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War/Politics
A few weeks ago I took exception to the following comment by John Emerson to this post:
To me when Schmitt writes "Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable" on the way to the "friend-enemy" political distinction, he's using a simple-minded logic to stack the cards in favor of conflict and war.
In response to Emerson, I asked him repeatedly to substantiate his claim regarding Schmitt. According to my memory, he never did so, yet kept insisting that, for Schmitt, the point of politics was war - or, in a softer version, that Schmitt was all for war. Rather than substantiating his own claim, Emerson asked me to substantiate my own, which I did, but I never provided a direct reference.
Anyway, while re-reading through Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, I was reminded of the following passage (a mere seven pages after the passage cited by Emerson):
It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action, by no means as though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with the friend-enemy alternative vis-a-vis every other nation. And, after all, could not the politically reasonable course reside in avoiding war? The definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism. Nor is it an attempt to idealize the victorious war or the successful revolution as a 'social ideal,' since neither war nor revolution is something social or something ideal.
Schmitt, of course, could very well be wrong about his own concepts, but, if Emerson (or others - Emerson's claim is common enough) wants to sustain his reading, the ball is, as they say, in his court.
By Craig | November 13, 2006 in Carl Schmitt | Permalink
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Much of the complaint against Schmitt hinges on the last eleven words, does it not? (either the social is political or it is not, and if not then how impoverished is one's account of 'the political,' especially regarding 'friendship' (in all its contradictory forms) etc.)
Posted by: Matt | Nov 13, 2006 7:14:28 PM
But an analogous distinction is to be found in Arendt, who otherwise would have apparently little in common with Schmitt: the political is the public, not the private, the realm of "freedom" and not necessity, a matter of "deeds" rather than a making of things (to happen). The political can not be instrumentalized because it is existential, a matter of defining/manifesting "identities", of establishing/articulating who "one" is. The oddity is that Arendt turns that conception in the direction of a refusal/critique of sovereignty, the very "thing" that Schmitt glorifies.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Nov 14, 2006 4:57:51 AM
There is a bit of the "protest too much" syndrome in the Schmitt quote, as if he's saying "Well it's not all about war, folks. No really." The implied presumption he's combatting is that the friend-enemy distinction readily makes sense in war, and in terms of the "concrete," which Schmitt never stops stressing, provides the political with its most obvious expression. He routinely refers to the enemy as an object of hostility, of collective "fighting," and he makes clear that without the possibility of war (to which one could easily submit that there is no possibility without the actuality of war), there would be no political.
I don't know Emerson or his court, but I don't find the claims particularly novel, nor unsupportable. Rather, I'd ask what you believe is at stake in your efforts to defend Schmitt in this manner? What is gained by making such a rigorous distinction between a military hostility and a generalized (which is apprently to say, in every arena but the military, so thus not really generalized as much as it is exceptional) hostility towards the enemy? I'm not trying to be polemical here, I simply don't understand what you believe is gained by this defense.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Nov 14, 2006 9:30:16 AM
Kenneth, the use of "concrete" here is an unelaborated category. In the thirties, Schmitt had not yet elaborated a difference between "decionistic" and "situational" sense of the law. In effect, he has collapsed the two distinctions in his discussion of the political; that is, something to the effect of "the concerete decision can only be made in the concrete situation." You are certainly correct that Schmitt makes many references to "a fighting collectivity," but you leave out the essential detail: the concrete situation is the one in which the decision is made that the "other" threatens "our" way of life. His concept of the political, relative to war, is entirely defensive. On this reading, the only war Schmitt could possibly endorse is a defensive war: that is, the traditional right of resistance.
This particular defense is but a particular response to what is both a common and bad reading of Schmitt, especially (but certainly not exclusively) on the part of self-identified liberals. A common and bad reading that too easily lends itself to an equation of the Bush administration with Strausso-Schmittian (to coin an incoherent designation) political theory and, thus, the belief that if you refute Schmitt, you refute the other two. (All permutations apply, of course.)
Posted by: Craig | Nov 14, 2006 12:43:55 PM
There is no discussion of threat that is "entirely" defensive. I find the idea of it backwards, mythic, and dangerous. And the relative level of elaboration given to the concrete seems largely immaterial to me, as the concrete is a) opposed to the spectral in Schmitt, hence his discussion of real possibility as opposed to abstract possibility, so the concrete is an arena that falls outside of Schmitt's own formulation of a thing supposedly formulated by its concreteness, and so hardly provides the ground for any distinction; and b) influenced (if not determined outright) by the dynamics of those in power who can manifest a sense of an event as concrete rather than some imaginary, or less factical alternative.
