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Alec Blockis
20
th
Century Political Philosophy
Final Essay
04/29/14

Academic Justice and the Universitys Other

[B]y formulating freedom as choice and reducing the political to policy and law, liberalism sets
loose, in a depoliticized underworld, a sea of social powers nearly as coercive as law, and certainly as
effective in producing subjectivated subjects[C]hoice can become a critical instrument of domina-
tion in liberal capitalist societies; insofar as the fiction of the sovereign subject blinds us to powers
producing that subject, choice both cloaks and potentially eroticizes the powers it engages," (Brown,
pg. 197).

I didnt know if I could even speak for a group that I was in the process of trying to escape, (Lee,
pg. 85)

Introduction
The University occupies a very peculiar space in contemporary liberal socie-
ties. It has generally existed as a bulwark of elite formation and, in colonial contexts,
as the alma mater of the comprador class. Today, various avenues within the Uni-
versity have embraced curriculums that engage with various forms of social justice
movements, movements that frequently contest the conditions that allow the Uni-
versity to exist in the first place. Its at this nexus where the University confronts
and attempts to build solidarity withthe populations whove been excluded from
academia whether theyre accepted into the University or not. While this moment
opens up numerous possibilities for a would-be elite institution to be reclaimed as a
transformative political tool thats capable of undermining liberalisms continued
viability, the Universitys political limitations must be acknowledged. In this essay, I
argue that the University is a political entity that commands a degree of exclusivity
that cannot be remediated solely through academic social justice. Furthermore, by
contextualizing the University and academic social justice as exclusive, I
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acknowledge their imbrication in the exclusivist and violent politics of liberal he-
gemony at large. This essay is composed of three sections. The first explicates Carl
Schmitts (2007) critique of liberalism. The second situates Wendy Browns (2008)
critique of civilizing and tolerance discourses within Schmitts writing, where Ill
pursue a more detailed analysis of liberalism and the depoliticization of domination.
Third, I will juxtapose M.E. Lees (2011) experiences of marginalization, within the
University and academic social justice courses, with the depictions of liberalism de-
tailed by Schmitt and Brown in order to tease out the limits of academia.
Liberalism and the Political
In his essay, The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt endeavors to locate a
distinctbut by no means exhaustivedefinition of the political and a heuristic
for understanding politics as theyre deployed. He argues that the political can be
reduced to, yet not defined by, the friend and enemy distinction wherein any con-
temporary social entity might recognize the latter as an existential threat to the(ir)
former (Schmitt, 2007). He makes a concerted effort to show that the political can-
not be conflated with the functioning of economics, aesthetics, morality, or
technologies of governance because each of these can exist in a (non-existent) apo-
litical world and, conversely, their operations must be understood as variably
political depending upon the political environment that theyre operating within or
for. Moreover, [e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis trans-
forms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively
according to friend and enemy, (Schmitt, pg. 37). In other words, politics are likely
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to be embedded in virtually every aspect of our contemporary lives sofor one to
understand their imbrication in politicsthe political must be demystified.
As Ive already mentioned, the machinations of politics can be located where
friends and enemies are delineated. These terms hold a very specific meaning
for Schmitt: the former is embodied by solidarity amongst a group of humans who
share an existential bond thats both defined and threatened by the latter (and vice
versa). For a social entity to become political, then, it must be capable of maintain-
ing its own existence by incapacitating any enemy that arises; a polity emerges
when a social entity can mobilize itself for war. Schmitts employment of the delib-
erately commodious term social entity concurs with his contention that any
commonly held identityreligious, economic, nation-state, or otherwisecan be-
come, a political entity when it possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of
promoting that decisive step [whether or not to wage war], when it is in the position
of forbidding its members to participate in wars, i.e., of decisively denying the ene-
my quality of a certain adversary, (Schmitt, pg. 37). In this way, the possibility of
making a sovereign decision to mobilize a social entity for or against war heralds
this entitys politicality. Regardless of whether this sovereign decision manifests
through a fascistic diktat or hegemonic consensus, the ways in which a state, church,
or group of insurrectionists (etcetera) can and do engage their capacity to will/wage
war and maintain their existential futurity exposes the mobilizing entitys political
anatomy.
Throughout his exploration of the political, Schmitt is principally concerned
with the early 20
th
century nation-states political anatomy and how the character
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and legibility of this anatomy has shifted with the advent of the liberal state. While
he does not endeavor to provide an exhaustive definition of the state, he acknowl-
edges that it could be any number of things: a machine or an organism, a person or
an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even
a basic procedural order, (Schmitt, pg. 19). Because the state is a recurring theme
in his contextualization of the political, its valuable to acknowledge that Schmitt us-
es the term state to loosely signify a certain organization of a political population
who can be mobilized for war, such as Germany or France in the 1920s. This de-
scription does not necessitate that a states population must be entirely aware of
their politicality. In fact, even if an individual or population within the state identi-
fies themself as apolitical, they remain in political congruence with the state so long
as it retains the capacity to wage war. For example, proclaiming myself to be mere-
ly a banker would not render me apolitical because the financial establishment that
hypothetically employs me is almost certainly invested in the arms manufacturers
or oil companies that provide my state the material means to wage war. According
to Schmitt, this hollow proclamation of apoliticality represents a crucial aspect of
the liberal state: the disavowal of its own politicality while ruthlessly deploying it.
The unique governance of the liberal state disavows its own political orienta-
tion in a very distinct way: those in the position to make declarations of war justify
their decisions not out of existential necessity but out of appeals to universal ethi-
cal principles or humanity. By shrouding acts of war in invocations of humanity or
universalityterms signifying a non-existent apolitical world wherein all of the
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earths people are no longer divided amongst friends and enemies
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war-makers
can eschew their murderous trysts by both conducting them for the sake of human-
ity and positioning themselves as universal subjects who merely make the same
decisions that any other rational being would. Moreover, a liberal states political
needs are reframed as universal needs, which discursively positions the mainte-
nance of the liberal states existential futurity and interests as the precondition to
avoiding war.
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The result of this is not war for self-defense but war for conquest, for
expansion.
Almost a century later, political theorists are still endeavoring to demystify
the consequences of disavowing the liberal states own politicality. In other words,
various thinkers are asking how centuries of ostensibly unjustifiable wars, capitalist
imperialism, settler-colonialism, and global policingall employed in racialized,
gendered, sexualized, and class/labor-oriented mannerscan become justifiable or
invisible within a liberal framework that claims to revile all of these practices. In
Schmitts words:
[These liberal technologies of annihilation needed] a new and
essentially pacifist vocabularyWar is condemned but execu-
tions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of
treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace re-
main. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a

