Bettina Bar Go Levinas Politics

Untying the Utopia-War Opposition in Levinas Or, How did Schmitts Political enter Levinass Totality?
What is Politics in Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics? Bettina Bargo (Universit de Montral)
I. Against Hope in Politics
Lawrence Olivier, a professor of political science, recently published a feisty book entitled, Contre lespoir comme tche politique [Against hope as a political task].1 There, Olivier offered a sustained critique of political utopianism. He argued that the logic of human liberation, whatever its specific form, has itself [been] inscribed in larger mech anisms of power [dispositifs de pouvoir], whose primary aim is the creation of the alienated individual upon whom it is possible to exert power (CLTP, 112). The conviction animating utopias and hopes, he continued, la Foucault, is the idea, i ncontestable for Western thought, that man must be led to his humanity. And that this humanity is the end point for man, the moment in which he attains finally his fullness as a human being. If this is true, Olivier asks, Why is it that revolutions so often go off course? Why do projects of liberation invariably finish by themselves becoming oppressive or often worse? (114). For him the answer lays in that the preoccupation of man for man consists in a di splacement in the exercise of powerall of which is framed in a logic of domination (115).2 There is not enough space to unfold his arguments here. But anyone who has read Foucault and Deleuze can follow them readily enough. Every time we read such critiques of a philosophy of history, the notion of utopianism leaves us feeling abandoned, as if to chimeras. II. A Non-Utopian Reading of Levinas For that reason, I would like to follow a different tack in regard to Levinas. I would like to argue that an interesting reading of Levinas might show that he is not actually offering us a formal utopia, understood as providing conditions of possibility through which utopia might take shape. Certainly Levinas offers a principle of hoperealizing that principles function as grounds, so that further appeals to found them in a prior logic are vaina sort of superbience.
An interesting reading of Levinas might argue that what he discovers in the face-to-face relationship had been hinted at in various places in Merleau-Pontys work; notably, in the Childs Relations with Others (1960), where he speaks of syncretic sociability and an original type of relation with others;3 and again in The Philosopher and his Shadow (1960), in his discussion of intercorporeal reality.4 This is the anti-subjectivist, chiasmatic dimension of Husserlian intersubjectivity that could not constitute the other first as an alter ego. Levinass approach is different from Merleau-Pontys. But the idea that in a certain moment what we call the Ego is the other, or is split by the other, or carries the other, although not in the sense that a substance carries a predicatethis idea is found in Merleau-Ponty. Is that enough to establish a philosophy close to Levinass but without a religious dimension? Maybe, yet my interest here is that Levinas not be taken as a utopian thinker, but rather in his quality as an interpretive phenomenologist who draws some of his examples from Bible and Talmud. These sources can be read ethically, or ethicoreligiously--that is his teacher Shushanis contribution (since Levinas had scarcely studied Talmud before meeting him)but the core of the intuition concerns, ultimately, the structure of sensibility, the adequacy of language to convey the density of sensuous investiture, and the dialogical origin of sayingwhich has roots both in Buber and in the linguist Roman Jakobson. Now, I think a Jewish, or Talmudic, reading of Levinas is a good thing. But I dont have the knowledge of rabbinics to explore it. On the other hand, I feel that many of the philosophical arguments he makes are not so much about utopianism, or redeeming politics, as they are about the non-innatist origins of responsibility. As such they make an important philosophical contribution, even there where philosophers have read his ideas as old saws for peace or responsibility. There is a lot more at stake.
III. The Secular Out of the Religious Of course utopia is a theme in Totality and Infinity. There, a sort of utopia receives the name, eschatology. It is tied to a lgos about the end of time, about the eschaton, conceived as an interruption of duration or of Heideggerian projections. It is an unusual way of speaking of eschatology, one that once again uses religious terms to bring out themes that are proper to human experience and, ultimately, taken up by religion. Nothing so remarkable in that. Otto Pggeler, Marlne Zarader, and Giorgio Agamben have shown that Heidegger used concepts drawn from the experiences of the early Christian community, as related in Pauls Epistle to the Romans, in order to reach a d imension, through it, that was secular and existential. One such term concerns living in wait for the fullness of time, which Paul called kairos. In short, the strategy Levinas uses, drawing from the prophets, from the
Bible, in no way begins with himnor even from Heidegger. It carries its weight, however, in existential importan import different from Kantian analyses of temporality, or even from Bergsonian duration.
IV. Politics, War, and Being In Levinas, utopia, as eschatology, is set in a logic that opposes war to eschatology, and equates politics with war, literally. To complicate matters further, Being itself will be characterized by war. Now, Derrida argues, in The Word of Welcome, that Levinass metaphysics is different from Kants, notably in his On Perpetual Peace. Derrida argues that because Levinass metaphysics is different, Totality and Infinity is a unique a treatise on welcome. In this Derrida is half right, half-wrong: Levinass metaphysics is about war and peace. In Perpetual Peace Kant argued for a Heraclitean metaphysics, wherein becoming including nature and societyexemplifies change and violence. This metaphysic of change implies that humans must be governed by lawsimmanent rational ones for individuals; constitutions, treaties and accords for political relations. Levinas, Derrida argues, gives us a Being, or a becoming, that is interruptible. Thanks to the possibility of interruption, welcome and harboring happen; they do not need to be minuteously governed by a plethora of formal norms. The welcome of the stranger comes to pass. It produces itself. Therefore, it need not be massively legislated, though that too may prove desirable. In my view, it is not enough to argue that Levinas has a metaphysics different from Kants on the basis of the possibility of ethical interruption. Even it can be experienced as enjoyment and love of life, Being nonetheless remains equated with nonregulatable change: too much sun, violent seas, Levinass Elemental. And Being remains equated with war. This is deliberately conceived against Heidegger, and for good reason, which Howard Caygill details in his book, Levinas and the Political. Being remains equated with violence and war. If we go just that far, we have a very Kantian metaphysics. But, of course, Being is interruptible. It has been asked what sort of Being this is, since it is not Heideggers call, not Heideggers clearing, not Heideggers finite Dasein. Levinass Being seems to belong to a preHeideggerian conception that combines elements of Hobbes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
In Totality and Infinity, eschatology interrupts Being, as conversation. It opens a break in Being as war and totality. Both the ethical interruption and war, paradoxically, tear people from their de facto situations. War tears people from their homes and their habitual acts; above all, from their morality. The ethical interruption tears people from Being. What concerns me above all is that these interruptionsafter all, war breaks out even if commerce, politics, and peacetime diplomacy all bear the marks of struggle these interruptions stand opposed to each other. Eschatology is the utopian answer that is not a solution per se to the violence of war. And war will be equated with politics, just as it is with Being. V. The Argument: Gravitas in Human Things If we read the argument in the first four pages of the Preface to Totality and Infinity, we find a claim that we can easily take either as formally utopian, or as Levinass idiosyncratic v ision of politics. In going through this section, I will bear in mind the question: What definition of the political is Levinas working with here? I would venture that it is the political of gravitas, the political that concerns life and death, which is also the notion of the political that aroused debate in the 1920s and 30s. We find this definition of the political in a thinker whose existential la nguage and concern with concrete experience equaled his drive to define the political as a distinct domainthe way ethics can be defined as founded on the distinction of good versus bad, or aesthetics, with its distinction of the beautiful versus the ugly. These are platonico-aristotelian modes of defining ethics and aesthetics. When Carl Schmitt first published his The Concept of the Political in 1927 in the Archiv fr Sozialforschung, an approach to the essence of the political was his primary concern. This work was debated by thinkers on the left and the right. Schmitts thought elicited the interest of Walter Benjami n and Leo Strauss.5 Ill return to that shortly. I am arguing here, firstly, that Levinass co nception of the political does not look like a political whose essence would be communitarian or dialogical. If there is anything like a social contract to be discerned in his work, even heuristically, it is certainly not in the political that is equated, here, with Being and with war. Because of that, what interrupts a political thus equated with war must be situated outside of politics and Being. The utopian dimension called eschatology turns on a definition of the political that Schmitt would have approved. It is neither misguided, nor pathological. It is tied to the kind of politics evident in Weimar conflicts and in the Nazi and fascist period. Thus, it is tied to what was in the air in the 20s and 30s discussion about the specificity of the concept of the polit ical. And it is bound up with Levinass five years in Fallingsbotel, near Hanover.6 We have Howard Caygill to thank for
the reminder that Levinass thought did not unfold in a philosophical vacuum, uninflected by the murder of his Lithuanian family and countless others. My concern is this: a definition of the political such as we find in Totality and Infinity and in Schmitts The Concept of the Political leaves us with precious little to interrupt or to change it. Perhaps that is as it should be. The eschatological is one such possibility. It is a po ssibility that Franz Rosenzweig himself took up in 1915, after attempting to show in his thesis that Hegels conception of the political could be enlarged by comparing it with concrete instantiations of the political in the emergence of the modern bourgeois state. The thesis was a progressive defense of Hegelianism. The War made the project derisory. Yet Rosenzweig published his Hegel und der Staat in 1920 and, the following year, he published his Stern der Erlsung. It was as if he were saying, This is what I was doing, following my teacher Friedrich Meineke, before I went to the Front: I hoped to save Hegel from appropriations by those who wanted Bismarcks Prussia to exemplify the Hegelian state. However he would also add, after my exper ience of World War I, during which I wrote the Star on postcards sent to my mother, I turned away from that question of the political in factical history. I turned to a revelation different from that of reason in history that optic had become impossible. I turned to revelation in the community of the Law. So much for the paraphrase of Rosenzweig. I owe its inspiration to Paul-Laurent Assouns Introduction to the French translation of Hegel and the State, the work whose abandonment gave rise to The Star of Redemption, which Levinas studied.7 VI. Totality and Infinity: Truth and the Good; War and Navet Let us walk through the initial argument in Levinass Preface. From there, I will turn to Carl Schmitt and to some of Leo Strausss questions to him. The argument of Totality and Infinity begins by informing us that it is important in the highest degree to know whether we are not the dupes, le dupe, of morality. We have to interpolate here: duped by the rhetoric of morality, which must be serving master other than the good. Why does it importe au plus haut point? Why is it important to the highest degree? Because this is a matter of life and death. What else would qualify for importance in the highest degree? It is a matter of gravity and seriousness. Lucidity, tied to one kind of transcendence, that of the truth, teaches us about the permanent possibility of war, Levinas argues. This permanent possibility is concretewe learn at least this from the 20th centuryand it is metaphysical. Hence the transcendence of the truth will be opposed, hereafter, to the transcendence of the good. And the two conflicting transcendences
