines “the state of emergency” based on the act of seizing the right to interpret from below, from within “the tradition of the oppressed” who will now decide on the meaning of “the real state of emergency,” the perpetual crisis, they live through every single day, not only during the recession of 2009.27 The reference to the tradition of the oppressed suggests that this hermeneutical act is not an arbitrary decision but an attempt to render politically relevant that meaning which derives from preexisting experiential and textual frameworks obscured by the hegemonic interpretation of emergency in terms of a threat to “national security.” Claiming the right to interpret for the oppressed is not only the first step in the direction of restituting their world and making it meaningful based on their own historical experiences, but it is also an act of sovereignty conditioned by a declaration of the state of emergency. In response to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, to interpret (or to reinterpret) the world and to change it may, after all, refer to one and the same thing. An examination of political hermeneutics is one of the pillars for the project of enunciating a post-metaphysical view of politics and countering the reading of Schmitt as a metaphysician, indeed as the “last great metaphysician” of the political, in the words of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. But doesn’t Schmitt conjure up the specter of metaphysical foundations for interpretation when he writes in Constitutional Theory that the “substantive meaning of the constitution has completely receded because the constitution

178

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

was rendered relative by its transformation into constitutional law and by the formalization of constitutional law?” (73). We have been already sensitized to the meaning of “substance,” which Schmitt transfigured from one of the most entrenched metaphysical categories, trivializing lived history as a series of superficial accidents, into an existential notion, an indicator of variable collective existence concentrated in a historical decision on the political form. But what is the substance of meaning, or “substantive meaning,” as the object of political hermeneutics? It is, evidently, the stratum of significance that falls victim to the process of relativization, whereby the reduction of Constitution to a set of legal statutes gives way to formalization in an effort to detach the text of the law from the concrete historical horizon of its meaning, violating the event of Being, as Gadamer would say, in the legal domain. Conversely, that meaning is substantive which carries a decision within itself, or which prompts “existential, comprehensive decisions” on the form of political existence to “constitute the substance of the constitution” (CT 78). Hermeneutically traced back to such decisions, the Constitution discloses itself as the event of political Being, with the text inseparable from the lived historicity of the decision that interprets itself as the place of “substantive meaning.” In the Gadamerian vein, the word “event” should bespeak an intrinsic connection between the substantive meaning of the constitution, concrete existence, and the decision on the form of collective existence, so that each of the three items on the list is not superadded to political ontology, but is directly identified with the very being of the constitution. Schmitt writes: “A constitution is not based on a norm, whose justness would be the foundation of its validity. It is based on a political decision concerning the type and form of its own being, which stems from its political being [aus politischem Sein hervorgegangenen]” (CT 125), and displays the strength of his hermeneutical commitment, his willingness to equate political Being with the existential meaning of politics. The conceptual circle, where the political decision on the form of political Being stems from this very Being, is a promising indication that Schmitt has chosen the hermeneutical path for his political philosophy. That is one of the reasons why he feels such antipathy to institutional approaches to politics and, especially, to proceduralism with its normative, rule-bound imposition of political method. As in Heidegger and Gadamer, the method of political hermeneutics will issue from the matters themselves; foregoing a reliance on a prefabricated normative basis and on sui generis metaphysical foundations, it will be coordinated with the self-grounding (therefore, the groundlessness) of political life.

Political Hermeneutics

179

Interpreting the Meaning of the Political While political activity is inherently interpretive, Schmitt himself is an untiring interpreter of the political, who, in all sobriety, recognizes that this second-level interpretation, replete with a history and tradition of its own, is exquisitely polemical and, therefore, political. Needless to say, the acknowledgement of the polemical nature of political thought, too, is an interpretation and a self-interpretation that interacts with the historical circumstances in which it finds itself, or, in Schmitt’s case, the perceived exhaustion of political potential at the end of a long history of de-politicization. It is this situational, occasional nature of Schmitt’s political thought, its acute awareness of the fissured horizon of its present, that has often been mistaken for the wildest opportunism.28 For instance, the emphasis on the political tradition of Roman Catholicism, valorized over the Protestant rationalization of politics, coexists in it, on the model of complexio oppositorum, with the admiration for Lenin’s capacity to polarize friend-enemy groupings against the backdrop of parliamentary stupor and sublimation of enmity into discursive disagreement. This is not a case of opportunism but the occasionality of a political hermeneutics committed to those rare historical sites, often incompatible with one another, where the distinction between friends and enemies still manifests itself. Anything less than that would be mere prejudice. The only political philosophy worthy of the name is a hermeneutical explication of the presupposed concept of the political it aims to bring to a historically sensitive and self-conscious understanding. An uncritical dissolution of this concept in the institution of the state, to the contrary, aborts the hermeneutical injunction and traps political theorists at the level of pre-understanding and “fore-meaning” of the political. If we are to supersede this futile and unphilosophical pursuit, we must revisit our earlier conclusion that the decline of the state does not portend the eclipse of the political. In Political Theology II, Schmitt cites this development with a measure of approbation, writing that “[t] he time of change came when the state lost its monopoly on the political” (PTII 44). It is not by chance that he applauds the decline of the state in the course of defending the paradigm of political theology; after all, the “historical specificity” of the state was bound up with the “secularization of European life as a whole” (NE 128). Far from being the pinnacle of de-politicization, the loss of state monopoly on politics, recently exemplified in the phenomena of piracy and terrorism, translates into the historical end of the centuries-long process of secularization and, more

