'The Most Radical Historicist'

It seems Leo Strauss is referring to one of two people - both of whom he greatly admired: either Heidegger or Schmitt. Which is the more likely candidate?

It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society, because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate. The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists: can these permanencies be used as criteria for distinguishing between the good and bad dispensations of fate? The historicist answers this question in the negative. He looks down on the permanencies in question because of their objective, common, superficial and rudimentary character: to become relevant, they would have to be completed, and their completion is no longer common but historical. It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason. ("What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 26-7)

As a matter of context, "What is Political Philosophy?," is the published version of the Judah L. Magnes lectures Strauss delivered at the Hebrew University in December 1954 and January 1955.

(Cross-posted to theoria.)

Notes on Coffee

Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas are, without a doubt, the most (in)famous political theorists to come from Germany since Marx. (One might want to include Leo Strauss, but I don't think he wrote anything of substance on coffee.) As is well-known - many of us get our introductions to Habermas via his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - Habermas associated the development of the salons and coffee-houses with the development of the public sphere, located between the spheres of 'family' and 'state.' Coffee, for Habermas, was essential to the development of liberal, bourgeois and democratic politics.  Much less well known is that Schmitt also wrote on coffee, the bourgeoisie and liberal democratic. His assessement of coffee and liberalism is nearly the opposite of Habermas'. Their respective assessments of coffee present interesting grounds upon which to judge and compare the anti-liberalism of Schmitt with the pro-liberalism of Habermas. Interestingly, it is worth noting that Schmitt's notes on coffee (1947-51) predate Habermas' book on the coffee-house (orig. 1962) by over a decade and coincide with the end of Schmitt's internment and interrogations at Nuremberg. While Habermas engages in a lengthy -  if albeit surprisingly ambivalent - confrontation with Schmitt in the Structural Transformation, he does not cite Schmitt's notes on coffee (most likely because they were not widely available, even in Germany, until 1991).

Extracts from Habermas' Structural Transformation and a discussion of Schmitt's Glossarium notes on coffee by Jakob Norberg 'below the fold.'

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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.

Conclusion: Carl Schmitt

Not looking to cut off at the last bits of discussion or to discourage future posts on the topic, but below is an interim index to the Carl Schmitt discussion, here at Long Sunday and elsewhere.  Should anyone be aware of any other discussions, please leave a comment with the URL.

I'd like to thank all the contributors - posters and commenters alike - for their participation.  The 'symposium' was far more successful than I had anticipated, given the length of the paper and the tendency of people to divide between those who can't look past his political affiliations and those who try to.

While there are no future symposiums under discussion at this time, I'd encourage people to write on nationalism/patriotism as we approach Canada Day (July 1) and the American Independence Day (July 4) and as we sit in middle of that soccer tournament.  Might I suggest the next formal discussion be on the topic of privilege?

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The Two Politicals

1. A number of commentators have speculated on the relationship between the people, the state and the political in Carl Schmitt’s political theory. Some, of course, have pointed out that this is a futile task: on the one hand, the English translation of The Concept of the Political is of the second edition and not the apparently decisive third and, on the other hand, the situation in the Weimar Republic is hardly comparable to our own. Thus, in one case we are told not to speak because of a lack of information and in the other case we are told not to speak because of the inherent difficulties in transposing concepts developed in one conjuncture to another. Readers of Carl Schmitt should, apparently, remain silent. (Indeed, some critics would prefer that Schmitt not be discussed at all.) And, yet, non-stop chatter, discussion and inquiries. The present 'symposium' is, by some measures, the most successful to date: it looks as though it will last the entire month featuring a diversity of contributions (many unduly neglected!) from a wide spectrum of contributors.

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Schmitt and Weber

The general progress of Schmitt's lecture (up to the point I'd like to discuss, which is the treatment of Lenin, which I don't get to below) goes like this: The emergence of the partisan, best represented by the anti-French resistance in 1808-1813 Spain, begins a long process that decays the distinction between 'citizen' and 'soldier.' Due to this international actors are pushed more in the direction of total war, where there are no citizens who can be reliably separated off from combattants. A lot of fascinating detail from the history of partisan activity is provided to illustrate the legal and technical changes. Particularly striking is the attempt by the Prussian state to adopt the Spanish model and, by legal fiat, compel the citizens of Prussia to employ 'partigiano' tactics against the French.