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Humanity, according to natural law and liberal-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all em-
bracing, social ideal, a system of relations between individuals. This materializes only when the real
possibility of war is precluded and every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible. In this
universal society there would no longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles,
and no enemy groupings, (Schmitt, pg. 55).
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When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of hu-
manity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military
opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as
one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as ones own and to
deny the same to the enemy, (Schmitt, pg. 54).
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disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of
humanity, (Schmitt, pg. 79).

In Tolerance As/In Civilizational Discourse, Wendy Brown (2008) explores the ways
in which discursive motifs of universality, humanity, civility/civilization, and toler-
ance frame a contemporary disavowal of the political in the United States. More
specifically, she shows how the hegemonized valuation of civilized dialogue and
tolerance legitimates and justifiesin both day-to-day conversation and in the
upper echelons of the state apparatusilliberal actions without appearing to do
so.
According to Brown, this is achieved by distinguishing, free societies from
from [sic] fundamentalist ones, the civilized from the barbaric, and the individ-
ualized from the organicist or collectivized, (Brown, pg. 177). These couplings have
been naturalized as theses and antitheses to one another within mainstream dis-
course, assist[ing] in each others constitution and in the constitution of the West
and its Other. Whenever one pair of terms is present, it works metonymically to
imply the others, (Brown, pg. 177). She avers that the functioning of these cou-
plings tacitly positions Western civilization as superior to non-civilized
culturesthose groupings of people that cannot think for themselveswhich
ought to be tolerated. It is in this way that tolerance can be understood as a per-
formance of dominance between those who preach its virtues and the cultured
Other, who can be either tolerated or intolerable depending upon their capacity to
challenge Western hegemony. Throughout my explication of Wendy Browns
(2008) essay, I will pay specific attention to the relationships between tolerance and
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culture and how the liberal virtues of individualism and freedom serve to disavow
the political.
As Ive already stated, the terminological espousal of tolerance is eminent
in virtually every proponent of liberal society and, Brown (2008) avers, a critical
component of pro-Western pedagogy, as well. Many of us are taught in schools and
through the news media that certain people and practices must be tolerated if they
fit within the pale of Western civilization while lacking the puissance or interest to
challenge itgay is okay, Muslims are people too, I dont see race, I see people,
I havent a political alliance, Im a humanist. If a social group, in Schmitts lan-
guage, can garner the means to politicize itself in opposition to globalized Western
hegemonythe Islamic jihadists, the Congos warlords, or uncivilized tribes
who oppose the Amazons deforestationthey must either become civilized, by
comporting themselves to US or Western European interests, or become subject to
annihilation for the good of humanity. Moreover, the valuation and practice of
tolerance simultaneously confirm the superiority of the West; depoliticize (by re-
casting as nativist enmity) the effects of domination, colonialism, and cold war
deformations of the Second and Third Worlds; and portray those living these effects
as in need of the civilizing project of the West, (Brown, pg. 186).
Power and politics disappear when toleration is espoused; the hegemonic is
poised as the universal and a politys enemy is reframed as anti-human, as a dan-
ger to all. Whether a population is to be toleratedto be treated as deviant and
inferior to liberal elites and those that pass as suchor dealt with, the functioning
of toleranceno matter how capacious a (de)political entity might assert itself to
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bedelineates global populations as differentially superior, inferior/deviant, and
insurgent/barbaric, while the superior can evade accusations that their politics far
outstrip existential self-defense and the deviant can deny any degree of complicity.
Brown (2008) argues that this evasion is realized not only by effacing the political
but through the denigration of people who belong to culture as well. To be(come)
tolerant/superior is not a choice open to the Other, to the tolerated: they are
described as possessed by culturecharacterized by a primitive or child-like ab-
sence of agency due to their enmeshment in a morass of social medievalismand
are therefore not capable of comporting to the liberal virtues of individualism and
freedom. Within this framework, culture effaces the reality that populations
whove been subjected to the interests of (Western) civilization are likely to engage
in resistance (read: existential self-defense; politics), while disavowing the violent
mores and laws within civil society by appealing to the liberal virtues of freedom,
tolerance, and autonomy. It is within this context that Brown (2008) conceives
of tolerance as, less a moral or political achievement of liberal autonomy than a
bourgeois capitalist virtue, the fruit of power and successeven domination,
