More than 20 years have passed since the publication of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1993). The three chapters (4, 5 and 6) of Derrida’s text that deal with Schmitt’s analysis of the concept of the political have attracted relatively little interest in the English-speaking world. It has generated much more controversy in Schmitt’s country of origin, Germany. As noted in Chapter 1 above, Derrida in Politics of Friendship not only engages with The Concept of the Political (1927), but also with other texts of Schmitt that touch on the ‘theme’ of the political, such as ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ (1963), Political Theology II (1970), the Glossarium (1991) and Ex Captivitate Salus (1950). In these texts, Schmitt appears to seek in typical metaphysical style, as elaborated on in Chapter 1 above, the essence of the political, with the latter appearing to be in decline in the twentieth century. In The Concept of the Political, the focus of Section A, he finds this essence or ‘criterion’ in the drawing of a distinction between friend and enemy, which in turn finds its limit or extreme case in war. In both The Concept of the Political and ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, the focus of Section B, Schmitt seeks to understand the nature of war, specifically in the modern era, by enquiring into different forms of enmity or hostility. In The Concept of the Political he identifies the enemy as polémios or hostis (and not ekhthrós or inimicus). In ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ he identifies the different forms of hostility (real and absolute) associated with respectively the telluric and world-revolutionary partisan, as compared to the conventional hostility established by the jus publicum Europaeum, at stake in The Concept of the Political. Going back in time, as Derrida does in Politics of Friendship, Section C follows Schmitt in Ex Captivitate Salus where he enquires into the enemy with reference to Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1845) as well as Descartes’ Meditations (1641) and concludes that the enemy is the one who can put me in question, and the only one who can do so is the self, or the brother. The concept of the political thus loses its essence and self-destructs.
The focus in the three sections that follow will be a somewhat neglected aspect in the reception of Derrida’s engagement with Schmitt, that is, the role of psychoanalysis. Following the analysis set out in Chapter 1 above, Derrida is not engaging in the first place in a critique of Schmitt as has been assumed in much of the literature. A deconstructive reading of Schmitt is taking place here, with Derrida seeking a form of friendship, or what he refers to as ‘lovence’, beyond the political. Derrida finds traces in the texts of Schmitt referred to above of something beyond the political. Sections A–C undertake an analysis of the new ‘structure’ of the concept of the political which comes to the fore in Derrida’s reading. This new structure must be at the heart of any attempt to rethink constitutional theory after Derrida, as the concept of the political is central to Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory.
Viele zitieren den Satz des Heraklit: Der Krieg ist der Vater aller Dinge. Wenige aber wagen es, dabei an den Bürgerkrieg zu denken.1
(ECS 26)
Der hier genannte pólemos ist ein vor allem Göttlichen und Menschlichen waltender Streit, kein Krieg nach menschlicher Weise.2
(Heidegger 1983: 66)
As noted above, Schmitt in Constitutional Theory seeks to spell out the implications of his analysis in The Concept of the Political. In the latter text he contends that the concept of the political is to be understood with reference to the potential of a friend-and-enemy grouping, with war as the most extreme consequence of this grouping (CoP 28, 33). The political has no domain of its own, unlike for example religion, morality, aesthetics or economics. It instead refers to the degree of intensity of an existential relationship, that is, of a union or a separation, association or disassociation (CoP 26; Herrero 2015: 103). The political can consequently be reached from any domain (CoP 62; Schmitt 2002d: 308). The political is moreover inescapable, due to the animality, drives and passions at the heart of human nature (CoP 58–68). Meaning itself is for Schmitt (CoP 35/BdP 36) dependent on this antithesis whereby men ‘may be required to sacrifice their lives, and authorized to shed blood as well as kill other human beings’.
Schmitt’s attempt at strictly defining the political in The Concept of the Political is motivated by the problem of depoliticisation, which he observes in the ‘disappearance’ of the enemy in the twentieth century. In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt expresses a similar concern about depoliticisation, specifically insofar as the conception of the modern liberal constitution is concerned. He argues in this respect that the political component of the modern constitution, which is repressed by liberal thinking through its privileging of the rule-of-law component (Chapter 5, Section B below), is the most important component of the constitution. In advocating the priority of the political component, Schmitt further insists on the recognition of sovereignty, not of the constitution, but of the people as constituent power (Chapter 3 below); on the acknowledgement of the positive concept of the constitution (as opposed to the absolute, ideal and relative concepts), that is, understanding the constitution as a political decision by the people concerning the form and nature of the political unity; on understanding equality in relation to democracy as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution (Chapter 6 below).
In Politics of Friendship Derrida engages in some detail with Schmitt’s Concept of the Political,3 through which a new structure of the concept of the political comes to the fore. The present chapter focuses on Derrida’s analysis in arriving at this new structure. The chapter will proceed by first enquiring into Derrida’s analysis of Schmitt’s reading of Plato, with Derrida showing that phûsis (usually translated as ‘nature’), which lies at the basis of the distinction which Schmitt seeks to draw between pólemos and stásis and the corresponding distinction between the public enemy and the private enemy, is divided in itself, that is, phûsis has an ‘other’, which however does not belong to it. Thereafter Derrida’s positioning of Schmitt alongside Freud and Heidegger will be analysed, which will seek to clarify what this division in phûsis entails. Derrida shows, first, how Schmitt ultimately sees civil war and external war as manifestations of the same concept of war. Secondly, he shows that the distinction between private and public (or between self and other), which Schmitt desperately seeks to maintain, ultimately breaks down, as Schmitt himself acknowledges in The Concept of the Political. Thirdly, tying in closely with the second point, he shows that Schmitt in Political Theology II speaks of stásis in pre-ontological terms, that is, in terms of a differantial4 turning against the self, which structures the political. This turning against the self of the political can, as Derrida shows, be understood with reference to the destructive drive in Freud, which is likewise preceded by a turning against the self. In placing Schmitt alongside Heidegger, we return to the (unified) concept of war in Schmitt mentioned above, with Heidegger seeking the originary sense of the Greek pólemos. This involves a form of originary combat, not between human beings, but between the gathering of Being and its dissimulation. We also return here to phûsis, which according to Heidegger is originally another name for Being and we look at Heidegger’s invocation of the phileîn (love, gift) of Being. Freud and Heidegger can in other words be read as pointing to that which gives rise to the friend-enemy distinction of Schmitt’s concept of the political, that is, to a force of self-destruction, or, translated in ethico-political terms, the gift, lovence, that is, a friendship beyond circular return.
In The Concept of the Political, in drawing a distinction between pólemos (war between Greeks and barbarians) and stásis (internal strife), as well as between polémios/hostis (public enemy) and ekhthrós/inimicus (private enemy), Schmitt relies in a footnote on Plato’s Republic.6 The enemy in the paradigmatic sense (polémios/hostis) for Schmitt is associated with pólemos (external war) rather than with stásis.7 In his reading, Derrida however shows that Schmitt ignores a certain complexity in Plato’s Republic insofar as the discussion of war is concerned. As we will see, this has important implications for the structure of the political. Plato, Derrida (PoF 90) notes, indeed says that the Greeks view a disagreement (diaphorá) between themselves as an internal struggle (stásis) and therefore as quasi-familial (ōs-oikeíous) and not as war (pólemos). It is also correct to say that Plato refers to the barbarians as natural enemies whereas the Greeks are by nature friends among themselves (PoF 90). One should however be careful not to conclude from this that stásis or the hostility between Greeks is for Plato an ‘unnatural’ phenomenon.8 Plato more specifically refers to civil war as an ‘illness’, which, as Derrida notes, ‘is something else again [ce qui est encore autre chose]’ (PoF 90/PA 111).
The two names (onômata) which Plato invokes in the Republic, as Derrida (PoF 91) points out, are supposed to rigorously name, in their legal purity, what belongs to nature.9 These two names – pólemos and stásis – pertain to two kinds of disagreement, contestation and discord (diaphorá). Stásis, as we saw, refers to the discord (diaphorá) between those who share kinship ties or origins – that which is sometimes called civil war. Pólemos, on the other hand, that is, war in the strict sense, refers to the discord between strangers or the families of strangers (PoF 91). In the case of the Greeks, the naturalness of the bond between them is said to remain intact whether they engage in pólemos or stásis.10 The Greeks, Plato (1955: Republic 471b) contends, always end up reconciling with each other, and do not seek to subjugate or destroy each other; they simply attack the ‘causes’, that is, ‘the minority who are responsible for the quarrel’. Even in the case of stásis, Plato says, the Greeks remain friends. And then a certain complexity slips in, that is, into the ideal distinctions of the Ideal State, which as Derrida notes are at stake here: Plato indeed refers to ékhthra (enmity or hatred) in this context, that is, when invoking the corresponding name stásis, but as Derrida (PoF 92) points out, this enmity is itself (like stásis) according to Plato a form of illness.11 Derrida summarises Plato’s position as follows:
Sickness is then what emerges, an equally natural sickness, an evil naturally affecting nature. It [i.e. nature] is divided, separated from itself [Celle-ci s’écarte d’elle-même]. When such an event occurs [i.e. Greeks fighting amongst themselves], one must speak of a pathology of the community. In question here is a clinic of the city. In this respect the Republic develops a nosological discourse; its diagnostic is one of ill health and dissension, a faction inside Greece … . Stásis, the name that should apply to this hatred or to this enmity (ékhthra), is also a category of political nosography.
(PoF 92/PA 113)
Schmitt is thus, on Derrida’s reading, correct to say that Plato draws a distinction between the two forms of disagreement (diaphorá), that is, between pólemos and stásis.12 A careful reading shows, as Derrida puts it, ‘that this difference returns as the same, in the sense that it appears as the same [qu’une telle différence revient au même, elle appartient au même]’ (PoF 113–14/PA 133).13 This is because the two forms of dispute are both ‘natural’, that is, they both stem from phûsis.14 They also remain natural, even if one of them, civil war (stásis), sometimes takes the form of a denaturalization (PoF 114).15Stásis then amounts to a denaturalisation of nature in nature, an evil, an illness, a parasite, a transplant, a foreign body (un corps étranger) within the body politic itself, within its own body (PoF 114/ PA 133).16Phûsis is in other words divided in itself: there is a certain denaturalisation in phûsis, an originary difference, or what Derrida would call a différance between phûsis and its other, as we will also see below in the discussion of Heidegger. A different structure of the political slowly starts to unfold in this reading of Plato.17
Schmitt, as indicated above, appears to follow Plato in suggesting that only external war, that is, a war between Greeks and barbarians (pólemos) would be ‘real war’, as compared to civil unrest, that is, fights between Greeks (stásis). This view corresponds with the reign of the jus publicum Europaeum (European public law), which lasted from the time of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until its dissolution between 1890 and 1918 (NoE 227–39).18 The concept of war was in this era associated with external affairs of sovereignty, and civil war was rendered a purely internal matter of state.19 The enemy that defines the concept of the political is correspondingly the public enemy (polémios), not the private enemy (ekhthrós) that one hates (CoP 28). A few pages after invoking the Platonic distinction, thereby identifying the polémios as defining the political, Schmitt however expresses the seemingly contradictory view that the political can also find expression through domestic conflicts between political parties.20 He seems to symmetrically align here external war and civil war: ‘War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within a (thereby however becoming problematic) organized unit’ (CoP 32/BdP 33). This move in Schmitt is important for Derrida’s reading because, as we will see further below, it will allow him to align Schmitt’s understanding of war with Heidegger’s analysis of pólemos. In view of the privilege accorded to the state in the opening sentence of The Concept of the Political,21 Derrida is of the view that Schmitt ultimately sees civil war as an instance of war in general (PoF 121). Civil war would in other words be ‘a war between a weakened state and a potential state to be constituted, a war for the seizure or the reconstitution of a state power’ (PoF 121/PA 142). There would thus be in truth, according to Schmitt, only one concept of war, Derrida concludes (PoF 121).22
Derrida’s next step is to destabilise the private/public distinction which Schmitt tries to draw. The stakes here are high, because the distinction between polémios (public enemy) and ekhthrós (private enemy), which as we saw Schmitt seeks to derive from Plato, is relied on by Schmitt to later view (and condemn) the re-invocation of the notion of a ‘just war’ in the twentieth century (accompanied by a hatred of the enemy), as amounting to a depoliticisation.23 With the distinction between polémios and ekhthrós, Schmitt seeks to arrive at a pure concept of the enemy which is stripped of any passion, sentiment or (personal) affect (PoF 87). The public enemy should in other words not be hated as this leads to wars of total destruction.24 In expounding on this distinction, Schmitt refers to Matthew 5:43–4 and Luke 6:27 where Jesus, in response to the common saying ‘love your neighbour and hate your enemy’ contends that one should instead love one’s enemies (diligite inimicos vestros, agapâte tous ekhthrous umôn). Schmitt points out that the words used here for ‘enemy’ in the Latin and Greek manuscripts are respectively inimicus and ekhthrós and not hostis.25 There was according to Schmitt consequently no obligation on Christian Europe to love the Islamic invader, that is, the public enemy, but only the private enemy.26 In other words, the command to love one’s ‘enemy’ extends only to the sphere of the private, and does not include the public enemy, even though the latter enemy ‘need not be hated personally’.27 Driving the point home, Schmitt (CoP 29) notes that it only makes sense in the private sphere to love one’s enemy.28 As Derrida (PoF 88) points out, this has the consequence that I can also wage war against a friend, provided it is without hatred. I can in other words be hostile towards my friend in public (as a hostis),29 yet love him in private (PoF 88). Derrida makes the same point later in Politics of Friendship, noting that the political enemy can also be loved ‘as friend, lover, neighbour, human being’ (PoF 125/PA 148). The whole concept of the political, with its insistence on the ‘public’ nature of the enemy,30 can thus be said to ultimately depend on the fragile, porous and contestable border between the private and the public (PoF 88).31
In Chapter 6 of Politics of Friendship, in analysing Schmitt’s ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ (Section B below), Derrida will refer inter alia to tapping devices,32 to the police as spy network (which Walter Benjamin refers to as the spectre of the modern state),33 new forms of cryptography, cybercrime and the institution of psychoanalysis, which all point to the loss of the distinction between the public and the private (PoF 144).34 The importance of psychoanalysis in this respect will be explored below, yet it can be mentioned here that Derrida’s analysis of Freud in Politics of Friendship points to a ‘structure’ which undermines any attempt at distinguishing between the private enemy (ekhthrós/inimicus) and the public enemy (polémios/hostis), as this distinction is itself preceded and made possible by what is most secret/private.35 The body politic, Derrida (PoF 114/PA 133) comments, should undoubtedly neatly (proprement) identify ‘the foreign body of the enemy outside of itself [le corps étranger de l’ennemi au-dehors]’, but it never succeeds in doing so. No pure distinction between the enemy within and the enemy beyond the body politic is thus possible.
It is against the threat of the implosion of this border (between private and public), which is also a border of the self, Derrida (PoF 88) comments, that Schmitt attempts to construct his discourse.36 Schmitt (CoP 53–5) himself acknowledges this implosion when he later discusses and condemns so-called ‘humanitarian war’ for turning the enemy into a figure to be dehumanised and hated.37 Such wars, as Schmitt points out, amount to the abolition of the idea of a ‘just enemy’ that one treats with respect and honour, as established by the jus publicum Europaeum. After World War I, the latter order comes to an end: the enemy is now criminalised and outlawed: taking action against him amounts to police action (CoP 54; NoE 124).38 The waging of war in the name of humanity, Schmitt (CoP 54) further contends, is nothing but the ruse of imperialist expansion. The enemy at stake in humanitarian wars, as well as in the Cold War, is no longer the just enemy, but the absolute enemy who needs to be exterminated in waging a just war against him (CoP 36).39 The Cold War moreover mocks (spottet) all classical distinctions: of war and peace and neutrality, of politics and economics, military and civilian and of combatants and non-combatants (BdP 18).40
The strict distinctions which Schmitt attempts to maintain in The Concept of the Political are thus, by his own account, collapsing in the twentieth century.41 Derrida’s contention is that this does not occur by accident or by way of a ‘fall’ or ‘collapse’ of the political, but that it is made possible by the ‘structure’ or ‘law’ of the concept of the political itself. The collapse has as a consequence always already begun. Schmitt appears to recognise this ‘law’, as well as the structure it implies in certain of his texts.42 Derrida for example points in this respect to Schmitt’s discussion of stásis in Political Theology II (PoF 108–9 n13). At stake here is a debate with Peterson (who had argued that there could be no Christian political theology due to the nature of the Trinity)43 and Blumenberg (who likewise sought to problematise political theology and rejected the idea of modernity as secularisation).44 In the passages which Derrida refers to, Schmitt (PT II 122–3) first notes the importance of the criterion of the friend-enemy distinction for the political and for political theology and then refers to Peterson’s invocation of the statement of Gregory of Nazianzus that ‘the One – to Hen – is always in revolt – stasiazon – against itself – pros heauton’ (PT II 122/PT II (G) 90).45 Schmitt (PT II 122–3) reminds the reader that this word, that is, stásis, as we saw above, was important for Plato in the Republic, and adds that this was so for the church fathers as well. Stásis, as Schmitt (PT II 123) further notes, means state of rest, repose, status; the opposing concept being kinesis, movement. Stásis however also has the political meaning of unrest, movement, revolt, civil war. ‘At the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity’, Schmitt contends, ‘we encounter a genuine politico-theological stasiology’ (PT II 123/PT II (G) 92). He takes this idea from Gnosticism: the two sides of God, that is, God as a God of love/salvation and God as the creator of an evil world, are in a state of open war, or at least in a state of unbridgeable alienation (PT II 124).46 Schmitt (PT II 124) refers in addition here to Augustine who’s thought Schmitt sees as being in close proximity to Gnosticism.47 Augustine relocated the difficulty as to the nature of God onto man, who was ‘endowed with freedom and created by God’ (PT II 124/PT II (G) 93). Due to this freedom, man acts in such a way that the world which originally needed no salvation, now does. Augustine furthermore points to the accommodation in the Trinity of the identity of God the creator (father) and God the saviour (son) in their unity – although they are not absolutely identical, ‘they are “one” ’ (PT II 124/PT II (G) 93). Schmitt (PT II 125) concludes that there is inevitably this tension in every religion of salvation and redemption, and this is likewise the case with a world in need of change and renewal. From this he then further concludes that ‘the problem of hostility [Feindschaft] and of the enemy [des Feindes] does not allow itself to be concealed or suppressed [läβst sich also nicht unterschlagen]’ (PT II 123/PT II (G) 92). This analysis of Schmitt in Political Theology II is linked by Derrida (PoF 109) to the opening words of The Concept of the Political where Schmitt (CoP 19–20/BdP 20) refers to the state as ‘sheer status [der Status schlechthin]’, transposing thereby this same structure to the state.48 Viewed in these terms, The Concept of the Political would concern itself with the way in which
the One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself, itself becoming war [se fait la guerre], frightens itself, itself becoming fear [se fait peur], and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence [se fait violence], transforms itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other, for it guards itself from, and in, the other [il se garde de l’autre], always Him, the One, the One ‘different from itself’.49
(PoF 109 n13/PA 110 n2)
Derrida in the above passage relies on the double meaning of stásis as pointed to by Schmitt in PT II, in order to explain in a way the ‘origin’ of this double meaning, as well as of the war of God with himself, and of mankind with itself. At stake in this radical re-conception of (political) theology can be said to be the ‘origin’ of the distinction between friend and enemy, as well as of the other oppositions which play themselves out in Schmitt. In both Plato and Schmitt we thus find the contention that the two forms of dispute (pólemos and stásis) are made possible by something else: in Plato this ‘origin’ is to be found in the other of phûsis (the de-naturalisation of nature in nature), and in Schmitt, in what can be referred to as a ‘pre-ontological understanding’ of stásis. The ‘basis’ for this reading of Plato and Schmitt, showing a differantial relation between forces, is inter alia to be found in Derrida’s engagement with Freud, to which we now turn.
In Chapter 5 of Politics of Friendship, Freud is invoked by Derrida in an epigraph, thereby clarifying the nature of the ‘disorder’ in nature which Plato speaks of and the pre-ontological understanding of stásis in Schmitt. Here we are also faced with the ‘other’ of nature (phûsis), referred to earlier.51 The quotation that forms the epigraph of Chapter 5 of Politics of Friendship is from Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), where Freud (2001, XXIII: 246–7) endorses Empedocles’s two fundamental principles – philía (attractive force, friendship) and neikos (repulsive force, strife) – and notes their correspondence in respect of name and function to what Freud views as the two primal instincts: Eros and destructiveness. Freud (2001, XXIII: 247/1991, XVI: 93) points here to his own research, which has shown that the instinct of destruction can be traced back to a death drive and he adds the elusive remark that ‘no one can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to later understanding [niemand kann vorhersehen, in welcher Einkleidung der Wahrheitskern in der Lehre des Empedokles sich späterer Einsicht zeigen wird ]’.
