From the partisan to the political

(The following is a guest post by Gary Sauer-Thompson, author of the weblog Philosophical Conversations.)

Can Carl Schmitt's theory of the partisan inform us about what is happening today in the war on terror that we are living? More specifically, how does his theory of the partisan change the way we understand the political as a friend/enemy antithesis (understood in an existential, concrete sense)? Is this friend/enemy understanding of the political, often interpreted as a weapon in the battle against liberalism an historical one? In highlighting Schmitt's response to this I am building on a previous post at philosophy. com, which was more or less a working through Schmitt's text. It is based on an understanding of the political as a basic characteristic of human life. The suggestions of an answer to the above questions can be found in the last section of Schmitt's text entitled, 'From the Real to the Absolute Enemy'. It is here that Schmitt explores the way in which the conception of the political presupposed in his theory of the partisan mutates into something quite different. He explores so by asking a simple question, 'who is the enemy'? Whilst showing how the legimatization of the partisan is given by a third party, Schmitt introduces a bounded concept of the enemy. He says :

... the heart of the political is not enmity per se but the distinction of friend and enemy; it presupposes both friend and enemy. The powerful third party who is interested in the partisan may think and deal in an entirely egoistic way, but with his interest he stands politically on the side of the partisan. This functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it is not expressed in terms of public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government.

So the theory of the partisan presupposes a bounded concept of enemity. The partisan has a real, but not an absolute enemy. Schmitt reinforces this conception of the political when he says that another boundary of enmity follows from the telluric character of the partisan.The partisan defends a patch of earth to which he has an autochthonic relation. His basic position remains defensive despite his increasing mobility.The real enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, and also is not the ultimate enemy of mankind as such. Schmitt then argues that a shift has taken place in the bounded concept of the enemy, in that an absolute enemy has been made out of the real enemy. Though Lenin's professional revolutionary of the world-wide civil war made the conceptual shift of making an absolute enemy out of the real enemy the new understanding of the enemy has its roots in the technical-industrial development that has made human weapons into pure means of destruction. Therein lies the danger. Schmitt says that the weapons of absolute annihilation:

.. require an absolute enemy lest they should be absolutely inhuman. Men who turn these means against others see themselves obliged/forced to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They have to consider the other side as entirely criminal and inhuman, as totally worthless. Otherwise they are themselves criminal and inhuman. The logic of value and its obverse, worthlessness, unfolds its annihilating consequence, compelling ever new, ever deeper discriminations, criminalizations, and devaluations to the point of annihilating all of unworthy life.

There in lies the danger. A nuclear world is one in which the partners push each other in this way into the abyss of total devaluation before they annihilate one another physically. Are we not in Heidegger's world of the planetary dominion of the technological mode of being, in which the world becomes totally enframed as a picture, and integrates the world as standing reserve? A technological ordering in which there is a refusal of limits, a rejection of boundaries and concrete difference and a blurring of borders? Schmitt says that this gives rise to new kinds of absolute enmity, and he understands this darkly. He says that:

enmity will be so terrifying that one perhaps mustn’t even speak any longer of the enemy or of enmity, and both words will have to be outlawed and damned fully before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation thus becomes entirely abstract and entirely absolute. It is no longer directed .. against an enemy, but serves only another, ostensibly objective attainment of highest values, for which no price is too high to pay. It is the renunciation of real enmity that opens the door for the work of annihilation of an absolute enmity.

Being political now means being orientated to dire emergency; as it is a situation in which two orders of what is right confront each other, without any mediation or neutrality. Is this not what we in the war on terror? A war in which the enemy is both external and internal? Schmitt by making reference to The Nomos of the Earth since nomos is a way to understand the transformation from one historical epoch to another.

Comments

[john c. halasz]

Gabriel Sanchez:

In the first place, I'm not aware that Strauss is a major thinker on the order of, say, Heidegger, (from whom he's largely derivative and, I think, uninterestingly so), such that his frame-of-reference should be regarded as somehow "obligatory" in orienting one's interests. At any rate, one has to pick and choose among the work, in which one invests one's limited time and energy, according to one's interest, and I'm rather more interested in the likes of Arendt and Levinas who have some innovative things to say, beyond opposition to/repetition of "the Master".