And if it's a bad reading by bad liberal readers, it is also the reading of several who think a bit otherwise, Derrida's chapter 4 of Politics of Friendship being an obvious example. Not that I think Derrida's reading need be privileged, I'm simply saying that the necessity of a defense against bad, liberal readings, might beed to be rethought along the rather strict formulation of its necessity.
Regardless, let's assume for a minute it's a bad reading. So what? On this point, again, I don't want to be polemical, but are you defending the author's meaning or intent against those that misread it, or is there some political or ethical stake beyond this upon which the reading of Schmitt matters?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Nov 14, 2006 4:04:11 PM
There is no discussion of threat that is "entirely" defensive.
Could you elaborate on this, Ken? I mean, besides the citing of the neocons as an example and without overly losing the attention of the lay reader, either, if you please. And if you care to. (It's a good conversation!)
Thanks John, (of course you are right. And I agree, it is odd) and thank you Craig, for the elaboration.
Posted by: Matt | Nov 14, 2006 8:18:35 PM
I'm not trying to be too clever, here. I mean that a) empirically, history shows that those who talk about the need for fighting, the need for combat, the need to understand who the enemy really is - concretly! - and then purport to do so purely from defensive concerns typically (if not always) are doing so while formulating an offensive posture - the examples of this are so numerous that I doubt we need any, though the neocons and Iraq works fine - and b) that theoretically, the notion of a purely defensive conflict is ridiculous, as all conflict, even a conflict of goals that aims at prevention, entails a certain level of violence and mediation that, if it is to keep the enemy, must maintain (and that implies action) the enemy's stature, and so the "real possibility" of war is planned as such even if that possibility is never realized.
Nuclear weapons are defensive, to cite the relatively banal example of MAD, and yet textually the nature of the defense (which is actually an overwhelming offensive capability) exerts a tremendous violence over the friend and enemy alike, since it is the threat of the strike or the counterstrike that maintains "peace." And further, as with all the weapons of war, nuclear weapons work as a defensive deterrent in as much as they are tested against territories (and necessarily populations) in a manner that can only be called offensive. The training of troops, the manufacture of light arms, the entire industry that makes war possible functions because of a sustained demand for services because of an emphasis on the offensive. The defensive is made possible by the offensive, which again, I don't consider any particularly novel insight. Nor is there ever the real possibility of war without the prior requirement of the offensive, since this is required for the industry that makes the waging of war possible in the "concrete."
What I find horribly problematic is not the claim that the emphasis is on defense rather than offense, though I'm not sure if Schmitt's particular, explicit emphasis matters as much as the logic that informs his argument, but rather this claim (by Craig) that Schmitt is "entirely" defensive, as if such a thing is thinkable, much less possible.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Nov 14, 2006 9:01:28 PM
I think it's undoubtedly right that a defensive/offensive distinction can not be clearly maintained here, to explicate what Schmitt would be getting at in insisting on the conflictual/polemical "nature" of the political as determined by the recognition of the enemy. But just as obviously it is not the pursuit of violent conflict, but rather the permanent potentiality of such extremity that makes for the distinction friend/enemy as determinative of political behavior. It's the dangerousness/exposedness of "man", i.e. human beings, that makes for the "necessity" and "elevation" of power-relations, for what Schmitt sees as the "essential" tension of the political. (The analog would be Heidegger's reflection on the Greek tragedians' characterization of man as "to deinon", not just dangerous, but fearsome, awesome, uncanny.) For Schmitt, the political was a,- if not the,- realm of human exceedance.
Schmitt's initial concern was to criticize the liberal constitutional conception of the Rechtstaat, of the state as defined solely through the "autonomous" self-regulating operation of legal norms. (Schmitt, it seems to me, was clearly strongly influenced by his early reading of Lukacs' "History and Class Consciousness": his criticism of the split between economism and moralism in liberalism paralleling Lukacs' "antinomy of bourgeois class consciousness", his distinction between legality and legitimacy mirroring Lukacs' discussion of legality and illegality in revolutionary praxis, and his notion of "political theology" counterposing Lukacs' frankly idealist and messianic notion of the revolutionary proletariat as the subject-object identical of History). It was initially to account for the effectivity of law that he took recourse to , on the one hand, the political, (which is at once constituted by and constitutes a legal order), and, on the other, to the definition of sovereignty as the capacity to decide the exception, since law requires at once a coercive enforcement power and a legitimation as authoritative, if it is to effectively regulate social conflicts and maintain "order". It's that rootedness of legal "order" simultaneously in political conflict and in the effective coercion of "authoritative" power, with its underlying potential for violent excess, that liberal advocates of "the rule of law, not men", of a fictive harmonization of norms and interests independent of the agency and conditions of human beings, can not seem to abide, nor grasp, or, perhaps rather, that they denegate. But that underlying potential for violent excess must be at once drawn upon and limited in the political delimitation that maintains any legal "order", which is always in question, subject to exception, to the decisions of socio-political action. And that would be for Schmitt what "fuels" the pre-eminence of the political, which is not so much a matter of being in a state of nature, but of being in the "nature" of a state. What characterizes the liberal temptation to misread Schmitt is to see him as saying the potential extremity of violence is the "essence" and even goal of the political, rather than the source of political "peace", as the "essential" tension that bounds and delimits political decision/action.