Immediately after the quotation of Freud, Derrida refers to the quotation attributed to Aristotle: ‘O my friends there are no friends’, which serve as a refrain throughout Politics of Friendship, as well as to its reversal by Nietzsche: ‘foes, there are no foes! Say I, the living fool’ (PoF 112/PA 131). In Derrida’s reading, Schmitt can in a sense be said to repeat Nietzsche’s aphorism when he laments the disappearance of the enemy in the twentieth century in The Concept of the Political. Rather than simply affirming the typical metaphysical oppositions which seem to be at stake here, Derrida at this point speaks of a ‘hyperbole that ranges beyond Being’ which lies at the root of these oppositions:
a hyperbole at the origin of good and evil, a hyperbole common to both, a hyperbole qua the difference between good and evil, the friend and the enemy, peace and war. It is this infinite hyperbole common to the two terms of the opposition, thus making them pass into one another, that makes one’s head spin.52
(PoF 112/PA 131)
The shared secret of the dying sage and the living fool, Derrida (PoF 113/PA 132) suggests, perhaps lies in ‘a theory of absolute ambivalence’, in the Empedoclean tradition kept alive by Freud, that is to say, a theory that is welcoming or hospitable to a death drive (accueillante à une pulsion de mort). We encounter Freud’s death drive again when Derrida discusses Schmitt’s analysis of combat (Kampf ). Combat, like the concepts of friend and enemy, is essentially about ‘the real possibility of physical killing’, Schmitt notes (CoP 33/BdP 33).53 As Derrida (PoF 122) points out, Schmitt implicitly distinguishes such ‘justified’ killing in war, from natural death and from murder, as well as explicitly from war crimes, which would consist in a transgression of the laws of war.54 For Derrida (PoF ix/PA 13), at stake in this kind of ‘justification’, that is, in the constitution of the concept of the political through a certain kind of ‘repression’, is what he refers to as the ‘political crime [crime politique]’. The latter is to be understood in terms of Freud’s death drive: the positing of enemies of whichever kind (who may justifiably be killed), can be traced back to the death drive, which originally is turned against the self.55 Freud’s death drive has the further implication that Schmitt’s attempt to construct a pure hostility without affect or at least without private affect cannot succeed (PoF 124).56 This has important implications for the structure of the concept of the political, as appears from the so-called ‘three logical tracks [trois voies logiques]’, which Derrida (PoF 122/PA 143) notes can follow formally from the co-determination of the friend and enemy concepts:57
Derrida (PoF 123/PA 145) refers to these logical tracks and the relation between them as an ‘undecidable trivality’. A choice between them is in other words not really possible. This is because, as Derrida (2002c: 270–6) puts it in an analysis of Freud, the cruelty drive, which produces war and murder, cannot be eradicated, whilst a certain ‘beyond of the possible’ without cruelty, must be affirmed.64
In gaining a better understanding of the ‘structure’ of the political which appears from Derrida’s analysis, it is necessary to further investigate the link posited by Derrida between Heidegger and Schmitt. This can be done by looking at Schmitt’s employment of the notion of ‘real possibility’ (reale Möglichkeit) in The Concept of the Political and linking this to Heidegger’s notion of death as Dasein’s most proper possibility; as well as by enquiring into the relation between Schmitt’s concept of combat (Kampf) and Heidegger’s analysis of pólemos as well as of the gift or event of Being (phûsis). Apart from ‘real possibility’, Schmitt also employs a number of other closely related notions, such as eventuality (Eventualität), present or present-at-hand (vorhanden), real (real/wirklich/Wirklichkeit) and possible/possibility (möglich/Möglichkeit), either on their own or in other combinations. The notion of ‘real possibility’ for example plays an important role in Schmitt’s analysis of ‘combat’ (Kampf), which, according to him, needs to be distinguished from competition and forms of discursive or symbolic struggle (CoP 33/BdP 33). For Schmitt, as noted above, both external war and civil war are about armed combat and physical killing (PoF 122). This follows from the concept of the political itself, which, according to Schmitt, requires the real possibility of combat, which must always be present-at-hand (Die reale Möglichkeit des Kampfes, die immer vorhanden sein muβ) (CoP 32/BdP 32). Likewise, the concept of the enemy, Schmitt (CoP 32/BdP 33) says, implies the eventuality of combat, which is located in the realm of the real (zum Begriff des Feindes gehört die im Bereich des Realen liegende Eventualität eines Kampfes). Schmitt specifically mentions in this respect that the essence of the concept of a weapon is that it is ‘a means of physically killing human beings’ (CoP 32–3/BdP 33).65 Schmitt (CoP 33) further notes that ‘combat’ is like ‘weapon’ to be understood ‘in its existential sense’, as Schwab’s translation has it (CoP 33), or rather ‘in its ontological originality’ (im Sinne einer seinsmäβigen Ursprünglichkeit).66 The whole of human life is a combat (Kampf ), Schmitt (CoP 33/BdP 33) adds, and every human being is a combatant (Kämpfer), with quotation marks being used in both cases, pointing thereby, on Derrida’s reading, to the ontological meaning of these terms (PoF 123).67 As Derrida (PoF 123/PA 145) further notes, in linking Schmitt and Heidegger, this means at least that ([c]ela signifie au moins que)68 Dasein’s being-towards-death is not to be distinguished from his being-towards-killing or towards-death-in-combat.69
In contrasting the acknowledgement of the political with depoliticisation (Entpolitisierung) and neutrality, Schmitt insists that the exceptional case of war has to remain a ‘real possibility’, otherwise politics will disappear (CoP 35/BdP 35). Schmitt motivates this statement in various ways, through a discussion of the centrality of the political decision as to the identity of the enemy, the question of neutrality, the politics of avoiding war, the frequency and ferocity of war today, the motivations for waging war and the possibility of a (pacifist) war against war. In his analysis of Schmitt’s discussion in this respect, Derrida (PoF 131) focuses specifically on Schmitt’s use of the terms real (real), possible (möglich), possibility (Möglichkeit), reality (Wirklichkeit) and present(-at-hand) or presence-at-hand (vorhanden/vorhandenheit), which on his reading play an organising role here. Schmitt uses these terms in various forms and contexts, with ‘real possibility’ (reale Möglichkeit) appearing the most frequently.70 Derrida (PoF 125) points in his analysis to the proximity between Schmitt’s thinking in this respect and Heidegger’s existential analytic in which ‘possibility’ likewise plays a central role.71 In ‘Heidegger’s ear: philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’, that is, the second part of Politique de l’amitié, Derrida (‘Geschl IV’ 203ff.) goes into this proximity in more detail when he analyses Heidegger’s discussion in Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 64–6) of pólemos in Heraclitus’s saying (pólemos pantôn men patêr esti pantôn de basileus kai tous men theous edeixe tous de anthrôpous, tous men doulous epoiêse tous de eleutherous), the first part of which is usually translated as ‘war [ pólemos] is the father (and king) of all things’. Heidegger here analyses and re-translates Heraclitus’s saying as follows:
Auseinandersetzung ist allem (Anwesenden) zwar Erzeuger (der aufgehen läβt), allem aber (auch) waltender Bewahrer. Sie läβt nämlich die einen als Götter erscheinen, die anderen als Menschen, die einen stellt sie her(aus) als Knechte, die anderen aber als Freie.72
(Heidegger 1983: 66)
As Derrida (‘Geschl IV’ 204) points out, for Heidegger, pólemos in this passage cannot be understood as war in the human sense as it precedes (waltet vor) men (and gods) to which it gives birth.73 Heidegger therefore translates it as Auseinandersetzung (debate, argument, discussion, confrontation, dispute, difference, clash, altercation, quarrel, hassle). He furthermore takes issue with the (anthropological) translation of pater as ‘father’, and basileus as ‘king’, and translates it instead as Erzeuger, the one who produces, generates, makes bloom, rise, come to presence; and the latter as waltender Bewahrer – the guardian who rules (‘Geschl IV’ 205). At stake here for Heidegger, and for Derrida, is thus pólemos in its originary sense, or what Heidegger (2000: 65/1983: 66) refers to as ‘originary combat’ (ursprünglicher Kampf), and which as Derrida (‘Geschl IV’ 209) points out, gives rise to opposition as well as to joints and couplings.
Derrida (‘Geschl IV’ 169–71, 179–83, 193–4) further analyses Heidegger’s invocation of the voice of the friend in Being and Time (1962: 206/2006: 163)74 as well as in a number of other texts of Heidegger, thereby seeking to bring this voice of the friend into a relation with Heidegger’s analysis of phileîn (das Lieben, aimance, in Derrida’s terminology, and also associated with the gift) as well as philía (friendship, gift). At stake here is the gift of Being, that is, of phûsis, to which we return here, in the rising of what is concealed (a double movement of emergence and dissimulation), that is, a giving of that which does not belong to it (‘Geschl IV’ 193–6). How does pólemos/Kampf relate to this gift? Pólemos, in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, refers to the struggle between the gathering of Being and its dissimulation (‘Geschl IV’ 207–9). Pólemos, which can be said to be another word for différance, can therefore both be equated with Being, that is, with logos as gathering and with phileîn and philía, as indeed happens in Heidegger’s texts (‘Geschl IV’ 196, 201–2, 207–10).75
Through this analysis of Heidegger’s texts, Derrida is again pointing to that which gives rise to the friend/enemy opposition, which Schmitt speaks of: a certain friendship as aimance, as gift.76 Schmitt and Heidegger ultimately say something very similar on Derrida’s reading, though they approach the notion at stake from different directions, so to speak (PoF 249).77 Schmitt’s closeness to Heidegger can for example be detected when the following passage, where Schmitt again invokes the notion of a ‘real possibility’, is read as alluding to the ontological or perhaps rather the ‘hauntological’ event:
The concepts friend, enemy and combat acquire their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility [reale Möglichkeit] of physical killing. War follows from enmity, for war is the existential negation of another being. It is the most extreme realisation of hostility [die äuβerste Realisierung der Feindschaft]. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain present as a real possibility [als reale Möglichkeit vorhanden bleiben] for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.
(CoP 33/BdP 33)
In Derrida’s reading, possibility (Möglichkeit) is not employed by Schmitt here in the classical Aristotelian sense of the actualisation of a possible.78 Potentiality and act also do not stand opposed here in the conventionally Aristotelian sense (PoF 124). It is instead here about the radicalisation of a possible reality or a real possibility (PoF 124). With reference to other texts of Derrida (2007b: 445; Neg 362) that do not specifically engage with Schmitt, we can say that the possible that Schmitt speaks of is thus also not to be understood as opposed to or as distinguished from the impossible. The thought of the possible which is at stake here is that of the possible as impossible, or the impossible possible (Neg 344). This ‘eschatology’, as Derrida (PoF 124) calls it, opens itself to a certain beyond of the political, in the form of the Nietzschean ‘perhaps’, as we will see further in the discussion that follows. At issue in for example the most extreme realisation of hostility in war (CoP 33) is therefore not an actualisation of war, but instead, as we saw above, yet with the emphasis elsewhere, ‘the radicalization of a possible reality or a real possibility’ (PoF 124/PA 147). The realisation of the possibility at stake in each instance (of war, or of the enemy) would, Derrida notes, be ‘but the passage to the limit, the extreme accomplishment, the éskhaton of an already real and already present possibility’ (PoF 124/PA 147). The analogy with Heidegger’s discussion of pólemos in its originary sense should be clear.79 The doubling of pólemos as philía, which as we saw above is also at issue here, perhaps requires greater elaboration insofar as it relates to Schmitt.
In his discussion of Schmitt’s notion of war as the exception, Derrida comments that what the thinking of real possibility (pensée de la possibilité réelle) perhaps wants us to understand is that the exception is the rule (PoF 127/PA 151). ‘The exception’, Derrida continues, ‘is the rule of what takes place, the law of the event [la loi de l’événement], the real possibility of its real possibility’ (PoF 127/PA 151). This is indeed what Schmitt says, albeit in somewhat different terms (CoP 35/BdP 35): ‘Daß dieser Fall nur ausnahmsweise eintritt, hebt seinen bestimmenden Charakter nicht auf, sondern begründet ihn erst.’80 In Derrida’s words, ‘this exceptionality grounds the eventuality of the event. An event is an event, and a decisive one, only if it is exceptional. An event as such is always exceptional’ (PoF 127–8/PA 151). What precisely is at stake here appears from Derrida’s analysis of Schmitt’s diagnosis of de-politicisation in the twentieth century.81 Whilst observing such depoliticisation, Schmitt remarks that the more sporadic wars being waged in the twentieth century are waged with greater intensity, and that, as we saw, they go along with an absolute hostility which seeks to annihilate the enemy as well as to do away with all the classical distinctions mentioned earlier (war/peace, military/civilian, etc.). Derrida (PoF 128–30) ties this diagnosis – of a ‘withdrawal’ of the political,82 the political to be understood here in terms of an ontological pólemos or gathering of adversaries, that is, as Being – to Heidegger’s withdrawal of Being,83 in view of Schmitt’s analysis of the exception as unveiling the essence of things (den Kern der Dinge enthüllende Bedeutung). What Schmitt diagnoses as depoliticisation, in Derrida’s reading, can thus be referred to as a withdrawal of the political (and of Being). This ‘withdrawal’ at the same time involves a split in as well as a beyond to the political (referred to above as aimance), which precedes the friend-enemy couple. The wars being fought less frequently today and therefore more exceptionally, with the real possibility of infinite killing, that is, raising the spectre (or phantasm) of the total self-destruction of humanity, must in other words be understood as revealing the ‘true essence’ of the political.84 War today, insofar as it can still be called such,85 and the real possibility of total destruction tied thereto, thus involve both a ‘symptom’ (though not in the sense that it can be resolved through analysis) and a phantasm, drive or spectral law making it possible.86 Derrida therefore ties this ‘real possibility’, which as he notes appears to haunt Schmitt, to the Nietzschean perhaps (PoF 128–9). The earlier-referred-to disproportionate friendship – or aimance, as Derrida calls it – which has no concern for the self, and which precedes the friend-enemy opposition, is thus alluded to by the thought of the real possibility of self-destruction which Schmitt observes in the world of the twentieth century.
A different structure of the political vis-à-vis what would appear from a traditional reading of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political clearly appears from Derrida’s reading in Politics of Friendship, with the force of self-destruction playing an important role: the age of neutralisation and depoliticisation with its paradoxical intensification of hostility, as exposed by Schmitt, does not in Derrida’s reading involve an accidental ruination or perversion of the political, but instead reveals its peculiar ‘structure’. At stake in what is happening in the world today is in other words a ‘symptom’, which at the same time points to its own condition of possibility. It is in the symptom or phenomenon of what Schmitt (‘TP’ 34/TdP 54) would later call an international civil war, that is, the worst form of conflict, and reaching the highest point of intensity of the political, even going beyond it, with the political thereby becoming depoliticised on the one hand, and Schmitt’s reaction to this phantasm of self-destruction, that is, the attempt at bracketing or binding the political on the other, that the structure of the political can be glimpsed. Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, with war as the extreme possibility, can in other words be said to be preceded and made possible by a ‘pre-originary’ form of friendship characterised by dissymmetry and the perfect gift. The political in this latter ‘sense’ (in quotation marks because sense or meaning dissolves here) withdraws in its appearance. Derrida’s placement of Schmitt alongside Plato, Freud and Heidegger shows a similar structure: in Plato, phûsis is with reference to stásis shown to divide itself; the destructive drive in Freud is preceded by a turning against the self; and pólemos in Heidegger, both conceals and gathers. The concept of the political is in other words haunted by a force of self-destruction or what Derrida would in later texts call ‘autoimmunity’ as its condition of possibility. From this reading it necessarily follows that every ethico-politico-legal decision is likewise haunted by and exposed to what can be referred to as the law of spectrality, by philía (friendship/gift), the originary pólemos, aimance, the event, the Nietzschean perhaps,87 and even a ‘pre-originary declaration of (perpetual) peace’ (Adieu 48–50, 80–90; Derrida 2006b: 213). Nonetheless, no decision can be made without violence being done to the perhaps, which inevitably withdraws from the light of day (PoF 67).
Schmitt’s ‘The Theory of the Partisan’1 traces the origin and further development of partisanship within the world order, and in doing so enquires anew into the concept of the political. According to Schmitt the partisan appears in the early nineteenth century in ‘a new, decisive role, as a novel, hitherto unacknowledged figure of the world-spirit (Figur des Weltgeistes)’ (‘TP’ 32/TdP 51). The partisan thus starts, already in the nineteenth, yet more surely in the twentieth century, to personify the political. As we saw in Section A above, in The Concept of the Political Schmitt defines the political with reference to the drawing of a distinction between friend and enemy. In the latter respect he distinguishes between the private enemy (ekhthrós) and the public enemy (polémios), and compares the just enemy, treated with respect and honour under the jus publicum Europaeum, to the hated, criminalised and dehumanised enemy of the twentieth century. In the Preface to the 1963 (German) re-publication of the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt acknowledges that he failed to distinguish clearly and precisely enough in that text between the different forms of hostility: conventional, real and absolute (BdP 17). In addressing this neglected issue, ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ effectively rethinks the concept of the political through the identification of two forms of partisan: the telluric partisan characterised by real hostility and the revolutionary partisan characterised by absolute hostility, in contrast to the conventional hostility and its degeneration into the hostility towards the ‘foe’, that is, another form of absolute hostility, at stake in The Concept of the Political.2
In Chapter 6 of the Politics of Friendship Derrida closely analyses Schmitt’s ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, with the aim of establishing the implications thereof for the concept of the political. Derrida’s reading of ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ can arguably be best understood with reference to Derrida’s ‘transformation’ of Freud’s thinking on psychoanalysis. As we will see in the analysis that follows, in the background of Derrida’s reading of Schmitt’s ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ are a number of Freud’s texts, including ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900), ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920). Schmitt’s criteria for determining the true partisan, his mention of the abyss and the Acheron in the context of exploring the partisan’s origins, his recognition of the brother as the enemy (‘TP’ 61) and his silence about women in the context of partisan warfare are all interpreted by Derrida against the background of Freud’s thinking. This reading of Schmitt thus confirms from another perspective the analysis undertaken in Section A above, namely of a concept of the political that has no identity and is characterised by a force of self-destruction as its condition of possibility.
In the discussion that follows, we will first enquire briefly into Schmitt’s four criteria for recognising the true partisan, and the consequent distinction between the two forms of partisan. Of importance for Derrida in this regard is the tension between the criteria of the ‘telluric’ and of ‘mobility’ as well as the difficulty in maintaining the distinction between the two forms of partisan. Secondly, we will look at the important role of technology for the figure of the partisan, which Schmitt holds responsible for the collapse of the true partisan into the global revolutionary partisan who is no longer tied to the telluric. Derrida reads Schmitt’s positing of the telluric vis-à-vis the global partisan, as a reaction to a generalised delocalisation, which structures existence in general. The third focus point will be Schmitt’s attempt to locate the moment of the opening of the ‘abyss’ (Abgrund) of absolute hostility associated with the global revolutionary partisan. This leads to a discussion of the Geneva and Hague Conventions as well as the invocation by Schmitt of the Acheron. On Derrida’s reading we find in Schmitt’s discussion an acknowledgement of the fragility of the concept of the political as he defined it in The Concept of the Political and in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, as well as of the distinctions between the different forms of hostility that it relies on. By invoking the ‘abyss’ and the ‘Acheron’, Schmitt furthermore appears to be acknowledging the role played by ‘unconscious’ forces in the coming to the fore of absolute hostility. The latter acknowledgement means that it would be impossible to determine the precise moment when the rigid distinctions of the concept of the political and the bracketing (Hegung) of hostility that goes along with it start dissolving. On Derrida’s reading this dissolution is always already underway in view of what can be referred to as the ‘human structure’. In the next section a discussion takes place of Schmitt’s designation of the brother as the enemy, which Derrida reads alongside the figure of the double in Poe’s The Purloined Letter (1844) and Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Freud 2001, XVII: 217–56). In the latter text Freud relates the double to narcissism, the repetition compulsion and the relation to death. Taking a detour through Derrida’s Dissemination (1972) with its discussion of Mallarmé’s Mimique (1886), we will see that on Derrida’s reading, the brother as invoked in Schmitt’s texts such as The Concept of the Political and ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ points to a mirroring as well as a threat to the self. Schmitt’s exclusive focus on the brother and his exclusion of the sister (and woman in general) leads to the fifth point of discussion, namely Derrida’s suggestion that woman (la femme) may be the absolute partisan, that is, the ‘other’ or the ‘beyond’ of the political, which/who also functions as its condition of possibility. With this suggestion, where the figure of ‘woman’ alludes to an absolute unbinding or what Derrida elsewhere refers to as the ‘perfect gift’, we arrive, as noted, from another direction at a reconfigured concept of the political. In concluding the chapter we will take a brief look at Derrida’s analysis of what is referred to as ‘international terrorism’ in the twenty-first century in order to establish the implications thereof for the concept of the political as analysed in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ and in Politics of Friendship.