But at the same time Schmitt accompanies the description of this development with hyperbolic phrasing about the significance of the phenomena under study. "A spark flew north from Spain at that time. It did not kindle the same flame that gave the Spanish Guerrilla War its world-historical significance. But it started something whose continuance today in the second half of the twentieth century changed the face of the earth and its inhabitants. It produced a *theory* of war and of enmity that culminates in the theory of the partisan" (5). What do people think: does Schmitt overstate the significance of development he traces? Would it be fair to paraphrase Schmitt like this: "The emergence and growth of the partisan meant that the old approach to wars – which relied on a sharp, binary distinction between regular and irregular, combattants and non, legal and illegal – was no longer applicable. That's why the partisan is a world-historic figure that ends up producing new theories of war."

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How shame and envy maketh "the enemy" to go 'round; knights, be ye forever wroth, then with name cast vote, whilst women watch and nearly swoon

        When Sir Palomides saw that Sir Tristram was disguised, he thought to shame him:  he rode to a knight who was sorely wounded and who sat under a tree a good way from the field.
       "Sir knight," said Sir Palomides, "I pray you to lend me your armor and your shield, for mine is overly well known in this field; that hath done me great damage.  Ye shall have my armor and my shield which are as good as yours."
       "I will well," said the knight, "that ye have my armor and my shield.  If they may do you any avail, I am well pleased."
        So Sir Palomides armed hastily in that knight's armor and his shield, which shone like any crystal or silver, and he came riding into the field.  Neither Sir Tristram nor any of Sir Tristram's or King Author's party recognized Sir Palomides.  Just as he came into the field Sir Tristram smote down three knights, right in the sight of Sir Palomides.  Then he rode against Sir Tristram and each met the other with great spears, so hard that the spears burst up to their hands; then they dashed together with swords eagerly.  Sir Tristram marvelled what knight it was who did battle so mightily with him.  Then he was wroth, for he felt that knight to be passing strong, and he deemed he could not have ado with the remnant of the knights because of the strength of Sir Palomides.

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what we lose with 'the partisan'

Schmitt makes a very interesting point around p. 28 of the English translation of "Theory of the Partisan." First there was the irresistible temptation experienced by established European powers to use 'partisans' for their wars of national salvation. He refers to Bismarck's comments about wanting to use "any weapon" made available by new-found national feeling against France and the Hapsburg monarchy. The Prussian Landsturm edict, signed by the Prussian king in 1813, ordered all Prussian citizens to use every means to oppose the French and demanded that citizens refuse to cooperate with any measures, no matter how banal, of the occupiers (29). But at the same time established armies treated 'irregular' troops with great harshness. When armies fought, everyone wore uniforms, carried weapons openly, and you knew who who was. The beneficial aspect of this, Schmitt points out, was that a sharp limit was established concerning who war was directed at. If a soldier from an invading army came upon a civilian in a town -- someone not dressed as a soldier, not carrying a gun or sword -- the soldier didn't have to worry that the 'citizen' might jump up and stab him. The citizen, likewise, did not have to worry that the soldier would regard her as a menace. The result is a barrier against total war. This distinction held up, with exceptions, through World War I.

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Bibliographical Comments on Carl Schmitt

Commenter Gabriel Sanchez has some interesting things to say. To me, the most interesting involve the availability of Schmitt's work in English. Given the amount of attention Schmitt has gotten in recent years, one would think that the gears would be turning and soon we'd have the complete works -- but to my knowledge, there is not even a scholarly edition of the complete works in German, much less in English. What we have in English are a series of rather small books and short translations scattered throughout journals, and up until this spring, Political Theology -- one of his most discussed books -- was out of print.

What's the deal?