give rise to a sardonic question: Whether a culture can be tied to both transcendences at once. Let us add, without one of them giving the lie to the other, within metaphysics. Levinass argument continues: the state of war, born of its permanent possibility, suspends morality. It trumps the institutions of society; it annuls their eternal obligations. Why so? Perhaps because in a long tradition of thinking about war, which includes Machiavelli, Grotius, Hegel, Schmitt, and others, justice is not a category proper to the logic of war. If that surprises us today, it is because liberal political conceptions impugn this claim. The state of war annuls their eternal obligations and unconditional imperatives; that is, if war is true, then eternal obligations and unconditional imperatives are neither eternal nor unconditionalwhich would be the case if war came before ethics, in an essential though not an everyday sense. Moreover, if war does suspend obligations and universals, then going to ones death for ones state, in the name of protecting that state from an enemy or taking from an enemy state some resource, would trump imperatives like Kants preserving life, speaking the truth, or cultivating humanity. In that sense, war is an absolute. For my purposes, that means that the politics of war must have a domain of inquiry proper to an absolute. That domain would be the State, its friends and its enemies. Carl Schmitt called that domain the political; it was none other than the art, pra cticed by the state or its people, of determining who were enemies and who, friends. Of course this determination took place in a non-permanent way, but it always concerned circumstances of the utmost gravity.8 Levinass argument continues: Winning is the art of wari.e., suppressing or annihilating ones enemiesand this art is called politics. The art of foreseeing and winning war by all meansthe political (la politique, which does not mean politics but the concept of the political itself)imposes itself, thence, like the very exercise of reason (TI ix, my trans.). To foreshorten: the art of war is the political, not everyday politics; we are in the realm of the essential, and of how something essences in Heideggers sense. The political is opposed to, and trumps, morality. Reason, and philosophy which is the art of reason, are thus opposed to navet. VII. Totality and Infinity: Being is War The second part of the argument claims that Being reveals itself as war to the philosophical gaze. If Levinas already argued in Existence and Existents, that the Being of beings and their self-manifesting are one and the same, a tautology, he will now argue that war is the most patent, i.e. manifest, of facts: war is patency itself, the truth of the real ( la vrit du rel). In war, he says, reality tears the words and images that dissimulated it, to impose itself in its nudity and in its hardness (sa nudit et sa duret) (TI, ix).
Thus, war is produced (we should hear pro-ducere, coming forth, dis-closure, here VIIE, 1, 151sq), war se produitas the pure experience of pure being, in the very instant (should we hear event) of its flashing (fulgurance) wherein the draperies of illusion burn. The ontological event that is sketched in this black clarity (should we hear black Lichtung) is a setting in motion of beings, anchored up till then, in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which one cannot extract oneself (se soustraire) (TI, ix). One can hear Hegel conjoined to Heidegger: the objective order or objective logic is pro-duced in a black clarity (noire claret) that is the ontological event, the Ereignis of war. Perhaps we should hear other events, like that of November 9th, 1938. In fairness, the marriage of Hegel and Heidegger, which results in divorce further on, is not fair to either philosopher; not fair unless the political really is the summum of the objective logic and war, the disclosive event of being which is, itself, co-extensive with the objective-political. Contrast Levinass argument here with a remark that aims in a similar direction. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or a separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, sthetic, economic or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically uglyit may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the otherand it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different or alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible (COP, 27). In this formulation, it is the alienness of the other that grounds the possibility of conflict, which is also the possibility of a truly political act: i.e., distinguishing, for no other reason than a political one, between those with whom one remains associated and those from whom one must dissociate, and fight to the death. The statement is rare in Schmitt who usually speaks of groups in conflict or association. In Levinass Preface the objective order is the order of what -is. This is not just for heuristic purposes; it is integral to his logic. What-is is permanently liable to conflict, and conflict as war is proper just to the political, whose event suspends other domains like economy and morality, because the political is the decision concerning the fate of friends and enemies, of entire cultures. We should keep in mind that Schmitts otheras enemyis every bit as alien as Levinass other. Schmitt writes explicitly, the other and like Levinas he adds to this, the stranger. He insists he is speaking of hostis rather than inimicus, the personal enemy, and that the distinction goes back to the Greeks polemios (), not ekhthros () (COP, 2829). Less surprising than one might think, hostis etymologically gives us both guest and hos-
tility. And Levinas will remark, midway through Totality and Infinity, that the face is the only thing that an I can wish to murder. The Preface to Totality and Infinity draws a triple equation: objective beingcomes to light as warthe art of objective being is politics. This is the truth of the order called reality, which is also the order attached to truth or the secular. War institutes an order, he adds, from which nothing is henceforth external (x). And war is the event (really, the dure) of the totalization effected in the highest degree in Hegels political thought. From there, a strange transition then takes place. As if to show us that the argument of page ix was hyperbolic, Levinas adds on the following page: the face of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality that dominates Western philosophy (x). The argument thus divides Being into faces, faces, perhaps the front and the back. So there is another face or surface of being. The other face of being may make it possible to bear the mocking gaze of politics. This other face is the certitude of peace so far as it is able to dominate the evidence of war (TI, x). Enough evidence, or strong evidence usually makes certitude possible. This is certainly how it is in Heidegger, where certainty has modes, like conviction about what is uncovered or evident, namely, that all men die.9 In Levinas, certitude is counterpoised to evidence, because he realizes certainty is modal, but need not be authenticated by evidence or truth claims. The mode of certainty Levinas is concerned with arises as the utopian moment of cert itude, though it is a funny utopia since we could never call this certitude unless we were, in fact, not duped by morality. The only way not to be duped by morality is to accept both faces of being. The new face de ltre is, Levinas says, a new relationboth originary and uniquewith Being (x). If this is utopian, it is employed as a strategy of demystification. Here, Being has two faces, one apparently larger than the other. The new relation with Being is not totalized. So it should not participate in a logic where morality works for being and for politics. The utopian is born, rather as it is in Adorno, in the possibility of correcting the monolithic triumvirate: politicsobjectivitytotalization, or again: wartruththe sublation of morality and civilization. Yet this possibility does not proceed, as in Adorno, from reflection. It proceeds from a different calling into question, of which we, as lone reasoning beings, would be incapable: the approach of the other. In 1962, this is the approach of the other who is interlocutor, teacher, the stranger to be sure, but the widow and the orphanfigures that affect us before we can make a private friend-enemy distinction. The tensions of language, using certitude against evidence, are more than just a call to move beyond Husserl and the early Heidegger. They reflect the Hegelian distinction between subjective and objective logics. Certitude has a modality, here, that belongs to particularity rather
than to universality. Nothing like this is found in Heideggers Dasein, because Dasein can be singularized by anxiety, but it is never particular. If something can be beyond the totality without being outside of time and space, then the strategy can only be one of a particular, which is not just singular or different from its universal ground. Eschatology sets [us] in relation with being, beyond the totality or history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one couldbelieve what one liked and promote, this way, the rights of a subjectivity free as the wind (xi). Not a new space -time, eschatology happens like a chiasm. The subject eschatology defends is particular in its event, and generic in its being. The other is the other and the particular stranger. In this way Levinas short-circuits the logic by which the other is firstly a group of strangers that some Is would war against. The other is, for him, irreducibly particular though that strategy becomes so problematic that by 1974 the other is presented as an immanent schism, a split subjectivity, rather than the radical exteriority and external particularity. VIII. Peace: Messianic and Otherwise The great illusion is messianic peace. It is the philosophers utopia, Levinas says; they benefit from it and deduce a final peace of reason, which plays its game in the midst of ancient and present wars (x). The philosophers illusion arises from their re asoning and their desire, which is to found morality on politics. In this illusion we can hear: morality is moral for the sake of politics. Who wouldnt relish a morality that reforms politics? Would that not be the interru ptionin the midst of political machinations and terrorof an act called witnessing, protest, or self-sacrificesome act that stopped political actuality in its tracks and called it to account for itself? With politics explicitly defined as war, morality is not moral for the sake of politics. That is the philosophers error. Eschatology does not supplement ontology or complete its p hilosophical evidences (x). Eschatology does not belong to the order of evidence; it is a different modality of certainty. Though this certainty is not ex-videre, arising from sight, it is reflectablethis is more than a metaphor. The beyond of totality is not describedin a purely negative fashion. It is reflected in the interior of the totality and of history, in the interior of experience (xi). This is the logic of the trace, counterpoised to that of presence.10 Obviously, the interior-exterior distinction is one binarism that cannot be further reduced here. Later works like Otherwise than Being will inflect this binarism so that it no longer matters where the other is. Of course the intention remains the same. Totality and Infinity argued that