180

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

positively, works as a catalyst in the surging up of questions concerning the meaning of the political no longer precomprehended as a vague synonym of the state. What, then, is the meaning of the political? And, first of all, what does this question signify? Have we learnt to hear it yet? My hypothesis is that Heidegger’s question of Being, Seinsfrage, recoils into Schmitt’s question of the political and cannot but present itself in the form of the latter. Henceforth, the meaning of Being, which boils down to the meaning of the being of Dasein for whom Being becomes an issue, is to be sought in the interrogation of the hermeneutical-existential sense of politics,29 while the forgetting of Being, the abandonment of and the inability to hear the question regarding its meaning, goes hand-in-hand with the theoretical erasure of the concept of the political, its identification with state institutions, and the historical tendency toward de-politicization that culminates in Western liberalism. To recap: It is no mystery that the “specific meaning” of the political resides in the friend-enemy distinction reached by means of an existential interpretation of the situation at hand. The state may, certainly, harness and efficiently organize this distinction in an effort to single out public enemies, but the specific meaning of the political thrives outside the sphere of state control. In interpreting this meaning, Schmitt does not impose abstract conceptual categories onto political practice; rather, he wants to draw upon concrete political experiences and to discover their inner logic. It is, perhaps, baffling that, in its specificity, the difference between friends and enemies is not at all separate from those meaningful distinctions that structure the economic, aesthetic, moral, and other spheres. As I have observed with reference to the event of politics, Schmitt’s thesis is that the boiling point of the political, when the pull of oppositionality is so powerful that it lapses into sheer antagonism and prompts the transformation of the other into an enemy, is reachable from any other domain of human activity, which, as a consequence, will be politicized, losing its specific delineation as the “aesthetic,” the “economic,” and so on. In other words, the meaning of the political is already inherent in human existence as a whole, whereas the meaning of aesthetic and other endeavors is, in the last instance, political. Now, for Heidegger in Being and Time, the question that inquires into the meaning of Being unfolds as an interrogation of the being of Dasein, which takes the form of the hermeneutic of facticity, or a painstaking interpretation of Dasein’s everydayness. There is no question of

Political Hermeneutics

181

objective Being in Heidegger (as there is, for instance, in Hegel’s Science of Logic), since Being is always meaningful for someone, from a particular interested perspective awaiting interpretation. Ontically, within the framework of Division I of Being and Time that details the worldly dispersion of Dasein, the assertion that every region of its everyday activity, every mode of concern (Besorge) later formalized as a “domain,” is potentially politicizable is indicative of the fact that the meaning of Dasein’s being, and hence the meaning of Being as such, is political, or at least, potentially political. In Division II of the text, Dasein finds its being as a whole overshadowed by the possibility of death triggering, from a different standpoint, the question of the meaning of Being. The one for whom Being is meaningful is a mortal, finite Dasein who is strong enough not to evade the apodictic certainty that its time is bound to run out. The meaning of the political, too, is an inescapable question for someone whose whole existence is defined and endangered by her or his political belonging or activity—someone like a political prisoner or a partisan epitomizing an engaged subject in the era of the state’s neutralization and de-politicization. Perspectivalism, the essential interestedness of any given interpretation, inherited by twentieth-century hermeneutics from Nietzsche and marking the meaning of Being as much as the meaning of the political, is here existentially substantiated. From the perspective of a “hopeless” partisan fight, as Schmitt describes it in Theory of the Partisan, and from the standpoint of being-toward-death anticipating one’s possibility of no-longer-being, the meditation on the meaning of Being imposes itself with an irrecusable weight. Considered in the context of the ontological problematic, depoliticization corroborates the conclusions, though not the premises, of Strauss’s exposé of The Concept of the Political: what is endangered in de-politicization is the very being of human beings, that is to say, the meaning of Being as such. It is intuitively clear that de-politicization is the side effect of nihilism (the apathy to and meaninglessness of human existence) and that liberalism, with its current motivational deficit, chases the political still further into concealment. The interest in the political fades when the potential for politicization immanent to everyday existence is stunted and when pervasive concerns with security that flare up when we are faced with our finitude and vulnerability prompt us to evade the orientation toward death. But, in addition to the empirical de-politicization summed up here, there is, what we might name, “ontological de-politicization,” pertaining to the history of Being itself. The