Schmitt (‘TP’ 3, 9–14) finds the origin of the partisan in the Spanish resistance against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century and proceeds to lay down four criteria which distinguish the ‘true’ partisan (as ideal-type) from its degenerated historical counterpart.3 These criteria are: (1) irregularity, (2) intense political engagement, (3) increased mobility and (4) the telluric. The latter characteristic is especially important for Schmitt and he consequently views the autochthonous partisan, associated with real hostility (wirkliche Feindschaft), and with the ability to make a concrete identification of the enemy in the absence of the ability of the state to do so, as the true partisan (‘TP’ 41/TdP 62). This true partisan stands opposed to the revolutionary (communist) partisan, who is associated with absolute hostility (absolute Feindschaft) and who fights a global revolutionary war, thereby moving away from his original telluric nature (‘TP’ 65–6/TdP 93). The philosophical recognition of the partisan according to Schmitt takes place in Prussia in 1812–1813 during the time of the French occupation, but quickly disappears again from view (‘TP’ 28–33). Whereas the telluric partisan remains a marginal figure until World War I, in the hands of Lenin, and later Mao and Stalin, he becomes a central figure of war in the twentieth century. Lenin’s revolutionary partisan furthermore explodes the attempt at bracketing war and hostility which, as we saw in Section A above, was imposed by the jus publicum Europaeum from the time of the peace of Westphalia (1648) until the end of World War I (‘TP’ 33–8). Schmitt sees a close association between the telluric partisan, resurrected by Mao, and his own vision of great spaces (Groβräumen) as set out in The Nomos of the Earth (‘TP’ 41/TdP 62).4 The revolutionary partisan as well as the criminalisation and dehumanisation of the enemy, which characterises the twentieth century with its belief in just wars, would have no place here (Chapter 7 below).
We now need to look in more detail at the four criteria identified by Schmitt. The first criterion – irregularity – appears from Schmitt’s discussion of the origin of the phenomenon of the partisan, that is, as noted above, the Spanish people’s guerrilla war against Napoleon from 1808–1813, after the defeat in 1808 of the Spanish army (‘TP’ 3–4).5 Schmitt notes that although one can say that there have always been partisans, in the sense that the laws of war have been breached throughout history and thus by irregular fighting, the (true) partisan, that is, the modern partisan, could come to the fore only after the French Revolution. This is because the first modern, well-organised, regular army was established only at this point in time, and furthermore, because the irregularity which defines the partisan can be said to exist only if it can be concretely opposed to a regularity which up until then had not existed in this exact sense (‘TP’ 3). The partisan, as Schmitt points out later, nonetheless cannot divorce himself completely from regularity. He needs the assistance of a regular force or third party, inter alia to attain technologically sophisticated weapons, and so as not to be simply regarded as a criminal. In the long run the partisan furthermore needs to become regularised, either by being recognised as such by an existing regular, that is, by the state that he is waging a battle against, or by taking over the state through his own force (‘TP’ 52–4).6
The second criterion, that is, intense political engagement, likewise distinguishes the partisan from criminal individuals or groups, or from pirates acting simply in their own self-interest (‘TP’ 10).7 Schmitt (‘TP’ 65/TdP 92) refers in this respect to Che Guevara for whom the partisan is ‘the Jesuit of war’, and reads this metaphor as alluding to the absoluteness (Unbedingtheit) of political engagement on the side of the partisan. This has the further implication that the bond between members of a partisan group is usually very intense, much more so than between ordinary citizens in the modern state (‘TP’ 10). The third criterion is that of increased mobility, and Schmitt refers under this heading to ‘mobility, speed, and unexpected shifts between attack and withdrawal’ (‘TP’ 11/TdP 23). The criterion of ‘mobility’ should thus be broadly understood as, for example, also related to the ‘incalculability of appearance’ of the partisan, which is made possible by the absence of a uniform, enabling him to wear the uniform of the opponent, to change uniforms and insignia, as well as to ‘go underground’ (‘GP’ 15–16). This ‘mobility’ is furthermore continuously on the increase, as Schmitt (‘TP’ 11) points out, because of developments in technology. The fourth criterion also stems from the origin of the modern partisan in Spain: Schmitt (‘TP’ 4, 50) emphasises the fact that the Spanish guerrillas fought on home soil against a foreign occupier, even though they were ultimately pawns in a global political conflict.8 The partisan’s true meaning for Schmitt (‘TP’ 13, 65–6) appears here, that is, his fundamentally defensive function. This original and ideal defensive nature is however deformed when the partisan through Lenin becomes identified with the absolute aggression of a world revolutionary fighter or with a technological ideology. It is Lenin who, via the thinking of Hegel and Marx, recognises the true potential of the partisan in fighting the communist revolution, and who takes the partisan to its limit. Lenin recognises the enemy as the class enemy, the bourgeois, the Western capitalist and his social order in every country he rules (‘TP’ 36). Lenin’s partisan consequently fights in a revolutionary civil war, both on the national and the international level (‘TP’ 34). For Schmitt (‘TP’ 13) this fourth criterion is absolutely essential in recognising the true partisan.9 It is, as we saw, tied to his essentially defensive nature, which in turn means the limitation of hostility and the ‘protection’ of the partisan from the absolute claim to abstract justice (‘TP’ 13). According to Schmitt (‘TP’ 7–8/TdP 18–19), this telluric dimension can for example be seen in the Russian partisans who fought against Napoleon, and in Stalin, who ‘seized this myth [Mythos] of autochthonous [bodenständigen], national partisanship in World War II against Germany’. With Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro there is similarly a link to the soil, that is, with the autochthonous population and the geographical singularity of the land: mountains, forest, jungle or desert (‘TP’ 13). Yet the partisan, as Schmitt (‘TP’ 14) points out, runs the risk of being completely dislocated through technological developments. In the Cold War, he notes, he becomes simply a technician in an invisible war, a saboteur and a spy.
As we can see from the above discussion of the four criteria which Schmitt identifies, he seeks in as far as possible to retain the traditional concept of the partisan as it originated in Spain. This can also be seen from his description of the archetype (Urbild) of the autochthonous partisan as concerned first and foremost with the defence of home, hearth and homeland from the foreign intruder (‘TP’ 20/TdP 35). In his reading, Derrida will seek to problematise Schmitt’s evaluation of the revolutionary partisan as a ‘fall’ from some essential purity (by virtue of technology) as well as Schmitt’s (negative) stance towards what he (Schmitt) refers to as ‘conceptual dissolution [Begriffsauflösung]’ in the twentieth century (‘TP’ 12–13/TdP 24–5).10 Derrida does so by first of all looking at the question of technology as raised by Schmitt in his discussion of the four criteria. As Derrida (PoF 142) notes, Schmitt, specifically in discussing the criterion of mobility, but also elsewhere (‘TP’ 54–7), points to the important role of technology in the transformation of the classical concept of the enemy as well as of the classical concept of the partisan. The question of technology, according to Derrida, is of decisive importance in two respects.
First, technology lies at the heart of what Schmitt refers to as ‘concept dissolutions [Begriffsauflösungen]’, and which he (Schmitt) describes as ‘notable signs of the times’ (‘TP’ 12–13/TdP 25). Derrida here employs an understanding of language as technology, which he has explored elsewhere in more detail (ET 36–8). This dissolution even happens in respect of the concept of the partisan itself. Today every loner (Einzelgänger) and non-conformist, Schmitt (‘TP’ 12–13/TdP 25) says, can be called a partisan, irrespective of whether he actually thinks of taking a weapon in hand. Schmitt (‘TP’ 12–13/TdP 25) comments that the employment of the term ‘partisan’ in this metaphorical sense (als Metapher) is not necessarily impermissible, and acknowledges himself having had recourse to it in identifying certain figures and events in the history of ideas.11 In elaborating on a theory of the partisan, Schmitt notes, specific criteria however need to be kept in mind so that the theme at stake here does not ‘dissolve into abstract generalities [in einer abstrakten Allgemeinheit zergeht]’ (‘TP’ 13/TdP 26). Yet, as Derrida (PoF 142/PA 163) points out, this threat of concept dissolution is directly related to the criteria which Schmitt himself invokes in recognising the partisan. Although these criteria are indispensable, they are what Derrida (PoF 142/PA 164) refers to as ‘fake criteria, quasi-concepts, criteria of degree of intensity, that is to say, indefinitely extensive’.12 This can clearly be seen in the criterion of ‘intense political engagement’ as well as in that of ‘increased mobility’ in respect of attack and retreat, but can also be said in respect of irregularity, which can exist to a greater or lesser extent (‘TP’ 3/TdP 11). This may sound like critique, but Derrida in a sense endorses these criteria as they testify to the lack of identity of this figure that personifies the political for Schmitt in the twentieth century. Although Schmitt thus constructs the (true) partisan as an ideal, it becomes a spectral figure in his own hands. Schmitt in other words allows for the ‘metaphorical’ extension of the figure of the partisan, with his own criteria.
The second reason for the decisive importance of technology relates to the growing speed of motorisation, in other words, to what Derrida refers to as ‘tele-technological automation’, through which a break takes place with autochthony (PoF 142).13 Schmitt (‘TP’ 14/TdP 27) notes that the partisan’s mobility is ‘so enhanced by motorization that he runs the risk of complete dislocation’. This leads to the cutting off of the telluric roots characteristic of conventional warfare, but also signals a break with the early form of the partisan (‘TP’ 14). This mutation, as we saw, does not however mean the total abandonment of telluric autochthony in respect of the partisan. Schmitt mentions a number of names here associated with partisan warfare in this sense even after Lenin’s transformation of the partisan, including Mao Tse-tung, whose ‘revolution is more tellurian based than Lenin’s’ (‘TP’ 40/TdP 61), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) and Fidel Castro (Cuba) (‘TP’ 13, 40/TdP 26, 61).14 For Derrida, Schmitt’s analysis here is significant because it reveals the ‘structure’ at stake in the figure of the partisan: Schmitt implicitly confirms that ‘this territorial drive has always been in contradiction with itself, troubled, displaced, de-localized. And [it also means] that this is the very experience of place’ (PoF 142/PA 164). Schmitt does not however draw any clear and conceptually rigorous consequences from this, Derrida notes. Schmitt does not seem to fully appreciate, Derrida (PoF 142/PA 164) contends, that ‘telluric autochthonism is already a reactive response to a de-localization and some tele-technology, regardless of its degree of development, power and speed’. This is an important point, which Derrida has also explored elsewhere. As he points out in these other texts, technology dislocates, expropriates, delocalises, deracinates, dis-idiomatises, de-territorialises and dispossesses, thereby giving rise to a ‘reaction’ or ‘response’ towards the ‘home’ (‘F&K’ 45; ET 37, 79). According to Derrida (and this is why ‘reaction’ and ‘response’ appear in inverted commas), this takes place in one and the same movement by virtue of what he refers to as ‘the law of exappropriation’ (ET 79–80). There is in other words ‘no appropriation without the possibility of expropriation, without the confirmation of this possibility’ (ET 80). The expropriation at stake here finds its limit in death, which is what technology ultimately points to (ET 39). In announcing our own death, technology in turn gives rise to a desire for rootedness, for presence (ET 39, 115). Returning to Politics of Friendship, Derrida (PoF 142–3/PA 164) points out that at stake here in Schmitt’s analysis is a law (loi) which, as he notes, ‘regulates historically diverse events, places and contents’. In other words, what Schmitt points to in relation to the modern partisan, that is, that he is losing his telluric character because of technological developments and is in danger of becoming completely displaced, could already be said of the most classical combatant.15
Der Acheron läßt sich nichts vorrechnen und folgt nicht jeder Beschwörung.16
(‘TP’ 58/TdP 85)
In his discussion of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, Schmitt (‘TP’ 15–18/TdP 29–32) is complementary, especially insofar as they give recognition to new forms of enemy fighters while still remaining tied to classical international law and its tradition. The basis of these Conventions ‘remains the statist nature of war and the consequent bracketing [Hegung] of war with its clear distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian, enemy and criminal, inter-state war and civil war’ (‘TP’ 22/TdP 37). Schmitt (‘TP’ 15–16/TdP 29–30) however at the same time mentions that the Conventions failed to take account of further developments in the partisan problematic after the war and that they ‘loosened or even challenged these essential distinctions [Unterscheidungen]’ with the consequence that ‘the door is opened for a type of war that consciously destroys these clear divisions (Trennungen)’ (‘TP’ 23/TdP 37).17 These Conventions were, like the Hague Convention of 1907, based on a compromise between larger and smaller states, but with Russia this time on the side of the smaller states (‘TP’ 21). Of particular interest to us here is Schmitt’s invocation of the abyss, noting that:
many of the cautiously stylised compromise-standardisations of the Conventions appear only as the narrow bridge over an abyss [die dünne Brücke über einem Abgrund], which conceals a momentous transformation [folgenreiche Wandlung] of the concepts of war and enemy and partisan.
(‘TP’ 23/TdP 37)
Schmitt, Derrida (PoF 143/PA 165) contends, is here effectively acknowledging that the clear distinctions or ‘conceptual shores [les rivages conceptuels]’ he tried to construct so carefully in The Concept of the Political, and even here in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, are being engulfed by the abyss. This, he notes, also has important implications for the conception of man as political animal (PoF 143). Schmitt, Derrida (PoF 145) furthermore comments, believes that he can pinpoint with reference to places, events and dates, when this abyss, that is, the destruction of the conventional conception of war and its accompanying limitations and distinctions, opened up. Yet, as Derrida (PoF 145) points out, one can always give a counter-example or an earlier example, in an infinite regression. The criticism levelled by Schmitt (‘TP’ 25/TdP 41) against the legal experts of European international law – that they have ‘stubbornly repressed from consciousness [hartnäckig aus ihrem Bewußtsein verdrängt]’ the new reality which has emerged since 1900,18 can therefore also be raised against Schmitt, Derrida (PoF 145) comments. Schmitt, in other words, locates a mutation in the nature of war and hostility in the twentieth century, but, as Derrida (PoF 145/PA 167) notes, he is constantly forced to go back, step by step, to acknowledge premises to events in the twentieth century, and the premises of those premises, without (really) acknowledging these. As we will see, Derrida is alluding here to the unconscious, which Freud associated with the mythical Acheron, and which Schmitt himself refers to here in passing. The examples which Derrida gives of this backward movement in Schmitt are, first, the acherontic moment in the Prussian soldier state, that is, the Bismarckian invocation in 1866 of the Acheronta movere (stirring the underworld)19 against the Hapsburg Empire and France,20 and secondly, the ‘acherontic moment’ in 1812/13 in Prussia (‘TP’ 28/TdP 45–6).21 Noteworthy in the latter respect is the Prussian King’s edict (of April 1813) calling for partisan warfare against Napoleon. In this document, that is, the Prussian Edict, there is a call by a legitimate king for using every means against the enemy and for ‘the unleashing of total disorder [die Entfesselung der totalen Unordnung]’ (‘TP’ 29–30/TdP 47–8). Schmitt (‘TP’ 29/TdP 47) describes this as ‘belonging to the most astounding documents of the whole history of partisanship [das zu den erstaunlichsten Dokumenten der gesamten Geschichte des Partisanentums gehört]’ and these ten pages as ‘definitely belonging to the most unusual pages of all legislative codes in the world [gehören bestimmt zu den ungewöhnlichsten Seiten aller Gesetzesblätter der Welt]’. Derrida emphasises what he refers to as the ‘fervent tremor’ of these remarks and adds that:
they [i.e. these pages] possess everything to seduce and to fascinate: the paradox of a military legality, political legitimacy, Prussian nationality placed regularly in the service of the irregularity of a revolutionary war, of a partisan war – against a French emperor!22
(PoF 145/PA 167)
Schmitt (‘TP 30/TdP 48) points out that the Edict was however amended on 17 July 1813 and ‘purged of every partisan danger, of every acherontic dynamic [von jeder acherontischen Dynamik gereinigt]’. The original Edict, as Schmitt (‘TP’ 30) further notes, was different from the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the Tyrolean rebellion of 1809 and the Russian partisan war of 1812, influenced by the philosophical spirit of revolutionary France. Schmitt (‘TP’ 30–2) refers in this respect specifically to the role of Fichte and Clausewitz in this philosophical discovery of the partisan.23
With the events in Prussia as described above, Schmitt contends that a certain alliance is formed between philosophy and the partisan. Yet this alliance did not lead to an insurrectional war against Napoleon in Prussia. Schmitt (‘TP’ 32/TdP 51) explains this with reference to the fact that Clausewitz was a reform-minded vocational officer of his time, and that he was not able to bring to full fruition the seeds (Keime) that became visible here. This would only happen much later, and needed ‘an active, professional revolutionary [eines activen Berufsrevolutionärs]’ (‘TP’ 32/TdP 51).24 Philosophy here remained, as Derrida (PoF 147/PA 169) notes, following Schmitt (‘TP’ 5, 33/TdP 14, 52), in ‘a still-abstract “theoretical form” and, as such, a spark, a flash, a flame, a light awaiting its heir’. ‘The Acheron, which man had unleashed’, Schmitt observes:
immediately returned to the channels of state order. After the wars of liberation, the philosophy of Hegel dominated in Prussia. It sought a systematic mediation of revolution and tradition. It could be regarded as conservative, and it was such too. Yet it also preserved the revolutionary sparks and provided through its philosophy of history of continuous revolution, a dangerous ideological weapon, more dangerous than Rousseau’s philosophy in the hands of the Jacobins.
(‘TP’ 33/TdP 52)
Following Schmitt, Derrida (PoF 147) comments that its early heirs, Marx and Engels, were likewise too philosophical, and thus not philosophical enough, or in the words of Schmitt (‘TP’ 33/TdP 52), they were ‘thinkers rather than activists of revolutionary wars’.25 Lenin was, according to Schmitt, the first authentic heir of the Prussian Magna Carta (i.e. the Prussian Edict), which was in turn inherited by Mao, and further transformed.26 Schmitt (‘TP’ 34/TdP 53) notes in this respect that the concept of the political takes a subversive turn (eine umstürzende Wendung) with the events in Russia in the twentieth century.27 The classical concept of the political, founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of European international law based on inter-state war with its bracketings (Hegungen), was now replaced by a revolutionary partisan-war (revolutionären Parteien-Krieg) (‘TP’ 34/TdP 53).28 Hostility, Derrida (PoF 147) notes following Schmitt, is with Lenin taken to its absolute limit. Schmitt can be said to trace here the origin of absolute enmity from the other, communist side, compared to The Concept of the Political, where the focus was on the motivating factors for such enmity on the liberal-capitalist side, that is, the United States. Derrida (PoF 148/PA 170) then points to the coincidence here between the purest philosophy and ‘the most intense concrete determination’.29 This alliance between philosophy and the partisan moreover releases unexpected forces that, according to Schmitt (‘TP’ 37/TdP 57), led to the explosion (Sprengung) of ‘the whole Eurocentric world, which Napoleon had hoped to save and the Congress of Vienna had hoped to restore’.30 Derrida (PoF 148/PA 170) refers to this event as an ‘absolute present’, and as ‘a parousia of the political’. He however adds that there is inevitably still some play in the merger or identification of the two movements at stake here, that is, of depoliticisation and hyper-politicisation (la surpolitisation), which ‘gives history its chance’ (PoF 148/PA 170).31 This further historical development can be seen in the movement away from the thinking of Lenin, who according to Schmitt (‘TP’ 43/TdP 65) was ‘somewhat abstract-intellectual in the determination of the enemy’. With Stalin and especially with Mao Tse-tung, partisan warfare is (again) concretised by providing it with a defensive telluric rooting, coupled with real enmity (wirkliche Feindschaft) (‘TP’ 38–43/TdP 58–65). In the words of Schmitt:
However, with Mao an additional concrete moment is added [kommt … noch ein konkretes Moment hinzu] in relation to the partisan, whereby he comes closer than Lenin to the heart of the matter, and whereby he attains the possibility of extreme theoretical consummation [wodurch er die Möglichkeit der äußersten gedanklichen Vollendung erhält]. In short: Mao’s revolution is more tellurian-based than Lenin’s.
(‘TP’ 40/TdP 61)
What interests Derrida particularly is the relation posited by Schmitt between, on the one hand, the alliance between philosophy, the partisan and absolute presence, and, on the other, technology, spectrality and the Acheron. He therefore shifts his focus at this point to Schmitt’s discrete mention of the brother in the analysis of the movement from Lenin to Mao Tse-tung, that is, in the context of a discussion of absolute and real hostility.
As Derrida (PoF 148/PA 171) points out, for Schmitt the absolute war, the revolutionary war which drives the theory of the partisan to its most extreme point, the war which violates all the laws of war, ‘can be a fratricidal war [cela peut être une guerre fratricide]’. This theme of a brother enemy, as Derrida further comments, has an immense tradition: both Greek and biblical. This comment takes us back to the question raised earlier about determining precisely when the abyss which Schmitt appeals to, opened up, yet here we move beyond the Freudian unconscious. Derrida’s ‘thesis’ is that there is nothing strange about a brother being the subject-matter (sujet) of absolute hostility. There is in fact, he provocatively contends, only absolute hostility for or against a brother (PoF 148/PA 171). At stake here, as we will see shortly, is more specifically the ‘phantasm of the brother’, which connects the discussion here with our earlier discussion of technology and the spectrality of the partisan. The equation by Schmitt of the brother and of (absolute) hostility, Derrida (PoF 148) contends, accords with the whole history of friendship, which is simply the experience, in this respect, of what appears to be an unspeakable synonymy, a deadly tautology. Derrida notes that Schmitt’s mention of the brother happens furtively and is similar to a ghostly apparition. What Derrida (PoF 148/PA 171) refers to as the ‘double passage of a brother [[d]ouble passage d’un frère]’, occurs in the discussion by Schmitt (‘TP’ 38–9, 41/TdP 59, 63) under the heading ‘from Lenin to Mao Tse-tung’, of the wars in the erstwhile Yugoslavia between 1941–1945, where communist and monarchical partisans fought ‘brutal internal battles’ against each other (Tito winning with the support of Stalin against Mihailovich who was according to Schmitt supported by the English); and of the ‘long, fierce civil war’ between Mao Tse-tung and the Kuomintang (the National People’s Party).32 In the course of this ‘war’, Derrida (PoF 149/PA 171) comments, ‘absolute hostility directs itself at the brother, and converts the internal war, this time into real war, into an absolute war, and thus into an absolute politics’. At first sight there seems to be a problem with Derrida’s reading here, because it seems to confuse the strict distinction Schmitt draws in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ between real and absolute hostility.33 Derrida’s contention that the brother in Schmitt becomes the target of absolute hostility, nevertheless finds support in the following passage:
Various kinds of enmity [verschiedene Arten der Feindschaft] are joined in Mao’s concrete situation, rising to an absolute enmity [die sich zu einer absoluten Feindschaft steigern]. Racial enmity against the white colonial exploiter; class enmity against the capitalist bourgeoisie; national enmity against the Japanese invader of the same race; the enmity against the own national brother [gegen den eigenen, nationalen Bruder], expanding in long, embittered civil wars – all this did not paralyze or relativize each other reciprocally, as would be conceivable, but were confirmed and intensified in the concrete situation.