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the eschatological idea of judgment (contrary to the judgment of history where Hegel saw the rationalization of that judgment)11 implies that beings have an identity before eternity, before the completion of history that beings exist in relationstarting from themselves and not from the totality (xi). In 1961, this relation is dialogue and teaching, with its non-teleological root: signification without context, unwilled gratuity, such that ethics is a way of seeingseeing others, and seeing Being itself as total yet chiasmatically interrupted.12 From there, Levinass discussion takes another turn whose importance is hard to determine. Why does the force of war and the universality of politics not refute eschatology, the way it refute morality? he asks. His only answer to this is cryptic. He speaks of the duality of allegiance, even two ways of being, of an essentially hypocritical civilizationour own. The West is not just philosophy and religion, it is hypocritical because it has no desire to abandon its allegiance to either philosophy and war, or to religion and peace. Indeed, it wants to dialectize these. But this is more than an allusion to Hegel for whom there was nothing more in Philosophy than in Religion. In the Phenomenology, they simply proceeded along different vectors: the Concept for philosophy, and Representation for religion. But Levinas is more than anti-Hegelian here; it is not just that civilization is attached to the True and to the Good, henceforth antagonists (xii). Ni etzsche saw that much in his critique of values. It is rather that there seems to us to be no where from which to redirect our attachments, partly because we invariably ask, Is it true? and partly because everything gets trumped by politics in this logic. An interruption is not a momentary trumping; it is a gasp, a metaphoric space, or a crossing that does not change the logic. Is the West addled by lust for power so that it cannot see its dual allegiance? Surely the phrase, dsormais antagonistes means that the true and the good have no meta-discourse, unless that is precisely the function of eschatology. Yet eschatologys structurethat is, of summoning beings, interrupting, proceeding as if momentarily ineluctable, and coming from an other who could, under other circumstances, be my enemyeschatologys structure seems to mirror that of war, which is itself an interruption, a mise-en-mouvement of people uprooted. Mirroring is not identity, however. It is repetition with difference. I spent time on eschatology in order to address two questions: 1) How does it change the equation: warpoliticsreasonbeing? And 2) Is eschatology itself a rival order? To the first question, it is clear that eschatology may motivatethrough the Tiersa demand for justice. Eschatology is produced as a responsible gesture toward even the other, my enemy. But this eschatology does not sublate the political. If anything, eschatology comes out as the only possible
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way to explain that life is not like an endless Kristallnacht, since politics trumps ethics, and perverts morality into its own rhetoric. The answer to question one is that eschatology changes the equation of warpoliticsreasonBeing imperceptibly, like the inflection performed by an adverb. Is eschatology a rival order? If the adverbial question how regroups modalities into an order, then it is one. But there is no need to assemble and hypostatize in that way. Moreover, the Goodmeaning, the domain of valuedoes not belong to the true. Does that mean the Good is not true? I believe it means, that we can ask What does it mean? but not Is what it means true? Now, What does it mean? is not enough, for philosophers, to make the Good into an o rder that rivals the True. The Good is antagonist to the True, but it is not the rival of Truth. Of course Nietzsche also saw this and called for a critique of the Western obsession with truth. Inflecting Being without changing its structure or appearance; no need for a rival order unless we take Levinass detailed explorations in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being as explicitly constituting an order. That would be a category error. What-is carries values, yet it does not determine all values. Nevertheless, the little event called the Good, this nothing, has its necessity in a logic where the political is war, and where Being also is war, and where reason serves both politics and Being. IX. Donning the Hegelian Mantle If we cannot ask Is it true that the Good? We can still ask, Is it true that the political? We can proceed this way. Heidegger did not write about politics directly. Levinas may have been thinking of Kojve and his Nietzschean transformation of the Master-Slave dialectic. But Levinas also knew of Jean Wahls reading of Hegel, which privileged the unhappy consciousness as the figure that moved history.13 There is an engagement with Hegel in Levinas. The engagement is related to Hegels logic and his politics. But it concerns the political as Absolute, as Absolute Spirit, which is reached, in the Phenomenology, at the end of the section on Morality. There, the movement of history through the French Revolution and the Terror is doubled by the passage of Kantian philosophy into Hegelian dialectics.14 On the basis of this, Absolute Spirit was taken by some commentators to be instantiated effectively in Bismarcks Prussian state. We should pause here, because the political understood as war itself, comes from a source other than Hegel. It may come from a number of sources, but one of which is clearly Heideggers contemporary, touted by many as the twentieth century inheritor of Hegel: jurist and political philosopher, Carl Schmitt. Next to Schmitt, Kojve seems a brilliant Hegel exegete. Unlike Schmitt, Kojve does not himself unfold an original theory of the political. But the irony about inheriting
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the Hegelian mantle does not stop there. Before the first World War, the young Franz Rosenzweig, the brilliant student of the Freiburg Hegelian, Friedrich Meinecke, looked as though he might become the left Hegelian of the 20th century with his thesis, Hegel and the State. Once Rosenzweig gave up his defense of Hegels conception of the universal statea defense that argued that it was not universal enough)he also gave up completely on a philosophy of history and politics that would expand Hegels concept of the political into actual European history. Had it not been for the Balkan trenches, in which he found himself (not to mention the framing of the Jews after the War as betrayers of the German cause), Rosenzweig might have laid claim to the heritage of Hegelian thought, over Carl Schmitt. Moreover, he would have inflected it in a cosmopolitan direction. In that case, we might have had Derrida but never Levinas. As it was, Schmitt put on the mantle of right Hegelianism, trenchantly critical of the liberal state. George Schwab, Schmitts translator and commentator, argues that Schmitt supported a strong executive branch over the conflicted parliamentarism of Weimar. In his political works, Schmitt was concerned with the immediate centrifugal forces tearing the Weimar state apart and on some of the intellectual underpinnings of these forces.15 Above all, Schmitt strove to distinguish politics from the political as a distinct domain. His concern was to keep the numerous political parties legitimated by the Weimar constitution, the unions, and left movements of his time, from paralyzing Weimars parliamentary system. While this may seem historically understandable, Schmitts position took an ugly turn following Paul von Hindenburgs surprise appointment of Hitler as Chancellor,16 at which point Schmitt too turned around, and joined the Nazi party. Did he agree with Hindenburgs advisors that Hitler could be contained and manipulated to their ends?17 It is hard to imagine anyone joining the Nazis in good faith. What we do know is that he joined the Party in the same year that Heidegger did, 1933. He remained its ideologue longer than Heidegger remained the Rector of the University of Freiburg, but both men shared what J. Taminiaux has called that nostalgie de la Grce ancienne. X. The Concept of the Political The arguments of the Preface to Totality and Infinity brought us to the elliptical question: Is it true that the political? By this I mean, following Levinas: that the political is war? that the political is defined as the calculus of war? That it is the domain wherein life and death, is decided and legitimated? In his The Concept of the Political,18 Schmitts answer to these questions was: Yes, the political is war, the calculus of the when and the how of war. Now Schmitts answer is dedu ctive, Aristotelian, its language disconcertingly close to Heideggers hyperbolic, existential res o-
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luteness before life and death. Schmitts response rests on a conception of humanity and Being shared by thinkers as different as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Fichte, and Marx. This is simply the conception that man is evil in the non-religious sense of being unable, past a certain point, to resist the power of his own passions. 19, 20 The Concept of the Political is divided into eight parts. The first part discusses the difficulty of defining the political. This difficulty is tied to the question: What is the modern state? We find general answers in the debates of jurisprudence over the fifty years prior to publication of the Concept in 1924. Yet that literature continues to grow without a definitive definition of the state. The question has arisen because the state has gone through three phases between the 18th and the 20th centuries: from the absolute monarchies, to the neutral states of the 19th century, to the liberal bourgeois state of the 20th. The latter has definitively blurred the boundaries between state and society; as a process, this was noted as early as the years between 1848 and 1870.21 The distinctive feature of the bourgeois state is its capacity to extend into social, religious, economic, and cultural affairs without being able to assure its own effective independence from these domains. As we know, Hegels universal state also extends into autonomous domains but does so while remaining above those domains in matters of war and peace. The state that loses itself through hyperextension into economic and cultural domains will be called the total state. Its condemnation by Schmitt follows a certain tradition in political thought, which is justified by its accompanying depoliticalization, that is, it is no longer clear what the state itself should be or do. For Schmitt, the answer to depoliticalization is found in a strategy that moves in the opposite direction: toward the universal state. Superficially like the bourgeois state, Hegels universal state pursues the most vigorous penetration of all societal spheres by the state for thepurpose of winning for the entirety of the state all vital energies of the people (COP, 25). 22 Universality is unavoidable; the difference turns on the transcendence of the state and, by extension, the autonomy of the political. Part II of The Concept of the Political argues that the answer to the question, What is the State?, turns on a more radical inquiry: should we conceive the political as a domain categorically distinct from the cultural, the economic, and the moral? If so, then what is its specific difference, what are the foundational categories of the political? These categories do exist in all simplicity; they are above all the distinction of public friend versus public enemy (Freund vs. Feind). A longer work could show, in this regard, that Levinass ethics works on a precise reversal of Schmitts logic: for Levinas, the other, the stranger is, radically, if not the friend (as Ricur a rgued), never the enemy: the peaceable resistance of the face excludes, pre-reflectively, the friendenemy distinction.