That said, I'm certainly not opposed to close and careful reading of a body of work and would agree that one reads, first of all, for coherence, with some interpretations being better than others. But that does not mean that one would and should find coherence and that incoherence is necessarily disqualifying or uninteresting. The question is rather once one arrives at an interpretation, as best as one can construe the work in question, what does one then do with it? It doesn't necessarily follow that one should extract a doctrine or "teaching", in accordance with a teleology of unitary meaning and an assumption of edifying "clarity". (It's doubtful, after all, that philosophy actually "does" much of anything and holding to a doctrine might be symptomatic of a dead-end; that's a Wittgensteinian point, just to label where it's coming from.) Rather doesn't one read for the sake of learning about the world, to open up further understandings and their applicabilities, rather than to attain the security of one's "position"? I was attempting to suggest above, in my loose-limbed way, that accurate interpretation is better served by reading a thinker's work in terms of its problematizations and the conceptuality formed by its wrestlings with what it problematizes in relation to the worldly context that the work is addressing. (Yes, the "outside the text"; but if I have any inkling what Derrida meant, it's that the meaning of a philosophical text emerges from and is exceeded by the extra-philosophical meanings of the world that it claims to master.) That, at least, to my mind, brings out and specifies the meaning of a text and its concepts in terms of their actual application and possible applicability, rather than assuming an implausible coherence and continuity of thought that might very well abstract from and miss what is at issue. (Important thinkers might well pursue a fundamental intention and commitment at the outset and basis of their work, but precisely in the course of thinking and the fatality of worldly experience, that intention and commitment evolves and alters the meaning and retrospective "coherence" of the body of thought).

Yes, you've repeatedly emphasized the 2nd and 3rd editions of PC and Strauss' notes, but you haven't deigned to unpack your point and just why that is the decisive consideration for the whole oeuvre. (Does the fact that the 3rd edition was published in the fateful year of 1933 at all inflect it's meaning?) You've also cited something from 1916 (from a secondary source?), when Schmitt was just an obscure graduate serving in the army, presumably having published nothing but his qualifying dissertations, lending credence to an assumption of impossible continuity and coherence. And this, mind you, in a discussion stemming from of a late text of Schmitt, published when he was 75, when both his and the world's context had irretreivably altered from the initial Weimar context, and in which his very conception of the political is strained to its limit.

It's not really hard to identify the Enemy for Schmitt: it's social revolution, specifically in the form of Marxism and Leninism. Whether that requires diabolization and an appeal to salvational theology is perhaps a moot point, as the issue is politics as something entirely terrestrial, worldly. You're right that Schmitt is not a confessional theologian,- he was a lawyer,- but that just raises the question of the meaning and function of the appeal to "theology" as a means of explicating the political in his work; just how and why did Schmitt deploy the resonnance of theology to explore the nature and limits of the political and was his deployment unitary, continuous and coherent? The meaning of a concept is not its reference to the heaven of ideas but its (differential?) function within the structure of a text, a writing/thinking. If the theological/political becomes all-encompassing, perhaps that's just symptomatic of the failure of a thinking. If the meaning of the political can only be saved through dogmatic adherence to an extra-worldly perspective, then perhaps it is already lost. I think the core problem of Schmitt's Weimar-era writings, (of which perhaps the revisions of the 3rd edition are the end-point), at least in terms of his "official" legal/political concerns, is "polyarchy", which is the problem of social revolution, of the intrusion of the social onto the affairs of state,- (a plaint that one can also find in Arendt),- and it is in that context that one should understand how the political becomes "total" through the intensification of conflict. It is not a matter, initially at least, of there being nothing but the political, (which is somehow identical with, rather than differentiated from dogmatic theology), but rather of the constraints the distinctively political imposes and of the containment of those constraints. The friend/enemy distinction, after all, amounts to an inverted form of recognition.

The superciliousness and exclusiveness of there being one true univocal interpretation, as of there being one true faith, is rather symptomatic of the Strauss cult. You spoke of an "hermeneutic faith", but I understand philosophical hermeneutics as an inquiry into meaning/interpretation to be a rational discipline. Such superciliousness, as well as, repetitive nonresponsiveness, are not very conducive to fruitful or informative dialogue.

[john c. halasz]

"...that Schmitt both detests the 'culture' of discussion and would find it unbecoming to submit his theology to it..."

Wow! Schmitt caught up in a performative contradiction. Who woulda thunk it?