182

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

advantage of the Heideggerian approach is that it calls our attention to this second tendency, more precisely, to a certain necessity behind the retreat of Being and, hence, behind “the retreat of the political” deftly diagnosed by French thinkers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip LacoueLabarthe.30 To propose, as Strauss does, that “[t]he political must first be brought out of its concealment into which liberalism has cast it”31 is to neglect its ontological dimension that cannot be made to appear, directly and immediately, in the ontic reality it subtends. It is for this reason that the ontic hermeneutic of politicization stands in need of the ontological supplement that would conceptually convert ontico-ontological difference into the difference between politics and the political, so that the political would be the condition of possibility or, indeed, the presupposition of politics without being demonstrable in an “objective” or even “phenomenal” way. The retreat of the political would, consequently, mark a political event, regardless of liberalism’s involvement in the empirical history of its concealment. Strauss underestimates the severity of this predicament when he speculates that the political could be easily brought out of its concealment as soon as liberalism withers away, since he does not entertain the possibility that liberalism is a peripheral symptom for the closure of the epochal history of the political. As a principle of displacement affecting all other spheres of human life, the political is not immune to its own expropriatory power, which means that de-politicization is produced as an internal displacement in the political and that it, therefore, partakes in the meaning of the political. It stands in the same relation to the political, as the inauthentic relates to the authentic in Heidegger, that is to say, as a deficient modality, a modification, which is not exempt from the logic governing the positive term and which, moreover, expresses the truth of what it modifies. Another complication in this rough schema is that political concepts, for Schmitt, are secularized theological categories, while secularization, as a testimony to “the liberty of the children of God,”32 is an internal displacement in the theological sphere. Those who wish to arrive at the specific meaning of the political (but how specific can it be, given the disarticulations the political produces and, at the same time, undergoes?) will have no choice but to make a triple detour through the interpretation of the transformations within other spheres of human activity that get organized along friend-enemy lines, through de-politicization as the inalienable mode of the political, and through the theological sources of the political vernacular.

Political Hermeneutics

183

Political Theology as a Hermeneutic Endeavor Political hermeneutics is, at once, political and theological; its acts of interpretation discover that the referent is deferred, drawn back to the traditional object of hermeneutical concern, the “prehistory,” in Gadamer’s terms, of philosophical hermeneutics. Aside from the divine connotations of concepts such as sovereignty shimmering with the borrowed light of the supreme power of God, political hermeneutics is shored up by “an ethos of belief ” and, therefore, by a thoroughly Christian theology, wherein the problems of psychic interiority, subjectivity, and belief first take root. As Schmitt states in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, no political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief. (17) Despite the virulent anti-economism of this early treatise, the attribution of “the idea” to the political is not an attempt to idealize it in order to counteract raw economic materialism. Nothing could be further from rationalism and idealism than an idea wholly reliant on the ethos of belief, which is responsible for the more or less enduring construction of political reality. We may, perhaps, declare this construction to be “ideological,” except that this paleonym wrongly takes for granted the existence of an objective, nonideological, “scientific” truth comprised of facts that are absolved from the necessity of interpretation.33 Much of the discussion of political-theological hermeneutics in Schmitt revolves around the notion of the world that connotes much more than its theological sense referring to the secular, non-transcendent realm. As in the philosophy of Gadamer, for whom language is the experience of the world, Schmitt’s “world” is intimately tied to speech and, therefore, to the insuperable horizon of sociality, so much so that, whoever speaks is no longer alone in the world . . . Man is either alone or in the world. As long as he is truly alone, he is not in the world, that is he is no longer even a man, and as long as he is a man and in this world, he is not alone. (RC 48) Being in the world is already being with others, in a linguistic community, which humanizes the one who is in it not by virtue of its inherent