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Schmitt writes, The inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses, like the good and the bad (morality), the ugly and the beautiful (aesthetics), the profitable versus the economically harmful (COP, 26-27). In his concern to remain historicist, realistic, and existentialist, Schmitt adopts a tone we hear, around the same time, in Heidegger. Thus Schmitt: Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve ones own form of exi stence (COP, 27). Here too, the other is literally the stranger who is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien. It is on just this definition of the other that Schmitt sets the political in the kind of light that allows Levinas to oppose it, along with Being generally, to Levinass notion of the ethical or religion.23 Part III of The Concept prolongs Schmitts existential analytic of the political. It insists that the categories of friend and enemy be understood in their concrete and existe ntial sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions (COP, 27). The only way to accomplish this is to keep the private and the public as separate spheres (just as Levinas worked to keep eschatology from being absorbed by Being or by the public sphere). The time-space in which the distinction public friend-public enemy is clearest is war. In war, Schmitt argues, the political comes to the fore in its own distinctiveness and, in the process, politicizes everything. This is especially true of modern or world warfare. The Heideggerian languagewhich Adorno recognized as extending beyond Heidegger and amounting to the jargon of authenticitycontinues. The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping (COP, 29). We can compare this with Heideggers Existential Projection ofBeing-Towards-Death.24 In Being and Time, death stands where the enemy stood in Schmitts concept of the political: deciding who is the public enemy and how to face them is the proper potentiality of the truly political people. It is the authentic gesture of the political, made by those resolute enough to remain within the political domain. Generally, a people takes up an inauthentic stance in regard to the political. The eve ryday bourgeois is consonant with the they, das Man, of everydayness in Heidegger. In both cases, a serious stance toward death, and war, is unconsciously avoided. The consequences of this existential inauthenticity are deducible: they amount to a loss of meaning in the entire traditions
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approach to ontology, for Heidegger, and in virtually all recent approaches to the political, for Schmitt. The latter argues, The fact that the substance of the political is contained in the context of a concrete antagonism is still expressed in everyday language, even where the awareness of the extreme case has been entirely lostWords such as state, republic, society, class, as well as so vereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorshiptotal state, and so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combatedor negated by such a term (COP, 30-31). For Heidegger, inauthenticity results in death being relegated to an anxious but superior attitude such that death comes, certainly, but not right away (BT, 302, emphasis mine). Schmitt contrasts the inauthenticity of party politics with the political properly grasped: in usual dome stic polemics the word political isused interchangeably with party politics (COP, 32, emphasis mine). These inauthentic stances cover over the truth of concrete existence, despite appearances to the contrary. This is true in regard to the meaning of Being in Heidegger, and in regard to the meaning of the political in Schmitt. Of course neither thinker would allow that such a resolute approach to the truth of their question implies a concrete plan of action per se. Schmitt urges, It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war by no means as though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with the friend-enemy alternative vis--vis every other nationThe definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor milit arism, neither imperialism nor pacifism (COP, 33). And yet his tone will give the lie to this shortly, because for a people to stand authentically in the political requires that that people truly possesses political energy sufficient to group men according to friend and enemy (COP, 36). Or again, ventriloquizing Hegel this time: The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphereHe is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichmentConsequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death (COP, 62-63). The group, or Volk, that faces risk and decides to enter, or stand firm in, the political, is the serious people; the one that has grasped the meaning of the most extreme possibilityhere, not simply of life and death, but rather of dying-for the group, or destroying the otheras a group. In Schmitt, the emphasis on the people as a national entity is so strong that it resembles Sartres group -in-fusion and becomes in itself a sort of individual. Against Levinass self and other, the individual in Schmitt is one people; the decisive difference is that this singular is never particularized. XI. That Permanent Possibility: War, the Political and its Effacement
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Let us recall for a moment what Levinas wrote in the third line of his Preface about war: Luciditythe openness of the spirit upon the truedoes it not consist in glimpsing the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality (TI, ix). We find the same expression in Schmitt. War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. If war is not the content of politics, that is because politic s eo ipso was never defined by Schmitt. No, war is the content of the political, starting from the friend-enemy distinction. He continues, But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking (COP, 34). On the following page, What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived (COP, 35).25 The third section closes with the declaration that Leo Strauss seized upon, fairly: a world without politics, a completely pacified globe lacking the friend-enemy distinction, would contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized tokill other human beings (COP, 35). While the pacified globe sounds like the best possible state of affairs, Schmitt is not serious, here. Very interesting antitheses are not serious antitheses, not matters of life and death. Strauss ventures here that Schmitt is conceal[ing] his moral judgment (COP, 105). That judgment is none other than that Being political means being oriented to the dire eme rgencyjust as being authentically in Heidegger means being oriented to ones ownmost po ssibility of death. Strauss says, He who affirms the political as such respects all who want to fight; he is just as tolerant as the liberalsbut with the opposite intention (COP, 105). This tolerance toward all but those who want to fight Strauss calls a liberalism with the opposite pola rity (COP, 105). Working minutiously, Leo Strauss shows that Schmitt made an unconscious moral judgment here. What is more obvious is the aesthetics of war that animates Schmitts argument. Tolerance is the leitmotif of liberalism; but to have tolerance toward all but those who want to fight really means nothing, since Schmitt will argue that a religious, an economic, or a cultural struggle becomes political at the moment when it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. Thus, the political does not reside in the battle itselfbut in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility (COP, 37). This is how the fourth se ction of The Concept begins. It explores how a group can enter, or seize hold of, the political. Ifthe economic, cultural, or religious counter forces are so strong that they are in a position to
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decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality become the new substance of the political entity (COP, 39). On the other hand, if no group proves so strong as to decide on friends and enemies, then the political entity is nonexistent (Ibid.). There follows a critique of German and Anglo Saxon pluralist theories. At the heart of this sectionbeyond Strausss observation about its moral judgmentis the following claim: whatever its original charactereconomic, religious, or cultural (cf. COP, 42),26 the political entity, the entity becoming-political remains above all the other antitheses in society. The section is concerned with Schmitts conception of transcendence. His is a violent, realpolitik situation of transcendence, to which Levinas contraposes his analytic of ethical particularity (the particularity of enjoyment, that of the other, that of responsibility) and interruption. The ever present possibility of a friend-and-enemy grouping suffices to forge a decisive entity which transcends the mere societal-associational groupings (COP, 45). A Schmittian equation arises: transcendence is sovereignty; transcendence characterizes the state just as the authority of the will to life and death characterizes the political (COP, 45-47). The exception, actual war, proves to be the rule of the political. This exception is a permanent possibilityas permanent as Being itself. The neo-Hegelian theme of the transcendence of the state continues through Section Five, justifying itself by appending a critique of liberalism: Under no circumstances can anyone d emand that any member of an economically determined society, whose orderis based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operationsThe individual may die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualist liberal society, a thoroughly private matter (COP, 48).27 Possible arguments about economic or cultural ways of resolving a differend, or neutralizing an enemy are dismissed as trivial.28 To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry can flourishor that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow iscrazy (COP, 48). Yet the observation leads him to two conclusions. First, there exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how trueno s ocial ideal no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other (COP, 49). War has no justification, hence no justice. This is also why morality could not but dupe us about war; morality cannot justify war and both Schmitt and Levinas realize this. As proof of the pudding: attempts at regulating war, infusing justice into it, or outlawing it have all failed (COP, 50-52). The world will not thereby become depoliticized, and it will not be transplanted into a condition of pure morality, pure justice, or pure economics (COP, 52). His second conclusion is that the political is as ineradicable as the conatus is natural. If a people no longer possesses the
