Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt's decision

Representations

Volumn 83, Issue , 2003, Pages 67-96

  Kahn, Victoria ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42949149065     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2003.83.1.67     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. See, for example, Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, 1983)
2. George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception (Westport, Conn., 1989)
3. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919-1046
4. William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)
5. William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, Md., 1999)
6. Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York, 1992)
7. John McCormick, "Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany," Political Theory 22 (1994): 619-52
8. John McCormick, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997)
9. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York, 1997)
10. Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Harvey Lomax (Chicago, 1995)
11. David Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism (Durham, N.C., 1998)
12. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, trans. Marcus Brainard (Chicago, 1998)
13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998)
14. Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London, 1999)
15. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York, 2000)
16. See also the review article by John McCormick, "Political Theory and Political Theology," Political Theory 26 (1998): 830-54
17. In addition, Telos 71 (1987) has a special section on Schmitt and the Frankfurt School
18. and the entire issue of Telos 72 (1987) is devoted to Schmitt. For the specifically aesthetic dimension of Schmitt's work, see the studies cited in note 7. Needless to say, there is also an extensive bibliography of recent works on Schmitt in German, Italian, and French
19. Carl Schmitt, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, " trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos 96 (1993): 130-42; here 131. Schmitt emphasizes that this is not a unidirectional, unidimensional process: "there is always a plurality of diverse, already spent stages coexisting" (131)
20. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996), 65-66, 72
21. McCormick, Carl Schmitt, 66
22. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 18-19
23. Karl Löwith, "The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt," in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York, 1995), 141, 146. This essay was originally published in 1935
24. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 15: "The exception is more interesting than the rule."
25. Peter Bürger, "Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf Asthetik," in Zerstörung, Rettung des Mythos durch Licht, ed. Christa Bürger (Frankfurt, 1986), 173 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own)
26. Richard Wolin, "The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror," Political Theory 20(1992), 433, 443, 445
27. On Schmitt's aestheticization of politics, see also Jürgen Habermas, "The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English," in The New Conservatism, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 137
28. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), Introduction, section 9, 34
29. On Schmitt's attack on the liberal notion of culture, see the excellent article by Miguel E. Vatter, "Taking Exception to Liberalism: Heinrich Meier's Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue" Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19 (1997): 323-44, esp. 331-32
30. referring to Kant's Critique of Judgment, section 84
31. Paul Hirst, "Carl Schmitt's Decisionism," in Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, 11
32. The Thomas Hobbes of Political Theology is, however, not quite as sublime as this would suggest. Hobbes has the right conception of sovereignty, but he hovers on the threshold of liberal modernity. Hobbes was influenced by the natural sciences and "mathematical relativism" (34). Still, "juristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences" that Hobbes neglected the importance of the person of the sovereign
33. See Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 207
34. on how later editions of The Concept of the Political reflect Schmitt's accommodation to the Nazi regime: among other changes, Schmitt deleted references to Karl Marx and Georg Lukács that had appeared in the first edition
35. All quotations in this and the next paragraph are from Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), here 66
36. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, Conn., 1996), 13-24. See 21 on materialism, and 19 on the incarnation
37. On mere fictions, see Leo Strauss's comments on The Concept of the Political, in that volume, 93, 94
38. To a literary critic, Schmitt's distinction between myth and representation seems remarkably close to J. W. von Goethe's aesthetic preference for symbol over allegory, which Walter Benjamin famously criticized in his book on German tragic drama
39. On the mutually reinforcing relationship between myth and technology, see McCormick, "Fear, Technology and the State," 642
40. citing Walter Benjamin, "The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" (1936)
41. McCormick also points out that the mutual relationship between myth and technology is more familiar to us as the relationship between myth and enlightenment in T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment
42. Helpful discussions of Strauss's commentary on Schmitt can be found in John McCormick, "Fear, Technology, and the State"; McCormick, Carl Schmitt, 250-66
43. Vatter, "Taking Exception to Liberalism"
