°Not-yet counterpartisan
Apropos the upcoming Long Sunday symposium on Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan” - which at present I find difficult to not read as a theory of ‘third world national-populism armed’ - I thought that I would make an extended, prefatory reference to Grant Farred’s “The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality” (SAQ, 103:4).
Farred’s reading of The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum is interesting, particularly insofar as he overtly eschews any ontological (or existential) reading of Schmitt that would situate the politics of enmity, if only implicitly, on the ground of being rather than epoche or, put another way, as a condition of politics as such rather than as a specific and temporal articulation of ‘us’.
The latter, for me, seems the only way to approach the Schmittian figure of the partisan, dare I say, in these times. Particularly given the trajectories of ‘third world national-populism armed’, as they becomes apparent in recent ‘events’ in East Timor, in the fenced-off, bantustan-like character of Palestine, and so on.
According to Farred, Schmitt’s concept of nomos, given Schmitt’s inability to define the term, is actually a means to explain the transition from the Respublica Christiana to the Westphalian system to the Cold War. Skipping much of Farred’s intervening discussion of Schmitt, which is nevertheless of interest, a lengthy excerpt:
South Africa has always been lived on the terrain of Schmitt’s formulation of the political: the (absolute) friend counterposed by the (absolute) enemy; it has always been lived on the tumultuous topography of the partisan; apartheid created the (black) partisan, which it understood as the counterpartisan (by virtue of opposing the apartheid state), as the definitive subject of the post-1948 political. (The partisan can, in part, be distinguished from the friend by the depth of the former’s ideological investment in a political project; the partisan is an active—even activist or agitator—political subject, always acting on behalf of a political project. The friend, while not indifferent or ideologically neutral, does not share the partisan’s proclivity for political participation.) South Africa has always engaged in partisan politics: the Hobbesian war of white all (with some exception) against black all (with rare exception).
The politics of the partisan continue to hold in the post-apartheid era. For the Mbeki government, more so than for its racially and ideologically conciliatory Mandela predecessor, there is no room for the “nonfriend” (Moreiras’s term). There is only friend and enemy of the ANC. The ANC instantiates, of the variety of the sovereign nation that restricts, katechonizes within itself, all sovereignty (to itself): the “other partisans, the enemy, are the absolute enemy.” For the ANC government, these subjects of the new nomic political order constitute what we may understand as the “not-yet but soon to be” absolute enemy, those (insufficiently post-apartheid) partisans who must be watched as they become, inevitably, the absolute enemy. […]
The position of the not-yet counterpartisan represents an argument against the ANC’s “tendentially unchecked striving for (absolute) power, and for absolute power against an absolute enemy.” The ANC requires an “absolute enemy” or, failing that, at least a committed cadre of counter-partisans. Without that its politics of enmity shows itself to be nothing other than that of the postcolonially discredited comprador class grubbing for “unchecked power.” In Moreiras’s formulation, in the “historical dispensation of actually existing globalization, the friend/enemy division is insufficient to capture the specificity of the political.”
To invoke Schmitt, and Moreiras’s (and Agamben’s) use of him, in a critique of the first decade of post-apartheid democracy is not only to implicitly militate against the existing nomos; it is also, as has been argued, to undertake the theoretical project of thinking a different conception of the political in South Africa: it is to imagine how the politics of the not-yet counterpartisan could disrupt the existing nomos and rearticulate it from a position that is tangentially, fragily inside and incipiently, provocatively outside. This project will require the disruption, the discursive breaking of the political, historical, ideological, and ethical concatenations that constitute the new nomos. This deconcatenation will demand a speaking about, of, and beyond the moment this collection names “post.” After the thrill of democracy has been enunciated, how can a new politics of resistance be constructed within—or against—the confines of the new nomos? Will it depend on not only the memory of the defeat of apartheid but also the animation of a more recent political experience: the structural nonfulfillment of anti-apartheid aspirations? Or, can those two moments, these different modes of political subjectivity, be conflated into the positionality of the not-yet counterpartisan? Or, better still, can this oppositionality produce the historically legitimated subject of the fully fledged counterpartisan?
If this political subject is indeed possible, then Agamben’s “zone of anomy,” that nomic terrain where political meaning is struggled over, often antagonistically, can be conceived as the only space from which the counterpartisan can conduct politics. If, in this formulation of politics, the (anti-apartheid) partisan is not (now presumed to have been) in excess of the nation (even as it was outside of the apartheid state), then neither is the counterpartisan — not in excess or outside of the nation. The partisan and the counterpartisan are the political figures who make up, are partially constitutive of, the nation. It is also, however, to posit these two figures as intimately related: the anti-apartheid partisan, named “subversive” or “Communist” or “terrorist” by the white state, finds its equivalent in both the disgruntled, historically enfranchised white subject (in an antagonistic relation of exception to the post-apartheid moment) and the discontented black subject (not-yet counterpartisan); these constitute very different kinds of partisans, and counterpartisans, for that matter, but they are bound by the difficulty of their standing as (erstwhile) friends and enemies of both the anti-apartheid and post-apartheid states. These are political subjects who operate from within a “zone of indistinction,” the only political territory that has not yet been ascribed either friend or enemy. It constitutes, this temporally and ideologically precarious space of the political, the zone of the not-yet political that is intensely political precisely because it has not yet been politically identified in nomic terms.
This collection works in this zone of indistinction, demonstrating the fluidity and the nonfixedness of the positionalities available, where the identities of the partisans and the counterpartisans are complicated. It is only by elaborating and expanding, by rethinking and reinscribing the “indistinguishability” of the partisan from its counter, that it becomes possible to create an oppositional place that is, by its very definition, the only space for the post-apartheid political. It is — the “zone of the not-yet political” where the not-yet counterpartisan operates — the only place from which the current nomos can be critically undone, the only space from which a new nomos of the South African earth can be thought, the only concatenation of historical forces that can produce a new orientation of the political.