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energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics,29 [the political] will not thereby vanishonly a weak people will disappear (COP, 53). A conclusion that Levinas would have to accord, the moment war and being are equated. In Schmitt, the equation war-being is not yet explicit, but it imposes itself swathed in his sthetic jargon of the strong versus the weak people. Like Levinas, Schmitt will accord that humanity is not a political concept. In a more ambiguous vein, Schmitt remarks that humanity is both a social ideal and a system of relations between individuals (COP, 55). This furthers his argument that where or whenever there is one state, there are really at least two states. A League of Nations or international body could only be political if it could remove the right of war from its member states, while not itself seizing that rightlest the become a mega-political formation. No political humanity, no world state is possible, unless it were in truth a social entity like that of customers purchasing gas [sic] from the same utility company (COP, 57). In that case, like liberal society and liberal politics, the international body would just oscillate between economic concerns and moral ones, which is the lamentable essence of bourgeois individualistic society. Schmitts disdain here grows so ponderous that it turns on him and he concedes that he is finally lead to an anthropological profe ssion of faith (COP, 58). That profession is none other than that evil, stripped of its metaphysical sense as sin, amounts to animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy) (COP, 59). Schmitts undiscriminating aggregate of physical drives, emotions, and pa ssions is polemical. Like Kant, passions for him are pathologies that must be checked. The inclination to slide from passion to evil is the principal feature of human nature (COP, 59), that nature which Levinas called the conatus. Such a human natureand Schmitt insists it must be accepted by anyone who consider himself a political thinker30is the anthropological rock against which liberal and anarchist thought both run aground. Marxism is more consistent; at least it accepts human evil. Schmitt posits his claim about evil as a fact and drives it home with a shower of di sdain heaped on the sycophants who argue that man is good in order to gain a political upper hand or to attack the state.31 Above all, it is Schmitts root. It is the reason why he claims that the p olitical, the other as enemy, and some kind of state institution, are ineradicable. The Concept of the Political culminates in a loose syllogism to the effect that: human nature makes the political unsublatable; the political concerns groups not individuals; liberal society depoliticalizes all groups that participate in it.32 Therefore, liberal society is a new leviathan and hypocriticalsomething Levinas might have sanctioned in 1961: recall his the evidence of war is maintained in a civilization essentially hypocriticalattached at once to the True and to the Good (TI, xii). Schmitt would argue that in liberal society the good is the ideal of humanity, while the true is what those societies actually enact; the unsublatability of the political, combined
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with liberal depoliticalization means that the liberal parliamentarianism will often be unable to rise over and control the pre-political struggles, which arise in times of unrest. Perhaps Schmitt would concede that the hypocritical attachment applies to authoritarian regimes as well. In any event, the attachment to the good and the true is arises from the strife of reason and passions, both of them being as apt to serve desire and rage while, on other occasions, the authoritarian restriction of those excesses. One conviction is constant: liberal society cannot eliminate the political. Worse, liberalism is but a critique of politics not a theory of the political argues Schmitt. There is no specific difference in liberalism, which would let us define the genre called the political. But therein lies the rub: in an odd twist that doubles his arguments for the ineradicability of the political, Schmitt adds that liberalism has still not been replaced in Europe t oday (COP, 71). This is because, while it is not a theory of the political, liberal thought shows an incredibly coherent systematics (COP, 71).33 Why is this? Liberal thought fuses with political concepts the double face of ethical or moral pathos and materialist economic reality (COP, 71). This dualism of the ideal and the moral sensibility, coupled with hardnosed materialism, should suffice to doom liberalism. Now this double face of morality and economics woven into political thought is what the critics of post-World War II liberalism borrowed from Schmitt, justly enough. While never espousing the platforms of authoritarian parties, Levinas himself rarely proves all that fond o f liberalism. In his 1984 talk Peace and Proximity, he reiterates his preferred litotes: It is not without i mportance to knowand this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century whether the egalitarian and just State in which the European is fulfilledand which it is a matterabove all of preservingproceeds from a war of all against allor from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other34 But this is over twenty years after Totality and Infinity. And before that, in his 1934 essay Reflections on Hitlerism, Levinas was more skeptical still about liberalism. In the liberal state, where freedom constitutes the whole of thoughts dign itythought becomes a game. Man revels in his freedom and does not definitively compromise himself with any truth. He transforms his power to doubt into a lack of convictionSincerity b ecomes impossible and puts an end to all heroism. Civilization is invaded by everything that is not authentic, by a substitute that is put at the service of fashion35 How can we fail to hear in this early critique, Schmitts argument that the decline of an autonomous political domain promises the advent of masked conflicts, and ushers in the reign of economy, morals, law, art, entertai nment, etc. (COP, 53)where entertainment sums up the basic lack of seriousness and focused power that characterizes such a society. My point is simply that Levinass stance toward liberal
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society moves from deep skepticism to a reserved toleranceprovided one knows, in the mode of certainty set forth in Totality and Infinity, what the true ground of society is. The principal thrust of Levinass remarks is always the question of the priority of the o rder of Being-War or the interruption of proximity, which sometimes rings foundational. Even if, by 1984, the liberal state had persevered for almost forty years, even if it is deliberately set forth against the inegalitarian state, it can and indeed has slid toward war. For it is unthinkable that the interruption of Beingof the Being that is also Schmitts existential-politicalcould itself become an order rivaling Being. Levinass ethical interruption may hold the political in abeyance. But it neither changes Being nor redeems it. The interruption is simply as old as the order in which Being is equated with the political and with war.36 XII. What are Human Things, What is Culture? In that sense, while he supposes a political37 disturbingly close to that of Schmitt, Levinas proves ultimately more consistent than Schmitt was. Schmi tts own Introduction and Appendices to the 1963 German edition (eliminated from the English translation), explains that his concern is with the order of the human things.38 Can the question of the state really be coextensive with the order of human thingswithout making the state the ultimate raison dtre for humans? The essence of the political lies in the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt roots that distinction in the thought of Machiavelli and Hobbes.39 But Schmitts conception of the political amounts to the collectivization (groups at war) of what was, for Hobbes, individuals in the state of nature.40 Strauss reminds us that Hobbes devised the state of nature for the purpose of heuristics: to describe how human beings probably act if unrestricted. Moreover, Hobbess conceived his heuristic state of nature to show why it was desirable, even imperative, to leave it behind. Given human culture, which is arguably as old as any political formation, Schmitts state of nature is not always on the verge of breaking out. Man may be a dangerous, passionate animal, but unless we ignore the gravitas of culture, war is not our ever-present possibility. Schmitt admitted that war between groups could be deflected through economic or cultural means. His prompt abandonment of this point goes unexplained, but it is understandable. When it serves as a secular theodicy, politics must ignore a realm (like the cultural) in which humans realize themselves spiritually. This is also why a notion like political culture must see its ability to alter political life denied. War must be its own court of appeal. Its ethic and its aesthetics must be determined only by energies and the Will of a people. The autonomy of the political that Schmitt secures through his definition confers on it the status of a theodicy, or an 'ontodicy'. As Strauss puts it, The political is thus not only possible but also real; and not only real but also neces-
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sarybecause it is given in human nature (COP, 95). This can only be achieved by wholly di screditing the meaning of human activities whereby conflict is disarmed through cultural practices.41 Levinas worked with a Schmittian conception of the political from 1934 through 1961. The equation: Being-politics-the permanent possibility of war establishes an order, which is crossed by an interruption. Our interest in ethics arises from that interruption, as does our interest in utopia. But the interruption, called eschatology, is utopian only because the political has been extended to the entirety of Being. Eschatology must, therefore, be transcendencethe counterweight of Schmitts transcendence of the political. That way, eschatology looks utopian because it is not attached to evidence, the true, or the verifiable. Its mode of certainty admits the possibility of doubt. The purpose of the present essay was both to show a significant root of Levinass notion of the political and to pose this question: if politics is not made coextensive with Being, and defined as the activity of distinguishing between friends and enemies while negating the stranger and the enemy, then would Levinass interruption by the other have to be deemed utopian? To answer this, Strauss had recourse to the meaning of culture today. We might ask whether pluralist political theories serve no other function than to depoliticalize society, as Schmitt argued. Above all, we should ask whether the so-called incredibly coherent systematics of liberal thought is due simply to its appealing individualism or its anti-categorial sloppiness (blending the ethical with the economic and losing the political in the process). Rosenzweig abandoned the Hegelian projectat least the left Hegelian one. What shall we do with the right Hegelian critique? There is little irony in the fact that right Hegelians witnessed the devastation, by Hitler, of the liberal political system in 1933the very system they had execrated publically as late as 1932, when The Concept of the Political appeared as a monograph.
Lawrence Olivier, Contre lespoir comme tche politique, suivi de Critique radicale: Essai dimpolitique (Montral: Liber, 2004). Olivier is professor of Political Science at the Universit de Qubec Montral. He has published on Foucault and on relativism in politics. 2 The thesis is somewhat false, of course. Political utopianism is older than the Enlightenment hope of improving man. Plato sketches a utopia, with two provisos: 1) that it is more concerned with what is good for us, than with what is possible for us: it is not a matter of programmatic utopianism, it is an atopian utopia; 2) that it works only if but no one group occupies more than its one type of task: money makers can make money, traders trade, poets must leave, and philosophers, always the aspirant meddlers, can meddle only if they have mastered a program of education that leaves them ready to rule at the youthful age of fifty. At that point, it is to be hoped that their education and age may assure them that their thumos is effectively allied with their reason, permitting a certain control over pleonexia. We are familiar with critiques of Plato and the kallipolis of his Republic, Nietzsche among them.
