On Schmitt's "Theory of the Partisan"

(The following is a guest post by Luke Mergner, author of the weblog The Decline.)

The Partisan appears immediately relevant to analysis of the Bush Adminstration’s prosecution of the “Global War on Terror” [sic].  For example, William Scheuerman recently published an article (pdf) in Constellations drawing the parallels from Schmitt to Abu Ghraib.

A “partisan” for Schmitt has four qualities:  irregularity, mobility, intensity of political commitment, and a telluric (or territorial) attachment.  The partisan is outside the law by virtue of his irregular status viz. the regular army.  Schmitt argues convincingly that despite the increasing attempts to regularize irregular troops within international law it is difficult to fully normalize the exception.  Laws of war – which I have personally always found a bit oxymoronic – attempt to protect non-combatants or civilians.  The line between combatants and non-combatants is precisely what the partisan must blur if he is to be effective.  The telluric character of the partisan connotes for Schmitt a defensive posture rooted in tradition, land, and family. In an example Schmitt doesn’t mention, peasants successfully organized resistance to Operation Barbarrosa from the marshes of Ukraine.  For each German killed, the Einsatzgruppen killed scores of villagers – well over the 10/1 (civilians per soldier) allowed by international law at the time.  The effectiveness of the partisan resistance – and remember the Wahrmacht had roving liquidation squads throughout Ukraine and Eastern Europe – owed precisely to its local knowledge and defensive nature.

However, it is prudent to ask whether the telluric quality conflicts with political commitment.  Schmitt is adamant that the partisan has “intense political engagement” since this differentiates him from the criminals and terrorists.  Schmitt’s theoretical examples turn out to be Chairman Mao and Raoul Salan.  Scheuerman, in the essay referenced above, is correct I think to ask whether there isn’t a blurring of partisans and terrorists here.  The attribute of political commitment as an expression of existential conflict pivots the partisan from the defensive to the offensive:  can he maintain in these circumstances his telluric character?  Schmitt praises Lenin for recognizing the existential character of conflict, but Lenin’s fight was explicitly universal:  it was directed against traditional modes of living.  Of course, for Schmitt Lenin expresses the logic of the partisan without himself practicing it:  “He also learned that other notion of distinguishing friend and enemy, and that this is most important because it defines not only war, but also politics.  For Lenin, only revolutionary war is genuine war, because it is based on absolute enmity.  Everything else is conventional play.”  (§on Lenin)

Before discussing the conclusions Schmitt develops about international law, I want to examine the fundamental ways in which Schmitt’s definition and treatment of the partisan is based in his definition of “the political.”  (I hope that my exegesis here will prove relatively uncontroversial, but also useful for discussion throughout the week.)  For Schmitt, “the political” is not ‘politics’ as the liberal conception generally defines it, that is as the negotiation and compromise of interests.  The political, in contrast, is conceived analogous to Weber’s value spheres, which for Schmitt derive their coherence from a binary logic that orders values and action within a sphere.  Schmitt claims that the binary logic of “the political” is friend/enemy.

In contrast to the relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action, particularly the moral, aesthetic and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way.  The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinction, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced…. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is friend and enemy.” (Concept of the Political [U. of Chicago Press: 1996] p. 25-6)

From this distinction, Schmitt asserts that the intensity of conflict in any relationship can elevate it to the level of the political.  Existential struggle, by which Schmitt means the threat of death, is the essence of the political.  This definition however appears tautological:  Schmitt defines politics as conflict which can always intensify and any binary conflict may become political if the intensity rises high enough.  That is, the political is not an a priori zone of action, but parasitic on conflicts generated in other realms of activity.  Schmitt is conceptually driven to identity existential conflict as the essence of politics.  À propos of the partisan, it is the intensity of the commitment (to a political position or a territorial defense) which makes him a political figure.

Oddly though, war not murder is the existential arena par excellence:  “War is the existential negation of the enemy” (ibid, 33)  The telluric quality of partisan fights that Schmitt celebrates gives some clue to this inconsistency:  Schmitt sees conflict primarily between nations not individuals.  Politics is only possible in the absence of sovereignty.

A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. …there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings.(ibid, 34)

While it is an open question to what extent Schmitt’s pessimistic realism refers to our world – most of the time, Schmitt writes in a descriptive genre – Schmitt goes beyond simple description to celebrate his existential political as the only truly meaningful sphere of life.  The political is the antithesis of the technological neutralization and depoliticalization of the world (see Schmitt’s essay on this subject [pdf].)  When Schmitt points towards the end of “The Partisan” to the changes wrought by technology (e.g. the atom bomb), the potential elimination of the partisan must be read as a cipher for the neutralization of the political itself by technology. Radicalizing Weber, Schmitt located the last vestiges of meaning in a disenchanted world in the irrational political opposed to rationalized modernity.