(‘TP’ 41/TdP 63)
What is in other words, according to Schmitt’s schema, supposed to involve a restricted form of enmity, that is, complying with the requirement of the telluric, turns out to be the worst form of violence – that between brothers. Derrida (PoF 148–9/PA 170–1) consequently refers to the hostility at stake here as ‘absolute hostility’ and to the war as an ‘absolute war’.34 A vertiginous reversal is taking place here in the truth of the political,35 Derrida (PoF 149/PA 171) observes, and it happens precisely ‘at the moment that one touches the limit, of oneself or one’s double [son double], the twin, this absolute friend that always comes in the guise of the brother’.
The figure of the double36 makes a number of appearances in the Politics of Friendship, inter alia with reference to descriptions of friendship in its ideal sense.37 In an analysis of Cicero’s On Friendship, or Laelius, Derrida (PoF 4/PA 20) for example notes that ‘one projects or recognises in the true friend one’s exemplar, one’s ideal double [son double idéal], one’s other self, the same as the self, yet better’ (PoF 4/PA 20).38 The self here, Derrida (PoF 4/PA 20) furthermore comments, can be likened to ‘Narcissus who dreams of immortality [Narcisse qui rêve d’immortalité]’. In commenting on Schmitt’s insistence on the identification of the friend and the enemy in The Concept of the Political, Derrida (PoF 116/PA 136) somewhat similarly remarks that philautia (self-love), or narcissism, the fraternal double, are obscurely at work in this discourse.
Of interest to us here is specifically the brief discussion by Derrida (PoF 151– 2) of Poe’s The Purloined Letter at the point where Dupin has managed to retrieve an incriminating letter which was taken from the Queen by the Minister in an attempt to blackmail her.39 Although this appears as an aside, the motivating force of Derrida’s analysis of ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ comes to the fore here. In linking The Purloined Letter to ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, Derrida refers to the invocation by Dupin in the last lines of the play of Atrée et Thyestes (1707), by the French dramatist Crébillon (1674–1762).40 At stake in all these texts, as well as in the biblical Cain and Abel, which is also referred to here (PoF 151),41 is a rivalry between brother enemies.42 At this point in The Purloined Letter, Dupin predicts the self-destruction of his rival who, as Derrida notes in an analysis of Poe’s text, resembles him like a brother (Dupin: ‘Thus he will inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction’). Also noteworthy is Dupin’s equivocal admiration of his rival (i.e. the Minister): ‘In the present instance I have no sympathy – at least no pity – for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius.’ For Derrida (PoF 152/PA 175) this prediction of self-destruction (of the rival) points to ‘monstrous truths’, which evoke the ‘pitiless sympathy’ at stake here and elsewhere, that is, in any kind of ‘war and death among brothers’. This is a war to death, and takes place ‘by virtue of the phantasm of the symbiotic [selon le fantasme du symbiotique]’, Derrida notes (PoF 152/PA 175).43The Purloined Letter with this projection of a dangerous secret of the self onto the figure of the brother (the double thereby both mirroring and threatening the self), thus seems to suggest that the friend as brother, the ideal double as reflection of the self, as constructed in the philosophical tradition, is ultimately so constructed to protect the self against the abyss, against the Acheron, that is, as we will see below, against the doubling of the double.
A detailed discussion cannot be undertaken here of Derrida’s analysis of the double in texts such as ‘The Double Session’ (1970) and The Post Card (1980), which enquire into Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ (2001, XVII: 217–52) and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud 2001, XVIII: 1–64).44 A few brief comments and a short analysis with the aim of clarifying the appearance of the double in Politics of Friendship will have to suffice. At stake in ‘The Double Session’ (dating from 1969) is the relationship between philosophy and literature to the truth (as adequatio or aletheia). Derrida contends that both literature and philosophy have in the metaphysical tradition been viewed as a means of conveying the truth.45 This also applies to the double in general, which has in the metaphysical tradition been understood as the copy of something original, as the imitation of the truth (Dis 201). Freud’s Das Unheimliche (2001, XVII: 249) appears to adopt, but at the same time to question, this approach to the truth insofar as it attributes appearances of the uncanny (including the figure of the double) to childhood experiences (thus a return of the repressed) and at the same time suggests with reference to literature that some other mechanism may be at stake here (Dis 306 n67; PC 342–3, 426–7).46 Freud’s text in other words raises the question whether the repetition in question involves the repetition of some repressed prior (childhood) event, or instead, of some event that has never been a present past.
Derrida finds especially in Mallarmé’s Mimique allusions to such a different, non-present understanding of the operation of the double. In Mimique the miming is not of any prior thing or reality, but instead follows upon an ‘event’ of unbinding, or of dying-laughing (PC 343, 350; Dis 212–13, 220) which, as we will see, never in fact occurs. In the play – Pierrot Murderer of His Wife – which Mallarmé comments on in Mimique (in a theatre review), Pierrot (performed by Mallarmé’s cousin Paul Margueritte) kills his unfaithful wife, Columbine (also performed by Paul Margueritte) on their wedding night by tickling her to death. The Mime character does not copy a pre-existing reality or idea, and follows no prescribed text.47 Mallarmé speaks in this regard of a ‘yet unwritten page’ on which the gestures and facial expressions (of the Mime character) are inscribed (Dis 208/Diss 240). The Mime character does not act spontaneously either; one can rather say that he ‘inaugurates’, Derrida (Dis 208/ Diss 240) notes. What he is required to do is:
to write himself on the white page he is; he must himself inscribe himself through gestures and plays of facial expressions. At once page and quill, Pierrot is both passive and active, matter and form, the author, the means, and the dough of his mimodrama. The histrion produces himself here.
(Dis 209/Diss 244)
The ‘event’ at stake (the crime, suicide, spasm of laughter/pleasure) is enfolded or doubled in a number of ways: what is staged is Pierrot returning after having buried his wife, and then recalling (by virtue of some force wrenching the secret from him) by way of miming how he had first deliberated on the manner in which he would kill her, by accident came upon the idea and then proceeded to do so – by tying her up while asleep and then tickling her feet until she died in spasms of orgasm or as Derrida (Dis 213/Diss 248) describes it, a kind of ‘masturbatory suicide [suicide masturbatoire]’. Pierrot himself then shortly afterwards likewise dies after first being overcome by a contagious tickling and then having a hallucination of a portrait of his wife breaking out in laughter and then tickling himself to death.
Commenting on Mimique, Derrida (Dis 208) notes that the Mime character does not imitate anything; he does not even imitate. Compared to Plato’s Philebus, here no presence, no speech, and no logos precedes or predetermines the ‘gestural writing’ of the Mime (Dis 208/Diss 240). Commentators on ‘The Double Session’ have in general made little of the specific ‘crime’ committed here. To understand the ‘structure’ of the double, as well as its role in Politics of Friendship, the central role of the ‘crime’ however needs to be understood. As Derrida points out, the ‘crime’ is never committed in the present on stage; it is also never observed by anyone; and in the end, no crime is really committed (Dis 212). This is because it is the perfect crime, death by jouissance, which involves no violence, and leaves no trace, as well as the fact that it is actually an act of love (Dis 212, 224). The Mime furthermore plays both Pierrot and Columbine, and as noted earlier, Pierrot himself dies of laughter soon after, and is thereby absolved (Dis 224).
Keeping in mind the quotation above of the Mime producing himself, as well as of the specific ‘crime’ committed, Derrida (Dis 217/Diss 254) notes the differences between the traditional structure of the double and that of Mallarmé: with the latter, the ‘double doubles no simple’; and the double is not anticipated or awaited in advance, at least not by anything that is not already itself double. In the case of Mallarmé’s double, reality is death, and inaccessible except through simulacrum. The ghostly Mime character is moreover ‘the phantom of no flesh, wandering about without a past, without any death, birth or presence’ (Dis 217/Diss 255). Mallarmé thus positions himself within Plato’s structure of the phantasma (the simulacrum as the copy of a copy), with the only difference being that there is no model, and therefore, strictly speaking, no copy (Dis 217).48
The ghostly Mime character (as double) can, reverting to a quasi-Freudian language whilst returning to Schmitt, be said to come to haunt the Pleasure Principle (i.e. narcissism in the form of the friend-brother as ideal self), ‘undermining it, persecuting it by seeking an unbound pleasure’ (PC 352/CP 374). We see this in Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, where the ideal double of the self turns out to itself be double: the brother as friend in The Concept of the Political, and in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ (and in Ex Captivitate Salus) as (absolute) enemy.49 This (philosophical) construction, or perhaps rather phantasm, of the double as brother, with its structural exclusion of the sister, points to its condition of possibility beyond the political: to woman as the absolute partisan, as we will see below. The self, here transposed into the concept of the political, is in other words an effect of what will be termed below, the ‘feminine operation’.
Schmitt, as Derrida (PoF 149) points out, never speaks of the sister, at least in the texts that concern themselves with the political. Derrida (PoF 155/PA 179) refers in this regard to ‘a certain desert [un certain désert]’, which refers back to his analysis in Chapter 5 of Politics of Friendship of The Concept of the Political at the point where Schmitt speaks of depoliticisation, and which Derrida (PoF 130/PA 154) likened to a dehumanised desert (un désert déshumanisé). The desert at stake here (PoF 155) is however one teeming with people, or rather with men. As Derrida (PoF 155–6) points out, in Schmitt’s ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ as well as in The Concept of the Political), only men are mentioned. All the partisans, generals, politicians, professors, etc. being referred to are men. In Schmitt’s account of war and merciless killing, of absolute hostility, Derrida (PoF 156/PA 180) notes, ‘what disappears in becoming indiscernible in the middle of the desert, is woman or the sister’.50 There is not even a mirage of woman in this desert, Derrida (PoF 156/PA 180) notes.51 And there is furthermore no mention by Schmitt of the role women have played throughout history in partisan warfare, in the two world wars (or resistance movements during the war, for example in France) and in wars of national liberation after these wars or, Derrida (PoF 156) seems to suggest, of the war for their own liberation from patriarchy.52 The fact that woman herself does not appear in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, that is, in the theory of the absolute enemy, the fact that she never exits from this enforced clandestinity, from such invisibility, Derrida notes, makes one wonder:
and if woman [la femme] were the absolute partisan? If she were the other absolute enemy [l’autre ennemi absolu] of this theory of the absolute enemy, the spectre of hostility, conjured for the sake of sworn brothers, or the other of the absolute enemy becoming the absolute enemy that one would not recognize in a regular war? She who, following the same logic of the theory of the partisan, becomes an enemy especially formidable who cannot become an enemy [une ennemie] in his/her blurring and parasiting of the reassuring limits between hostility and hate, but also between enmity and its opposite, the laws of war and lawless violence, the political and its others etc.
(PoF 157/PA 181)
By raising the question of woman as the absolute partisan, Derrida seeks to further ‘reconstitute’ the structure of the concept of the political, which he has up to this point shown to be spectral as well as haunted by the brother absolute enemy. By suggesting that woman may be the absolute partisan, Derrida accords a similar ‘role’ to the figure of woman, as he does in a text such as Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. In the latter text, at stake in the displacement of truth by woman (to be understood here not as female sexuality, but as non-identity, non-figure and as simulacrum, as gift without exchange, is what Derrida (1979: 48–9, 54–5, 56–7, 120–1) refers to as the feminine ‘operation’. Read in view of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Abraham and Torok’s The Shell & the Kernel (Chapter 5, Section B below), we can in other words detect in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ the force of an unbinding, the threat therefore of the (feminine) absolute enemy, always already restricting, that is, concealing herself, dissimulating herself, somewhat analogous to a partisan operation. What tends to happen is that this non-figure or spectre, that is, the one who bears witness to the (return of the) absolute unbinding, is immediately ontologised by the person who conjures it. The spectre is in other words constructed as the double of something real, that is, in the present context, the brother of flesh and blood, whereas he/she actually has another ‘nature’. Woman’s exclusion by Schmitt from the concept of the political thus reveals the law or the differantial topology that is at stake here.53 The disappearing figure of woman in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ can in other words also be referred to as the gift, that is, the friendship that goes beyond circular exchange. One has to learn, as Derrida (PoF 283) notes with reference to Nietzsche (who says that neither men nor women are as yet capable of this), how to give to the enemy.
The present section can be brought to a close by briefly looking at the issue of the implications of today’s terror for the concept of the political. Shortly after the events of 11 September 2001, Derrida (‘Auto’ 102; Rog 156) expressed the view that the violence of the early twenty-first century (including that of suicide bombers) is not encompassed by Schmitt’s two partisans and that it involves a new form of violence, although it cannot be regarded as completely new. He gave a number of reasons for this ‘novelty’: the first is that this violence is more clearly suicidal or of an autoimmune nature than previously. Secondly, what is called ‘international terrorism’54 does not only strive for attaining sovereignty over some territory, as was the case with both Schmitt’s two forms of partisan (Rog 106, 155–6). Nevertheless, this paradigm cannot be said to have completely disappeared (Rog 156; ‘Auto’ 111–12). The third reason is that there is not the same reliance on a third interested party or state, as was the case with the two forms of partisan which Schmitt identifies in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ (‘Auto’ 101).55 Fourthly, the ‘form’ which the enemy takes has changed, in the sense that the ‘enemy’ of sovereign states no longer (or at least ‘more seldom’) takes the form of an actual or virtual56 state (Rog 155).57 There is consequently no longer, as was the case during the Cold War, a ‘balance of terror’ (‘Auto’ 98). The nuclear, total or absolute threat now comes ‘from anonymous forces that are absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable’ (‘Auto’ 98).58 In the fifth place, the means of waging ‘war’ and their relation to the telluric has changed, making possible attacks by way of air or surface missiles, attacks on computer systems and informational networks, as well as nuclear, bacteriological, chemical and nanotechnological attacks by non-state actors (Rog 155; ‘Auto’ 101–2).59 In the sixth place, the integral and co-determining role the media plays in (the impact of) events such as 9/11 (Rog xiii, 155; ‘Auto’ 108–9).60 Finally, the cause, motivation, aim or message of what is called ‘international terrorism’ is more difficult to determine than is the case with Schmitt’s two forms of partisan (‘Auto’ 111).61
Derrida thus sees in the suicidal or autoimmunitary violence of today (which includes both the actions of the suicide bomber62 and of the United States (and its allies)63 as dominant world power, tied to the unlimited proliferation of nuclear capability) a modification, which points much more clearly to what is at stake in the structure of the political (‘Auto’ 94–102; Rog 156).64 In suicide bombings (and the autoimmunitary actions of the United States and its allies) this structure comes very clearly to the fore.65 Whereas the terminology which Derrida employs in this analysis slightly changes after 2001, the structure of the political identified through his reading of The Concept of the Political and ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ stays the same.66 Derrida’s ‘thesis’, already in Politics of Friendship, is that violence, in whatever form, is derived from the same ‘source’. This ‘source’ is the Freudian death drive, which is alluded to by Derrida in the interview in Philosophy in a Time of Terror as well as in Rogues by the notion of autoimmune actions. Translated into the language of Politics of Friendship, such actions can be said to at the same time point towards an asymmetrical friendship with no return to the self, beyond the friend-enemy couple.67
In The Concept of the Political Schmitt points to the centrality of the question of human nature (Section A above). Schmitt (CoP 61/BdP 61) finds support for his definition of the concept of the political specifically in the reflections of political thinkers who view man as ‘evil, i.e. as in no way unproblematic, but as a dangerous and dynamic being [als “gefährliches” und dynamisches Wesen]’. In ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ the question of human nature again comes to the fore insofar as Schmitt defines the partisan with reference to the telluric.1 In the present chapter, we move back in time to the text ‘Weisheit der Zelle’/’Wisdom of the Prison Cell’ (ECS 79–91), dated April 1947 (hereafter ‘Weisheit’, to trace what appears to be an a-chronological development as well as a further a-temporality in Schmitt’s thinking regarding the concept of the political. In this semi-autobiographical text, Schmitt uses both his own situation and that of humanity in general, to reflect on the concept of the political, with the question of human nature taking centre stage. Before we start with the analysis of ‘Weisheit’, let us first look briefly at the context within which this text was written.
After World War II, Schmitt was interned briefly by the Russians in April 1945 and thereafter again on two occasions (from September 1945 to October 1946 and from March 1947 to May 1947) by the Americans. During his second detention he was interrogated by Robert Kempner at Nuremberg to determine whether he should be charged for participating, directly or indirectly, in the planning of wars of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity.2 During his time in Nuremberg, Schmitt wrote a number of smaller texts, inter alia ‘Weisheit’, which was published in 1950 under the title Ex Captivitate Salus. In ‘Weisheit’ Schmitt again takes up the issue of the enemy. The enemy figure is here not however, or at least not in the first place, explored with reference to external or civil war as in The Concept of the Political, or to partisan warfare as in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, but to the self, or the brother. As he does in his other texts, Schmitt here suggests, perhaps more explicitly, that the self, and by implication, the concept of the political, is haunted by a force of self-destruction. The concept of the political, with reference to which law is ultimately to be understood, in ‘Weisheit’ implodes on itself. In this section, the implications of this implosion will be enquired into primarily through an analysis of ‘Weisheit’, and of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1997a: 159–67), where he discusses this text of Schmitt.
Schmitt (ECS 79) starts off his reflections by asking himself which of the definitions of man in circulation appears self-evident (dir unmittelbar einleuchtet). For him this is the fact that the human being (der Mensch) is naked.3 The most naked is the human being who, without clothes, appears before another who is clothed; someone who has been disarmed, appearing before someone who is armed; someone who is powerless, appearing before someone powerful. This is an experience that Adam and Eve already had when they were driven from paradise, Schmitt (ECS 79) notes. This of course raises the further question whether the definition of man is to be attached to the first or the second category of person in every instance, and, in addition, which of these is closer to paradise. In the versions of paradise promoted in the present age,4 Schmitt (ECS 79) comments, human beings instead go around clothed. In contrast, Schmitt (ECS 79) sees himself as clearly naked and proceeds to quote Daübler’s Perseus: ‘Now you stand naked, naked as at birth [geburthaft nackt], in desert expanses [in wüsten Weiten]’.5 Schmitt’s comparison of himself in his small prison cell, where he was kept in solitary confinement, with the desert expanses in Daübler’s poem, most likely has the aim of pointing to a feeling of solitude and vulnerability common to both. The pieces of clothing that were left for him, he says, only confirm his nakedness in an objective sense. Even more so, the clothing underlines his nakedness in a highly ironic, as well as unpleasantly accentuated manner. One experiences oneself being thrown back onto one’s last reserves, Schmitt (ECS 80) notes. Further emphasising his own vulnerability, he notes that his remaining physical powers can very easily be extinguished. Yet, at least for the moment, he adds, he still has some strength. Then, continuing his reflections on the definition of man, he recalls the sentence in Wagner’s 1876 Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung): ‘Einzig erbt ich den eigenen Leib, lebend zehr ich ihn auf [Singularly do I inherit my own body, living, I feed on it]’.6 This passage is sung by Siegfried in what Schmitt (ECS 80) refers to as ‘a wonderful collapsing and crashing interval [einem wunderbar auf-und abstürzenden Intervall]’. It captures in unparalleled fashion an exuberant physical feeling of happiness, Schmitt says, which still rides upon the waves which led to the 1848 revolution in Germany. Schmitt however notes that the passage is originally to be found in Max Stirner7 and that with Stirner we approach the idea of paradisiacal nakedness in contrast to modern versions of paradise where, as we saw, man is clothed. At stake here appears to be Stirner’s radical individualism, which to some extent also finds expression in Wagner’s Siegfried, and which Schmitt, as appears from a passage in the Glossarium on Stirner, clearly finds problematic:
Thus at any rate: glorious solidarity: Millions of us can call out in a speaking choir ‘nothing is beyond me, and I am I’. You can perhaps say that of yourself, and the millions in your speaking choir who shout with you can do so too. I can unfortunately only say of myself that I don’t know whether I am I/ego [ob ich Ich bin] and whether nothing is beyond me [ob mir nichts über mich geht]. I do not know how things stand with this I/ego/self of mine [wie es sich mit diesem meinem Ich verhält], whether it is a fixed star or a marsh light, or both. Are you singular [ein Einziger] or are you a thousand and countless selves in your I/ego/self [bist Du tausend und zahllose Ich in Deinem Ich]? All of this I do not know. I do not know who I am. If you know who you are, all the better. Let your knowledge serve you.