[Gabriel Sanchez]

John,

This issue has been punted back and forth enough. So maybe I'll let it die and you can continue to harbor your beliefs on Schmitt and I'll harbor my own. I suspect at some point in the future, we'll have a chance to hash this out again in fresher terms.

All the same...

I am a little surprised and maybe a bit displeased with your provactively poor understanding of Strauss. I have no inclination to try and "justify" him to you; your choice not to read him is your own. What I find offputting is that you are so quick to cast him aside as derivative of Heidegger. I don't know how would could read the first chaper of Natural Right & History and think that. Heck, I don't know how one could read about Strauss on Wikipedia and think that. If anything, his work is a response to the challenge of Heidegger (and others) to the possibility of political philosophy.

Given your self-professed ignorance of Strauss, I am equally perplexed why you feel so assured to castigate the "Straussian" position or, rather, the "Straussian" manner of reading. Yes, it's all fine and dandy that you've read pot-shots in the dreadfully incomplete secondary literature, but passing them off as the dogma of the day strikes me as pathetic. But maybe you are more of an expert than you let on. If so, perhaps you could define what a "Straussian" is and what links them together because for the life of me, after some years of reading not only Strauss, but Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Thomas Pangle, Ernest Fortin, Ralph Lerner, Nathan Tarcov, etc., I'm totally in the dark.

[Adam Kotsko]

Agamben has a little section on the katechon in The Time That Remains.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to study Tertullian, sadly (so many Fathers, so little time -- though we're kicking around the idea of a directed study on the Latin Fathers, to match my kick-ass study of Greek ones -- it might have to wait until I can read Latin at a rate of more than a page and a half a week).

[John S. Ransom]

Sanches says:

for the life of me, after some years of reading not only Strauss, but Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Thomas Pangle, Ernest Fortin, Ralph Lerner, Nathan Tarcov, etc., I'm totally in the dark. [end Sanchez]

A Straussian is someone who reads Strauss, Bloom, Haffa, Pangle, Fortin, Lerner, Tarcov, etc., and then when asked what a Straussian is, says he's totally in the dark.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

John,

But I'm a Christian...I thought "Straussians" were just a Jewish cabal...

Adam,

I read the article on the Schmitt/Tertullian connection (finally). I thought the author quickly undercut the "newness" of their exploration by immediately pointing out that Meier had beat them to the punch on that one. Just the same, some observations...

- Tertullian reposed in heresy against the Church. Whatever influence he may have had on the direction the Catholic Church took in the Middle Ages is, at best, questionable. Augustine was always the Latin Father par excellence. As for the Eastern Church, Tertullian's influence was minimal, especially after the Council of Nicaea. Also, Tertullian's dualisms also seem to be overstated by the author; certainly they are overstated concerning the Christian understanding of the world. Warding off heretics is not a matter of persecution, but protection. To drop a loaded word like "heresephobia" in the article is horribly lame.

- Tertullian's fideism has been condemned by both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The author is really stretching the matter by setting it up as some "important" teaching that actually matters. It really isn't until Luther & Protestantism that fideism becomes a "standard" part of Christianity again. As far as Schmitt goes, I don't know what evidence there is that he was a fideist (though it seems necessary to certain parts of the author's thesis).

- The reading of 2 Thess. is weak. While I can't speak definitively for the Latin West, the Church has never understood St. Paul to mean that God sends Satan into the world to trick humanity. Like all that exists, Satan is made of God's hand, but his evil is self-chosen, not manufactured by God. (I admit, this is a minor point to the overall thesis of the article.)

- I think the author is overstating the place of katechon in supporting the Christian Empire. Again, I may be too narrowed-in on the Eastern understanding, but I have never heard of that being a justification for Byzantium or the "Third Rome", Russia.

- Nothing beats the use of a questionable secondary source to write off Strauss and Meier. The author's infatuation with "esotericism" puts any "Straussian" to shame.

[s0metim3s]

It's from Tertullian that Schmitt acquires the conception of politics as the ability to decide between friends (of God) and enemies (of God).

