Liberal enmity: The figure of the foe in the political ontology of liberalism

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 75-99

  Prozorov, Sergei ^a  

^a PETROZAVODSK STATE UNIVERSITY   (Russian Federation)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33847024328     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060350010801     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. See Bryan S. Turner, 'Sovereignty and Emergency: Political Theology, Islam and American Conservatism', Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 103-19;
2. Michael C. Williams, 'Words, Images, Enemies: Securitisation and International Politics', International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003): 511-31.
3. See Renato Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998);
4. William Rasch, 'Conflict as a Vocation: Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Politics', Theory, Culture and Society 17, no. 6 (2000): 1-32;
5. Mika Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life: Carl Schmitt and the Political Thought of Late Modernity (Jyvaskyla: Sophi, 2004).
6. See David Long, 'Conclusion: Interwar Idealism, Liberal Internationalism and Contemporary International Theory' in, Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis: Interwar Idealism Reassessed, ed. David Long and Peter Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) for a detailed discussion of the liberal philosophical sources of interwar idealism in IR.
7. For a critique of the realist/idealist dichotomy of the 'First Debate' see Cameron G. Thies, 'Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the Idealist-Realist Debate', European Journal of International Relations 8 no. 2: 147-85;
8. Stefano Guzzini, 'The Enduring Dilemmas of Realism in International Relations', European Journal of International Relations 10 no. 4: 533-68;
9. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
10. See Chantal Mouffe (ed.), The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999);
11. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), William Rasch, 'Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy', Cultural Critique 54, no. 1 (2003): 121-41;
12. William Rasch, 'Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy', Cultural Critique 54, no. 1 (2003): 121-41;
13. Louiza Odysseos, 'Über der Linie: Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror', paper presented at the 5th Pan-European IR Conference, the Hague, September 9-11 (2004);
14. Fabio Petito, 'Against World Unity: Carl Schmitt and the Western-Centric and Liberal Global Order', paper presented at the 5th Pan-European IR Conference, the Hague, September 9-11 (2004).
15. See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 48-53.
16. See respectively Carlo Galli, 'Carl Schmitt's Antiliberalism: Its Theoretical and Historical Sources and its Philosophical and Political Meaning', Cardozo Law Review 21 (2000): 1597-1617;
17. Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life;
18. Petito, Against World Unity.
19. Cf. Nikolas Rose, 'Governing "Advanced' Liberal Democracies" in., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, Andrew Barry et al. (London: UCL Press, 1996a), 37-64.
20. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), 35-6.
21. For a detailed reading of liberalism along these lines see Sergei Prozorov, Political Pedagogy of Technical Assistance: A Study in Historical Ontology of Russian Postcommunism (Tampere: Studia. Politica Tamperensis, 2004).
22. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 69 and more generally 69-79.
23. See also Galli, 'Carl Schmitt's Antiliberalism'. Understanding liberalism as a dispersed discourse also permits appreciation of Renato Cristi's argument that Schmitt's own approach also belongs to the liberal discourse and functions as its auto-critique.
24. See Cristi, Carl Schmitt.
25. For a more general argument that political realism must be located within the discursive context of 'liberal modernity, which nonetheless remains ambivalent on Schmitt's (anti)liberalism, see Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, particularly chs 3, 4).
26. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 73-8.
27. I am grateful to the anonymous referee for Millennium for suggesting this formulation of the approach of this article.
28. Cf. Dean, Governmentality, 49-51;
29. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61-97.
30. See also William, The Realist Tradition for a similar reading of political realism as an (auto)critique of a problematic foundations of liberalism, which nonetheless appears to endorse a more conventional approach to Schmitt as the 'enemy' of liberal democracy (84-93, and more generally ch. 3).
31. Cf. Guzzini, 'The Enduring Dilemmas of Realism'.
32. Mouffe, 'Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy' in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Mouffe 50.
33. See also Jef Huysmans, 'The Question of the Limit: Desecuritisation and the Aesthetics of Horror in Political Realism', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 569-89.