(GL 48, entry of 22 Nov 1947)
Schmitt (ECS 80–1) notes that he has known Stirner since high school (Unterprima) and that this knowledge prepared him for many things, which would otherwise have surprised him. Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own was published in 1844 and Schmitt (ECS 81) notes that the depths of the European thought process from 1830–1848 prepare one also for present world events. What Schmitt (ECS 81) refers to as ‘the debris field [das Trümmerfeld]’ of the ‘self-decomposition [der Selbstzersetzung]’ of German theology and idealist philosophy, had since 1848 developed itself into a force field of theogonic and cosmogonic approaches. What is exploding in the present, Schmitt notes, was already prepared before 1848.8 The fire that is burning in the present was then built. There are, he continues, with clear reference to the recent-at-the-time developed atom bomb, certain uranium mines of intellectual history (Uran-Bergwerke der Geistesgeschichte). These include the pre-Socratics, some church fathers and also certain writings of the time before 1848. The poor Max (Stirner), Schmitt (ECS 81) notes, also falls within this category (of atomic thinkers). This categorisation of Stirner should not be read as unqualified praise: ‘On the whole’, Schmitt (ECS 81) says, Stirner is ‘hideous, boorish, pretentious, boastful, a tormentor [ein Pennalist], a depraved student [ein verkommener Studiker], oafish [ein Knote], an egomaniac [ein Ich-Verrückter], obviously a severe psychopath [ein schwerer Psychopath]’. Stirner, Schmitt (ECS 81) continues his mocking, crows with a loud, unpleasant voice: ‘I am I. I feel no authority over me’, and his word-sophisms are unbearable. This vehement denunciation of Stirner can partly be ascribed to the latter’s view in relation to self-identity, which is for Schmitt the issue at stake here. As we saw above, Schmitt (CoP 61) agrees with those thinkers who regard man as a dangerous and dynamic being. In The Nomos of the Earth (1950), in a discussion of Hobbes’s homo homini lupus, Schmitt mentions Stirner as one of those who had (wrongly) denied the truth of this maxim. Schmitt’s polemic in Section 7 of The Concept of the Political against anarchism and liberalism, which both believe in man’s goodness, and either opposes or mistrusts the state, in the latter instance seeking to limit its powers by making it the servant of civil society, can thus be read as directed also at Stirner.9 ‘Every consistent individualism’, Schmitt (CoP 70/BdP 69) says, amounts to a ‘negation of the political’.
Schmitt does however give Stirner credit for something. Apart from the back-handed compliment that Stirner counts among the atomic thinkers of the nine-teenth century, Schmitt (ECS 81) also credits Stirner for realising that the ‘I’ (das Ich) is not an object of thought (Denkobjekt).10 This is likely to be at least partially a reference to Stirner’s statement that the ‘I’ (as spirit/ghost) ‘is to be found at the back of or behind things, so I must later find myself also behind thoughts, that is, as their creator and owner [Wie Ich Mich hinter den Dingen finde, und zwar als Geist, so muss Ich Mich später auch hinter den Gedanken finden, nämlich als ihr Schöpfer und Eigner]’ (Stirner 2006: 17/1845: 14).11 How is this ambivalence towards Stirner to be understood? Perhaps by taking account of the fact that the same Stirner, also in the reading of Schmitt,12 did battle with ghosts, which he showed to continuously haunt the ‘I’.13 Schmitt appears to adopt a reading in ‘Weisheit’ of Stirner (similar to that of Derrida in Specters of Marx) in terms of which Ego equals ghost. Derrida spells out this equation as follows:
Stirner has often been read, in fact, as a Fichtean thinker. But this Ego, this living individual would itself be inhabited and invaded by its own specter. It would be constituted by specters of which it becomes the host and which it assembles in the haunted community of a single body. Ego=ghost [Moi=fantôme]. Therefore ‘I am’ would mean ‘I am haunted’ … . Wherever there is Ego, es spukt, ‘it spooks.’14
(SoM 166/SdM 212)
In further support of this reading, we see that Schmitt (ECS 81–2), after expressing his admiration for the title of Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum – declaring it to be the most beautiful, or in any event, the most German (deutschesten) book title in the whole of German literature – notes that ‘in this moment Max is the only one/the Ego (der Einzige)’ who visits him in his prison cell. This visit, Schmitt (ECS 82) says with perhaps a tint of irony, touches him deeply (rührt mich tief ) in view of Stirner’s rabid egoism. This Ego/ghost haunting Schmitt in his prison cell, as we will see further below, can be said to stand at the ‘origin’ of thought, which would explain why Schmitt (ECS 81) contends that it cannot be the object of the latter. The ghost thus appears to tell Schmitt something about the definition of man that he is searching for.15
The ultimate drive (letzten Antrieb) or true longing (wahre Sensucht) of the ‘I’-lunatic (Ich-Verrückten) Stirner is, according to Schmitt (ECS 82), to be found expressed in a letter written by Stirner.16 With this we return to the Stirnerian paradise mentioned in the discussion above. In this letter Stirner declares that the new paradise will consist of an overcoming of self-estrangement and self-alienation in a perfect bodily presence. Man would then again become like the animals of the forest and the flowers in the fields. Schmitt (ECS 82) compares Stirner’s paradise to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1500) and Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie (1817). In this paradise there will be a pure identity of man with himself – he will experience a feeling of happiness of ‘a blissfully accelerated blood circulation [Glücksgefühl eines selig beschleunigten Blutkreislaufs]’. Schmitt (ECS 82) as a result refers to Stirner as one of the first ‘Panists’ of German literature.17
This modern Pan, Schmitt (ECS 82) however notes, was overtaken by modern natural science. The happiness that Stirner speaks of is today even more of an illusion than when he lived. Schmitt (ECS 82–3) compares this Stirnerian bliss (of an ego reconciled to itself) with the feeling experienced by city-people who visit the countryside on holiday, the fleeting awakening of cheerful feelings in a child on the beach and the bliss of a poet laureate. The pleasure at stake here is thus no longer one of eternity as it is for Stirner and for Christianity. There is now a resignation to the fact that although more is desired, the holiday cannot last forever. Today this ‘poor I’ (arme Ich) can only wed his own echo and in this infertile, self-indulgent marriage, the ‘I’ is no longer forlorn (vereinsamt) as in Stirner’s paradise, but for a long time already organisationally monopolised (organisatorisch vereinnahmt). Schmitt (ECS 83) plays here with the German words Pan and Plan, nature and technology. Planning (die Planung) has for a long time already monopolised the ‘I’: the plan appears and Pan stops smiling. Pan founders and planning appears on the agenda (Der Pan versinkt, der Plan tritt auf den Plan).
Today new versions of paradise again wink on the horizon, Schmitt (ECS 83) notes. He refers here to the paradise of a thoroughly planned world, with all the splendours brought about by an unlimited productive power and an infinitely increasing consumer power, accompanied by a generously extended leisure time and corresponding recreational activities. This is the paradise of a technicised earth (technisierten Erde) and a highly organised humanity (ECS 83). Social limitations now replace the natural limitations which have been overcome. These social limitations do not only capture us (erfaβt uns nicht nur); they change us. It is now no longer about understanding the world and humanity, but about their transformation.18
Failures in the artificial paradise of technology can however lead to experiences of hell, as Schmitt (ECS 84) points out with reference to the destruction of the sewage system in Berlin in 1946/7, thereby bringing to light the backside (Kehrseite), so to speak, of this paradise. These failures nonetheless are avoidable and affect only the vanquished, Schmitt (ECS 84) points out. Different from the optimism of earlier generations, the benefits of technology are not for everyone, but favour the elite, that is, the gods of the new paradise.19 After remarking (somewhat sceptically, one can assume) that technology may perhaps be able to free us from all hardship in 50 or 100 years, Schmitt (ECS 85) returns to the opening sentences of ‘Weisheit’ and asks the question whether man in this new paradise is naked or clothed. This again raises the question of the political. Perhaps the new productive powers of technology, he says, can ensure that we (Schmitt ECS 85 emphasises the ‘we’) can afford to wear fantastic new costumes every day, or perhaps even better: there may no longer be clothing. Technology would improve to such an extent that we (or at least the new elite) would gird ourselves with light and heat covers. Or even better, the substance of our own bodies, Schmitt (ECS 85–6) speculates, could be transformed into radiation (Strahlung) resulting in the technically transfigured body, analogous to the way in which those who can fly today are technically perfected angels. The new elite would then be neither naked nor clothed (ECS 86), and in this way, it can be added, have transcended the political. The latter distinction would lose its meaning in a new level of human existence (einer neuen Daseinsstufe). This new superhuman elite would no longer be human. This new man would be the wholly other (das ganz Andere).20 Some theologians, Schmitt (ECS 86) notes, say that God is the wholly other, yet, he adds, the wholly other is completely incalculable (ganz unberechenbar). Why would the new man then not be the wholly other, he asks rhetorically.21 Man, as is well-known, is something that has to be overcome (überwunden), Schmitt (ECS 86) notes.22 Why should he not in this way be overcome? He would then no longer be begotten, no longer conceived and no longer born (ECS 86). Even Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) with its logical, highly scientific family planning would then be old-fashioned. Schmitt’s own question as to the definition of the human, he points out, would become old-fashioned too (ECS 86). Everything would then simply be radiation (Alles ist dann nur noch Strahlung).23 Although Schmitt’s irony appears palpable on some level, it is clear that this new man as described by him (as totally other, incalculable and as neither naked nor clothed, but radiating) also tells us something about human nature in general.24 At stake, as suggested above, is a transcendence of the political.
Schmitt (ECS 86) next raises the question whether he has been placed on earth to ensure through his labour that technology can transform us into radiation (Strahlung). If this is indeed the case, the question arises as to whose command he should subject himself to, in order to undertake his labour. He raises this question, he notes, because he has for a long time already not been alone and lonely (für mich allein und einsam), but organisationally monopolised (organisatorisch vereinnahmt) (ECS 86).25 Schmitt however cuts himself short. These questions may actually no longer be asked in the new world. In fact, questions may no longer be asked at all. One must instead answer the questions posed to oneself. Questionnaires are now prepared by others, which place one in question together with one’s questions (die dich mitsamt deinen Fragen in Frage stellen) (ECS 87).26 Schmitt makes a call to the reader (and to himself perhaps) to finally grasp what this means (Begreife endlich, was das bedeutet). Schmitt is clearly using his own position to say something about the definition of man which he is searching for. In the opening essay of Ex Captivitate Salus (‘Gespräch mit Eduard Spranger’) we see something similar when Schmitt (ECS 11) notes that he finds the prosecutorial function (to which he is being subjected) even more uncanny (unheimlicher) than the inquisitorial function. He ascribes this to his own theological roots, because, as he points out, Diabolos means prosecutor (Ankläger) (ECS 11). His experience of his own prosecution, Schmitt suggests, places him in a similar position to Descartes who was confronted by the spiritus malignus.27
Following Derrida, we can say, also with reference to what happens later in ‘Weisheit’, that a movement takes place from the question, that is, ‘Who is then my enemy?’ (ECS 89); ‘Who can I ultimately recognise as my enemy?’ (ECS 89); and ‘Who can really place me in question?’ (ECS 89), towards an inscription of the question into a preceding self-questioning, that is, a being-placed-in-question (PoF 162–3). This self-questioning no longer qualifies as a theoretical question, a question of knowledge or recognition (PoF 162). The question is posed by someone, who first of all puts the question to himself, as an attack, a wound, a complaint, the calling into question of the one who questions (PoF 162–3). The enemy and the question are therefore inseparable, as expressed in Däubler’s Hymne an Italien (1916), which Schmitt (ECS 90) quotes on the second-last page of ‘Weisheit’: ‘The enemy is our own question as figure’.28 Yet one poses the question of the enemy (as Schmitt does) only because one is first of all being placed in question by it (PoF 150). 29
The ‘question’ which is at stake here is clearly not simply any question, but the philosophical question itself, which as Heidegger has shown, is closely connected to the nature of man.30 Derrida (PoF 150) is indeed alluding here to Heidegger, and one could explore the issue at stake here also through a reflection on the essence of language, as Derrida does in more detail elsewhere.31 In Politics of Friendship Derrida notes that the whole history of the (philosophical) question, starting with the question of Being, as well as the whole of history which has been governed by the latter question (i.e. philosophy, epistemology, history, research, investigation, inquisition, etc.), has been accompanied by polemical violence, strategy and arms techniques.32 Without suggesting that the question itself should be renounced, Derrida (PoF 150/PA 173) notes that at stake in ‘Weisheit’ can be said to be a movement beyond and before the question, before and beyond all war which enables the deployment of the question; in other words, a movement towards ‘the perhaps’, towards that ‘space’ and ‘time’ that ‘precedes’ the friend and enemy passing into each other in the form of the brother.33 One would, Derrida (PoF 150/PA 173) suggests, have to hear an exclamation mark before the question mark. The Aristotelian ‘O my friends, there is no friend!’ and the Nietzschean reversal: ‘O enemies, there is no enemy!’, point for Derrida (PoF 150) towards this movement. This double outcry would be addressed both to the friend and to the enemy who is no longer or not yet (PoF 150). In other words at stake is a friendship – exceeding all measurement, moderation and calculation, and involving no concern for the self, thereby characterising the perfect gift – before the friend-enemy distinction of the political as well as before the Schmittian and Däublerian notion of the enemy as our own question as figure, in this way leading to a re-positioning of the political (PoF 244, 249).34 Schmitt appears to also allude to this in ‘Weisheit’ when, after having quoted Däubler to the effect that the enemy is our own question as figure, he (implicitly) refers to the sayings of Aristotle and Nietzsche, whilst insisting (as in The Concept of the Political) on the necessity of making this distinction:
Woe to him who has no friend, as his enemy will judge him.
Woe to him who has no enemy, as I will become his enemy on the day of judgment.
(ECS 89–90; PoF 165/PA 190)
Again underlining his own/man’s vulnerability in the new world, Schmitt (ECS 87), having invoked the issue of being placed in question by questionnaires, notes that it would show a lack of taste to delude oneself (like Stirner, perhaps) due to the luxury of one’s solitary confinement into thinking that one is simply forlorn (vereinsamt) in the cell and not already for a long time monopolised (vereinnahmt). He concludes the section by asking himself/the reader whether he wants to succumb anew to deception (Willst du von neuem dem Betrug erliegen? (ECS 87)). This question can of course be understood as an admission of having been misled by national socialism, but read in the context of Schmitt’s reflections on his own/man’s non-autonomy, being placed in question and being prosecuted, at stake here (in addition) seems to be the question of ‘human nature’ or the structure of the human, particularly the relation to self-deception.
Self-deception, Schmitt (ECS 87) notes, belongs to isolation. Someone who is isolated thinks by himself and speaks to himself, and in soliloquy we of course speak to a dangerous sycophant (einem gefährlichen Schmeichler) (ECS 87).35 The moralists, Schmitt (ECS 87) says, are correct in regarding an autobiography as a sign of vanity.36 Yet, he notes that vanity would be the most harmless and amiable of the motives that come into play here, that is, in his semi-autobiography.37 The holy, Schmitt notes further in a quasi-confession of guilt, do not write autobiographies. In the deepest core of the prison cell, he says, lies soliloquy and self-deception (ECS 87). Schmitt (ECS 87) compares this to the excruciating dread of Descartes who philosophises in his solitary room by the fireplace, and who thinks only of escaping the evil, deceptive spirit (dem bösen, betrügerischen Geist), that is, the spiritus malignus from whose treachery we are never safe, the least when we think ourselves secure. In the fear of deception, Descartes becomes a masked man, l’homme au masque. Similar to the new man, whom Schmitt spoke of earlier, the masked man is no longer naked and also no longer clothed. ‘Larvatus prodeo [I proceed wearing a mask]’, he says (about himself), quoting Descartes (ECS 88). The dread, Schmitt (ECS 88) says, is so much more excruciating, as one comes closer to the source (zur Quelle), where there are ever more deceptions. Someone who thinks only of evading deception (dem Betrug zu entgehen) walks straight into it. The deceptions at stake here, Schmitt (ECS 88) comments, casting the net as wide as possible, are those of feeling and of mind, of flesh and spirit, of vice and virtue, of man and of woman. Schmitt notes, again in a quasi-confession, that he always again succumbs to deception. Yet, he says, he has always again evaded it (bin ich ihm entgangen) (ECS 88), presumably, in view of what Schmitt had just said, after having first faced up to its inescapability.38 Also with the ‘final jump [der letzte Sprung]’, Schmitt (ECS 88) says, he will succeed in doing so. He ends the paragraph with a call: ‘Come, dear death [Komm, geliebter Tod]’.
After having made this call to death, perhaps expressing thereby his deepest desire,39 Schmitt (ECS 88) nonetheless acknowledges that death too can deceive us. He mentions two (mis-)understandings of death here: as a jump into the sphere of freedom,40 and as the sweet heathen/heaths dying.41 Schmitt’s mention of death in the same breath as deception, suggests that he sees death as the ultimate deceiver.42 All deception, Schmitt (ECS 88) further notes in support of this reading, is and remains self-deception. The self-shielding (Selbstverpanzerung) of Max Stirner, that is, seeking to exorcise the ghosts troubling man, Schmitt (ECS 88) notes, is self-deception of the highest order.43 Stirner’s combination of harmlessness and cunning, honest provocation and deceitful swindle, Schmitt (ECS 88) describes as ‘unsightly’ or ‘hideous’ (häβlich). Like every person obsessed with the ‘I’ (jeder Ich-Verrückte), he sees in the non-I the enemy.44 In this way, the whole world becomes his enemy and he imagines that they must believe it when he, non-committedly (freibleibend), offers them a brotherly kiss (ECS 88).45 In this way Stirner conceals himself from the dialectical splitting force of the ‘I’ (der dialektischen Aufspaltungskraft des Ich) and seeks to escape the enemy by deceiving him (ECS 88–9). However, the enemy is an objective power. He, that is, Stirner and probably also humanity in general, will not escape from him and the real enemy (echte Feind) does not allow himself to be deceived (ECS 89).
In the last two pages of ‘Weisheit’, which we will explore further below with reference to their Hegelian heritage, Schmitt reflects further on the enemy, asking who one can ultimately recognise as one’s enemy, and concludes that this can only be someone who can put me in question. When I recognise someone as enemy, he continues, I accept that he can place me in question. But who can really place me in question? He then asks, and answers: ‘Only I myself. Or my brother. That is it. The other is my brother. [Nur ich mich selbst. Oder mein Bruder. Das ist es. Der Andere ist mein Bruder].’46 In his analysis of this passage, Derrida (PoF 163/PA 188) notes that the ‘oder/or’ in this sentence fulfils the function of both an alternative and of equivalence, that is, ‘myself as my brother: myself or, if it is not me, my brother’.47 With the notion of being one’s own enemy, Derrida (PoF 163) further comments, Schmitt both confirms and contradicts everything he (Schmitt) had said about the enemy up to this point. We in other words find in ‘Weisheit’ the same insistence on correctly identifying the enemy, as in The Concept of the Political and in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’. Yet whereas Schmitt’s concern in these latter two texts is in the first place to guard the borders of the self, that is, of the proper, in ‘Weisheit’ the enemy is said to be lodged within the proper, the familial, the own home, at the heart of resemblance and affinity, within the oikeiotes, where actually, in terms of the logic of The Concept of the Political and ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, only the friend should have been lodged (PoF 163, 172).48 The enemy as the most improper, as Derrida (PoF 163) points out, is here identified with the proper, with the self. The most proper is in other words the most foreign, the most unheimlich. The enemy did not appear only after the friend, to oppose or negate him, but was always already there (PoF 172).