184

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

universality but thanks to an association of friends sharing the finite horizon of a particular language. Yet, the institution of the Church is irreducible to the visible word in which it is found; “the Church can be in but not of this world” (RC 52). Does Schmitt’s claim with respect to the immanently transcendent status of the Church suggest that it participates in the meaningful paradigms of the worldly linguistic community but does not derive its meaning from them? The Church is, admittedly, a structure of transcendence in immanence, with its visibility engendered by something invisible and unspeakable (divine solitude in the absence of friends or enemies) in the same way that the phenomenality of the political is based on the great non-phenomenal arcanum, as Schmitt insists throughout his writings. The world, however, has been specified in terms of the linguistic being-withothers of a human being. An entity located “in” it is assigned a particular place and, therefore, makes sense within the webs of signification from which it is woven but, if the same entity is not “of ” it, then the source of meaning is not exhausted by the semantic network, in which it is caught up. In spite of being emplaced, it is the possibility of any experience of place, of existential spatiality, and of phenomenality or visibility.34 At bottom, the invisibility of the Church and of the political, for which the visible Church and the state are but the signs, need not be imbricated with metaphysical transcendence that would confer upon earthly clericalism and statism the mantle of divine authority. Rather, it is the ethos of belief—and, with it, subjective interiority as such—that is invisible, and it is the idea that “obtains its visibility in the Word, just as a breath of air becomes sound when it is forced through a reed” (RC 57). In disclosing the non-phenomenal conditions of possibility for phenomenality, Schmitt recommends that we read the visible for the invisible, that is to say, that we interpret “facts” as façades hiding interpretive frameworks of belief whence they issue in the first place. It is impossible to flee from the world, because, if such a flight were successful, the one who would accomplish it would no longer remain human in the absolute silence and solitude of gods and beasts that the evasion would bring with it. It is unfeasible, therefore, to grasp the invisible or the non-phenomenal directly, without the patient passage through the visible, to insist on the pure interiority of belief without the practice in which it manifests and, at the same time, encrypts itself. Interpretation must proceed as the interpretation of the invisible in the visible, not as the interpretation of the invisible qua invisible. And, conversely, one must rigorously “distinguish between true visibility and factual concreteness” (RC 53), given that the latter puts up a pretense of autonomy from interpretation, whereas the former is the end result of rigorous hermeneutical activity. (How should we take Schmitt’s positive references to the invisibility of the partisan after

Political Hermeneutics

185

the state’s political potential has been depleted? Doesn’t the political come into its own in the figure of the partisan and finally dwells in the invisible as invisible? And how does the reduction of the visible state affect the status of the Church? Were Schmitt to extend the theory of the partisan to the theological sphere, would he, despite himself, find himself arguing for the key tenets of the Reformation, to which he was so hostile?35 For, aren’t Luther and Calvin the partisans of the theological?) The Church is not alone in its ambiguous standing between the visible and the invisible, in that the idea of nomos as “the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible” (NE 70), for the first time, in the form of a line that divides the pastures in the process of land-appropriation. Concretized in a line, the idea of order offers its adherents a determinate spatial orientation; the very link between “objective” order and “subjective” orientation that is a veritable guiding thread in The Nomos of the Earth is a conjunction of the visible and the invisible, not unlike the one forged in the institution of the Church. The precarious balance between these disparate elements is entirely upset in modernity with its positivist ideology, where the visible survives its detachment from the invisible, where the line outlasts the logic that drew it, and where the idea recedes while the institutional structure that gave it phenomenal shape remains. Significant as the intersections of the visible and the invisible in the Church and in nomos itself might be, one cannot afford to “circumvent the mixed nature of the spiritual-worldly [Geistlich-Weltlich] combination of any specifically historical event” (PTII 92).36 The ambiguity of the “mixed nature” of historical events has nothing to do with the perfect mediations of Hegel’s world spirit. For an interpretation to be effective, it would have to disentangle the knot of the visible and the invisible, to decipher the work of spirit in the world, to read, as it were, “in historico-political events the finger of God and his providence” (PTII 92), and to attribute sovereignty to this divine source of authority. Here Schmitt is, once again, on the verge of imputing a massive metaphysical program to hermeneutics and only the so-called question of competence haunting his writings on sovereignty (Political Theology, Constitutional Theory, among others), saves him from this. Insofar as our fate is to be in the world, the question of competence—of political existence as opposed to essence—cannot be definitively resolved. The final meta-interpretation and the meta-decision as to who should be able to interpret and to decide are infinitely delayed or, at the very least, postponed “to the Day of Judgement,” as Schmitt writes with a measure of sarcasm: “Until the Day of Judgement, the Augustinian teaching on the two kingdoms will have to face the twofold open question: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabur? [Who will decide? Who will interpret?]” (PTII 115).