34. See Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 12-13, 30-1;
35. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political 21-27, 37-9.
36. Leo Strauss, 'Comments on Carl Schmitt's Der Begriff Des Politischen' in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 103.
37. Slavoj Zizek,'Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics' in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Mouffe,19. Italics added.
38. Ibid., 20. Italics added.
39. For a similar argument see Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life.
40. We have addressed the ontological status of Schmitt's constitutive concepts in more detail in Prozorov, 'X/Xs: Toward a General Theory of the Exception', Alternatives 30, no. 1 (2005): 81-112.
41. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 38.
42. Ibid., 33.
43. See also ibid., 27-8, 33-5.
44. For a detailed discussion of this notion see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1996), 114-36;
45. Jesse Sims, 'Absolute Adversity: Schmitt, Levinas and the Possibility of Killing', Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2005): 223-52.
46. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27.
47. Cf. Strauss, 'Comments', 87-90. This interpretation of Schmitt's understanding of enmity clearly differentiates his approach from the conservative-revolutionary 'aesthetics of horror' and the romanticisation of violence that are frequently attributed to him.
48. See, e.g., Huysmans, 'The Question of the Limit'.
49. For a reading that rejects any such attribution see Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, 27-8. In our view, Schmitt's affirmation of the ever-present possibility of violent death carries no romantic or aesthetic connotations whatsoever; it is horrifying beyond any aesthetisation. Moreover, it is precisely the fear of this horrifying possibility that animates both his 'transcendental' project of elevating enmity to the constitutive condition of politics and his affirmation of the historical modality of enmity that characterised the Westphalian era, which, as we discuss below, was marked by the limitation and rationalisation of enmity.
50. See Sims, 'Absolute Adversity' for a Levinasian reading of Schmitt from this perspective on enmity. It must be emphasised that an argument that enmity is inherent in the human condition does not necessarily require subscribing to any anthropological or theological account of 'human nature', but merely an existential recognition that our 'being-with-others' carries an ever-present danger of violent death.
51. Cf. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 58-66;
52. Strauss, 'Comments', 93-8 on the abandonment of moral categories of good and evil in favour of the existential category of dangerousness.
53. Zizek, 'Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics', 29.
54. See also Williams, The Realist Tradition, 90-2, 189.
55. See Prozorov, 'Three Theses on Governance and the Political', Journal of International Relations and Development 7, no. 3 (2004): 267-93;
56. Prozorov, 'X/Xs'.
57. See Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 101-26, 184-7.
58. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 187. Italics added.
59. Cf. Sims, 'Absolute Adversity;
60. Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, 156.
61. Ojakangas's reading of Schmitt's understanding of the encounter with the Other is almost identical to Levinas's famous description in Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 198-236.
62. 'As a concrete force, the enemy precedes reflection. It perturbs the world of the reflecting self - its otherness and strangeness calls the self into question. The force of the enemy disrupts my identity and no amount of reflection can reduce its difference into an immanence of the same' (Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, 153). Of course, Schmitt draws entirely different conclusions from this ontology of alterity than Levinas does.
63. For a detailed discussion of this theme in the attempt to reconstruct a Schmittian ethics of alterity see Prozorov, 'The Ethos of Insecure Life: Reading Carl Schmitt's Existential Decisionism as a Foucauldian Ethics' in The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt, ed. Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito (London: Routledge: forthcoming 2007).
64. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27-9;
65. Georg Schwab, 'Introduction' in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 9-11;
66. Jean-Francois Kervegan, 'Carl Schmitt and "World Unity"' in, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Mouffe 62-3;
67. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 245-8.
68. Schmitt, The Concept of Political, 29.
69. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 36. Italics added.
70. See Zizek, 'A Plea for Leninist Intolerance', Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 542-66;
71. Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), ch. 5.