(Brown, pg. 200).
Summarily, tolerance and civilizing discourses operate both as propellants of
and veils for globalized governance and sovereignty. Brown illuminates the, dis-
cursive function of tolerance in legitimating the often violent imperialism of
international liberal governmentality conjoined with neoliberal global political
economy[that] liberalisms conceit of independence from culture, of neutrality
with regard to culture[is] a conceit that in turn shields liberal polities from charg-
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es of cultural supremacy and cultural imperialism, (Brown, pg. 202). This univer-
salization of civility and shrouding of violent global Western hegemony serves to
justify the slaughter and exploitation of the (un)civilized and (in)tolerable Other.
Whereas Schmitt (2007) has outlined the unjustifiable expanse of warfare natural to
the liberal state, Brown (2007) has contextualized the ways in which liberal violence
is disavowed and, consequentially, justified at virtually every level of society. Addi-
tionally, Brown (2008) has detailed an heuristic of the political, which differs from
how Schmitt (2007) mightve imagined warfare, that suits the contemporary politi-
cality of liberalism. I would like to ask, though, if there is a particular politicality,
immanent within Browns (2008) capacity to locate the carnage of globalized liber-
alism and its Other, that has yet to be demystified?
The University and the Political
The primary purpose of this essay is to show how the same consequences of
liberal depoliticization framed by Carl Schmitt (2007) and Wendy Brown (2008)
manifest themselves in the university. That is to say, Browns depiction of the ped-
agogy of tolerance can be located within the University, a linkage thats rendered
barely legible for many of those whore invested in academia as a catalyst for
change or social justice. While many of us invested in the University and academia
might have to do a lot of digging to discover its politicality, folks like M.E. Lee had
no choice but to confront the Universitys politicality and its familiarity head-on. In
M.E. Lees (2011) essay, Maybe Im Not Class Mobile, she recounts how her queer-
ness, bi-racial identity, and low-income upbringing impacted her understanding of
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the University and how the University concurrently transformed her relationship to
capitalism, race, queerness, the family, and social justice.
I would like to bring particular attention to the ways in which Lee became
disillusioned with her womens studies courses. Its been fairly safe (and accurate)
to assume that the University has been a particularly favorable environment for
White heterosexual men with a substantial degree of economic security, which Lee
has argued for. In addition to this, though, she endeavors to destabilize the idea that
courses with a focus on social justice, such as womens studies, operate as a sort of
subversive element of the University that challenges its pandering to the elites of
liberal society. In her own words, [a]cademic institutions reinforced class privilege,
but academic feminism, for all its espoused anti-oppressive commitments, did not
want to get into the details, (Lee, pg. 86). Whenever she tried to speak out against
the classist aspects of the academic industry and the values that permeate it, (Lee,
pg. 85) in her womens studies courses, for instance, she would be, met with slight-
of-hand, apologist pandering, and dismissal, (Lee, pg. 86). Her lived experiences of
economic, sexual, gendered, and racial marginalizationthe very ones being dis-
cussed in her classeswere effectively ignored or pinned as problematic, running
parallel with the underrepresentation of low-income folks and people of color in the
University; [e]ven when the oppressed person is sitting right there, the subjects of
our study, the university setting permits everyone to talk about us in the third per-
son, (Lee, pg. 90). This is an example of a liberal disavowal of the political par
excellence, wherein those who preach social justice, a manifest good, often remain
unwittingly complicit with the very institution they wish to critique. Nowhere in
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Lees (2011) essay is this made more salient than in her brief discussion on other-
ness.
Lee (2011) explains that as she, began to put down roots in the middle-class
professional world, it became clear that there was a lot of unresolved, even
unacknowledged tension and anger with regard to those with class privilege. [Lee
and her mother] had not constructed this us and them world, but [they] had lived
in it all of [their] lives, and suddenly, [Lee] was becoming a them[], (Lee, pp. 86-
7). Throughout this passage, Lee constructs an understanding of isolation that I
would like to juxtapose with Browns (2008) explicit employment of the Other.
While Brown (2008) is principally focused on how liberal discourse attempts to
contain and marginalize the Other, Lee expands our understanding of marginaliza-
tion as not only something that pits a population against polities subsumed in
bourgeois liberal values but as a populations isolation from their own economically
and racially subordinated communities and families. In other words, political enti-
ties that benefit from liberalism, such as Universities, do not own a monopoly on the
power to marginalize.
An academic
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conception of liminality, marginalization, or otherness that
focuses solely on a unilateral relationship of power between mainstream society
and the Other conveys 1) a narcissistic conviction that only the people sharing
many facets of the academics own positionalitya positionality that the academic