And why not an anthology? For instance, I just picked up the standard Marx-Engels Reader (ed. Tucker), which seems to be an agreed-upon standard for non-experts seeking to get a sense of the scope of Marx's thought. From what I know of Schmitt's work, such an anthology would be comparatively easy to assemble. His tendency toward relatively short books would make it easy to include entire works and avoid the danger of printing a series of potentially misleading extracts, for instance. Given the current status of Schmitt's work in English, an anthology of 400-500 pages would represent not simply a valuable condensation of a larger body of work -- it would arguably be a major step forward for knowledge of Schmitt in the English-speaking world. Even if there are already 400-500 pages (in Norton Anthology format) worth of stuff out there in English right now, half of it is out of print and most of the rest is difficult to track down.

Maybe I can get a fellowship to go over to Germany and get started on this. But until then, does anyone have any idea why this problem is so pronounced, given that Schmitt has become so unavoidable in certain ways?

If that question doesn't do it for you, here's a stupid one: Does it seem to anyone else that Schmitt is referred to by his first and last name more often than other thinkers are? You've got Hegel, Derrida, Agamben, Benjamin (though he gets a first name more often than some), Adorno, Marcuse, Zizek.... and Carl Schmitt. Is it the unexpected "C" that so fascinates us?

blogging schmitt

Schmitt's lecture, "The Theory of the Partisan," is given in March, 1962.  What was the status of the figure of the 'partisan' at that moment?  Castro was active as early as 1953.  The Algerian War of Independence took place 1953-1962.  Schmitt has been invited to the capital of the basque region in the far north of Spain, Navarra, by the Estudio General de Navarra.  This 'estudio' has long-time links with Opus Dei; the estudio itself was founded by the Church in 1960.

For me the substance of the preface is very hard to make out.  He seems to say that a mistake has been made concerning this essay, that it's not really linked to The Concept of the Political (CP) at all.  But then what's with the subtitle?  The subtitle, he writes, is "explained by the specific date of the publication.  " The publishers, Schmitt goes on, "are making the text of my essay of 1932 (that is, CP -jsr) accessible again at this time.  In recent decades several corollaries to this theme have emerged.  " Corollaries to what theme?  Are we still talking about the subtitle or now is it CP?  "The present treatment of the subject is not one of these" – that is, not one of these corollaries of an indefinite theme.  No, The Theory of the Partisan (TP) "is a freestanding work." And this free-standing work, what does it do?  In a sketchy way – and here I quote precisely (as always!) – "issues unavoidably in the problem of the distinction between friend and enemy."   Either that's a typo or an infelicitous translation -- which is easy to do with German.  The problem is at the word 'issues.' TP can't "issues unavoidably" in any problem.  A plausible rephrasing: "The Theory of the Partisan is not one of these more recent corollaries to CP, but a free-standing work that nevertheless unavoidably touches on the friend-enemy distinction."   But at the end of the paragraph he tells us he has decided to make TP available in the interests of "all those who have been following so far the difficult earlier discussion of the concept of the political."   I end this paragraph not being sure how to assess the 'free-standing work' line.  The comment about the publisher is also unclear to me.

The historical illustration that Schmitt chooses for his discussion of the partisan is the popular, reactionary Spanish resistance to Napoleon.  A choice of historical backdrop that doubtless provoke a wolf-like grin of approval from Schmitt's masters in Opus Dei.  (Okay, that last sentence was a joke.  But Schmitt does choose a "Spanish civil war" and one that was also – in large part, no reductionism here – marked by the battle between Enlightenment and Reaction.  He also does not choose the other, twentieth century Spanish civil war, with its different sentimental attachments.  No Ernest Hemingway is going to show up in Schmitt's spanish civil war.)

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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.

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’.

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Expansion, Exhaustion, Evaporation

Expansion, Exhaustion, Evaporation, (the fate of the political)

*all questions are leading, but not rhetorical*

I would like to begin by quoting Jodi’s post, she writes:

1. “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.”

2. Jodi’s formulation indicates a nagging question: Is it better to assume applicability in the case of a thinker like Schmitt? Are his categories and ideas applicable, or outdated? What is left of his thought when stretched out over the partisan? Even farther?

3. Thus, and first of all, the question of expansion. At what point does the current situation become prohibitive for the continued expansion of Schmitt’s ideas? When do we abandon his conceptions, his theories, as simply no longer applicable to the world we live in? When is it no longer Schmitt we are talking about, really, but something new? What would it mean to persist in speaking his vocabulary in spite of its obsolescence?