Schmitt arrives at this point, as we saw, by seeking a definition of man with reference to his own situation as well as of humanity in general in the new era. Descartes’ evil genius, through which he (Descartes) places in question the metaphysical foundations of knowledge, plays an important role here as well. Descartes asks in this respect what the position would be if the God he believes in and has always trusted were to be an evil genius who is deceiving him so that all his certainties are actually deceptions. To understand what is at stake here, it will be useful to briefly look at Derrida’s ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’.49 The evil genius invoked by Descartes can, Derrida (WD 52–3/É&D 81) contends, be likened to a ‘total madness [ folie totale]’ which exceeds metaphysics, that is, ‘a total derangement over which I could have no control because it is inflicted upon me – hypothetically – leaving me no responsibility for it’. After this invocation, Descartes however quickly seeks to reassure himself that he is not mad. He does so by way of language, which is, as Derrida (WD 54–5) points out, necessarily tied to reason, and therefore in itself entails a break with madness. Madness in this ‘sense’ continues to haunt philosophy, as we can also see from the reflections of Stirner and Schmitt on the Ego/ghost. The typical reaction of philosophy, when daring to go to the limit, is to immediately seek reassurance, as Descartes for example does by relying on God and reason to support the cogito. Philosophy, Derrida (WD 61) contends, can in fact only exist insofar as it suppresses madness, that is, the mad man within us. Schmitt, as we saw above, realises that one cannot simply escape the deception of the evil genius – then one walks straight into it. Schmitt’s invocation of Descartes in this context, as Derrida points out in his analysis of ‘Weisheit’, necessarily has important implications for the enemy, which as we know is central to Schmitt’s concept of the political, and therefore at the same time for his definition of man:
Without an enemy, I go mad, I can no longer think, I become powerless to think myself, to pronounce ‘cogito, ergo sum’. For that I must have an evil genius, a spiritus malignus, a deceitful spirit. Did not Schmitt allude to this in his cell? Without this absolute hostility, the ‘I’ loses reason, and the possibility of being posed, of posing or of opposing the object in front of it; ‘I’ loses objectivity, reference, the ultimate stability of that which resists; it loses existence and presence, being, logos, order, necessity, and law. ‘I’ loses the thing itself. For in mourning the enemy,50 I have not deprived myself of this or that, this adversary or that rival, this determined force of opposition constitutive of myself: I lose nothing more, nothing less, than the world.
(PoF 175–6/PA 200)
Hegel’s analysis of the struggle for recognition between self and other in the development of self-consciousness, as outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is alluded to in the following paragraphs of ‘Weisheit’ which need to be quoted here in full:51
Who is then my enemy? Is he who feeds me in this cell my enemy? He even clothes and houses me. The cell is the garment that he donates to me. I thus ask myself: who can then ultimately be my enemy? And indeed in such a way that I recognise him as enemy, and must even recognise that he recognises me as enemy. In this reciprocal recognition of recognition lies the greatness of the concept. This is hardly suitable for an age of the masses with its pseudo-theological enemy-myths. The theologians tend to define the enemy as something [etwas] that has to be destroyed. I am however a legal scholar and not a theologian.
Who can I ultimately recognise as my enemy? Obviously only he who can place me in question. Insofar as I recognise him as enemy, I recognise that he can place me in question. And who can really place me in question? Only I myself. Or my brother. That is it. The other is my brother. The other proves himself [erweist sich] to be my brother, and the brother proves himself to be my enemy. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humanity. Thus appears the father of all things. This is the dialectical tension which keeps world history in motion, and world history is not as yet at an end.
Thus be careful, and do not speak recklessly of enemies. Man assesses himself by means of his enemy. Man appraises himself through that which he recognises as hostility [Feindschaft]. Evil [Schlimm] indeed is the destroyer, who justifies himself thereby that the destroyer must be destroyed. However all destruction is simply self-destruction. The enemy on the other hand is the other. Remind yourself of the great statement of the philosopher: the relation to oneself, through the other, that is the truly infinite. The negation of negation, says the philosopher, does not amount to neutralisation, but the truly infinite depends on it. The truly infinite however is the foundational concept of his philosophy.
(ECS 89)
The master in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is prepared to look death in the face, and in this way succeeds in subjecting the bondsman who fears death; yet the bondsman ultimately attains mastery through his labour. From the above-quoted passages as well as The Concept of the Political, it is clear that Schmitt reworks the terms of this struggle between master and bondsman, thereby providing in a certain sense a ‘correction’ to Hegel.52 Schmitt’s implicit objection to Hegel’s account in The Concept of the Political is that he does not take the antithesis, that is, hostility, seriously enough: the antithesis in Hegel is always already viewed in terms of its imminent sublation in the synthesis.53 As noted above, for Schmitt (CoP 58–68), the friend-enemy distinction is tied to human nature and remains a real possibility even in an era of seeming depoliticisation.54 No synthesis takes place.55 ‘Weisheit’ appears to amount to a further ‘reworking’ of Hegel’s struggle for recognition.56 To gain an understanding of the nature of this reworking, as well as of Derrida’s reading of Schmitt in this respect, it will be helpful to look again at what Freud says about negation (Verneinung):
To negate something in a judgment is, at bottom, to say: ‘This is something which I would prefer to repress.’ A negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for repression; its ‘no’ is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin – like, let us say, ‘Made in Germany’.57
(Freud 2001, XIX: 236/1991, XIV: 12)
Affirmation – as a substitute for uniting – belongs to Eros; negation – the successor to expulsion – belongs to the instinct of destruction.58
(Freud 2001, XIX: 239/1991, XIV: 15)
Schmitt, as Derrida (PoF 152) points out, was criticised by Otto Brunner for giving primacy to the enemy in his analysis of the concept of the political. Schmitt responded to this objection in the ‘Foreword’ to the 1963 German edition of The Concept of the Political by pointing out that the focus placed on negation in his analysis is not to be confused with giving it ‘primacy’ or viewing the enemy in a positive light. This critique, Schmitt says, ‘ignores the fact that every development of a legal concept [in legal theory] emerges with dialectical necessity from the negation’ (BdP 14). Likewise, the legal process shifts into gear only once a right has been negated. Criminal law for this reason posits a crime or misdeed (eine Untat) at its origin. This does not mean that a positive view is attached to the crime or that primacy is given thereto. In analysing the logic employed here, Derrida points out that for Schmitt ‘starting with the enemy’ does not stand in opposition to ‘starting with the friend’, but means that one takes one’s point of departure in the antithesis (du contraire) without which there is neither friend nor enemy. Schmitt’s insistence on the role of negation, Derrida concludes, takes us to the ultimate limit of the political, and thus to a kind of origin. He transcribes Schmitt’s reasoning in respect of method as follows:
If I were to take my point of departure in the friend, as you invite me to do, I would have to give a preliminary definition thereof. But this would be possible only with reference to an opposing term: the enemy. One must therefore take one’s point of departure in this oppositional negativity, i.e. in hostility, in order to access the political. ‘Starting with the enemy’ is not the opposite of ‘starting with the friend’. It is, on the contrary, to start from the antithesis without which there is neither friend nor enemy. In short, hostility is required by method and by definition – the very definition of definition. By the dialecticity or the diacriticity, by the necessity of the subject [topique] as well, which cannot function without the possibility of war. There is no space, there is no place – either in general or for a thought, for a definition or for a distinction – without the real possibility of war.59
(PoF 152–3/PA 175–6)
The negativity at stake in the above quotation is what Derrida (PoF 139/PA 160) refers to earlier, with reference to Schmitt’s alignment of the political and of Hegelian oppositional negation (defining the latter with reference to the political), as ‘oppositional negativity in general’, and as ‘supreme opposition, qua the essence and telos of opposition, negation and contradiction’. Derrida however suggests that Schmitt goes beyond this oppositional negativity in ‘Weisheit’ when he (Schmitt, ECS 89) declares that the enemy is ultimately the self, or the brother,60 and that all destruction is simply self-destruction.61 We find an allusion here to the ‘origin’ of hostility/destruction in what Derrida (PoF 155) refers to in his analysis of Plato’s Lysis, which follows immediately after the discussion of the negative in Schmitt, as an ‘aneconomic friendship’. Although Derrida does not analyse the Schmitt-Hegel connection in detail here, we can gain some insight into what is at stake in this regard when we look at Derrida’s reading of Hegel with reference to Bataille in the essay ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ (WD 251–77). In this text, Derrida analyses Bataille’s reading of Hegel, with a somewhat similar focus on the negative in Hegel’s dialectic. In Bataille’s reading, what Hegel calls ‘abstract negativity’, that is, an ‘absolute renunciation of meaning’, and an ‘absolute risking of death’ comes into play (WD 256/É&D 376).62 Here the master does not look death in the face in order to become the master of the slave and thus to attain recognition and freedom, but rushes headlong towards death (WD 254–5). This negativity, as Derrida (WD 256/É&D 376) puts it, ‘never takes place … never presents itself, because in doing so it would start to work again’.63 This ‘negativity without measure’, this renunciation of recognition, which is also at stake in ‘Weisheit’, exposes Hegelian self-consciousness as servile and vulgar consciousness (WD 259, 265–6, 276).
Schmitt (ECS 90) ends his reflections in ‘Weisheit’ by invoking wordplay: his own imprisonment is again the focal point:
This is the wisdom of the prison cell. I lose my time and gain my space (Raum).64 Suddenly I am overcome by the quiet/silence/peace/rest (Ruhe)65 which shelters the meaning of words.
Schmitt (ECS 90) then points to the association between Raum (space) and Rom (Rome), declaring them to be the same word.66 Schmitt (ECS 90) proceeds by pointing to the wonders of the German language, specifically its spatial and germinal powers (Raumkraft und Keimkraft). The German language, he notes, makes possible the rhyming of ‘word’ (Wort) and ‘place’ (Ort). Even the word ‘rhyme’ (Reim) has retained or conserved (bewahrt) its spatial sense and allows poets to utilise the dark play (das dunkle Spiel) of ‘rhyme’ (Reim) and ‘home (country)’ (Heimat) (ECS 90–1).
In rhyme, Schmitt (ECS 91) contends, a word searches for the sibling sonority of its meaning (den geschwisterlichen Klang seines Sinnes). German rhyming, Schmitt (ECS 91) notes, is not the kind of bonfire (Leuchtfeuer) rhyme of Victor Hugo. German rhyme is in the nature of Echo, clothing and decoration or finery (Echo, Kleid und Schmuck) and at the same time a divining rod (Wünschelrute) to localise meaning (91). The words of the prophetic poets (sibyllinischer Dichter) Theodor Daübler and Konrad Weiβ, Schmitt (ECS 91) comments, now take hold of him (ergreift mich). The dark play of their rhyme, he notes, becomes sense and appeal or meaning and entreaty (wird Sinn und Bitte). I listen to their words, Schmitt (ECS 91) says. I hear and suffer and acknowledge, that I am not naked, but clothed and on my way to a house/home (zu einem Haus) (ECS 91). Schmitt (ECS 91) concludes ‘Weisheit’ by first paraphrasing a section of Weiβ’s poem ‘1933’ (‘I see the defenceless rich fruit of the years [die wehrlos reiche Frucht der Jahre], the defenceless rich fruit, upon which the law of meaning [dem Recht der Sinn] grows’) and then quoting from it:
Echo wächst vor jedem Worte; | Echo grows before every word |
wie ein Sturm vom offnen Orte | like a storm from open places |
hämmert es durch unsre Pforte | it hammers through our gates |
(ECS 91)
Echo stands here for rhyme, which Schmitt suggests is there from the first word, and which has a certain containing power.67 With this emphasis on meaning, home and place, we appear to have moved far away from Descartes’ spiritus malignus, Stirner’s ghostly Ego and being placed in question, that is, from delocalisation, meaninglessness, madness, Unheimlichkeit.68 If we continue to follow Derrida’s reading, then Schmitt’s invocation of meaning, home and place at this point, however, amounts to a response to the deterritorialising effect of modern technology (which we also encountered in Section B above), that is, the expression of a drive for rootedness, for presence, in view of that which technology announces: our own death (ET 38–9). Technology, as Derrida (B&S II 77, 82, 117) shows in a reading of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, is in the first place a response to our foundational phantasm (fear and desire) of being dead while alive, more specifically the image of being buried or swallowed alive. Technology mimics the functioning of this phantasm or self-destructive power, which itself functions in a mechanical fashion, thereby disobeying the (own) interest of reason and the law (B&S II 84–5).69 Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) can be read as testifying to the same phantasm. Echo does not simply repeat the words of Narcissus which she hears, as Schmitt seems to suggest. In repeating his (narcissistic) words (‘Is anyone here?’, ‘Come!’, ‘Why do you run from me?’, and ‘Here let us meet’) she gives them a new meaning which speaks of her overflowing love for him. When speaking in this inaugural fashion, she still keeps literally to, yet at the same time disobeys the law, that is, the limitation placed upon her by the goddess Hera (PoF 24, 160, 165–7; Rog xi–xii). When she attempts to embrace Narcissus upon his invitation to the voice he hears, he flees from her when he sees her, with the words ‘Hands off! Embrace me not! May I die before I give you power o’er me!’; she repeats ‘I give you power o’er me!’ Here we again touch on delocalisation, meaninglessness, madness and Unheimlichkeit.70 The Echo which storms through the portals invoked by Weiβ and Schmitt, now in fact appears to be a threatening and self-destructive force, which disrupts meaning and home.
We saw in the above analysis that in ‘Weisheit’, Schmitt does not reject his earlier view of human nature or of the political, but that a certain development nevertheless takes place. He refers to his own vulnerability, his nakedness, his being placed in question, his persecution, his being haunted by a ghost, his wearing of a mask and his subjection to deception by Descartes’ evil genius. In seeming contrast, the new man, to be transformed by modern technology, is portrayed as the totally other, as the incalculable and as radiating. Yet the relation between the superman (man becoming technology and thus becoming spectral) and the subhuman, with which Schmitt associates himself, is not one of simple opposition, but rather what was referred to above as a ‘stricture’ or a binding. This appears also from Schmitt’s invocation of Stirner’s ‘atomic’ thinking and his idea of the self consuming itself. He mocks Stirner’s belief in self-identity, and speaks of the enemy as ultimately the self, or the brother. The above speaks of a division in the self, that is, of a self being haunted by a force of self-destruction; or rather, of the ‘self’ becoming a self only through a binding of this force of self-destruction (PC 402/CP 429). Schmitt no doubt stands sceptical towards the modern era and the ‘overcoming’ of man that is taking place, yet it appears from his analysis that this overcoming is a ‘symptom’ and that its appearance today is only possible because it is ‘written’ in man from the beginning. The implications of Schmitt’s analysis in ‘Weisheit’ of what can be termed the ‘differantial stricture [stricture différantielle]’ of the living being (PC 351/CP 373) for the concept of the political with its friend/enemy distinction, are undeniable. Schmitt’s text shows the latter concept to be haunted, similar to every (human) being, by a force of self-destruction. Freud (2001, XVIII: 7–64) identified this force in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ as the death drive. At stake in this ‘force’ would be a kind of friendship, that is, an act of loving, which Derrida (PoF 7/PA 23) refers to as ‘lovence’ (aimance), which is disproportionate, without calculation, with no concern for the self, with no expectation of any return.
1 ‘Many cite the phrase of Heraclitus: war is the father of all things. Few however dare to think of it in terms of civil war.’ The two preceding sentences in ECS 26 read as follows: ‘Poets and philosophers, historians and soldiers have spoken about war. Unfortunately, everything one says about war, only receives its ultimate and grim significance in civil war.’
2 ‘The pólemos in question here is a conflict that prevails prior to all things divine and human, not war in the human sense’ (Heidegger 2000: 65).
3 Derrida’s focus is on the 1932 edition.
4 Derrida explores the notion of différance, which is at stake here, with reference to the texts of De Saussure, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, in SP 129–60. The Freudian death drive is central to this notion; see further De Ville (2011a: 28–37); and the discussion below.
5 References to Plato’s texts are, unless otherwise indicated, to Plato 1997. Reference will be made to the Stephanus page numbers.
6 This footnote appears for the first time in the 1932 edition (BdP 29), and re-appears with slight modifications in the 1933 edition (Schmitt 1933: 10–11).
7 Meier (1998: 33; 2013: 22–5) contends in this regard that there was a shift in Schmitt’s analysis from the 1927 to the 1932 edition. Whereas in the 1927 edition Schmitt regarded only battles with the external enemy (pólemos) as war, in the 1932 edition, civil war (stásis) was included within the concept of war. This shift corresponds with the changing internal position in Weimar Germany at these particular points in time. Derrida explores a similar ‘shift’ or tension within the 1932 edition.
8 Schmitt (CoP 29 n9) does not expressly say that stásis is ‘unnatural’, but he could be said to imply this by noting that the idea underlying the distinction which Plato draws between pólemos and stásis is that ‘a people cannot wage war against itself [i.e. stásis is not really war] and that a so-called “civil war” only means self-destruction [Selbstzerfleischung], not however the formation of a new state or even of a new people’.
9 Plato (1997: Republic 470b–c) refers here to ‘two names’ for ‘two things’.
10 The barbarians on the other hand are said to be strangers vis-à-vis the Greeks both in respect of kinship ties and origins.
11 See Plato (1997: Republic 470c–d). Plato’s Menexenus, which consists for the most part of a speech by Socrates in the form of a funeral oration, seems to go even further in this diagnosis of stásis as an illness (PoF 92). Socrates here denies that enmity (ekhthrós) or wickedness has any role to play in stásis and says that the cause thereof is dustukhía, which can be translated as ‘a fatal disorder, a stroke of bad luck, misfortune’ (PoF 92). Derrida’s discussion of the Menexenus for the most part touches on themes which are not of direct relevance for our present concern, and will thus not be analysed in detail here. Worth mentioning is nonetheless Derrida’s reference to Loraux (2006: 252) who refers to stásis as an ‘absolute evil’ and as ‘a parasitic evil grafted onto the good nature of the city’. See also PoF 273/PA 303 where Derrida, within the context of a discussion of the notion of crimes against humanity and with reference to Kant, notes that ‘[f]ratricide is [considered as] the general form of temptation, the possibility of radical evil, the evil of evil [Le fratricide est la forme générale de la tentation, la possibilité du mal radical, le mal du mal]’.
12 Derrida (PoF 90) furthermore points out that in the Republic Plato does not simply accept this opposition between stásis and pólemos. He in fact through Socrates calls for its erasure in the form of a law to be laid down. He more specifically admonishes the guardians to treat the barbarians as they now treat the Greeks, i.e. they should not ravage their lands and destroy their houses (Plato 1997: Republic 470a–471c).
13 In PoF 113–14, this sentence is rendered, correctly, but perhaps a bit simplistically, as ‘such a difference amounts to the same thing … it belongs to the same’. The word ‘revient’ (revenir: return or come back) however suggests that Derrida is alluding here to Freud’s repetition compulsion as well as his later discussion in ‘Geschl IV’ (which does not appear in the English translation of PoF) where at stake is the originary difference or the event of the gift in its relation to pólemos in Heidegger’s texts (‘Geschl IV’ 171); see further below.
14 In the discussion below, we will see that Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 14–18) insists that the Platonic phûsis should be understood in its originary sense, i.e. as Being itself.
15 Derrida (2003d; PoF 147), for whom deconstruction can to some extent be equated with denaturalization, is of course not with his analysis supporting a belief in nature; see PoF 159. For now, Derrida is simply following Plato’s terminology, seeking to establish a certain law.
16 Derrida’s analysis here shows a similarity with his analysis elsewhere of Plato, specifically ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination (at 130–5) with its analysis of the rite of the pharmakos. In Athens, two pharmakoi were sacrificed as scapegoats whenever some calamity befell the city. The pharmakoi, as Derrida points out here, were a ‘wretched’ man and a woman housed on the inside, who represented the evil coming from the outside. The notion of the ‘foreign body’ (corps étranger) also makes its appearance in other texts of Derrida in the context of psychoanalysis, and specifically when he engages with the work of Abraham and Torok; see e.g. Psy I 321 and ‘Fore’ xxx on the crypt incorporated in the self. Derrida partly draws on these analyses in PoF. See further Chapter 5, Section B below.
17 It is therefore not possible to agree with Filmer (2007: 14), according to whom Derrida’s detour through Plato, to criticise the distinction between pólemos and stásis, is unnecessary.
18 Schmitt (NoE 237/NdE 211) interestingly describes the opening of European international law to all states, which led to this dissolution, in the terminology of hospitality: ‘a family or housing cooperative of European states and nations’, he says, ‘suddenly opened its house to the whole world’. In Schmitt’s assessment this was ‘a fall into the nothing of a spaceless and bottomless generality [ein Absturz in das Nichts einer raum-und bodenlosen Allgemeinheit]’.
19 See Preface to BdP 10–11 and NoE 141/NdE 113, where Schmitt notes that war during the preceding period (the Thirty Years’ War, lasting from 1618–1648) had degenerated into civil war (Entartung des Krieges zum Bürgerkrieg). Schmitt (NoE 142/NdE 114) also speaks in this respect of the ‘liquidation’ (Liquidierung) of civil war through the Westphalia treaty. See further Kochi (2006a: 271–2; 2006b: 148).
20 See Schwab (1987: 200–1) on the role of communism in stoking civil war and thereby undermining the epoch of the state.
21 CoP 19/BdP 20: ‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’. See in this regard Hooker (2009: 17); Schwab in his ‘Introduction’ to CoP 6–8, 12–13; and Hirst (1987: 17). The state thus finds its origin in the political; see also Galli (2015: 11). McCormick (2007: 328) points out in this regard that ‘[b]efore the modern state, and before Hobbes’s theoretization of it, the political was fluid and completely unruly … . Hobbes and the modern state make it possible to govern the political more efficiently – not eliminate it … but institutionalize it’. In the Foreword to the 1971 Italian edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt (1988b: 271) further notes that with Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes, the state becomes the sole subject of politics; the state and politics were inseparably related to each other. See moreover Chapter 6 below on how, according to Schmitt, this relation became undone.