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Political utopias are anything but children of the Enlightenment. Yet Lawrences protest against secular utopianism remains compelling in its staunch, pessimistic refusal to give way to a liberal interest. 3 See The Childs Relations with Others in M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, James M. Edie, tr., (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 135, 140. He points out that, before the child acquires a sense of its body as spectacle, and even well after this, we find the phenomenon of transiti vism, i.e., the absence of a division between myself and others that is the foundation of syncretic sociabi lity. For we must consider the relation with others not only as one of the contents of our experience but as an actual structure in its own right. We can admit what we call intelligence is only another name designating an original type of relation with others (the relat ion of reciprocity) 4 See Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Richard C. McCleary, tr., (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1964, French edition 1960), pp. 168-70. My two hands coexist or are compresent because they are one single bodys hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeal reality. If the other person is to exist for me, he must do so to begin with in an order beneath the order of thoughtwhich is more dispossession than possession.The whole riddle of Einfhlung lies in its initial esthesiological phase. For Husserl the experience of others is first of all e sthesiological. 5 The debate about politics, then as quite recently too, concerned the legitimacy of pluralist theories of the political in contemporary liberal states. These debates, as must have been clear to their participants then as now, inquire into the reality of liberalism and its ability to protect society and minorities in keeping with its own doctrines. As John P. McCormick has pointed out, in his book on Carl Schmitt, The prevailing notion of pluralism, whether in its existential warring -gods, Weberian manifestation or its more mundane American post-World War II variety, are rightfully challenged today for their insensitivity to concrete cultural, economic, or gender-based specificity. But the advocates of identity and difference qua concrete otherness ought not to leave wholly unexamined their own potential essentializing of themselves or others in their challenges to traditional pluralism. When both sides foreclose the possibility of commonality and mutual rational exchange, they consequently leave the public sphere vulnerable to those who would seek to enforce a stable and unifying order from above and who would exploit concrete othernessin a strategy aimed at naked political gain. Schmitt himself was aware of this sort of exploitation of difference in pl uralist politicshe was a bitter critic of just such hypocrisies. But he was also a proponent of a unifying order imposed from the position of transcendence proper to the state as instance of the political. See McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 310. McCormick and others, like Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, find themselves thus opposed to post-modern positions like those of Deleuze and, to a lesser extent, Iris Marion Young. See McCormick, Op. cit., p. 310 n. 25. The pathos of the pluralist position appears to be that, even in insisting upon integrating the demands of excluded others into consensual agreement andfully d emocratic legitimacy (ibid.), there seems little in these theories to protect one against the imposition from above of part icularist (economic-political) interestsoften presented in guise of defensive strategies, or outright wars, to protect a putatively threatened homeland or way of life. 6 See Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Lvinas: La vie et la trace (Paris: J.C. Latts, 2002), p. 83ff, for a description of life in the camp, Stalag XIB, to which Levinas was deported. 7 See Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel et ltat, Grard Bensussan, tr., Paul-Laurent Assoun, intro., (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991; first published in 1920). 8 For a discussion of the significance of seriousness, gravitas, in Schmitt, see Leo Strausss critical engagement with The Concept of The Political, Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, J. Harvey Lomax, tr., in The Concept of the Political, George Schwab, tr., (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 83-107. Of Schmitts arguments about the appearance of a world in which the political, as the friend and enemy distinction and as war, had ceased to exist, Strauss writes , Schmitt thus makes it clear: The opponents of the political may say what they will; they may appeal on behalf of their plan to the highest concerns of man; their good faith shall not be denied; it is to be granted that weltanschauung, culture, etc., do not have to be [mere] entertainment, but they can become entertainment; on the other hand, it is impossible to mention politics and the state in the same breath as entertai nment; politics and the state are the only guarantee against the worlds becoming a world of entertainment; therefore, what the opponents of the political want is ultimately tantamount toa world without seriousness.[This] is only possible if man has forgotten what genuinely matters p. 101.
9
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See Heidegger, Being and Time, John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson, trs., (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 52, esp. p. 301; German edition p. 257. 10 Like what Emile Benveniste, historian of semantics, called the second sight beyond everyday vision. superstes, super-stare, superstitio. See Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-europennes (Paris: Minuit), Vol. II. 11 The French text reads, Lide eschatologique du jugement (contrairement au jugement de lhistoire o Hegel a vu tort la rationalization de celui-l) implique que les tres ont une identit avant lternit Celui-l, a masculine pronoun, either refers to the judgment tied to eschatology, which Hegel mistook for that which is rationalized by the judgment of history, or it is an error in the text. 12 We should remember that Heidegger also argued that The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency-of-Being, though this optic as Levinas puts it, belongs to everydayness and can be called curiosity [Neugier], not cognition, but nevertheless a certain understanding, in the sense of the genuine appropriation of those entities towards which Dasein can comport itself in accordance with its essential possibilities of Being, see Being and Time, Op. cit., 36, p. 214 (German edition, p. 170). 13 Because Hegel was, on Wahls account, a thinker deeply influenced by, and concerned to distinguish himself from, the Romantics. 14 See Emanuel Hirsch, Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phnomenologie in Hans Friedrich Fulda and Dieter Henrich, eds., Materialen zu Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p.246. It is easy to say in a general sense, from which world the historical forms [ Gestalten] are taken, that is, those forms which provide the material and the background of the Section on Morality. Immediately prior runs the subsection on absolute freedom and the Terror, in which Hegel has set the French Revolution and Napoleon in the magic picture [ im magischen Bilde festgehalten hat]and, at its close, he clearly pronounced the passage from France to Germany. Toward the end of the Section on Morality itself, however, the absolute Spiriti.e., the highest thought of Hegelian philosophyis attained. Therewith, the movement through the forms of morality falls together with that of the movement of Spirit in Germany, which is itself contemporary with the movement of the French Revolution. Now the movement of Spirit to Germany has its origin in Kantian philosophy and its goal or end in that of Hegel. The attraction or stimulus proper to the whole Section is thereby almost already perceived: Hegel speaks here of the becoming [vom Werden] of his philosophy, out of that of Kant, refraining from all the questions which stand in the foreground of the well known essay on Glauben und Wissen. He is attempting, ratherto make comprehensible the philosophical significance the transformation of the Ethos [den Wandel des Ethos] from Kant to Hegel. If for this reason only, it is not a matter of indifference if we while letting the Forms that Hegel himself has us passing over, here, as pure nameless Spirits [ also reine namenlose Geister]are really able to find [these forms] in the outer bounds of a delimited historical sphere. The matter here of course is the relationship of the Phenomenology, and above all, of Absolute Spirit, to factical, historical moments. In her With What Must the Science End?, Gillian Rose argued that we can think the absolute by acknowledging the element of Sollen [ought] in such a thinking, by acknowledging the subjective element, the limits on our thinking the absolute. This is to think the absolute and to fail to think it quite differently from Kant and Fichtes thinking and failing to think it. Thus: Thinking the absolute means recognizing actuality as determinans of our acting by recognizing it in our acts This is way of thinking the absoluteif surprising in its apparent modestyresembles what Adorno called his utopian element. A utopia of reflection; and one not completely alien to Levinas, at least in 1961, when the approach of the Other inaugurates response and conversation. What is reflection if not the immanentization of response and conversation? See G. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London and Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1981, 1995), p. 204. I pursue this at length because such an utopia both is and is not Levinass eschatology. That is, his e schatology is conversation and aptitude for speech. But it is also and massively the counterpoint of a vision of history that is unlike Hegels; Levinass history, if it evinces a dialectical movement at all, moves in no direction and, if this is too easily said about Hegel, Levinass history carries no ought. It only reflects something like an ought, though the modalities of that reflectionwhere and how it happensare not too clear. 15 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, With Leo Strausss Notes on Schmitts Essay , George Schwab, tr. and J. Harvey Lomax, tr (Strausss essay) (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The work Der Begriff der Politischen first appeared in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 58, No. 1; it was 33 pages long. The year it appeared was the same as that in which
24
Heidegger published Being and Time, 1927. The Concept was expanded and republished in 1932 under the same title, in Munich. Hereafter cited in the text as COP. The present citation is from George Schwabs Introduction, see COP, pp. 12, 14 -15 Schmitt, toward the end of the Weimar period, sought to strengt hen drastically the presidents hands, and hence he developed the idea of a presidential systemHe was willing to sacrifice a part of the constitution in order to save and strengthen the existing statehe would accept political parties and the Weimar parliament only on the condition that they be subordinate to and united with the president in search for solutions. This reading of Schmitts hopes makes him appear like a German Madisona move that proves, at best, exaggerated when one recalls his numerous anti-Semitic writings and the vacillation in The Concept that has it defining an internal enemy as a group that saps the state of its political power and authority and as something logically impossible (sometimes an enemy requires its own geographic boundaries, other times, it threatens civil war). Against Schwabs rather heroic Schmitt, Hans Mommsen provides us a quite different story. He writes, The presidential cabinets of the early 1930 were accompanied by concerted attempts to replace the parli amentary system with a system of constitutional rule by the administration. Ideas in this direction had been maturing over a long period. They were the products of the traditional view of the bureaucracy as representative of the common interest which accompanied the widespread criticism of political parties for their alleged inability to handle questions of stateThis objective [protecting the status of civil servants] pe rvaded the writings of Arnold Kttgen, the constitutional lawyer. In this he was representative of a broad school of contemporary thinking, one of the mostinfluentialof which was Carl Schmitt. Such prote ction did not end there. On the basis of Schmitts Verfassungslehre and writings on institutional guarantee, the Brning government began a limited rule by d ecree, which was supported by the Reichgericht (Republic court) and its rulings, like that authorizing salary reductions by emergency decrees. See H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, Philip OConnor, tr., (Princeton, NJ: Princ eton University Press, 1991), p. 82, and for Schmitts contribution to the discussion of rule by emergency decree, see p. 144ff. The ultimate question, here, concerns the relationship between German thought, from Kant or especially Fichtethrough Heidegger, Judaism (and Jewsnow the extension of Judaism, now a de facto group which theory should not touch). Andre Lerousseau has recently published a valuable study of this question, see Le Judasme dans la philosophie allemande: 1770-1850 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001). Marlne Zarader discusses the relationship between Heidegger and Jewish sources of his thought in La dette impense: Heidegger et lhritage hbraique (Paris: Seuil, 1994), English translation forthcoming from Stanford University Press. 16 Olivier Beaud, professor of public law at the University of Lille, points out that, after the fall of the Brning Administration, and against the largely Catholic Zentrum in parliament, Schmitt struggled famously with the prelate Kaas, who argued against any exceptional measures in regard to the Weimar Constitution. In a letter addressed on 29 January 1933 to Chancellor Schleicher and to the Reichs president, Schmitt defended his call for an adjournment of the elections on the basis of a state of exce ptionto keep Hitler from being named chancellor himselfthat, though the circumstances did not necessarily point precisely to such a state in the present case (one should not cry wolf, he insisted), any violation of the constitution [Verfassungsbruch] had to be understood in light of the political situation at hand. It was ther efore the political realitywhich he therein called the constitutional realitythat determined the authentic interpretation of a constitutional text. This is why, in The Concept of the Political, as elsewhere, Schmitt stressed the autonomy of the political (though not of politics). He added, in his discussion of the hermeneutics of the Weimar Constitution, that there existed four possible sub -systems to the parliamentary system under the Constitution of Weimar. The best system, under the circumstances, had to be determined according to the Schmittian hermeneutic [such that] in a determinate situation, any word can a cquire a political interest and thus become immediately conflictual. In short, c onstitutional institutions are meaningful only if they rest upon a real political force, which is another way of arguing that law cannot i mpose itself on political reality. This, in a nutshell, is why Schmitt always stood by the transcendence of the political, over law, economics, and morality. It was a significant aim of his to re-read the Weimar Constitution in such a way that Hitler could not, in fact, be nominated to the position of Chancellor. See Beaud, Les derniers jours de Weimar: Carl Schmitt face lavnement du nazisme (Paris: Descartes et compagnie, 1997)., pp. 191-93. Here, we see a Schmitt who, while clearly conservative, is dedicated, above all, to the idea (and ideal) of constitutionalityeven to the paradoxical point of promoting a sort of coup dtat to preserve a system that recognized constitutionality, over a state of affairs in which its meaning would be effectively eroded. This is not without interest for many of us, today.