4. When is it, in short, that we give in to the feeling of desperate exhaustion that pervades the entirety Concept of the Political? Leo Strauss in his superb commentary on the essay, writes, “[Schmitt] affirms the political because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. The affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing more than the affirmation of the moral.” Can we imagine the progress of this threat? The disappearance of politics; its mourners tramping around, asserting its continued presence in a disturbing, nostalgic, morality play? What would that look like?

5. Indeed, the first question for the translation of Schmitt to the contemporary political lexicon would be the question of terrorism. We might want the terrorist to be a partisan, but this is a lie. The terrorist does not exist – at least in the way the partisan does. That the partisan insurgents in Iraq are called terrorists only redoubles the point. The terrorist exists only as a pure concept of the enemy, and as such, its purity belies the evaporation of the state. Insofar as the state has created an enemy that exists no place, with no name, and has no coherent ideology, it is only possible to assert that the state itself stands for no name, no place, and no coherent ideology. It has evaporated.

6. Does anyone actually know what happened on 9/11? This is not to cast a vote in favor of the conspiracy theorists – rather it is just to reaffirm the concrete undecideability of the event that created what now circulates as terrorism.

7. I would like to draw a parallel between Schmitt’s expansion of the political to include the partisan, and the Government’s expansion of the friend/enemy distinction with the now famous “with us or against us” quote. This comparison takes place insofar as both attempts to stretch the friend/enemy distinction well beyond the point of coherence rebound onto the political itself. The partisan is more telluric mystic than political agent, as his descent into irregularity certainly confounds the ‘high-point of politics’ understood as the collective, public recognition of the enemy. (for more, see Jodi’s post) Similarly, the invocation by the US Government of a global, all encompassing friend/enemy distinction, must, by Schmitt’s own terms, herald the end of politics itself.

8. Three final questions then:

1. Are we witnessing the persecution of a worldwide systematic application of violence that can no longer be called political? by Schmitt’s terms? By whose terms can it still be so-called, and, following, what is gained in the way of explanatory power by the continued circulation of the category itself?
2. Can there be no distinction more in need of entrenchment than that between terrorist and partisan? How much longer can we afford to let the undecidabilty of 9/11 haunt us as the idea of a pure enemy?

(Still no such thing as a spectacular bandage, and we had better get over it)

3. In light of all this, has the dialectic ever promised greater hope than it does today? An impossible question to be sure, but, reading Schmitt I became more convinced than ever that if the political was threatened in the thirties, it may now be one worse; exhausted, impoverished to the point of self-parody, and approaching the emptiness of Schmitt’s own valorizing polemic.

Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

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Variations on a theme: La complainte du partisan

(The following is a guest by John Barner, author of the weblog Slow Learner.)

On February fifteenth of this year, the partisan lost a friend.

Anna Marly (formerly Anna Betoulinsky) died at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy that included two variations on the theme of the partisan. The Chant des Partisans (1943), was initially written by Marly in her native Russian and was translated, with Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, into French.  At the same time, Resistance fighter Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie penned the lyrics to another song, to a tune of Marly’s, entitled La complainte du partisan (1943).  Armed only with her voice and a guitar, Marly would travel around London to perform the songs either for BBC radio broadcasts (heard by comrades via pirate radio in France) or small audiences.  The former has risen to anthem status in France, while the latter is perhaps best known for its inclusion (in a modified form) on Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room (1969).  In his theorizing of the partisan, Carl Schmitt notes that a historian “finds examples and parallels in history for all historical situations”¹.  Given that I have spent a significant portion of my life as a musician and songwriter, I have written the following while searching, in a way, for a lyrical parallel in the example of Marly’s songs—a voice, perhaps, that embodies (or is embodied by) Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.

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At Least Not on This Planet

[This is a post by Adam Kotsko, who quite often posts at The Weblog.]

In The Concept of the Political, we find the following paragraph:

Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being--and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. That wars are waged in the name of humanity is not a contradiction of this simple truth; quite the contrary, it has an especially intensive political meaning. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one's own and to deny the same to the enemy (pg. 54 of the University of Chicago edition).