22 Derrida (PoF 121) further notes that Schmitt performs this mediation, which is at the same time a synthetic mediation of the two kinds of enemy, by way of the notion of a ‘real possibility’ which is present-at-hand (vorhanden); see further the discussion below. Derrida is referring here to the following statement of Schmitt, which precedes his aligning of these two forms of warfare: ‘The real possibility of battle, which must always be present-at-hand in order to speak of politics, concerns itself in respect of such “primacy of domestic politics” consequently no longer with the war between organised national entities (states or empires), but with civil war [Die reale Möglichkeit des Kampfes, die immer vorhanden sein muß, damit von Politik gesprochen werden kann, bezieht sich bei einem derartigen “Primat der Innenpolitik” konsequenterweise nicht mehr auf den Krieg zwischen organisierten Völkereinheiten (Staaten oder Imperien), sondern auf den Bürgerkrieg]’ (CoP 32/BdP 32).
23 This development in a sense amounts to a return to the period of religious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preceding the jus publicum Europaeum where the enemy was associated with personal hatred (i.e. a despised foe); see Schwab ‘Introduction’ to CoP at 8–10.
24 As Derrida (PoF 114/PA 133–4) points out, the purity of this distinction between polémios/ekhthrós and pólemos/stásis is an ideal construction (following Plato), which cannot be realised in practice. This inadequation between politics and practice is moreover ‘not accidental, since politics is essentially a praxis, as Schmitt himself always implies by resorting so insistently to the concept of possibility or of real and present eventuality in his analysis of the formal structure of the political’ (PoF 114/PA 134). This has important implications for the concept of the political itself as we will see further below. In summary, the attempt to establish an ideal essence in this context is an attempt (the typical metaphysical strategy as we saw in Chapter 1) at warding off another, more dangerous spectral enemy. Derrida will seek to re-conceptualise the concept of the political in view of this ‘enemy’ without the invocation of the ideal.
25 In the English translation at PoF 88 the terminology is confused; cf. PA 108.
26 See also Kennedy (2004: 105).
27 See further G&L 102–7 where Derrida attempts to read this passage in Matthew 5:43–4 as well as in Leviticus 19:15–18 (from which the instruction to love thy neighbour referred to in Matthew comes, and which incidentally does not include any instruction to hate the enemy) as suspending the economy of exchange, and similar therefore to the notion of aimance, which we will encounter again below. Derrida particularly points out that the instruction to love one’s neighbour in Leviticus is extended to all those belonging to the same nation (’amith), which therefore extends this instruction to the sphere of the political in Schmitt’s sense. When Matthew speaks of hating the enemy (inimicus/ekhthrós), the context thus suggests that this is a reference to the non-neighbour or foreigner (those not belonging to the same nation) and not to the private enemy. This seems to further undermine Schmitt’s attempted distinction between the private and the public enemy as well as the attempt to construe a public enemy without private affect.
28 See further Schwab (1987: 194–5) on the Hebrew Bible, which draws a similar distinction between soneh (private enemy) and ojeb (public enemy).
29 See further Benveniste (1973: Book 1, Chapter 7) on the link between the Latin hostis and hospitality. The word hostis, Benveniste notes, first had the meaning of stranger associated with reciprocity, but later ‘[b]y a development of which we do not know the exact conditions, the word hostis assumed a “hostile” flavour and henceforth it is only applied to the “enemy” ’.
30 See CoP 28/BdP 29: ‘The enemy is solely the public enemy [Feind ist nur der öffentliche Feind]’.
31 An important question which Schmitt does not seem to provide an answer to in The Concept of the Political, and which likewise troubles the border between the private and the public, is raised by Derrida (G&L 104): Is the passion or affect with which a community is established, i.e. national or nationalistic affect, private or public (i.e. political) in nature?
32 Specifically to the at-the-time just announced clipper-chip, a now-abandoned method of intercepting private communication.
33 See further AR 279–80 on the ubiquity of the police, i.e. their ability and authority to intrude in every sphere.
34 This is also a theme elsewhere in Derrida’s texts; see e.g. OH 49–65. At stake here for Derrida, as we saw above and as we will see again below, is the question whether it is indeed possible to think hostility without affect, especially after Freud; see PoF 124, read with PoF 136 n19.
35 See also Derrida and Ferraris (2001: 57); and ON 23–7.
36 This comment has to be understood within the broader context of Derrida’s analysis of friendship: in the canonical discourses on friendship, fraternal friendship has been regarded as alien to the public sphere – it could thus logically never found a politics. Yet at the same time, in the same discourse, the friend-brother relationship has served as the model for justice and virtue as well as for political and moral reason (PoF 277). This contradiction points for Derrida to a certain unconscious logic which is also manifested in the exclusion of friendships between women, and between men and women, from the tradition of friendship, as well as the traditional restriction of women to the private, domestic sphere (PoF 277, 279, 281).
37 The re-introduction of the English word ‘foe’ is significant in this respect, as Schmitt (BdP 18–19) notes. Private or personal feelings or affect thus intrude here in the public sphere.
38 This is also the case with the partisan, as Schmitt will point out in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’; see Section B below. In the Foreword to the 1971 Italian edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt (1988b: 272) however remarks that police action is nothing a-political (nichts Apolitisches); the world politics, which it forms a part of, results from the will towards pan-interventionism; it is a very intensive form of politics, and not the prettiest either, i.e. world civil-war politics. See further Galli (2015: 104) who aptly notes that this criminalisation of the enemy for Schmitt points to the collapse of the distinction between inside and outside, manifesting itself as a confusion between war and crime.
39 See also Bernstein (2011: 420); and Slomp (2009: 95, 104). In the Foreword to the 1963 publication of Der Begriff des Politischen, Schmitt reflected critically on the 1932 text by noting that he had failed to distinguish there between the different forms of the enemy: conventional, real and absolute (BdP 17). These distinctions were developed further in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, published in the same year (i.e. 1963).
40 As noted above, Schmitt (1988b: 272) refers to the intensification of the political at the time (circa 1971) as ‘world civil war politics’ (Weltbürgerkriegspolitik); see also ‘TP’ 34, 66, 68/TdP 54, 94, 96 where Lenin’s revolutionary partisan is associated with international civil war (internationalen Bürgerkrieges).
41 This is perhaps even more so today; see ‘Auto’ 85–136.
42 Schmitt’s invocation in ECS 26, 56–7, 89–90 of civil war, to make sense of the Heraclitian ‘war is the father (and king) of all things’, and his invocation of the brother as the enemy, point in the same direction; see further Section C below.
43 Schmitt (PT II 75) expresses his disagreement with this.
44 PT II 125, see also Hohendahl (2008: 15); Müller (2003: 158–9); and Galli (2015: 54).
45 Galli (2015: 112–13) notes that this figure (of the one at war with itself) can be applied to the conflict at stake in the Cold War, as the two enemies (the United States and the Soviet Union) were simply a reflection of each other, thus amounting to a global civil war.
46 According to Fues (2010: 198–9) the Holy Spirit in Schmitt’s reading ‘would represent the friend/foe-relation between the preserving and the altering God’.
47 See Hohendahl (2008: 15).
48 See Hirst (1987: 17) on the two conceptions of the state, i.e. static and dynamic, with Schmitt adopting the latter. See also Vardoulakis (2009: 128) who points out that the word stásis lies at the root of the state or body politic. See similarly Galli (2015: 6): ‘a political order cannot be founded on stability (or staticity) but only on openness to disorder. It is necessary, but never possible, to exit the state of nature’.
49 See also PoF 59 where Derrida uses similar terms in discussing the Aristotelian and Nietzschean sayings (‘O my friends there are no friends’ and ‘Foes, there are no foes! Say I, the living fool’). The terminology employed here is a precursor to the autoimmunitary structure that Derrida would later explore in texts such as ‘Faith and Knowledge’, ‘Autoimmunity’ and Rogues.
50 See Bendersky (2000) and Zakin (2011) for (favourable) comparisons between the thinking of Schmitt and Freud on the subject of human nature.
51 See Dis 206 where Derrida notes that in the philosophical tradition, phûsis has no other, and no outside.
52 See also Adieu 86 where Derrida, through Levinas, speaks of peace as no longer being opposed to war, but as in some sense originary.
53 Elsewhere Derrida (PoF 131/PA 154) speaks of the ‘obsessive nature of this recurrence [le caractère obsédant de cette récurrence]’ of the notion of ‘real possibility’ in Schmitt (see further below), thereby perhaps alluding to Freud’s repetition compulsion.
54 See in this respect AR 400–1 where Derrida refers to Levinas’s view that ‘there is no innocent murder, and one is guilty even of murders committed by accident’.
55 See De Ville (2011a: 28–37) on Derrida’s transformation in The Post Card of Freud’s thinking on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In brief, this involves the positing of a relation between an absolute astricture and the binding thereof by virtue of the drive for mastery. See also PoF 165 where Derrida quotes Schmitt ECS 90 to the effect that ‘all extermination is but self-extermination’.
56 An etymological analysis underscores the point: As Derrida (PoF 136 n19) points out, the words ‘enmity’ and ‘hostility’ are not strictly distinguished in everyday language and these words share a common root with words such as philía, friendship and love, which all include some element of feeling; see e.g. Benveniste (1973): Book 1 Chapter 7 (hospitality) and Book 3 Chapter 4 (phílos). See also PoF 124 where Derrida likewise casts doubt on Schmitt’s attempt to construct a pure hostility without affect or at least without private affect. Derrida refers in this regard to a footnote added by Schmitt in the 1963 version of Der Begriff des Politischen.
57 These logical tracks are related to what Schmitt says about physically killing the enemy; the co-determination of the concepts of friend and enemy at stake here stems from the criterion which Schmitt adopts to characterise the political, i.e. the possibility of distinguishing between friend and enemy.
58 ‘Non-natural’ because at stake here is not what is referred to as ‘natural death’; see PoF 122/PA 143.
59 See CoP 58–66, and above. Schmitt (CoP 61/BdP 61) declares in this respect that ‘all genuine political theories presuppose man to be “evil”, i.e. views man as by no means unproblematic, but a “dangerous” and dynamic being [als “gefährliches” und dynamisches Wesen betrachten]’; see also DC 26–30.
60 See similarly Freud (2001, XVIII: 101–2).
61 In Schmitt’s language, the state seeks to monopolise the decision as to the friend and the enemy; see McCormick (2007: 328).
62 In Chapter 3 of Politics of Friendship where Nietzsche is analysed, this form of love is described inter alia with reference to the gift, disproportion, dissymmetry, ‘a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality’ (PoF 62, 63/PA 81, 82), and ‘a love more loving than love’, i.e. that no longer wants to possess (PoF 64–5/PA 83–4).
63 See PoF 129; Rog 152. We find a similar kind of argument in Adieu 88 (and 90) where Levinas’s notion of perpetual peace is at stake (as a beyond to the political), which is said to also inhabit war (as well as hostility and murder) as a testimonial trace.
64 See further Meier (1998: 23–5, 50–4) who understands the centrality of the enemy in Schmitt as ultimately a reference to ‘the Old Enemy’, i.e. to Satan. The question that Derrida would be likely to pose to Meier, in view of our reading here of Freud, is ‘what does Satan ultimately represent for Schmitt?’ Revealing in this regard is Meier’s quotation (at 65 n107) of Kojève in responding to Schmitt’s invocation of Theodor Däubler’s phrase (the enemy is our own question as figure): ‘The “enemy in his ownmost figure” is most likely the Devil, more precisely: the Christian Devil, who shows himself precisely in “animal functions.” ’ See further Section C below and Chapter 3.
65 See further ‘TP’ 67/TdP 95: ‘And the German philosopher Hegel adds: weapons are the essence of the fighter [die Waffen sind das Wesen der Kämpfer selbst]’.
66 See Hitschler (2010: 130–46) for a discussion of Schmitt’s political existentialism.
67 This is a somewhat bold reading by Derrida of a sentence in Schmitt (CoP 33/BdP 33), which in full goes as follows: ‘[Combat] does not mean competition, not the “purely spiritual” combat of discussion, not the symbolic “struggles” in which ultimately every human being is engaged in, because after all the whole of human life is a “combat” and every human being is a “combatant”.’ Schmitt in this sentence appears to distinguish the ontological understanding of the word combat (Kampf ) from the everyday meaning and the passage in question on the face of it should be read as expressing the view that to say this (the idea that the whole of human life is a ‘combat’ and every human being is a ‘combatant’) would be to adopt a superficial understanding of the words in question; see also Simon (2008: 76). Yet Derrida reads the passage as if Schmitt is stating a general truth, in an ontological sense, with which he (Schmitt) agrees. In support of Derrida’s reading, it can be noted that in ‘TP’ 13/TdP 25 Schmitt makes a similar statement in outlining the criteria of the partisan in another context (when he points to concept dissolution – see above) that ‘[i]n a figurative sense to be a human being means being a combatant [In einem übertragenen Sinne heiβt ja “Mensch sein ein Kämpfer sein”]’. In ‘Geschl IV’ 177/PA 361 Derrida likewise notes with reference to Heidegger that ‘Kampf belongs to the very structure of Dasein’.
68 The English translation is problematic here. It reads as follows: ‘This does not mean so much that the being-for-death of this human life cannot be separated from a being-for-putting-to-death or for death-in-combat’.
69 See also ‘Geschl IV’ 198–9 where Derrida compares Heidegger’s notion of a community of struggle with Schmitt’s concept of the political.
70 A ‘commonsensical’ understanding of the use of this phrase would perhaps be that Schmitt is simply saying that war, hostility and combat can at any time become a reality; see Simon (2008: 119).
71 For Heidegger, death is the possibility par excellence, as well as Dasein’s most proper possibility: ‘Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [die eigenste, unbezügliche, unüberholbare Möglichkeit]’; see Heidegger (1962: 294/2006: 250–1); as well as Derrida (1993b: 63, 64).
72 Field and Polt (Heidegger 2000: 65) translate the passage as follows: ‘Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as the free.’
73 In Derrida’s linking of Heidegger and Schmitt, he at times opposes them, and at other times seeks a reading of Schmitt which accords with that of Heidegger; see e.g. ‘Geschl IV’ 204 concerning Schmitt’s theoanthropolemology and Heidegger’s reading of the Heraclitian fragment; see further below.
74 ‘[H]earing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being – as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it [als Hören der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt].’
75 Hence also the heading/title of this (part of the) text: ‘Philopolemology’.
76 The argument in Plato’s Lysis, which Derrida (PoF 153–5) briefly analyses, seems to have a similar structure.
77 See also PoF 139/PA 160 where Derrida, in introducing the reading of ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, notes with reference to The Concept of the Political that for Schmitt antagonism or opposition is in essence political and the more opposition or antagonism increases in intensity, the more political it is: ‘opposition is all the more oppositional – supreme opposition, qua the essence and telos of opposition, negation, and contradiction – when it is political’. Derrida has been (wrongly) accused of overlooking this all-important aspect of ‘the intensity of association or disassociation of human beings’ (CoP 38/BdP 38–9, quoted at PoF 245) in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and thus for reading Schmitt as positing an independent domain of the political; see Meier (2013: 178 n37); Marder (2010: 68). As should be clear from the analysis undertaken in the present chapter, this aspect is in fact central to Derrida’s reading of Schmitt.
78 See also PoF 17–18.
79 See PoF 249/PA 279 where Derrida comments that both Schmitt and Heidegger give credit to ‘oppositionality itself, ontological adversity, that which holds adversaries together, assembling them in lógos qua ontological pólemos’.
80 ‘That this case only arises exceptionally, does not abolish its determining nature, but instead underpins it.’
81 As Derrida (PoF 247/PA 277) points out, Heidegger would have called this depoliticisation ‘nihilistic’ – the truth ‘of the metaphysical concept of politics carried out to its culmination’. For Heidegger even the world wars are signs of the abandonment, withdrawal, retreat or dissimulation of Being (PoF 248). Derrida (1998d), however, does not view the withdrawal of Being as a fall; the withdrawal actually gives rise to metaphysics; see also Chapter 1 above.
82 Derrida (PoF 130/PA 154) refers to this withdrawal as resulting in a ‘dehumanized desert’, which alludes to the messianic desert he elaborates on elsewhere; see SoM 33, 211.
83 See also Thomson (2005: 174–81).
84 Derrida (PoF 129/PA 153) notes in this respect, following Schmitt’s logic of the exception, that ‘rarefaction intensifies the tension and the revealing power’ (the ‘truth’ of the political). See also Psy I 387 at 393–4, 396, 404–6 where Derrida brings together the phantasm of the total destruction of nuclear war with Heidegger’s gift of Being.
85 See ‘Auto’ 100–1; and Rog 106, 123–4, 156. Some prefer to call today’s conflicts ‘new wars’, which remains a contested term; see inter alia Münkler (2005); Kaldor (2006); and Newman (2004).
86 See Derrida (1999c: 223) where he comments favourably on Jameson’s analysis of Specters of Marx, specifically the reading that spectrality amounts to ‘the most radical politicization’ (Jameson 1999: 60).
87 See PoF 68–9.
1 Reliance will be placed here on the Goodson translation (Schmitt 2004a) rather than the Ulmen translation (Schmitt 2007c).
2 For an analysis of the Cold War context within which Schmitt wrote ‘The Theory of the Partisan’, see Horn (2004).
3 See also Hooker (2009: 163); Müller (2003: 147).
4 Schmitt (‘TP’ 41) finds support for his idea of a plurality of counterbalanced Groβräumen in Mao’s poem Kunlun. In ‘GP’ 26 Schmitt furthermore points to the link between the telluric requirement for identifying the (true) partisan and of ‘earth’ as one of the four elements (fire, water, air and earth), which he elaborates on further in Land and Sea; see Chapter 7 below.
5 See also Gasché (2004: 13–14) concerning the partisan-like strategies of the Napoleonic army.
6 The telluric partisan, as Hooker (2009: 190) points out, thus inevitably ‘folds himself back into a regular system of sovereignty’.
7 See further Schmitt ‘Der Begriff der Piraterie’ in FP 508–17.
8 Nitschke (2011: 144–5) reads Schmitt as saying that the (true) partisan fights for the people that has been dispossessed or oppressed and has to be liberated: ‘The partisan is thus the secret [heimliche] alter ego of the people: When the people cannot themselves be self-identical [nicht bei sich selbst sein kann], then the partisan is required!’
9 See further Chapter 7 below on Schmitt’s analysis of man’s earth-bound character.
10 See Chapter 1 above on the ‘reading strategy’ generally employed by Derrida.
11 Schmitt (‘TP’ 70 n15/TdP 25 n15) mentions that he, in an earlier essay (dating from 1940), called Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner ‘partisans of the world spirit [Partisanen des Weltgeistes]’, and in another essay (dating from 1962) referred to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as such.
12 Something similar can be said concerning Schmitt’s definition of the political in The Concept of the Political, which is likewise characterised by intensity; see CoP 29/BdP 30: ‘The political opposition [Gegensatz] is the most intense and extreme opposition, and every concrete opposition becomes all the more political the closer it comes to the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping’.
13 See further Briggs (2015) on ‘teletechnology’ in Derrida’s thinking.
14 See above.
15 As Thomson (2005: 174–7) also points out, in line with what was noted in Chapter 1 above regarding the reading of Schmitt undertaken here, technology (here, of warfare, with its deterritorialising effect) does not come second, as the result of an accident, to the originary pólemos/political; it inhabits it from the start.
16 ‘The Acheron does not allow itself to be calculated, and does not respond to every conjuration.’
17 Schmitt appears to be alluding here to what he will later call with reference to Lenin, ‘the new theory of absolute war and absolute enmity … that would be determinant for the age of revolutionary war and the methods of the modern cold war’ (‘TP’ 35/TdP 55).
18 See in this respect Kochi (2006a: 279) who notes with reference to Schmitt that ‘the juridical response to the phenomenon of the partisan has been to ignore the facts on the ground, to “criminalise” the partisan and to reaffirm the classical conception of European inter-state war fought by regular armies’.
19 From Virgil (2002: Book VII, line 312): Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo [if I cannot sway the gods, I’ll stir the Acheron]. The phrase is understood by Freud (1925: 169, para 50) as referring to ‘the efforts of the repressed instinctual impulses’ or more literally, the ‘drive movements’ [das Streben der verdrängten Triebregungen [mistakenly spelt ‘Triebregungsn’], and is employed by Freud (2001, IV) as epigraph on the title page of Die Traumdeutung (1900), see also Freud (2001, V: 608). The phrase is in addition mentioned by Freud (1985: 205) in a letter to Fliess on 4 December 1896.
20 Schmitt (‘TP’ 73 n25/TdP 45 n25) adds that the citation Acheronta movebo here ‘served to paint the devil on the wall’, or, as Goodson translates it, ‘imagining the worst’.
21 See also ‘GP’ 21 where Schmitt expresses his agreement with Schickel that in the Prussian documents explosives (Sprengstoff) were amassed for the centuries to follow, but adds that they were not ignited (entzündet) in Prussia. It was Lenin who realised this potential for the first time.
22 In a further step backward, Schmitt (‘TP’64/TdP 92) draws a direct link between the French Revolution, with its ‘victory of the civilian over the soldier’, and the consequent wearing of the soldier’s uniform by the civilian in Napoleon’s army on the one hand, and partisan warfare, on the other; see also Pan (2013).
23 See further Schmitt ‘Clausewitz als politischer Denker’ in FP 887–918; and Gasché (2004).
24 The central role that Lenin will play here, as heir to Hegel and Marx, is already anticipated in The Concept of the Political (63).
