Continuation, continuation

1. In a recent lecture entitled ‘War as Politics, Politics as War’, Etienne Balibar elegantly locates the central aporia of Clausewitz’s On War: the factor that led to that text remaining unfinished and, to its author’s mind, radically in need of revision. The problem lies in the ‘continuation’ that inhabits the famous definition of war as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’. There is a certain quarantining of politics that occurs here, as if politics remains ‘the logic’ and war ‘the instrument’. But Clausewitz’s formulation can also be read as a warning that ‘the violent means of war remain political means only if their own consequences and, again, retroactive effects on those who use them, their own “logic” do not escape the political rationality or subvert it’. And, with this possibility, there emerges a certain doubling in the definition of war.

What seems to be the case is that war, with respect to politics, has to be considered twice, from two different angles. It is not the whole of politics (since politics has other procedures than war, equally necessary), but it concerns and affects the essence of politics, which is revealed and, practically, determined by the ways in which it recurs to war, and the consequences on politics itself of the political use of the violent means of war. Certainly what Clausewitz wants to avoid (and we will see that it is not without difficulties, and that the question keeps haunting his successors) is to assert that recurring to war is the essence of politics, that the use of the violent means of war, with its logical and existential implications (such as the necessity to designate one or several “enemies”), defines the concept of the political, which in turn can lead to the reversal of the initial statement (namely that “politics is the continuation”, or the “consequence” of war). But Clausewitz wants (or needs) to be able to make the question of the use of war as an “instrument”, and the question of the converse effects of this use upon politics itself its crucial characteristic.

For Balibar, what is, for Clausewitz, an undesirable threat, namely, that politics might become the continuation of war, becomes legible only if considered alongside another three axioms that are central to Clausewitz’s argument: the strategic superiority of defence over attack, the distinction between limited and absolute war, and the primacy of moral over strategic factors in the history of wars. Each of these propositions must be read as supporting and qualifying the others but, both individually and in unison, they pivot on an ambivalence by which the ‘politicization’ of war threatens the rationality of politics. Clausewitz’s dilemma derives from his insistence that, at least in modern times, all wars must take the form of national and therefore nationalistic wars. This poses the problem of how to control the new popular power that emerged with modernity, requiring the state to permanently run ahead of its people’s passions. As Balibar puts it, Clausewitz faced ‘the military or strategic equivalent of the political problem faced by national states in general: how to “institutionalize the insurrection”, or harness the multitude’.

2. Although it was Engels and not Marx who read Clausewitz, Marx’s description of class struggle as war is a crucial switching point. There is a historical and logical transformation of the nexus of war and politics that emerges around the new intelligibility of history in terms of class struggle. By interpreting the class struggle as civil war, Marx designates as war exactly what Clausewitz wanted to exclude from the comprehensions of the category of war. As civil war, since the Greeks, has appeared as the destruction of the typically political institution, the city or state, and for this reason in Clausewitzian terms, it is not a political instrument but an anti-political instrument. Only with Schmitt are anti-political instruments, including civil wars, incorporated in the concept of the political in an antimonic manner. And this is why Schmitt, at least for a thinker like Tronti, becomes the crucial figure for understanding the political dimensions of class struggle. Importantly, it is Lenin, with his emphasis on the passage from the state monopoly of violence to the class monopoly of historically decisive violence, who provides the precedent for Schmitt’s antimonic conception of politics. Schmitt turns Lenin’s injunction to recreate politics at the expense of the state on its head, identifying sovereignty with the capacity to install an exception and suppress the class struggle in a way that reasserts the monopoly of the state and its capacity to wage external wars.

3. But what are we to make of Schmitt’s conception of politics at a time when, as Tronti argues, the great contradictions of modern politics have played themselves out: workers and capital, fascism and democracy, socialism and capitalism? To ask this question is more than to propose, as does Agamben in State of Exception, that Schmitt’s entire corpus is written as a response to Benjamin’s claim that the exception has become the rule. ‘Theory of the Partisan’ is the essay that demands and enables this line of questioning, since in this text, more than any other, Schmitt grapples with the epochal transformations of 20th-century politics.

Five years before the event that, for Tronti, would, mark the fall of actually existing socialism (the rolling of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968), Schmitt was experiencing his own version of historical disappointment. But, unlike, the post-communists, whom, for Derrida, would face the necessity of working through a loss, Schmitt was not given to mourning. ‘Theory of the Partisan’ is an aggressive strike, as desperate as it is brilliant. One might say it registers a refusal or, more precisely, an inability to mourn, since it aims, above all, to preserve a concept of the political that renders war instrumental. Schmitt announces that Clausewitz’s formula for ‘war as the continuation of politics’ is ‘the theory of the partisan in a nutshell’. But no sooner does he proffer this than he admits that this logic has been ‘taken to its limit’. It is at this limit that he writes, recognising that the partisan collapses the binaries of regular/irregular, legal/illegal, civilian/military and war/peace. But he holds and poses these differences at the limit that, for him, separates friend and enemy, and thus refuses to allow them to multiply into a matrix of differences. Ultimately, what is at stake, for Schmitt, in this assertion of the political in friend/enemy distinction is the bordering of politics itself.

This becomes clear when he writes of the ‘interested third party’ who prevents the partisan’s fall into the apolitical:

This interested third party is not some banal figure like the proverbially laughing third party. It belongs, rather, and essentially, to the situation of the partisan, and thus also to his theory. The powerful third party delivers not only weapons and munitions, money, material assistance, and medicines of every description, he also offers the sort of political recognition of which the irregularly fighting partisan is in need, in order to avoid falling like the thief and the pirate into the unpolitical, which means here the criminal sphere.

What becomes clear is that the politics to which war must be predicated as instrumental is bordered and negatively defined by the apolitical (figured here as the criminal). The third party does not raise the possibility of a third term that would be neither the political nor the apolitical. This is why the political commitment of Schmitt’s partisan, whether directed toward the defence of a state or the constitution of another, does not ultimately question his early theologisation of politics and its exceptions, which was posited precisely as a necessary counterpart to the depoliticisation implicit in modern technics.
 
4. It is always tempting, no more so than at present times, to merely reverse Clausewitz’s formula and assert that politics is the continuation of war. But, while there is a certain heuristic value to this inversion, it does not open up or explore the aporia that haunts Clausewitz’s famous definition of war. Schmitt’s difficulty is that ultimately he wants to resolve this indecidability, to close it in, to ground it and its dangerous reversals in a politics of enmity, either real or absolute, that plugs its operations or limits its play. What is at stake is nothing less than a valorisation of politics conceived as force or (hot or cold) war between friend and enemy. Here is not the place to note something else under the sky of politics, to register how it has left (or must leave) behind this distinction. Suffice it to say that the Schmittian politics of struggling-against remains the dominant paradigm, which haunts Marxist articulations of class struggle as much as the ‘either with us or against us’ logic that has reasserted itself in global war. Suffice it also to say that across the political spectrum the terms of this struggle are imagined as a struggle for democracy, which is why, after reading Schmitt, it might be important to return to Tocqueville.