186

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

The double question of competence stays unanswered because the two Augustinian kingdoms have been neither reconciled nor definitively set apart from one other. The historical impurity of the distinction between them is what Schmitt calls political theology ensuring the openness of interpretation in the indefinite but finite delay “until the Day of Judgment,” wherein the history of the secular world unravels.37 Keeping in mind the trenchancy of interpretation in Schmitt’s corpus, what is the status of “the irruption of time into the play,” the idea that unsettled Gadamer to such an extent that he felt the need to devote a separate appendix to Truth and Method to its critique? Halfway through his 1956 essay on Shakespeare, Schmitt writes, “A terrifying reality shed a faint light through the masks and costumes of a theatre play. No interpretation, whether philological, philosophical or aesthetic, however subtle, can change that” (HH 18). Notwithstanding the reasonable rejoinder that historical reality is constituted solely through interpretation, I want to focus on the fine grain of Schmitt’s text. Time breaks into the play as reality and reality is terrifyingly traumatic, bound up with death, which will befall those who dare to speculate on the circumstances surrounding James’s accession without engaging in aesthetic sublimation. Faced with the equation “time = the real = trauma,” the hermeneutical act is powerless, ineffective, weak, unable to produce a real change in what it interprets. In a proto-Lacanian key, the real and trauma are the limits of interpretation toward which all hermeneutical activity tends. But how does this stand with time? Is the play itself, both in the process of its composition and across the range of its performances, insulated from the temporal order it will exhibit only as an après-coup? What is time that it could break into a work of art, as though by burglary—one of the connotations of the German Einbruch—allowing reality to shed “a faint light” through the strangely spatial cleft it would create? Tending toward an unreachable limit, be it trauma or the real, finite interpretation becomes infinite, interminable, as Freud would have it, but such interminability is the very opening of time in the delay, in the postponement, for instance, to the Day of Judgement. The powerlessness of interpretation is not a mere illusion of brute historical realism; its truth is that, in addition to unfolding as a history or as a tradition, interpretation is the virtual condition of possibility not only for history but also for time, which it “temporalizes” in and as this delay. Neither immanently included in nor transcendentally excluded from temporality, it is utterly weak in the order of the actual but, in its absence, this order would not be what it is (or, more precisely, it would not be at all). In a word, interpretation “is” différance:38 the temporalization of the spatial

Political Hermeneutics

187

opening in the work of art and the spatialization of the temporal flow of the tradition in the visibility of institutions, such as the Church. Finally, if all political activity is hermeneutical, and if interpretation is différantial, then the meaning of political Being is time—the history of heterogeneous nomoi, their formalization, institutionalization, and decline; the fissured horizon of the present in the confrontation with the enemy; and the futurity of finite existence expressed in risk and in the question that lacks a final, determinate response. Given that the meaning of political Being is time, political ontology is here delineated in terms of “groundless existence,” precisely because it is no longer tethered only to spatial models but hinges upon the finite temporality of historically situated collective and individual subjects. Existence is always groundless; it is the experience of groundlessness, of spinning the web of time out of oneself—be it in the shape of futural possibilities, present actions, or flashbacks to the past one cannot fully reclaim—in the absence of mooring points that would safely secure this dynamic mesh of experiences. Suspended over what, in spatial terms, could be called “the abyss,” existence is lived temporality, incapable of mastering its incipience and of grasping, with any degree of certainty, its terminus ad quem. Only a politics that does not recoil from the temporal sense of Being but, rather, plunges headlong into groundless existence will be capable of overcoming the crises and metaphysical impasses of transcendentally legitimated regimes and institutions. Ceaseless practical and theoretical interpretation of the assertion that “the meaning of political Being is time” is the prerogative of such politics.