44. and Robert Howse, "From Legitimacy to Dictatorship - and Back Again: Leo Strauss's Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt," in Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics, 56-91. Vatter and Howse, who completely disagree about Strauss's views, are a good introduction to the conflicting interpretations of Strauss's work in general
45. Strauss's critique of Schmitt's indecision anticipates all those modern readers who have argued that Schmitt falls into the errors of Romanticism or aesthetics that he criticized both in The Concept of the Political and in Political Romanticism. Strauss cites the passage from The Concept of the Political where Schmitt asserts that a world without the political is a world "of culture, civilization" and above all "entertainment." According to Schmitt, this world might be very "interesting" (here one is reminded that the interesting was the mark of the aesthetic for Seren Kierkegaard) but it could never be serious (101, 103). This is Schmitt's aporia, according to Strauss: Schmitt cannot critique the aesthetic and affirm the seriousness of the political without making a moral claim, a moral distinction between the political and the ostensibly apolitical world of modernity. To do so, he must either affirm the moral seriousness of the political by subjecting the political to the liberal concept of morality from which he earlier distinguished it; or he must elaborate a different notion of morality, a new "transprivate" basis of "obligation" (104). But Schmitt has not done so. He has not described the new "order of the human things" (106). He has merely substituted the notion of "necessity" for that of obligation, thereby concealing his moral judgment (105). In doing so, he has acted in accordance with the individualism of liberal society
46. Of course, Strauss was also vulnerable to the charge of existentialist historicism. See McCormick, "Fear, Technology, and the State," 648 n. 31
47. Cf. Leo Strauss's pejorative remarks about how Leviathan anticipates the eighteenth-century notion of the aesthetic in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Eisa M. Sinclair (Chicago, 1952), 161 n. 2
48. The book was originally published in 1936. McCormick, "Fear, Technology, and the State," argues that Strauss's book on Hobbes pointed Schmitt to the importance of myth in instilling fear of violent death, but gives no specific references to Strauss's discussion of myth (636). In contrast, I believe Strauss saw the myth of Leviathan as complicit with the rise of the aesthetic
49. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1994), "Review and Conclusion." All subsequent references are to chapter first, then page
50. According to Schmitt, this is the dilemma of liberal democracy; cf. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 28
51. McCormick makes the point that Schmitt could have argued that the Nazi state overcomes the dilemmas of liberalism, but conspicuously he does not. For another reading Der Leviathan as an indirect criticism of the Nazi state, see George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception
52. and Schwab's introduction to The Concept of the Political, 13
53. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 17, 120
54. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 21
55. Of course, the emergency power of the Weimar Reichspräsident also means that he did not represent the people in any mimetic way. But, whereas Hobbes stresses convention, Schmitt stresses personalism
56. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, Conn., 1996), 98
57. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Düsseldorf, 1956)
58. The book has been translated into French as Hamlet ou Hécube: L'irruption du temps dans le jeu, by Jean-Louis Besson and Jean Jourdheuil (Paris, 1992)
59. One chapter and the Appendix, "A response to Walter Benjamin on The Origin of German Tragic Drama," have been published in English: Carl Schmitt, "The Source of the Tragic," trans. David Pan, Telos 72 (1987): 133-51. All quotations are from the Pan translation
60. Goethe, Wilhelm Master's Apprenticeship, trans. R. Dillon Boylan (London, 1875), 270
61. Though he doesn't refer to Schmitt's book on Hamlet, Jürgen Habermas discusses Wilhelm Meister as an illustration of the demise of Schmitt's concept of "representative publicness" in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 12-14
62. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett (New York, 2001), 34-41, esp. 37
63. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1979), 231, 583-84, 1225-32; the quote is from 1228
64. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber nordische Dichtkunst," in Characteristiken und Kritiken II (1802-1829), ed. Hans Eichner (Munich, 1975), 257 and 244. This equation of Hamlet with Germany helps to explain why Hamlet figured so prominently in Walter Benjamin's veiled critique of twentieth-century German politics in his book on German tragic drama
65. There is an extensive secondary literature on the cultural appropriation of Shakespeare by the Third Reich. See, among others, Werner Habicht, "Shakespeare and Theater Politics in the Third Reich," in Hannah Scolnicov and Peter Holland, eds., The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture (Cambridge, 1989), 110-20
66. and Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998). I am grateful to Richard Burt for these references
67. On the last page Hamlet oder Hekuba, Schmitt also refers to a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, whose first line is "Deutschland ist Hamlet!" Schmitt may also have been responding to Karl Jaspers's 1947 book, Von der Wahrheit, which included a discussion of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy that clearly allegorized the events of the second World War and the Nazi perversion of tragic rhetoric, the pseudo-tragic evocation of "the racial past."
