°Four things about Schmitt
Following on from the often interesting, but sometimes bewilderingly conservative, discussion on Carl Schmitt at Long Sunday, four things I would like to archive – or, if not quite archive and certainly not summarise, then perhaps simply four things about Schmitt I would like to return to, think on.
1. Schmitt is, above all, a thinker of (political) difference. That is, difference that is other than a prelude to reconciliation, resolution or synthesis. This, in many ways is why he remains of interest to, say, Tronti, and profoundly incomprehensible to the universalising inclinations of liberalism and/or humanism.
“Katechon becomes conceivable in him who does not stand for the unity of the world”. Noted here - and no doubt, there are interesting threads to follow here as they relate to the globalisation of capital, or capitalist globalisation, etc.
And yet, it becomes crucial to think difference outside the Schmittian dualism of friendship and enmity, which is to say, outside the logics of interminable, national socialist polemos. Along these lines, Moreiras and Farred, as well as Brett’s contribution, take up the possibilities of the ‘third term’. Jon, of course, has also been tracing the question of the non-friend in various ways and in a number of posts, most recently here.
That said, I’m leery of beginning with Schmitt’s Tertullian, which is to say both dualist and theological, characterisation of politics as the ability to judge the difference between friends (of God) and enemies (of God), in the sense that a critique which begins there tends to be posed as a question of multiplication or addition (three, etc). Hence my preoccupation, admittedly vectored through a reading of Lucretius, of Schmittian politics as, more emphatically, a politics of the mos maiorum.
2. Nate brought up the question of the individual (by way of Virno) - for while the absence of the individual in Schmitt might meaningfully be read as flowing from his critique of liberalism, it’s also that which betrays Schmitt’s theology - Schmitt’s thinking of the body as a political-theological body, the simultaneously corporeal and conceptual character of the political corpus, the effacement of the individual body. See the fragment from Sarah Pourciau on bodily negation, but also the (perhaps too) elusive reference to Tertullian and Christ’s body which I concluded with.
Following the second reading seems to me important, insofar as it might take the path not of reinstating liberalism’s fetishism of the individual, or individuation, contra Schmittian nazism, but of challenging National Socialism’s alternate fetishism of the nation-state - or, more accurately, the mos maiorum - on the level of materialities, of touch and of the senses. More on this later.
3. Schmitt’s critique of democracy and the limit-point of that critique. Schmitt praises Tocqueville, but thinks that without an understanding of the katechon, Tocqueville can only but “despair”. Brett adds that it’s “probably significant in this regard that Tocqueville writes in the Introduction to Democracy in America that he wrote the text ‘under the impression of a kind of religious terror’. And adds ‘to check democracy would be … to resist the will of God’.”
4. The least interesting way to read Schmitt is as a means to reimmunise liberalism (and democracy) against the scandal of its ‘exceptions’.
Indeed, it’s not surprising that attempts to do so - particularly as they turn to a consideration of Schmitt in relation to the ‘war on terror’ - will make precisely the same kinds of moves that Schmitt does: a theology of the ‘way of life’, an ‘alternative’ (but not at so different as it turns out) catalogue of friends and enemies, and so on.
Stupid liberals are far less interesting than smart nazis, if only because such stupidity amounts to a denial of the theological, despotic aspects of democracy. Much like Schmitt, they merely assert the border and the indisputability of the preservation of a ‘way of life’. Unlike Schmitt, they pretend that they are not (liable to become) nazis, when and if they persuade themselves that, for reasons of ‘pragmatism’ or ’self-defense’, they must be.
By the by, there’s a lovely bit of graffiti up the road, just off Sydney Rd, though I don’t know by who: Our way of life is not under threat. Our way of life is the threat.
All up, I’d recommend: Brett reads Schmitt by way of Balilbar’s recent essay on “War as Politics, Politics as War”; Carlos on Schmitt and Mao; Nate on the partisan of no part (or is it party?); Craig’s ‘introduction’ to the reading of Schmitt or [addendum] , better still, his recent post on the two ‘politicals’. And then there’s my rather circumspect contribution on Schmitt’s political theology of the ‘way of life’.
And, preceding the symposium as such: Alain with a fragment from Simon Critchley. Jon on buddies (or not). There was also a fine post on polemics at Charlotte Street , but the blog seems to have disappeared, sadly.
Mark Kaplan’s post on polemics can be found here
crojas [June 21, 2006 @ 4:09 am]
Interesting stuff Angela. I’m going to be trying to work through some stuff on politics and theology in Schmitt soon, maybe I’ll have more to add then. I’d like to hear more from you on the katechon. This relates to #4, your remark on a proffered alternative catalog of enemies. It seems to me the desire there is to swap out who is in what position in the catalog but to keep the layout of the catalog the same. One of the disconnects in talking to folk like that is that they hear a desire to get out of (abolish) the catalog as such to mean their desire to rearrange the positions in it. (”Yeah, I want a new administration too.”) I like to read the katechon as a possible figure for making the catalog seize up (pardon the mixed metaphor), jamming the gears. That may be an alternative to the katechon though, I’m not sure.
cheers,
Nate
Nate [June 21, 2006 @ 5:42 am]
Carlos, many thanks. Obviously I should sort out the blogroll …
I have to admit that I find the katechon a little confusing. I intuitively read it as Greek, which I think gets in the way of my making sense of it according to Christian theology, of which I’m no expert.
I’m not sure though that katechon can be parsed as a good thing. The katechon, as that which ‘lets’ and that which ‘restrains’ (which are the two senses in which katechon appears in the Second Epistle), is usually regarded as referring to Claudius Caeser. It’s obscure because it’s probably code for the transition from the rule of Caeser to Nero, and the persecution of Christians under the latter. I’ll hazard that Paul is advising the Christians to support Caeser, strategically.
Tertullian emphasised the etatist definition: “What obstacle is there but the Roman state, the falling away of which, by being scattered into ten kingdoms, shall introduce Antichrist upon (its own ruins)?”
s0metim3s [June 21, 2006 @ 2:22 pm]
Surely there were more interesting posts and comments than my platitudes!
Craig [June 21, 2006 @ 2:26 pm]
Craig, actually, I thought your ‘platitudes’ were just fine. Some of the other ‘platitudes’ being thrown around - well, I was kind of taken aback at just how platitudinous.
Oh, and I know how difficult posting at the close of a symposium can be - but I’ve been looking forward to a post from you for the last couple of days. You’re not obliged, of course. Still, would be nice.
s0metim3s [June 21, 2006 @ 2:31 pm]
Yes, of course, but the demands of an academic lifestyle press heavily at present. Indeed, throughout the entire month. By ‘demands’, of course, I refer to silly formal requirements associated with doctoral degrees in North America - in my case, proving that I’m qualified to call myself a ’social theorist’ and a ‘political sociologist’.
Okay: if I finish a section in my current work on Parsons (of all damn things) in the morning, I’ll write something on Schmitt in the afternoon.
Craig [June 21, 2006 @ 2:38 pm]