Notes 1. Schmitt considers occasio to be the core of Romanticism understood as “subjectified occasionalism” (PR 17). 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2004), p. 497. I am using the Romanticist, hermeneutical (and deconstructive) insights into “occasionalism,” that is, their “tendency to see in the most insignificant things an ‘occasion’ for the most far-reaching and universalist speculation” as a guideline for discussing the conceptual relation between decisions and interpretations based on Gadamer’s singular criticism of Schmitt’s book on Shakespeare. Cf. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 428, n. 12. 3. “For the play itself there is no antithesis of time and art, as Schmitt assumes.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 498. 4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 147.

188

GROUNDLESS EXISTENCE

5. Gianni Vattimo [Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)] lucidly elaborates on this point: The historian belongs as much to the tradition that makes up the document or event that he must interpretatively reconstruct, as the interpreter and the consumer of the work of art belong to the play that the work itself is . . . The event to be interpreted is present only in interpretation. (p. 146) 6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 329. 7. “German romantics possess an odd trait: everlasting conversation” (PT 53). 8. “Whether one has confidence and hope that it [the state of exception] can be eliminated depends on philosophical, especially on philosophical-historical or metaphysical, convictions” (PT 7). 9. I am aware of but a miniscule parenthesis in an article by Geoff Waite [“Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy,” in Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 169–211], where this divide is erased: “Both fundamental ontology (Heidegger) and philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer) are—more or less tacit or encrypted—modes of decisionism. (Carl Schmitt might have said shamefaced modes, but that qualification need not distract us here.)” (p. 175). 10. Michael Hoeltzl and Graham Ward, the translators of Political Theology II, recognize the significance of hermeneutics in Schmitt but immediately drown it in “metaphysical speculation”: The questions [Who will decide? Who will interpret?] arise from, and the answers offered are responses to, situations of immediate practical import. They are the key questions of 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 Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (London and New York: Polity, 2008), p. 2, emphasis added] 11. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 329, 324. 12. Ibid., p. 330. 13. “Self-interpreted.” Ibid., p. 174. 14. “Text of President Bush’s State of the Union Address,” 2004. 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 first introduced in Legality and Legitimacy in a 1978 text, “The Legal World Revolution”: “State legality concerns the unavoidable political premiums of the legal holding of state power” (Telos 72, Summer 1987, p. 74). 17. Schmitt expresses the same thought in Constitutional Theory: When parties with contradictory opinions and convictions achieve political influence, they express their political power by giving concrete content to the concepts

Political Hermeneutics

189

of state life, such as freedom, justice, public order, and security, all of which are necessarily undefined. (pp. 89–90) The “political premium” here turns into an expression of political power. 18. The limits of voluntarism in Schmitt bleed into the “passive” or, rather, pathos-laden enactment of understanding in Gadamer. Hence, Richard Bernstein [Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)] writes: “We will see that, for Gadamer, understanding is misconceived when it is thought of as an a activity of 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 stage in the history of de-politicization outlined in the 1929 text on “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticization” and leading up to extreme economism. Insofar as they survive in Schmitt’s own writings, metaphysical concepts and problems are restricted to serving as the polemical means in his politically inflected—polemical—political philosophy. 20. The fissuring of the horizon in the present does not invalidate Gadamer’s thesis on the fusion of horizons. As Gadamer observes, “In fact the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices” (Truth and Method, p. 306). The continual formation of the horizon of the present—which is not identical to itself, given its unavoidable reference to the past—is a polemical process. Its complexity will not be fully subsumed in any resulting fusion. 21. Hans Herbet Kögler [The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)] does well to note that, more often than not, “the radical will to avoid symbolic violence [that] shapes historical as well as intercultural hermeneutics” contributes to “the complete methodological concealment of power relations behind the backs of the interpreter and the interpretandum” (p. 218). It is this concealment that political hermeneutics must overcome. 22. “About an abstract concept there will be in general no argument, least of all in the history of sovereignty. What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le salut public, and so on” (PT 6). 23. Emphasis added. 24. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 61. 25. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, p. 81. 26. Schmitt’s immediate concern is with the Kellogg Pact of 1928 and the historical drama in which a “group of powers plays the higher third and itself interprets and sanctions the indeterminate concepts of the pact, including especially the concept ‘war’” (LL 35). 27. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 257. 28. For an excellent critique of the reading of Schmitt as an opportunist, see Alexandre Franco de Sá’s, “The Event of Order,” pp. 14–33. The same criticism, according to Schmitt, has been advanced against the Catholic policy understood as “nothing more or less than a boundless opportunism” (Schmitt, “The Necessity of Politics,” p. 24). The reason for this parallel is that Schmitt is transposing the experience of the Catholic political form, complexio oppositorum, onto the sphere of secularized political existence.