Bodily negation: Carl Schmitt on the meaning of meaning

MLN - Modern Language Notes

Volumn 120, Issue 5, 2005, Pages 1066-1090

  Pourciau, Sarah ^a  

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EID: 61949123584     PISSN: 00267910     EISSN: 10806598     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mln.2006.0021     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. For an early and extremely influential example see Karl Löwith, "Der okkasionelle Dezisionismus von C. Schmitt," Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1984) XIII, p. 40
2. More recently and with somewhat less analytical nuance, both Richard Wolin and Peter Bürger have used the same approach to argue that Schmitt's aestheticization of political struggle should be aligned with the vitaiist irrationalism of his counterrevolutionary contemporaries Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, and that his rhetoric of "energy" and "authenticity" must be held at least partially responsible for the unassimilable excesses of twentieth-century fascism. See Richard Wolin, "Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror," Political Theory 20 (1992): 424-47
3. and Peter Bürger, "Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf Ästhetik," in Zerstörung: Rettung des Mythos durch Licht, ed. Christa Bürger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986) 170-76
4. See Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (München: Duncker und Humblot, 1925)
5. For an in-depth discussion of Schmitt's attempt to overcome the technologization of experience, see John McCormick's Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1997)
6. All parenthetical page references are to: Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1963)
7. and Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996). The first page numbers always refer to the English translation, the second to the German text. I have frequently modified the translation
8. In his 1932 response to The Concept of the Political, Leo Strauss contends that Schmitt's fervent and lucid critique of liberalism remains bound to a liberal-humanist affirmation of meaning, an affirmation which has no legitimate, conceptual foundation in the formal friend/enemy opposition he proposes as the criterion of the political. Strauss's own critique, in turn, remains bound to the liberal-humanist affirmation of objectivity and unbiased clarity that Schmitt thematizes and willfully perverts in The Concept of the Political ("Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpalitik 67 [1932]: 732-49
9. Reprinted in English translation in The Concept of the Political, trans. J. Harvey Lomax, 83-107.)
10. Andrew Norris, in "Carl Schmitt on Friends, Enemies and the Political," also takes note of the gap between those who the and that which must be preserved, and draws the necessary conclusion regarding the normative thrust of the Schmittian political: "Schmitt relies on the threat to the individual's own physical life to draw out the 'existential' quality of the political. But this threat is hardly identical with the threat to the collectivity's 'way of life' or 'form of existence.' In order to bridge the gap between the two, Schmitt must present the Lebensform as in some way prior to the individual" (Telos 112 [1998]: 68-89). Norris uses this observation in order to argue against Wolin's assertion that Schmitt's "existential definition of politics in terms of the primacy of the friend-enemy grouping necessitates the relinquishing of all claims to the 'good life' and instead to rest content with 'mere life' -namely, existential self-preservation" (Wolin 443)
11. Carl Schmitt, "Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen," published in the 1932 edition of Begriff des Politischen and reprinted with the latter in 1963; 95
12. On the relation between naming and the acquisition of land as the originary meaning of the Greek "nomos," see Der Nomos der Erde (München: Duncker und Humblot, 1997), esp. 36-51
13. Giorgio Agamben has offered a penetrating contemporary analysis of these ramifications, and of their relationship to the category of political exclusion, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998)
14. See his observations on the nature of pacifist war: "Such wars are necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political, they must simultaneously degrade the enemy into moral and other categories and make of him an inhuman monster" (36, emphasis mine). ["Solche Kriege sind notwendigerweise besonders intensive und unmenschliche Kriege, weil sie, über das Politische hinausgehend, den Feind gleichzeitig in moralischen und anderen Kategorien herabsetzen und zum unmenschlichen Scheusal machen müssen" (37, emphasis mine).]
15. See, for instance, the following observation from The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy: "Parliament is accordingly a place in which particles of reason that are strewn unequally among human beings gather themselves and bring public power under control" ["Das Parlament ist infolgedessen der Platz, an dem die unter den Menschen verstreuten, ungleich verteilten Vernunftpartikeln sich sammeln und zur öffentlichen Herrschaft bringen"]. Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1969) 44
16. and Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) 34-35
17. Cited by" McCormick 180
18. Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002) 14
19. and Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood, 1996) 8
20. Cited by McCormick 159
21. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (München: Duncker und Humblot, 1928) 210. Translation mine
22. Schmitt's undertheorization of the internal political relation has not gone unnoticed. The paradigmatic treatment of the problem is Derrida's. In Politiques de l'amitié, he reads The Concept of the Political together with the much later Theory of the Partisan ( Theorie des Partisanen, Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen [Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1963]), in order to demonstrate the dependence of Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction - and the philosophy of negativity it grounds - on a prioritization of similarity, proximity, and presence. He goes on to identify an inability to think friendship independently of fraternization (a familial model founded on natural resemblance) as the central flaw of Western political theory since Plato
23. See Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), esp. 75-170
24. Other recent attempts to come to terms with this lack include Agamben's Homo Sacer, which can in some sense be read as an attempt to think the Schmittian political from the inside out, and Uwe Justus Wenzel's study, "Die Dissoziation und ihr Grand. Überlegungen zum Concept of the Political." Wenzel writes: "Absurd ist die Grenzsituation für den Einzelnen, weil die Erhaltung des Kollektivs mit der seiner selbst nicht identisch ist. Sie, als die Grenzsituation innerhalb des eigenen Kollektivs, nicht im Verhältnis zum fremden, zu thematisieren heißt Schmitt hinter sich lassen, wiewohl sein grenzbegriffliches Vorgehen den Weg dazu bahnt." In "Die Dissoziation und ihr Grund," Die Autonomie des Politischen: Carl Schmitts Kampf um einen beschädigten Begriff, ed. Hans-Georg Flickinger (Acta Humoria, 1990) 13-36, here 33
25. "In memory of my friend, August Schaetz of Munich, who fell on August 28, 1917, in the assault on Moncelul" (19). ["Dem Andenken meines Freundes August Schaetz aus München, gefallen am 28. August 1917 beim Sturm auf Moncelul" (5).]