68. The discussion of tragedy has been translated as Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston, 1952), here 101. According to Jaspers, "tragically, the individual represents the genuine exception which, though opposing the law, yet has truth on his side" (48). Jaspers also criticized the merely aesthetic understanding of tragedy, in which "the play becomes devoid of moral obligation" (87). Jaspers includes a brief analysis of Hamlet, in which he argues that Hamlet can only be condemned for inaction by someone who equates action with unthinking reflex (65)
69. Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 255
70. For the transcript of this exchange and commentary see Joseph W. Bendersky "Schmitt at Nuremberg," Telos 72 (1987): 91-106. The quotations from Schmitt's subsequent reflection on his exchange with Robert Kempner appear on 122 and 123. Bendersky states that Schmitt's ideas were ignored by the Nazi regime and that he was interrogated mostly because of his notorious reputation outside of Germany
71. "In tragedy the common public sphere (which in every performance encompasses the author, the actors, and the audience) is not based on the accepted rules of language and play but upon a shared historical reality"; Schmitt, "Source of the Tragic," 143
72. Carl Schmitt, "The Source of the Tragic," 136, 148, and 149
73. citing Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie, paras. 93 (misprinted as 98) and 218
74. For a good discussion of Schmitt's reading of Benjamin on Hamlet, see David Pan, "Political Aesthetics: Carl Schmitt on Hamlet," Telos 72 (1987): 153-59
75. For a discussion of Schmitt's relationship to Benjamin that briefly touches on Schmitt's Hamlet oder Hekuba
76. see Horst Bredekamp, "From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes," Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 247-66
77. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1977), 70-71
78. On the differences between Schmitt's concept of the sovereign and Benjamin's views of the baroque sovereign, see the excellent article by Samuel Weber, "Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt," Diacritics 22 (1992): 5-18
79. On the "discontinuous temporality of decision" in Trauerspiel, see Weber, "Taking Exception to Decision," 16-17. In Weber's words, "the plotter begins where the sovereign hopes to end: with the ex-clusion of the state of exception" (17). Benjamin's argument in the Trauerspiel book applies not only to Hamlet, with its crisis of sovereignty and Hamlet's own indecision, but also to Hobbes. Although the Hobbesian sovereign is he who decides the exception, Hobbes's political theory responds to the crisis of sovereignty that Benjamin sees represented in the baroque play of mourning. In Trauerspiel, Benjamin offered what Weber has called "a reconstruction of the political anthropology of the baroque," centered on three figures: the tyrant, the martyr, and the plotter (9). In the world of baroque politics, the sovereign finds himself in a position where a decision is both necessary and impossible. He responds by becoming a tyrant, but his inevitable ineffectiveness in turn transforms him into a martyr. The violent oscillation between tyrant and martyr in turn produces the plotter. This is a good description of the events leading up to the English civil war, which formed the backdrop of Leviathan. At the outset of the Long Parliament (shortly before the outbreak of civil war), Charles conceded he had abused his power; with his execution, he became a martyr. And these events catapulted Oliver Cromwell to power, whom Andrew Marvell described as a consummate plotter, a hero of Machiavellian virtù. I discuss the differences between the dysfunctional sovereign of the Trauerspiel and the Hobbesian sovereign later in this essay
80. My emphasis. Cf. Parliamentary Democracy
81. and The Concept of the Political on liberalism's relativizing of different points of view Spiel is associated not only with fiction but also with liberal relativism
82. On Spiel, see Schmitt, "The Source of the Tragic," 139
83. I was helped to see this point by conversations with my colleague, David Bates
84. This opposition between civilization and barbarism owes something to Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of civilization in The Genealogy of Morals
85. or perhaps to Oswald Spengler's defense of "blood and tradition" against civilization in The Decline of the West. Students of Benjamin will also recall his maxim that every achievement of civilization is simultaneously a record of barbarism
86. One is also reminded here of Schmitt's celebration in Roman Catholicism and Political Form of "the antithesis of [the] empire of technology ... nature untouched by civilization, wild and barbarian." In that earlier work, however, Schmitt rejected this idealization of the barbaric: "Such a dichotomy between a rationalistic-mechanistic world of human labor and a romantic-virginal state of nature is totally foreign to the Roman Catholic view of nature," which Schmitt was defending (10)
