"Oh, enemy, there is no enemy": the partisan disruption of the concept of the political

Carl Schmitt is well known for conceptualizing the political in terms of the friend/enemy distinction. What his account of the partisan suggests is a way of thinking about politics that disrupts this opposition. I read his "Theory of the Partisan," then, as a revision of his earlier work, one that works to elaborate a concept of the political no longer attached to the 18th and 19th centuries, but adequate to the particular challenges of the 20th century. This is not to say that his new account is clear and complete. Yet, it is an approach to the political that recognizes the political character of the indistinction between friend and enemy. The political, in other words, must be understood not simply in its clarity, but in its confusion and undecideability. At stake in the emergence of the partisan is the permanent destabilization of the political and of the political as itself another name for the temporal and spatial destabilizations wrought by the technologies producing something like a global.

First, the partisan challenges conventional oppositions between military and civilian, legality and illegality and illegality. Thus, rather than simply relying on the distinction between regular and irregular military when he observes that "the partisan fights as an irregular," Schmitt continues, rightly noting that

the difference between regular and irregular combat depends on a clear definition of what is 'regular...'

Second, in addition to challenging basic distinctions, to operating within a zone of indistinction, the partisan operates with a particular intensity, with an investment that gives his acts their political quality. Unlike the criminal he may be taken to be, the partisan operates within a political front, seeking not his own self interest but a radical change in the situation. In fact, it seems that it's the very intensity of the partisan's engagement that installs the partisan in this zone of indistinction between legal and illegal, military and civilian. Because of his commitments, his intensity, the partisan is willing to take risks, to act in a risky way, indeed, a way that places the entire population at risk insofar as the presence of the partisan blurs distinctions between military and civilian:

The word risky takes on an even more pregnant meaning, when he who acts in a risky way exposes himself personally to the danger and also takes into account the eventual negative consequences of his actions or of his omissions, so that he cannot consider it an injustice when these consequences hit him. ...

Not only does he risk his own life, as every regular combatant, but he knows, and for him everything depends on this fact, that the enemy considers him outside of every law, honor, and legality...

To my mind, this account of the partisan suggests the risk of the Lacanian act, the risk of subjective destitution, of complete dishonor. The partisan, then, needs to be thought of in terms of the indistinction between ethics and politics, in terms of bringing in to being the new categories according to which he might be judged (this point is clear when Schmitt notes that the partisan "appeared at the center of a new way to make war, whose meaning and goal was the destruction of the existing social order." And, of course, he can fail and this failure can be immense. There are no guarantees--it's risky.

Third, in the context of the extension of the theory and practice of partisanship from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the partisan as revolutionary suggests an indistinction between war and peace. Insofar as peace contains the potential for war and insofar as the communist knows who his enemy is, then any peace that has not been produced through the elimination of the enemy will necessarily contain the possibility of war--the enemy is still present. Likewise, this indistinction is implicated in yet another one, that between defensive and offensive war (a blurring Schmitt links directly to the experience of Stalin in WWII and of Mao on the long march).

Fourth, the very space of war becomes indistinct. Schmitt writes,

the partisan does not fight on an open battlefield, on the same level of regular war, with its fronts. Rather, he forces his enemy to enter a different space.

Up to now, the indistinctions wrought by the partisan lead to a differing sense of the political, one that resists an easy reading in terms of friend and enemy. The partisan is the enemy we can't recognize; he knows whom he hates, but we can't tell who he is. He may look like a friend, he may seem to be legitimate, but we don't know for sure, hence our entire political space becomes uncertain, an uncertainty that results from the risks he is willing to take.

Unfortunately, Schmitt tries to resolve these indistinctions. And, he does so by introducing a fifth one: the temporality of agrarian versus industrial, primitive versus advanced, traditional versus modern collapses as the partisan confronts the technocratic dreams of the makers and holders of weapons of mass distruction. This collapse appears in the correspondence between the partisan's intensely political character--the fact that he knows his enemy, that he is bent on destroying his enemy--and the emergence of weapons of mass destruction. Schmitt writes:

such absolute weapons of mass destruction require a foe not to appear inhuman . . . Those men who use these weapons against other men feel compelled to destroy these other men, i.e., their victims, even morally. They must brand their opponents as criminal and inhuman, as an absolute non-value, otherwise, they themselves would become criminals and monsters.

I think some of the problems with Schmitt's analysis appear here in number five. The biggest problem is with the way that Schmitt cuts off or limits his preceding account of the indistinctions wrought by the partisan by reinserting it into his friend/enemy matrix. While this reinsertion echoes unsettlingly with the Bush administration's so-called war on terror, it installs a kind of certainty that Schmitt had spent most of the essay contesting. Here the certainty is moral and monstrous rather than political (as he admits). Yet, insofar as humankind continues to persist in a zone opened up only in part by such weapons and insofar as this persistence involves politics, the monstrous doesn't exert the stabilizing or dividing force Schmitt might imagine. Differently put, precisely because Schmitt is describing/intervening in an emerging global (that itself is technologically produced, contesting and transcending state boundaries as well as previously stabilizing notions of time and space), he cannot rely on the sort of decision that would allow for such a certain term. Rather, the distinction would remain immanent, part of the undecideable political field.

Additionally, I think Schmitt's jump to the monstrous, to the absolute or real enemy, to pure enmity, relies on a misreading of Lenin: that Lenin knows his enemy does not mean that he has to kill each capitalist or member of the bourgeoisie; rather, it means that he eliminates the economic arrangements that produce them. Monstrous systems, in other words, produce monstrous conditions--but monsters are products of a decision.