72. We have addressed the question of a synthesis of philosophical projects of Schmitt and Foucault in a series of studies that demonstrate the affinities of two authors in a disposition that we term 'ontological extremism'. See particularly Prozorov,'Three Theses','X/Xs' and Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming 2007) For our purposes in this article, the two authors' critiques of liberalism are fully commensurable both ontologically and ethically, despite the evident difference between their political standpoints.
73. See, e.g., Ole Wæver, 'Insecurity, Security and Asecurity in the West European Non-war Community, in Security Communities, ed. Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69-118.
74. Cf. Thomas Diez, 'Europe's Others and the Return of Geopolitics', Cambridge Review of International Studies 17, no. 2 (2004): 319-35.
75. We have addressed this question in detail in Prozorov, Understanding Conflict between Russia and the EU: The Limits of Integration (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), ch. 6.
76. See Alexander Wendt, 'Why a World State is Inevitable', European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003): 491-542.
77. See Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, ch. 6;
78. Prozorov, 'X/Xs'.
79. Cf. Francois Ewald, 'A Power Without an Exterior', in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. T.J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 169-75.
80. Schmitt, 'Ethic of State and Pluralistic State' in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Mouffe, 201. Italics added.
81. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 52-9.
82. Schmitt, 'Ethic of State', 206. Italics added.
83. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the concept of the international as a fictitious space, constituted by the ontological priority of difference, see Prozorov, Understanding Conflict, ch. 7.
84. Schmitt, 'Ethic of State', 204.
85. Schmitt, Glossarium (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988), 243. Italics added.
86. Schmitt, 'The Legal World Revolution', Telos 72 (1987): 80. Italics added.
87. Wendt, 'Why a World State is Inevitable', 528. Italics added.
88. Cf. Michael Dillon, 'Criminalising Social and Political Violence Internationally', Millennium 27, no. 3 (1998): 543-67.
89. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 79.
90. Zygmunt Bauman, 'Wars of the Globalisation Era', European Journal of Social Theory 4, no. 1 (2001): 15.
91. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54. Italics added.
92. Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, 76-7. Italics added.
93. Rasch, 'Human Rights as Geopolitics', 137.
94. Schmitt, 'Strong State and Sound Economy: An Address to Business Leaders' in Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism, 227.
95. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 55.
96. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, 'Introduction' in, Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Barry et al., 9. Italics added.
97. See also Michel Foucault, 'Governmentality', in, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Cohn Gordon and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991a), 87-104;
98. Dean, Governmentality, ch. 6;
99. Graham Burchell, 'Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing 'The System of Natural Liberty", in The Foucault Effect, ed. Burchell, Gordon and Miller 119-50.
100. Dean, 'Liberal Government and Authoritarianism', Economy and Society, 31, no. 1 (2002): 41.
101. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988);
102. Burchell, 'Peculiar Interests';
103. Foucault, 'Governmentality.
104. Dean, Governmentality, 131-49;
105. Barry Hindess, 'The Liberal Government of Unfreedom', Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001), 93-112.
106. Hindess, 'The Liberal Government', 93-7.
107. See also Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life, 93-5.
108. See Prozorov, Political Pedagogy.
109. For the discussion of the centrality to education of liberal political philosophy see Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 170-2, 284-5.
110. See Foucault, 'Politics and Reason' in, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings: 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence. D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988),64-5.
111. See also Dean, Governmentality, 74-6.
112. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 28.
113. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1998), 198.
114. Dean, 'Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality', Cultural Values 6, no. 1-2 (2002b): 129. Italics added.
115. See Prozorov, Political Pedagogy, ch. 3.
116. Rasch, 'Human Rights', 137. Italics added.
117. See also Odysseos, 'Über der Linie';
118. Dillon, 'Criminalising Social and Political Violence', Williams, The Realist Tradition, 195-203.
119. Foucault, 'Society Must be Defended', 194.
120. Ibid., 195. Italics added.
121. Ibid.
122. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 102. Italics added.
123. Foucault, 'Society Must be Defended', 12-19.