17
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As Hans Mommsen reminds us, the illusion that Hitler could be used to conservative ends was fostered by the same tactic that allowed Hitler to consolidate his regime. The explanation of the national socialist regimes relative stability is that, during the Seizure of Power phase [1933 -34], Hitler had been obliged to make far-reaching concessions to the conservative elite controlling the army, economy and administrationAlthough indirectly annulled as time went by, these concessions acted as a brake, enabling the r egime to consolidate itself with remarkable success before the movements destructive forcescould bring about a final overstretching and overtaxing of available resources Mommsen, Op. cit., p. 145. 18 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Op. cit. 19 Incidentally, it really is a matter of man and men here. There are no women in Schmitts work b ecause it is his primary concern to maintain complete detachment vis--vis man as individuals; he insists his concern is with peoples, Vlkeranother crossing point with certain remarks of Heidegger. See for instance, his Beitrge zur Philosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65, (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1989), p. 319, 196 Da-sein und Volk: The essence of the people [des Volkes] is to be grasped only starting from Da-sein and that means, at the same time, to know this: that the people can never be a goal and a purpose [nie Ziel und Zweck], and that such meaning is only a folkish spreading of the li beral Ego-thinking [des liberalen ich-gedankens] and of the economic idea of the preservation [Erhaltung] of life. Like Schmitt, the condemnation turns toward the moral -economic double face of liberal thought and its disingenuousness in regard to, among other things, peoples. The question of whether the feminine might represent an aspect of humanity, and what that aspect might be in regard to peoples (is the feminine absorbed in the collectivity that evinces only masculine a spects; is the situation more complex; are there peoples that are less masculine than othersif these questions seem redolent of bad 19th century ethnologies, they concern positionings, dominance and subaltern status; and they are asking this: is peoples an overly abstract concept in political philosophy (versus jurisprudence)? And what happens to the political if it is so?) These questions should remind us that the Fe minine also has no status other than hearth and seduction in Levinass 1961 work. 20 Using Machiavelli as his legitimation, Schmitt writes, what Machiavelli wants to express everywhere is that man, if not checked, has an irresistible inclination to slide from passion to evil: animality, drives, passions are the kernels of human nature (COP, 59). Clearly, Schmitt felt a psychological kinship with Machiavelli. Toward the end of his essay, he added a note, In actuality, Machiavelli was on the defensive as was also his country, Italy, which in the sixteenth century had been invaded by Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and TurksAt the beginning of the 19 th century the situation of the ideological defensive was repeated in Germanyduring the revolutionary and Napoleonic invasions of the French. When it became important for the German people [sic] to defend themselves against an expanding enemy armed with a humanitarian ideology, Machiavelli was rehabilitated by Fichte and Hegel in COP, p. 66 (emphasis added). We see, here, his characteristic cynicism vis --vis humanitarian ideologies. Such a dsoeuvrement is understandable, but it is not possible to follow the positive prescription: rehabilitate Machiavelli (were we ever free of him?), establish the State as transcendent to all factions, movements, parties, enshrine the political as the sole domain in which a people d ecides who is a friend and who, an enemy, and thereby self-arrogates the right to murder entire groups of enemies. Even if Schmitts critique of the individualism, the anti -political yet hyper-politicized operation of the bourgeois liberal state is of real interest, he has nothing to put in its place and, by the end of his essay, he appears to conceded this. Given his joining and defense of the Nazi Party, one has to ask whether a Fichte traumatized, say, by Weimar upheavals would have joined such a party. The question can be extended further. The responses would be irreconcilable. If one adds that, like Heidegger as Rektor-for-a-year in Freiburg, Schmitt too got into significant trouble with the Nazis. Tracy Strong reminds us that the SS journal Das schwarze Korps accused him of the anathema, neo-Hegelianism, and that he had to find protection under Herman Gring, see Tracy B. Strong, Forward, COP, x. 21 Schmitt points out that it was discussed by men from Lorenz von Stein to Rudolf Gneist, both opponents of Napoleon, to Jakob Burckhardt, see COP, 23-4. 22 Here, Schmitt is citing Rudolf Smends Constitution and Constitutional Law [Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht] of 1928. Smend is citing H. Treschers 1918 dissertation on Hegel and Montesquieu. It is not that Schmitt approves these two strategies of integratio n (i.e. that of the total state and that of the universal state). He seems to recognize that, after Bismarck, the integration is inevitable. Still, it is better if soc iety integrates the state than if the state dissolves into the society. In the former case, he and others argue, political sovereignty is preserved and social or economic institutions do not thereby become political rivals
26
with it or for its power. In the latter case, the total stateno longer knows anything absolutely unpolitical, the state which must do away with the depoliticalizations of the nineteenth century andputs an end to the principle that the apolitical economy is independent of the state and that the state is apart from the economy COP, 25. The interest that Schmitt held for left and right critics of liberalism lies here, in the question of what the political becomes when everything is political. Everything has become potentially p olitical, clearly, but that means, for Schmitt, that in every domain of society, the distinction between friends of the state and enemies of the state can, and will, be made. It is not absurd to remark that Guantanamo and The Patriot Act denote one side of this process. 23 Totalit et infini, Op. cit., p. 52 Nous rservons la relation entre ltre ici-bas et ltre transcendant qui naboutit aucune communaut de concept ni aucune totalitle terme de religion. Recall Levinass equation of the proto-ethical with religion meant religion as tied to legare rather than to ligare; religion denotes intersubjective ties only late, in the Christian era, where it was a tie of piety. Formed from ligare, religio represents, a hesitation that holds one back, a scruple that hinders and not a sentiment that directs one to an action or incites one to practice the cult. This is Ciceros interpretation, read by a linguist who began his reflective life in yeshiva as a Talmudist: Emile Benveniste. Levinas knew of his work in historical semantics. I suspect he was not about to equate his sense of religion with the ties of piety (religare). Cf. E. Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes, Vol. II Pouvoir, Droit, Religion (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), pp. 267-273. 24 Heidegger writes, The ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not to be outstripped, is certain. The way to be certain of it is determined by the kind of truth, which corresponds to it (disclosedness). The certain possibility of deathdiscloses Dasein as a possibility, but does so only in such a way that, in a nticipating this possibility, Dasein makes this possibility possible for itself as its ownmost potentiality-forBeing (Being and Time, 53, p. 309/264). 25 The notion of decision and the doctrine of decisionism in politics are central to Schmitts Politische Theologie. The first chapter of that work defines sovereignty thus: Is sovereign, he who decides in the exce ptional situation. Only this definition can satisfy the notion of sovereignty as a limit notiona notion of the extreme sphere. See Thologie politique, Op. cit., p. 16. As we know, the extreme sphereunderstood as the consummation of the friend-enemy distinctionis politics itself. Here, it is a general notion of the theory of the Sate, and not some proclaimed emergency or some state of siege. The notion of a decision about all ontology in light of the weak cr itiques offered by neo -Kantianism and with a view to an authentic unfolding of ontology from its beginning is found in Heideggers Beitrge zur Philosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65, (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1989), 44-49; 104106, pp. 90-103; 203-206. Such a decisionthe term is central to the Beitrge is necessitated by another end, that of the history of metaphysics itself, as completed by Nietzsche (p. 206). I note this here, emphasizing that the parallel lies above all in the spirit and hyperbole with which both Schmitt and Heidegger pursue authentic meanings and beginningswhether for a post-metaphysical thinking or for the public order. (Keeping in mind that Heideggers Entscheidung and Ent-scheidung is seinsgeschichtlich zu fassen, nicht moralisch-anthropologisch [to be understood as being-historical, not moral-anthropological]. To ask what that means, for us, is, of course, to ask a mis-conceived question; as such, foreclosed by definition.) 26 In this discussion, the Kulturkampf against the Roman Church exemplifies a cultural battle whose outcome, in light of Schmitts definition of the political, left to be desired: in the Kulturkampfit was seen that even a state of the unimpaired strength of Bismarcks Reich was not absolutely sovereign and powe rful. This state was, he adds, equally unsuccessful in its battle against the socialist working class. Schmitt cites these examples in a discussion of Gierkes association theory[Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht German Law of Associations] of the state and one J. Neville Figgiss Churches in the Modern State (1913). He concedes that the significance of such associations is important to any theory of the pol itical. But he parries: The question remains unanswered: which social entity (if I am permitted to use here the i mprecise liberal concept of social) decides the extreme case and determines the decisive friend-and-enemy grouping? (COP, 43). Neither church nor union nor party, nor these together could effectively wage (he writes forbidden) a war then. Therefore, neither of these associations could arrogate to itself the right of war, the all-important notion of jus belli. 27 He will later close down all debate, arguing that there is absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal cr itique of politics, see COP, 70. 28 After all, once war breaks out, the cultural or the economic or the social become political themselves, which is the kind of integration of all aspects of human existence into the political that Schmitt approves.