But, of interest to me are the interesections between what's often stated as Schmitt's 'realism' and Tertuallian's insistence on the corporeality of Christ. That is, the 'materiality' of the concept (of the political), the call "to the warfare of the Living God" and so on. But, as I alluded, it's strange materiality - noli me tangere. Transubstantiation, etc.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

s0metim3s,

Is it from Tertullian? I ask that in ignornance, because that seems to me to be a much stronger connection than any I've seen made. The "friend/enemy" (and I use this term anachronistically) distinction in Christianity is as old as the Epistles of St. Jude and Paul. Its forerunner--the Old Testament--is even older than that. The identification and rooting out the internal enemies of the Church was, it seems, always part of her. I don't know why Schmitt would have to learn that from a (somewhat) obscure Father who hardly stands above his most noted contemporaries.

As for the "esoteric" article (I believe you were the one who first called attention to it), I was also noticing at how painfully inept the author is when it comes to Gnosticism, heresy, and the role of the early Fathers. Coupled with his laughable remarks on Voegelin, it doesn't speak very highly of what constitutes "scholarship" on that journal. But as I've alluded to elsewhere, I'm old fashioned and I believe people should actually read and (try to) understand ideas before commenting on them.

[John S. Ransom]

Gabriel Sanchez writes:

But as I've alluded to elsewhere, I'm old fashioned and I believe people should actually read and (try to) understand ideas before commenting on them. [end excerpt]

but then also writes:

Derrida's reading of Schmitt is something I haven't spent enough time with to fairly comment on. Part of that has to go with the fact I can't stomach Derrida. Still, I won't dismiss it outright until I've read it thoroughly. [end excerpt]

Well if I may say so that does not seem to rise to the necessary level of intellectual charity, saying that you won't "dismiss it outright" until you've read it. I mean, how can you dismiss it *at all* until you've read it? At least if you want to keep the self-described characterization of "old-fashioned"?

And you say you are a Christian! My word. Christ says: "5:41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain." Saying that you will not dismiss Derrida openly *until* you've read him is not a very 'twain' thing to say.

And so I urge you to approach Derrida *with Christian humility.* Believe me, the popular fashion -- and that's what it is, popular fashion, which if intellectual considerations cannot sway you, a sense of taste and of smell perhaps might -- that says one cannot 'stomach' Derrida is now on the same level as those who said they 'can't understand' Picasso. Derrida is no longer an argument, he is a fact.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

John,

Your comparison is pretty asinine for a couple of reasons.

First, Derrida writing on Schmitt is wholly different--in my book at least--from Derrida writing about deconstructionism or whatever else it is Derrida writes about. If the aim is to understand Schmitt better, reading Derrida in this context would be reading for Schmitt, i.e., to understand Schmitt. Even if I read the work 100 times, all I would feel emboldened to comment on is how right/wrong I guarage Derrida on Schmitt; it would have nothing to do with Derrida as a thinker overall (though maybe it could contribute to that).

Second, I have flipped through Derrida on Schmitt and I can't stomach it (well, not easily). You'll not I haven't come out and said, "Derrida misunderstands Schmitt..." or "Derrida is a fool when it comes to Schmitt..." I don't think I've fallen short of my own standards by remarking on what I have seen and making it quite clear how utterly incomplete my field of vision has been thus far.

Third, throwing Scriptural quotes out of context is fine and all for some people, but I'm not a Protestant. Try again.

Derrida is a fact...of what? I have heard the arguments for why I should read and even embrace Derrida from what I would consider to be very intelligent people (University of Chicago and Northwestern PhD students, along with various law students whom I know), but it hasn't "stuck." The primary reason for this is that when I have read Derrida, I've only ever been able to muster a, "So?" I must confess, I find myself saying that whenever I read anything from Stanford's Cultural Memory in the Present series as well. Only a certain context--on certain faithful assumptions--can they even begin to say something with purchase; but that is not my context nor is that my faith. Whether that makes me a dullard or not in yours (or anyone else's) book is another matter. Surprisingly, that's something I am capable of living with.

[Nate]

hi Gabriel,
I don't like Derrida either in what I've read of him, not least because I have a really hard time telling what he's saying - it's largely an aesthetic thing, not an argument on my part against him - so I've read little of him. I don't know if this would be up your alley or not, but one book I've read parts of and liked a lot on this is Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, by Samuel Wheeler. That helped me to place Derrida in terms of things I'm interested in and can understand. It also helped me to get at least some sense of what Derrida offers to people that appeals to them, which I had been entirely mystified about before.

As for Derrida's facticity - he does seem to be a haunting presence to a lot of folk who read him, but that doesn't mean his absence necessarily makes a big différance to those who don't read him.
cheers,
Nate