The partisan might be defined therefore as the paradigmatic political figure:  fighting for the life of the community, unconstrained by military bureaucracy, the partisan stands for the exception that can never be normalized precisely because of the existential gravity of the struggle.  “All this teaches that a normative regulation of the problem of the partisan is juridically impossible, unless one wants to risk juridical formulations that do not catch the concrete status of affairs and remain mired in generic and contingent value-judgments” (“The Partisan” §The Development of the Theory).  The partisan gives the lie to liberal attempts to “normalize” international relations within a regime of laws that are not themselves a subject to contestation.  In the development of Schmitt’s exception elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, the exception becomes explicit in the concentration camps; no one can fail to see the parallels to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo:  the partisan/terrorists (the blurring of this line is precisely what allows the legal exception) are placed outside the law.  Rumsfeld has stated that even if the military tribunals find no reason to detain a prisoner he retains the right to hold them indefinitely.  One does not have to be sympathetic to Schmitt to be appalled, to recognize the value of his insight in this regard.

But it is Schmitt’s celebration of the irrational political that should trouble us – and it is a celebration, since he categorically denounces liberalism in favor of existential conflict; that men must die is not once lamented.  He concludes from the failure of to ‘normalize’ international relations that such projects are inherently doomed to failure because they fail to understand the ‘evil’ nature of humans.  The attempt to extend legal protections to so-called exceptions is rendered obsolete based on the binary logic on which Schmitt bases his theory of the political.  If we acknowledge the insight that Schmitt provides for understanding the often arbitrary and incomplete nature of the liberal legal system, then must we also come to the questionable conclusion that it is useless to perfect a system of general norms?   For example, Schmitt writes, “The Geneva League of Nations does not eliminate the possibility of wars, just as it does not abolish states.  It introduces new possibilities for wars, permits wars to take place, sanctions coalition wars, and by legitimizing and sanctioning certain wars it sweeps away many obstacles.”  His point – that wars for humanity may be worse than national wars – is well taken, but does this mean that the United Nations is unworthy of reform?

Critical theory presumes as a point of aperture the full unfolding of human potential; the precise quality of this potential however is necessarily vague, leaving critique in a somewhat precarious epistemological position.  Debates about liberal rule-of-law in Anglo-American literature often revolve around the relative efficacy of Rights over Goods.  You will find no resolution of the debate here except insofar as all answers involve the hidden premise:  “…and we should realize X because X is good.”  Modern subjectivity is a historical product that owes more to media constructions than self-reflection (although this should not be taken as a reactionary claim that previous forms of consciousness were ‘better’ – “il faut être absolutement moderne.”).  George Lakoff argued the quite banal thesis that all cognition proceeds through metaphor:  the forms of thought are not deductive but juxtaposed (and isn’t this precisely the level on which Zizek’s argumentation proceeds?  The “short circuit” relies on structural-metaphorical homogeneity.)  Lived-experience provides the substance of metaphorical truth:  the limits of possibility are provided by what we have experienced.  Once traditional, these experiences are now mediated through technological manipulation.  The correlative process to technology is social acceleration, as Hartmut Rosa has theorized (very persuasively and thoroughly).  As time itself slips away in a wash of digital experiences is the question of human potential even still applicable?  We should ask this question in precise terminology:  is a “life-project” still possible in the sense that the Germans once celebrated bildung?  Acknowledging our historical situatedness leaves us with the notion that individual development – improvement, however one defines it – is a process based in time.  One necessary aspect of a “life-project” would seem to be predictability; how else could we make meaningful choices?  But this leaves us with one of the most intractable aporias of modernity, which is most often associated with the name Max Weber:  increasing rationalization (bureaucratization, calculability) would seem both necessary and alienating.  Certainly in this context, we would not celebrate a life-project that approximated Kafka’s The Trial.  What I want to suggest is that if we think that realizing the possibility of human potential as a life-project is a good worth pursuing, then the maintenance of properly-designed legal norms is absolutely necessary.

Schmitt’s assault on liberalism often persuasively identifies chinks in the armor, yet that does not mean we must accept the most pessimistic dismissals of the rule-of-law.  Even theorists of ‘conflictual’ politics retain some notion of weak norms to guide conflict in productive ways.  Although we should certainly not move to the Rawlsian extreme of constructing “justice” out of a minimum of agreement, it is essential to recognize that even contentious politics relies on bracketing issues and limitations on strategies.  Insofar as this fact obtains, we should ask, first, how do these limitations arise? And, second, is there a “better” way of thinking or acting in these situations?  Schmitt’s answer forecloses these questions by reducing politics to the muddy waters of the “the political”.

[I am at the moment in Baltimore struggling with unreliable internet access.  If I don’t immediately respond to comments, it is not because I don’t value dialogue.  Please do not be offended, I’ll respond as soon as it is possible.]