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While I may have used the term academic in a potentially facile manner, I do not intend to argue
that all academics are the same. Im merely trying to convey a certain positionality held by many
scholars in an economically elite and white supremacist pedagogical institution. M.E. Lees descrip-
tion of her academic career should suffice to evidence the fact that the experiences of academics in
general are, briefly put, absolutely plural.
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is actively critiquingpossesses the power to isolate and 2) a claim to universality,
wherein the academics understanding of a topic is intended to speak truth to the
subjects under scrutiny when said subjects are regularly excluded from the Univer-
sity, the institution thats played a significant role in producing the academic writer
in the first place. This isnt to say that Browns (2008) utilization of the Other is
incorrect or useless but, rather, that her capacity to speak for the populations she
studiesthose who were either denied admission to higher-education or ignored
upon their acceptanceand to share her thoughts with tens-of-thousands of read-
ers is implicated in the relations of power that she demystified in Tolerance As/In
Civilizational Discourse. In Lees (2011) words:
[U]niversities do not merely mediate the boundary between
professional and labourer, they teach the body of knowledge, the
worldview, the values that mark a person as professional, as be-
longing to the middle- or upper-class. Universities teach us to
renounce our sense of identification with the poor; they teach
this by mainly ignoring the existence of poor people, and by
treating us as other when we do become the subject of discus-
sionUniversities teach us that we are separate from where we
came from, that we are qualified (which suggests that our fami-
lies and peers are not), that we are justified in having power over
people, in speaking for the subjects of our study, (Lee, pg. 90).