27
This is, as Strauss also saw, the mirror image of the liberal states structure. That is why Strauss will also arguehaving uncovered Schmitts unconscious moral evaluationthat this theory is not just the reverse of liberal political theory, it really never leaves the sphere of liberalism because it neither defines politics nor stands without the moral and sthetic judgment about the good and the beautiful. Despite his protestations, Schmitt proceeds on the conviction that the permanent possibility of discerning who is a friend and who, an enemy, is good. It also seems to be a beautiful thing that the state remain pristine, untouched by culture, economics, and politics (a notion he never defined). 29 Sometimes Schmitt confounds the political with politics himself, but this is a matter of usage; in fact, everything that could be called politics (legislation, negotiations, interactions between the legislative o rganism and voters, or between an executive instance and the legislative, etc.) will be subsumed into one of two domains, the one legitimate, the other hypocritical: the political itself versus the liberal state. 30 He identifies the idea of a problematic human nature with theorists as diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Corts, Hyppolite Taine, and Hegel, who, to be sure, at times also shows his double face (COP, 61, also see pp. 64 -65). 31 the antagonism between the so -called authoritarian and anarchist theories can be traced to these formulas. A part of the theories and postulates which presuppose man to be good is liberal. Without being actually anarchist they are polemically polemically directed against the intervention of the state. Ingenuous anarchism reveals that the belief in the natural goodness of man is closely tied to the radical denial of state and government. One follows from the other, and both foment each other. For the liberalsthe goodness of man signifies nothing more than an argument with whose aid the state is made to serve society (COP, 60; emphasis added; also see p. 68). What else should the state serve if not society? What is left for it to serve, if war is not the end of politics, as he tried to assert earlier on. Humanity is an ideal; the state is not there to serve ideals; the state serves a certain rationality, but this must be the rationality of the political, whose founding distinction is that which structures war: the friend-enemy distinction. What is left for the state to serve, if not the properthe adjective is undeterminableadjudication of situations and initiation of war? To put this in a reduced form: the state comes, ultimately, to serve the promotion of death or, at least, to promote the death of the enemies. 32 The conclusion of section seven makes Hegel the supreme thinker of this political. This remains vis ible also through the correctness or incorrectness of Hegels ephemeral position on historical events of his time (COP, 62). Indeed, the spirit of Hegel has vanished from Berlin (where Schmitt was then teaching, himself). If Hegel saw the ethos of European philosophy migrating from France to Germany, from Kant to himself, on Schmitts account that ethos has actually now wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and LeninThe actuality of Hegel is [moreover] very much alive in Georg Lukcs (63). Through Hegel, Schmitt and Kojve also flow together. The friend-enemy distinction, considered along with Hegels cr itique of the bourgeois as the privatized, timorous man and his notion of the enemy as negated otherness (COW, 63), transforms the Lord-Vassal or Herrschaft und Knechtschaft dialectic into a master and slave onethis time, the dialectic of the master group and the slave group. Even if Schmitt argued that his friend-enemy animosity was a relation of reciprocity, his sthetic argues surreptitiously that only one side will evince energy and will sufficient to triumph. 33 As he points out in both The Concept of the Political and in Political Theology, the position that the people is good and the government, corruptible, simply reverses the older religious position concerning original sin and mans fallen condition, which leaves him/her in need of a good political power, capable of imposing its decisions. See Jean-Lois Schlegels remarks in his Introduction to Schmitt, Thologie politique, 1922, 1969, J-L Schlegel, tr., (Paris: Gallimard, 1988; translation of Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souvernitt, 2nd edition, 1934), pp. vii-viii. Ultimately, the claim is simply this, and it must sometime be raised in regard to Levinass work which is not Christian despite its popularity among some Christians: the metaphysical image that an age holds of its world has the same structure as that which seems to it evident in the affairs of political organization. Schmitt poses this as a rhetorical question; see Thologie politique, Op. cit., p. 55. 34 See Levinas Paix et Proximit in Cahiers de la nuit surveille, Jacques Rolland, ed., (Paris: Editions Verdier, 1984), p. 346. 35 Emmanuel Levinas, Reflections on Hitlerism, (1934) in Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1990, pp. 69-70. It is because of this slippage into hypocrisy, or into fashion, that makes the Germanic ideal of man [seem] to promise sincerity and authenticity. This is Levinas considering both Nietzsche and Heidegger and, I su spect, Schmitt, though he never mentions the latter.
36
28
Perhaps, in fact, the ethical interruption called responsibility is older than Being. It is older t han the state certainly. But since the incipience of the interruption is immemorial, and since it is absurd to speak of the beginning of the history of Being, the matter of their relative age cannot be decided. 37 Whether this is a right or a left Schmittianism; after all, we should recall that Walter Benjamin was interested in Schmitt, perhaps in light of the formers work on the two types of violence in Zur Kritik der Gewalt. 38 Fortunately for us English-speaking readers, Leo Strauss read these omitted p arts, and explained that the treatise by Schmitt serves the question of the order of the h uman things, that is, the question of the state (COP, 83). In other words, the state will be equated with that which has the greatest gravitas in human existence. It is with that step, precisely, that Schmitt has made of politics his theodicy. 39 Less cited in The Concept of the Political are the philosophers of the Restoration, which combated the activist spirit of the Revolution. These include, de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Donoso Corts, all of which are discussed in Chapter IV of his Political Theology. From these thinkers, notably Bonald, Schmitt draws support for his return to a two-term antithesis, against the Hegelian, three-term dialectic. See Concept of the Political, pp. 73-74 The triple structure weakens the polemical punch of the double -structured antithesis (p. 74) and Thologie politique, All sovereignty acts as though it were infallible, all gover nment is absolutea proposition that an anarchist could have taken up word for wordThe clearest antithesis that emerges from the entire history of the political idea in general holds in a proposition of this sort. All anarchist doctrines, from Babeuf to Bakunin, Kropotkin and Otto Gross, turn around the unique axiom: The people is good and the magistrate corruptible. Co nverselyde Maistre declares all authority good as such, starting from the simple moment at which it exists: All government is good once it is established, p. 64. As he is wont to do repeatedly, Schmitt ventures to show the mimetics at work with their characteristic reversalbetween radical politics and restoration politics. In this, he includes Rousseau and Fichte, whose legislators and legal despots educate brutish man and show the state as, in Fichtes words, a culture factory, Thologie politique, p. 65. Now it is precisely on this question of the role of culture that Strauss will attack Schmitts concept of the politicala work that has little concern for culture as a counterweight to the friend-enemy decisionism that characterizes the advent of the political. 40 See Strauss, Notes on The Concept of the Political, in COP, p. 90. 41 Which is of course why works like Marcel Mauss on the Potlatch are indispensable, the operatio n of culture there runs parallel to that of Schmitts state and suggests that the friend -enemy distinction was, for millennia, decided and administered by wars taking a form that did not resemble contemporary p olitical ones. If it seems compelling to venture a similar argument in light of contemporary society, we should keep in mind that Schmitt can always respond that, in liberal society today, cultural criticism or extra-political contestation arise because the state has abdicated its true role. Thus the pluralists theory of the state, i gnores the central concept of every theory of state, the political, .The result is nothing else than one association [being] played off against another and all questions and conflicts [being] decided by individuals. In reality, there exists no political society or associationThe political entity is something specifically different andsomething decisive. Were this entity to disappearthen the political itself would disappear (COP, 44-45), or some other group or institution would be exercising the right of war disingenuously.

Bettina Bar Go Levinas Politics

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Bettina Bar Go Levinas Politics

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Untying the Utopia-War Opposition in Levinas Or, How did Schmitts Political enter Levinass Totality?

What is Politics in Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics? Bettina Bargo (Universit de Montral)

I. Against Hope in Politics

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