Still, that is not to say that the formulations of Schmitt's work are unproblematic and don't invite disturbing questions. For one thing, his traditionalistic conception of sovereignty, as unitary, "inalienable, whole and entire", poses, but scarcely resolves the constitutional paradox of the constituent/constituted power,- (not that that paradox is exactly resolveable),- while biasing the concept in an authoritarian direction. Further, such a unitary conception of sovereignty belies the structural-functional differentiation of modern societies, which Schmitt was all too aware of. And it lends an identitarian cast to his conception of the political as involving mutually threatening conflicts between ways of life, which belies the conception of the political as an exposedness, a confrontation with otherness, which is precisely what lends it its uncanniness and pre-eminence. In other words, it fails to recognize the public-political as a realm of necessary alienation, in favor of an authoritarian conception of social solidarities. Again, in "defining" the political through the distinction between friend and enemy, with the emphasis on the recognition of the enemy,- (though that does seem to me to capture accurately aspects of political behavior, especially with respect to how alliances are formed through manoeuvers and conflicts),- an entirely "externalist" standpoint is taken, which fails to take into account how a political community is constituted "internally" in the first place; that is, it ignores any issue of "philia" and any good life in common. Likewise any such notion of community can be defined solely through its exclusions.
But I suppose what bothers me about Schmitt the most is the way his defining of the "autonomy" of the political realm through the distinction of friend and enemy leads on, not just to the intensification and totalization of political conflicts, insofar as any sort of issue, be it social, cultural, moral, economic, religious, etc., can be taken into the political realm and assume its cast and color, rendering conflict over political issues entirely intransitive and polemical, but to the stripping of any such issues of any "rational" criteria, by which they could be decided, as if it were the mere fact of decision, independent of any who or what of decision, that is decisive. (Among other things, the improvement over legal positivism here is not apparent). Between the definition of the sovereign as the one who decides the exception and the definition of the political as the decision between friend and enemy, presumably open to all political actors, any "substantive" criteria for decision becomes phantasmagorical. If in politics, as (the need for) collective action, the pressure for decision is paramount, likewise, in politics, the finality of decision is never final, but is always raised anew in its consequences.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Nov 15, 2006 7:58:44 AM
Awhile back I spent a few days reading a few hundred pages by and about Schmitt (in the context of Leo Strauss, Agamben, and to a lesser extent Benjamin). One thing in question for me was whether or not to spend more time with Schmitt, and I decided not to.
This was mostly because I didn't like what I read. I don't much like Strauss either, I have no idea what Agamben is trying to do, and I like Benjamin's cultural criticism but not his political stuff. I'm not a historian of Germany or of political philosophy and that's where I think Schmitt and the others belong (with Strauss also playing an American role).
So I'm never going to be a Schmitt expert and don't claim to be one. All I can say in the present context is about what Rufo said. The "final distinctions" are fundamental, and the intended message, and the "It is by no means" passage is a hedge.
I also doubt that Schmitt primarily meant defensive war. The other is the enemy by being other, as far as I can tell, not because he invades or threatens. Multinationalist systems favor defensive war and disfavor aggressive war, but I don't read Schmitt as a multinationalist.
Schmitt is not a particular bete noir of mine. To me the martiality of the early twentieth century (1900--1945) is unexplained, and without reading contemporary accounts (only reading summary histories) it's hard to realize how pervasive the desire for violence was. To me the turning point of European history was 1914, and not anything Hitler or Stalin did (much less Schmitt). But I don't have any special insight into that turning point.
I will respond to comments, but essentially I've said everything I know. I decided not to follow up my Schmitt studies, so I'm not going to be any help with Schmitt, and while I think I've framed 1914 correctly, I have no idea what 1914 really meant. 1914 is just an enormous question with no suggested answer.
Posted by: John Emerson | Nov 18, 2006 1:13:25 AM
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