Moreoveras an extension of Browns (2008) and Schmitts (2007) concordance
that the depoliticization of the illiberal is a critical component of liberalismI
would aver that depoliticizing the University and academias relationship to system-
atic forms of oppression and their imbrication in a broader liberal polity, which
shares these values and reproduces the conditions that these oppressions emerge
from, provides the false notion that an academic analysis of power will produce the
political transformations fought for everyday by humanitys most marginalized. In
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accordance with Schmitts convictions that 1) nobody can exist apolitically unless all
politics have disappeared and 2) that simply speaking out against a liberal state ful-
fills the liberal virtue of free speech without posing a concrete challenge to the
states stability, it seems unlikely that academic literature, on its own, could ever
emerge as a true political contestation to globalized liberalism.
Conclusion
In keeping with Schmitt (2007), I cannot assume myself or my writing to be
apolitical so Id like to make my political convictions (or, convictions that I would
like to become politically viable) clear: what must not be tolerated are the condi-
tions that put successful academics in a position to speak for the Other as well as
the subjugated communities that many students, academics, and professors are of-
ten, in the process of escaping, (Lee, pg. 85). Under the depoliticized guise of
meritocracy, those who best navigate the forms of gendered, racial, sexual, settler-
colonial, abled, and class-based marginalization, that both reproduce and constitute
the University, usually achieve success within academia. What ought to be
avowed, then, are the ways in which the Universitys exclusivity ekes its way into
academic literatureespecially in writing that pertains to social justiceand the
certain types of people and voices that tend to realize academic success. It should
be noted that the intent of this essay was not to critique Carl Schmitt (2007) or
Wendy Brown (2008) but, instead, to utilize their theories in a manner that would
unfurl the Universitys politicality and how academic social justice is necessarily in-
debted to and imbricated in this institutional paradigm.
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I will conclude by explicating a term that Ive employed frequently throughout
this essay yet only defined indirectly: politicality. A social entitys politicality is the
conditions and characteristics of this entity that cannot be measured solely by its
complicity in the states capacity to wage war. In other words, the University as we
know it owes its existence to the same systems of oppression, capitalism, and bu-
reaucratized governing structures that allow the liberal state to perpetuate itself
and engage in war. Therefore, if we are to reduce the political to a social entitys
capacity to cohere and wage war, politicality can be understood as a social entitys
internal self-organization that produces the means for it to wage war. It is in the
Universitys politicalitya reification of and in communion with the liberal states
politicalitywhere the limits of academic social justice can be located.

Works Cited
Brown, Wendy. Tolerance As/In Civilizational Discourse. In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age
of Identity and Empire, 176205. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

M.E. Lee. Maybe Im Not Class-Mobile; Maybe Im Class-Queer Poor Kids in College, and Survival
under Hierarchy. In Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Femi-
nism, edited by Jessica Yee, 8592. Our Schools/our Selves, 4th v. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives, 2011.

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of The Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.