Of course, a lot of this paragraph seems to be really right. What really stands out to me, however, is not the explicit conceptual apparatus brought to bear here so much as the strange little aside in the first paragraph: "at least not on this planet."

To some degree, it's a throw-away line. The logic is fairly transparent: If there were some alien empire out there who decided to wage war on humanity -- at least this is how the story normally seems to go in science fiction stories -- humanity "as such" would have an enemy and would therefore be able to wage war "as such." The crisis of the discovery of an extraterrestrial enemy -- an enemy not from this planet, not from earth -- would be necessary in order for humanity to become a political concept.

Thankfully, there probably aren't any extraterrestrial life forms waging war on humanity as such -- at least not at the moment. That goes without saying, right?

Perhaps not. In fact, one could say that The Theory of the Partisan takes place entirely within the space opened up by that strange little aside.

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Partisan of No Part

(The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, who authors the blog, What in the hell...?)

In 1972 Mario Tronti presented a paper dealing with Carl Schmitt at the University of Turin. Whether beginning or example, this presentation is of a conceptual turn in which "Schmittian elements became part of a thoroughgoing 'Marxist critique of Marxism' which sought (...) to put a practical theory of power squarely at the centre of revolutionary theorizing." (Muller, A Dangerous Mind, 179.) The Marxisti Schmittiani exemplify the problematic relationship of "Karl und Carl" which Tronti later characterizes, albeit not critically enough, as foundational to political theory.

There are several aspects in Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan resonant with the sensibility of operaismo and subsequent developments which take Tronti's early work as a touchstone. One such similarity is the relationship posited between resistance and constituted power wherein the former forces the latter to attempt to render resistance productive of innovation in the forms of power-over. In response to the partisan's irregularity, there are produced "new concepts of warfare (...) along with a new doctrine of war and politics" (3), such as that embodied in the Prussian Landsturm edict of 1813. A similar point can be seen in the chapter on the working day in volume one of Capital, concepts and law are produced in response to working class struggle. Technology as well. "The partisan too participates in the development - in the progress - of modern technology and its science." (54.) Again there is a Marxian parallel: "It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” (Capital v1, ch15.)

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Schmitt, at a tangent

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.

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The Becoming-Partisan of Thought: Fragments on Schmitt and Deleuze/Guattari

(The following is a guest post by Anthony Paul Smith, a contributor to The Weblog.)

First, let me voice my thanks to the powers that be at Long Sunday for allowing me to participate in this event. Reading Schmitt for the first time a few months ago (Political Theology) I had the feeling of aporia, that this was a thinker who causes a pause and then a speeding up of thought if one thinks first with and then past him. I’ve been working my way through Deleuze and Guattari as of late for a variety of projects and Schmitt’s thought kept creeping into my thoughts on their philosophy. I’ve presented some fragments here, as I lack a full picture of the problem currently, that I hope will be interesting for the symposium.

Deleuze and Guattari are famous for making thought political. For attempting bring attention to thought as it was already political. Following the many failures and weaknesses of commentary on Deleuze and Guattari this is usually taken to mean something carrying with it a moral goodness. Deleuze and Guattari resist stratification! Vive le différance! Becomings! The Body without Organs is magic! But it seems that this is preciously what politics is not. Schmitt’s thesis on the political is that it is the distinguishing between friend and enemy; this is the political project par excellence. The political is a stratification and that goes for the micropolitical.  Here I realize my reading may be contested and is not standard in the blogosphere, but let it be said that Deleuze and Guattari in their collaborative work show that the micropolitical is not resistance qua resistance as most people tend to suggest in blog commentary. Rather, the micropolitical is a site where one can resist at a ‘molecular’ level just as fascisms arise out of the micropolitical happenings within macropolitics (and this is why Goodchild’s attempt to create a transformer to wield the power of Deleuze and Guattari thought is appropriate). (Let it be noted that Guattari is less explicit about this in his singular work.) Micropolitics and macropolitics are not a moral binary and they tend to fall into one in the hands of socialists, anarchists, and communists (among whom I count myself).

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"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.

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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.

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Introduction: Carl Schmitt

In place of something substantive...