87. Cf. Parliamentary Democracy on the revolutionary use of force by the masses as an expression of immediate life and barbarity (68-72). Benjamin himself, according to Schmitt, neglected the differences between Elizabethan England and absolutist France and so missed the distinction between the barbaric and the political. He thus misapplied Schmitt's conception of the sovereign to Shakespeare's Trauerspiele: In Shakespeare's Elizabethan England the baroque theatrification of life was still unfounded and elementary - not yet incorporated into the strict framework of the sovereign state and its establishment of public peace, security and order, as was the theater of Corneille and Racine in the France of Louis XIV In comparison with this classic theater, Shakespeare's play in its comic as well as melancholic aspects was coarse and elementary, barbaric and not yet "political" in the sense of the state at that time. (140)
88. Franco Moretti reads Shakespearean tragedy in terms of the shift from a theological to a secular worldview in Signs Taken for Wonders (London, 1983), 42-82
89. (Moretti briefly discusses the relevance of Schmitt's notion of sovereignty for Tudor-Stuart drama early in this essay.) Stephen Greenblatt reads Hamlet as dramatizing contemporary anxiety about the shift from a Catholic notion of purgatory and fullness of ritual to a vitiated Protestant theatricality in Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, 2001)
90. Schmitt draws on Lilian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge, 1921)
91. and J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in "Hamlet" (Cambridge, 1951)
92. The first quarto was a pirated edition, half as long as the second quarto of 1604, and is not considered a reliable text. It may have been edited or pirated for performance in the provinces. For an excellent modern account of the differences between the first quarto, the second quarto, and the first folio editions of Hamlet, see Leah S. Marcus, "Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet," in her Unediting the Renaissance (New York, 1996), 132-76. Marcus makes it clear that the Hamlet of the first quarto is far less self-reflective and melancholic, and far more capable of action, than the later Hamlets: "While Q2 frequently doubles back upon itself and slows down the action with long meditative speeches, Q1 Hamlet has no time for prolonged meditation and very litde time for soliloquies"; "But what is lost in terms of Hamlet's relentless, nearly manic probing of the dark borders of human existence is partly gained back by his increased capacity for action" (145)
93. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2, lines 527-43, in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York, 1997)
94. It's as though Hamlet were anticipating Benjamin's analysis of the indecision and theatricality characteristic of German baroque drama in contrast to genuine tragedy. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin writes: "In the European Trauerspiel as a whole ... the stage is also not strictly fixable, not an actual place, but it too is dialectically split. Bound to the court, it yet remains a travelling theatre; metaphorically its boards represent the earth as the setting created for the enactment of history; it follows the court from town to town" (119)
95. In this light, Hamlet's decision to act would be analogous to what Löwith, "Occasional Decisionism," describes as Schmitt's "decision in favor of decisiveness" (158), or as the "radical indifference of purely formal decision to any kind of political content" (150)
96. Schmitt himself writes that Elizabethan society "largely perceived its own action as theater" but his remarks on Hamlet and Hecuba seem designed precisely to eradicate the difference between theater and historical fact; "The Source of the Tragic," 140
97. That is, it's the indecision that's tragic, rather than the facts of the succession. This is why Hamlet is a modern tragedy, rather than an ancient tragedy
98. Weber, "Taking Exception to Decision," 17
99. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic-Drama, 119, on spectatorship
100. For a variety of arguments regarding Shakespeare's theatrical critique of absolutism, see Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders
101. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
102. Constance Jordan, Shakespeare's Monarchies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997)
103. Lorna Hutson, "Not the King's Two Bodies," in Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, eds., Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 2001), 266-98
104. Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen (forthcoming)
105. See Wolin, "Carl Schmitt, the Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror," 434
106. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson with revisions by Howard A. Johnson (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 1:139
107. Kierkegaard allows for modern tragedy - but argues that the proportion of subjective and objective, pain and sorrow, differs from that of ancient tragedy
108. For a tendentious reading of Hobbes as a political realist, see Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics (New York, 2002)
109. and Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003)
110. Kagan is usefully reviewed by Tony Judt in "America and the World," New York Review of Books, 10 May 2003, 28-31
111. For a different analysis of why we should read Schmitt, though one that is ultimately compatible with my own, see D. A. Jeremy Tolman, "Should We Read Carl Schmitt Today?" Berkeley Journal of International Law 19 (2001): 127-60