"Anybody who is at all committed to liberal democracy does not at all need to read Carl Schmitt." - Kurt Sontheimer

Introduction - First, I would like to thank everyone who has agreed to contribute a short piece or scattered thoughts on Carl Schmitt's essay, "Theory of the Partisan," which will likely end up dominating Long Sunday content for about the next week.  I am especially greatful because this is, by far, the longest piece yet proposed for a symposium and, therefore, the time committments I've asked of people is, most certainly, unreasonable.  I look forward to reading the posts!  Second, if you have not volunteered to post something, but would still like to or would like to contribute a more detailed response to an individual (or series!) of posts than can be adequately done through comment threads, then please do contact me and we'll arrange something.

The texts under discussion can be found here: from the New Centennial Review and Telos; two journals which incidentally published translations - with some interesting differences - of the same text in the same year.  A bibliography of Carl Schmitt's works in English can be found here.

Additionally, this post can be used as an 'open thread' regarding administrative matters, comments, etc that do not fit into the already existing posts.

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Double Fantasy

In anticipation of the upcoming symposium on Schmitt, I found a short piece by Simon Critchley discussing the "logic of the political" as it is used by the Bush administration.  Many oberservors have noted the Schmittian influence on the current hegemons, but Critchley wishes to draw out a "crypto-Schmittianism" he sees at work.  Initially his description is rather traditional: The political is the sphere that deals with external security and internal order.  "The political is about the construction of an enemy in order to maintain the unity of the citizenry."  This construct actually produces a "double fantasy:" the fantasy of the enemy and the fantasy of the homeland.  "It is through the fantasy of the enemy that the fantasy of the homeland is constituted."

So far nothing very controversial.  But Critchley believes that the Bush administration is "crypto- Schmittian" because of its hypocrisy regarding its "moralization of political judgement."

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buddies! (or not)

After so much enmity in the blogosphere (if sometimes of a semi-affectionate nature), and given that this form seems particularly prone to dispute, occasionally ironized or celebrated as "snark," it's refreshing to see some reflections on friendship.

Angela is perhaps shy to mention it, but she's put up some interesting thoughts on mateship, in the wake of the mining melodrama in Beaconsfield. Glen responds. I wonder how nationally circumscribed that discussion is, the "mate" as Australian icon of a rather particular type. Indeed, that's partly what's at issue in the disagreement between Angela and Glen.

Meanwhile, over on Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan continues an ongoing series of meditations on friendship, most recently with reference to Blanchot, Benjamin and Brecht, and Nietzsche.

Now, however much my friends are important, I've mentioned before I'm also keen on the limits to friendship, the indifference of what Alberto Moreiras terms the "non-friend," who can in some ways be equated with the subaltern. At issue here is the challenge of living together beyond like or dislike.

It's the question of community and exclusiveness. And then there's love.

Perhaps all of this will return when we start reading Schmitt.

Cross-posted to Posthegemony.

Carl (und Karl)

The next (formal) symposium to take place at Long Sunday will be on the topic of Carl Schmitt's "Theory of the Partisan".  (The next informal symposium event will be in celebration or commemoration of Karl Marx's birthday.  Short pieces, scattered thoughts, etc.)  It is tentatively scheduled for early June, possibly the first week. Because of the length of the essay, I've put the announcement out a bit earlier than the previous ones.   If you're interested in participating, please reply here or at theoria.  As always, new and old participants alike are welcome -- and encouraged -- to join in.

The essay, originally published in 1963, has finally been translated into English -- twice in 2004.  One version, under the title of "The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political" translated by A.C. Goodson is available online [pdf] from CR: The New Centennial Review  as a companion to their special issue on the essay in Volume 4, Issue 3.  It has also been published as "Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political" [pdf] in, of course, Telos 127 (Spring).

A bibliography of Schmitt's writings in English can be found here [pdf].  The essay, like Schmitt's work in general, has received quite a bit of attention, links and references to which will be posted shortly.

Confirmed: John S. Ransom, Adam, Nate, Angela, Craig, Luke, Jodi, Matt, Anthony Paul Smith, Old Doug Johnson, Squibb, John
Unconfirmed: Jon , Brett