25 Schmitt (‘TP’ 34) notes that Engels still believed that it was possible for the proletariat to attain a democratic majority through general elections, leading to a classless society.
26 Meier (2013: 178 n37) criticises Derrida for regarding Lenin as ‘the representative of philosophy [der Repräsentant der Philosophie]’, yet Derrida is simply following Schmitt here (see ‘TP’ 36–7/TdP 57–8) who explicitly refers to the alliance established by Lenin between philosophy and the partisan, and the unexpected new explosive forces that it unleashed.
27 The English translation at PoF 147 incorrectly attributes this to Mao.
28 Lenin thereby overturns the seemingly Platonic view, relied on by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, that only external war is true war; see Section A above.
29 A few pages earlier, Derrida (PoF 146/PA 168) had referred to philosophy as the institution which is the actual producer ‘of the purely political and thus of pure hostility’. Meier (2013: 178 n37) criticises Derrida for this invocation of pure hostility and pure politics, which he says Schmitt abandoned in 1930. Meier however appears to incorrectly assume that Derrida is speaking here about the (purely) political in contradistinction to the domains of the moral, the economic, etc. At stake here is instead an understanding of politics in its ontological sense, i.e. an understanding of opposition itself, which can be said to have remained a concern for Schmitt, also in ‘The Theory of the Partisan’.
30 For a further analysis of the intrinsic relation between philosophy and war, see Section C below.
31 This remark is tied to an earlier comment of Derrida (PoF 146/PA 168) on the fact that Schmitt speaks in one place of the subversion or dissolution of the concept of the political (Begriffsauflösung) (‘TP’ 12–13/TdP 25), and in another of an ‘upheaval’ in this concept (eine umstürzende Wendung) (‘TP’ 34/TdP 53). See further Section A above where this identification was linked by Derrida to Heidegger’s notion of the withdrawal of Being, which likewise sets history in motion.
32 There is also a third mention of the brother, which Derrida does not specifically refer to, namely in the discussion by Schmitt (‘TP’ 61/TdP 88) of Salan. Here the brother enemy is said to be a worse, more intensive enemy (ein für ihn viel schlimmerer, intensiverer Feind) in comparison to the Algerian front, which Schmitt refers to as Salan’s ‘absolute enemy’. With reference to the fact that the brother of yesterday reveals himself as the more dangerous enemy, Schmitt notes that there must be some confusion within the concept of the enemy itself (Im Feindbegriff selbst muβ eine Verwirrung liegen).
33 See the criticism of Meier (2013: 178 n37).
34 Something similar is at stake in the discussion by Derrida (PoF 156–7/PA 181) of woman as the absolute partisan, as we will see in the discussion below. See also PoF 133 and 162 where Derrida casts doubt on the viability of Schmitt’s distinction between the annihilation of the enemy (in the case of absolute hostility) and his mere killing (in the case of conventional and real hostility).
35 Derrida appears to be alluding here to The Concept of the Political where the friend/brother stood in opposition to the enemy; now the brother becomes the absolute enemy, and where pólemos provided the paradigm for war; now stásis becomes the paradigm.
36 One of the earliest psychoanalytical investigations of the double was undertaken by Rank (1925; 1971) in Der Doppelgänger.
37 See PoF viii, 4, 116, 149, 152 and 172.
38 See also PoF 276/PA 307, referring to Montaigne: ‘If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be expressed by replying: “Because it was him: because it was me.” ’
39 See PC 459–60 and 490–2 where Derrida in the essay ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, and in an attempt at challenging Lacan’s Oedipal reading, refers to the double nature of the narrator (narrating-narrated), the double nature of Dupin himself as well as his doubling of the narrator, and Dupin’s identification with all the characters in the ‘story’ so as to solve the mystery. At stake here, Derrida (PC 492/CP 521) notes, is a ‘labyrinth of doubles without originals’. For further discussion see De Ville (2008).
40 Dupin leaves a note in the Minister’s apartment stating the following: ‘Un dessein si funeste / S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste’ (A plot so deadly, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes). Like Atreus, Dupin thus acts in revenge in response to an earlier crime – here by the Minister.
41 Schmitt refers to Cain and Abel in ECS 89: ‘Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of mankind. Thus appears the father of all things. This is the dialectical tension that keeps world history in motion, and the history of the world is not over yet.’ See further below.
42 The story of Cain and Abel can also be read as a story about doubles; see Ng (2008: 1).
43 In PoF 149/PA 171 Derrida comments in this regard that there are no brothers in nature and that for there to be a brother, ‘a law, and names, symbols, a language, engagements, oaths, speech, family and nation’ are required. A brother is therefore always a brother of alliance or by oath; see also PoF 159.
44 See also Derrida’s analysis of the marionette in Valery’s ‘Monsieur Teste’ in B&S I 184.
45 See in this respect the discussions of Gasché (1986: 255–70); and Saghafi (2010: 65–82).
46 Fichte, apart from his role in the philosophical discovery of the partisan (see above), also played an important role in respect of the development of literature on the double in the nineteenth century; see Vardoulakis (2006: 102).
47 Mallarmé reports that Mimique (of which there are three (different) versions: 1886, 1891 and 1897) was written in response to his having read a pantomime booklet by Paul Margueritte, Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife. The booklet contains a prescription which effaces itself insofar as it prescribes to the Mime character not to follow any prescription, i.e. not to imitate anything (no act or word) that pre-exists the play (Dis 209). The booklet was furthermore written only after performances of the play had started (in 1881). Mallarmé read the 2nd edition and perhaps also attended the performance; see Dis 209, 210–11, and 290 n20. The first edition (1882) contained a preface by Beissier, who reported what he had seen. In the 2nd edition (1886) the preface was replaced by an author’s note claiming originality, yet on the title page of the 1882 edition an epigraph appears in the form of a quotation from Théophile Gautier (dating from 1847), referring to the character Pierrot murdering his wife by tickling her (Dis 214–15). Derrida (Dis 292–3 n22, n23) also mentions other earlier examples of death by foot tickling from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as a number of other Pierrot texts where this character finds himself between life and death. These are just some examples of the abyssal complexities of the texts in play here or what Derrida (Dis 208/Diss 240) refers to as ‘a textual labyrinth panelled with mirrors’.
48 See also Hobson (2001: 136); and see further Chapters 4 and 6 below on representation.
49 In the discussion of General Salan and the Algerian War of Independence, Schmitt (‘TP’ 60–1/TdP 87) elusively raises the following questions which could be read to tie in with our discussion of the double: ‘Every two-front war poses the question of who the real enemy [wirkliche Feind] is. Is it not a sign of inner division [ein Zeichen innerer Gespaltenheit] to have more than one single real enemy [einen einzigen wirklichen Feind]? The enemy is our own question as figure [Gestalt]. If we have determined our own figure unambiguously, where does this double enemy come from?’; see further Section C below.
50 As we will see in the analysis that follows, Derrida appears to be alluding here again to the ‘withdrawal’ of the political, which we encountered in Section A above.
51 Derrida (PoF 278–9/PA 310) notes that this exclusion of women has taken place throughout the history of friendship, where friendships between women and between men and women are never spoken of. He refers to this as the ‘double exclusion of the feminine’.
52 To be fair to Schmitt, in elaborating on the essentially defensive stance in relation to the national soil of the true partisan, he does mention Joan of Arc (‘TP’ 66/TdP 93), although she was not a partisan.
53 Derrida (SoM 102–3/SdM 137) refers to a topology such as that of Schmitt as an ‘ontopology’, which he explains as ‘an axiomatic linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being (on) to its location, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality (the topos of territory, of soil, of the city, of the body in general)’. As can be seen from the above analysis, Derrida in Politics of Friendship looks for traces in Schmitt’s text of what one can refer to as a ‘differantial topology’ or an ‘a-topology’.
54 Derrida (‘Auto’ 103) takes issue with the tendency to restrict the act of terrorism to non-state actors. States can and often do perpetrate terror; see also Chomsky (2016). Furthermore, as Derrida (‘Auto’ 108) points out, terror can be perpetrated ‘simply’ through relations of force, i.e. without any identifiable subject or actor being conscious of or feeling responsible for it.
55 See also Münkler (2005: 112–13).
56 See ‘Auto’ 105 where Derrida refers to Palestine as an example of a ‘virtual state’.
57 See also De Benoist (2013: 61) who points out that Al Qaeda forms a scattered international network rather than a hierarchical organisation (the Islamic State however appears to be more hierarchically organised; see Glenn (2015)); and see Münkler (2005: 113) who points out that the enemy of ‘terrorist groups’ are no longer necessarily states as such, but rather ‘whole civilizations’.
58 De Benoist (2013: 63–6) points out that the war against terrorism is likewise a total (police) war. However, according to him there is an asymmetry at stake here in respect of actors, objectives, means and, most important, psychology. The latter form of asymmetry relates to the difference in perspective as to the value of life and death (at 68–70).
59 Münkler (2005: 108) refers in this respect to the use of the enemy’s own civilian infrastructure to wage attacks.
60 See also Münkler (2005: 110–12).
61 See also Münkler (2005: 110–16).
62 See Bargu (2010: 8) who, tying in with our discussion above, views suicide bombers or what she refers to as ‘human weapons’ as ‘carriers of the acherontic movement in today’s world’.
63 De Benoist (2013: 61–2) points out in this respect that as a consequence of the imposition of the United States’ new world order, associated with ‘the global opening of markets, guaranteed access to energy resources, the suppression of regulations and borders, the control of communications, and so on … it is no longer the logic of territory that characterises the action of the partisan but the “maritime” logic of deterritorialisation/globalisation which favours the emergence of a new form of terrorism, as it opens up new means of action to it’; see further Chapter 7 below.
64 We see this structure, or rather ‘stricture’ of unbinding vis-à-vis binding already in Derrida’s reading of The Concept of the Political (Chapters 4 and 5 of Politics of Friendship), specifically with reference to stâsis; see Section A above. It also appears from the reading of ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ as discussed above.
65 See also Chomsky (2016: 42, 249–55).
66 Schmitt (‘TP’ 68/TdP 96, also at ‘TP’ 56/TdP 81) incidentally predicted new forms of hostility in future as well as unexpected manifestations of new partisanship, or what he called elsewhere the further development of the ‘immeasurable partisan problematic’ (‘GP’ 10).
67 In Heideggerian language, it can be said that at stake here is the gift of Being which in a kind of Hegelian twist to Heidegger increasingly ‘reveals’ itself today.
1 See also L&S 1, and Chapter 7 below.
2 See Bendersky (1987; 2007); Schmitt (1987; 2007b).
3 The answer to the question posed here has a direct relation to the concept of the political. As Schmitt points out in GL 306, the reason for people’s nakedness in paradise is the absence there of enemies.
4 The (false) earthly paradise at stake here seems to allude to the reign of the Antichrist; see Hooker (2009: 49).
5 The lack of precise references in the text is due to Schmitt’s imprisonment at the time, and the confiscation of his library by the Americans.
6 Zehren: live off, feed on, wear out, sap, ruin, weaken, gnaw at, undermine.
7 The reference here is most likely to Stirner (2006: 135/1845: 167) where he says: ‘this, that I consume myself, means only that I am [dass Ich Mich verzehre, heisst nur, dass Ich bin]’ and where Stirner (2006: 324/1845: 412) refers to the mortal creator of the self ‘who consumes himself [der sich selbst verzehrt]’.
8 See also Schmitt (2002b: 102/DC 84–6).
9 See especially CoP 60–1/BdP 60–1, and see further Meier (1998: 7–9) on Schmitt and the anarchist Bakunin. At some point Schmitt nevertheless implicitly relies on Stirner to criticise liberalism, see e.g. CoP 71 where Schmitt points to the contradiction in liberal thought between the belief in individual freedom and the duty that is placed on this same individual to sacrifice his life for the collective when the occasion arises.
10 In GL 100, Schmitt, after having quoted a passage from Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, likewise comments: ‘I am I/Ego; I am no object of thought, but me/Ego; no idea and no concept [Ich bin Ich; Ich bin kein Denkobjekt, sondern Ich; keine Idee und kein Begriff].’
11 See also Stirner (2006: 311/1845: 396): ‘The truth, or “truth in general”, people are bound not to give up, but to seek for … . And yet the truth is only a – thought; but it is not merely “a” thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts, the irrefragable thought; it is the thought itself, which gives the first hallowing to all others; it is the consecration of thoughts, the “absolute”, the “sacred” thought.’ Stirner (2006: 312) then continues by pointing out that the self is much more than the truth and that truth only exists insofar as it has been made a property of the self.
12 GL 48: ‘The remarkable thing about Max Stirner is … the desperation of his struggle with the fraud [Schwindel] and ghosts [Gespenstern] of his time.’
13 See e.g. Stirner (2006: 41/1845: 44) where he conjures the ‘ghosts’ constructed by Christianity: ‘But through Christ the truth of the matter had at the same time come to light, that the veritable spirit or ghost is – man. The corporeal or embodied spirit is just man; he himself is the ghostly being and at the same time the being’s appearance and existence. Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts outside him, but at himself; he is terrified at himself. In the depth of his breast dwells the spirit of sin; even the faintest thought (and this is itself a spirit, you know) may be a devil, etc. – The ghost has put on a body, God has become man, but now man is himself the gruesome spook which he seeks to get behind, to exorcise, to fathom, to bring to reality and to speech; man is – spirit .… Man has become to himself a ghost, an uncanny spook, to which there is even assigned a distinct seat in the body (dispute over the seat of the soul, whether in the head, etc.).’
14 See likewise Saghafi (2011: 34): ‘I hunt you down. I chase you. I pursue you, because I am pursued. I am pursued – by myself. I am afraid – of myself. I scare myself. I am haunted (by myself), so I obsessively chase you. I chase you away, I exclude you, I banish you – because I am haunted. It’s as if I am after my own ghost.’
15 The ghost of Stirner visiting Schmitt in his prison cell can, in view of Schmitt’s critique in ‘Weisheit’ of the modern versions of paradise and his view of Stirner as one of the ‘fathers’ of the modern era, in addition be read as a reference to the unholy alliance between liberalism and technology; see also CoP 80–96 for Schmitt’s 1929 essay ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’.
16 It has not been possible to trace the date or addressee of the letter Schmitt is referring to here.
17 See also ECS 48 on the mythological Pan, who plays an important role in Däubler’s Nordlicht; see further Schmitt (2009b).
18 The issue here is again the political, which technology seeks to neutralise, see CoP 95; DC 38–9; Meier (1998: 3–6); McCormick (1999: 253); and Lievens (2013: 125).
19 In CoP 90–1/BdP 89–90 Schmitt unmasks the claim of technology’s neutrality and points out that it is always an instrument and a weapon and therefore simply a new terrain of struggle (Kampfgebiet). It cannot in other words free mankind from the political.
20 Schmitt’s analysis here corresponds with Schmitt (2002b: 114/DC 110–12) about Donoso Cortés’s recognition of man’s tendency to terrorise and destroy all others who do not submit to him, as well as the rise of the superman (Übermensch), with his murderous counter-concept, the subhuman (Untermensch), which opens the terrible abyss of enmity. The subhuman, with which Schmitt clearly associates himself here, ‘deserves’ only extermination and destruction in the eyes of the superman.
21 See Meier (2013: 55–6) on man making himself into a god.
22 This statement is presumably to be read with Schmitt’s comments in CoP 64 about anthropological optimism, i.e. that man is good and educable in the sense that he can be taught to overcome the friend-enemy relation of the political; see further Zakin (2011: 98–101).
23 Radiation is of course associated with an exceeding of boundaries, which ties in closely with the reading of Schmitt adopted here.
24 Schmitt (ECS 49–51) also speaks of Strahlung in the 1946 essay ‘Zwei Gräber’ (ECS 55–78) when he sets out how he understands Däubler’s Das Nordlicht. Whereas he at first gave it a Christian meaning, he says that he now knows that the Northern Lights convey knowledge of mankind. It is the meteorological sign of a self-saving humanity, an autochthonous radiation (Strahlung), which is sent from the earthly followers of Prometheus into the cosmos. Schmitt notes that he came to this new insight through Proudhon who contends that it is the destiny of the earth to gradually cool down and die like the moon. Mankind will then have to die with his planets if he does not succeed in sublimating himself to spirit (sich zum Geist zu sublimieren), that is, to spirituality, consciousness, freedom. Schmitt (ECS 49) concludes that for Däubler, the polar light is the telluric witness and guarantor specifically of this salvation of mankind through the spirit, ghost or spectre and in the spirit, ghost or spectre (durch den Geist und im Geist).
25 As we will see below, Schmitt appears to suggest here that one is always already confronted by the evil genius of Descartes, represented here by modern technology.
26 See in this respect the opening pages of ECS 9–10 where Schmitt reports that he was asked towards the end of 1945 to fill in a questionnaire (in 14 points about his Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism) by Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), at the time Rector of the Friedrich Wilhelms University and member of an executive committee tied to the Berlin local authority with the function of investigating political affiliations to national socialism. Spranger told Schmitt that what he (Schmitt) had thought and said may be interesting and clear but that it was never clear who he was as a person. Schmitt refused to complete the questionnaire. He however referred to himself on this occasion as a Christian Epimetheus, which Meier (1998) makes much of in his analysis of Schmitt as a political theologian. We will explore the implications of Schmitt’s statement further below with reference to what it tells us about the (philosophical) question.
27 See further below.
28 Däubler (1919: 65): ‘Der Feind ist unsre eigne Frage als Gestalt. Und er wird uns, wir ihn zum selben Ende hetzen [And he will hound us, and we him, to the same end/for the same purpose]’. References to this passage in Däubler can also be found in GL 213, 217 and ‘TP’ 61/TdP 87. In the latter text, Schmitt (‘TP’ 61/TdP 87), after having invoked this phrase from Däubler, notes the following: ‘The enemy is not something to be eliminated for a particular reason, something to be annihilated as worthless. The enemy stands on my own level. For this reason I must contend with him in battle, in order to assure my own standard [Maß], my own limits, my own figure.’ For an interpretation of this citation in Schmitt, see e.g. Meier (1998: 44–8); Groh (1998: 64–73); and Thiele (2011).
29 See similarly OH 3–5 on the question of the foreigner, who places me in question.
30 See Heidegger (2005: 32/1982: 44): ‘This understanding of Being (Seinsverständnis) which comes to expression in philosophy [i.e. of the Being of beings] cannot be invented or thought up by philosophy itself. Rather, since philosophizing is awakened as a primal activity of man (das Philosophieren als Urhandlung des Menschen in diesem selbst erwacht), arising thus from man’s nature prior to any explicit philosophical thinking, and since an understanding of Being is already implicit in the pre-philosophical existence of man (for otherwise he could not relate to beings at all) philosophy’s understanding of Being expresses what man is in his pre-philosophical existence. This awakening of the understanding of Being, this self-discovery of the understanding of Being, is the birth of philosophy from the Dasein in man.’
31 See Derrida (1989: 129–36).
32 See also ‘Geschl IV’ 201–2/PA 397–8 where Derrida engages with Heidegger’s Rectorate address.
33 See Glas 191a/Glas (F) 215a: ‘The question is already strict-uring, is already girded being [La question est déjà stricturante, l’être ceint].’
34 See further Derrida (‘Geschl IV’ 175/PA 359) on the friend as the figureless (le sans-figure).
35 As noted in Section B above, Schmitt also alludes to this division within the self in ‘TP’ 60–1/TdP 87 with reference to General Salan who fought against both the French and the Algerian Front: ‘Is it not a sign of inner division [innerer Gespaltenheit] to have more than one single real enemy? The enemy is our own question as figure [Gestalt]. If we have determined our own Gestalt unambiguously, where then does this double enemy come from?’
36 Balakrishnan (2000: 256) contends, with reference to the opening sentence of ECS 9 (‘Wer bist du? Tu quis es?’, i.e. Who are you?), that in Ex Captivitate Salus Schmitt answers the question ‘Who was Carl Schmitt?’, which would make of ‘Weisheit’ a kind of autobiography.
37 In seeking to understand what Schmitt is alluding to here, reference can be made to B&S II 86–7/SB&S II 136 where, in an analysis of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Derrida points out that ‘every autobiography … presents itself through this linguistic and prosthetic apparatus – a book – or a piece of writing or a trace in general … which speaks of him without him, according to a trick that constructs and leaves in the world an artefact that speaks all alone [tout seul] and all alone calls the author by his name, renames him in his renown [le renomme en sa renommée] without the author himself needing to do anything else, not even be alive’. The fantasy (of being buried alive) which provokes such writing as well as technology (see also B&S II at 130), we will come across again in the discussion below.
38 See also PoF 160.
39 See the discussion below.
40 An allusion to Engels (1894: 318): ‘It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history; it is only from this point that the social causes set in movement by men will have, predominantly and in constantly increasing measure, the effects willed by men. It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom [Es ist der Sprung der Menschheit aus dem Reiche der Notwendigkeit in das Reich der Freiheit].’
41 An allusion to Däubler’s ‘Grünes Elysium’ (1916): ‘Die Pflanzen lehren uns der Heiden sanftes Sterben [plants teach us the sweet heathen/heaths dying]’.
42 Death and Descartes’ evil genius (see further below) would in other words be equated in the formless form of a death drive; see Derrida ‘To Do Justice to Freud’ in Res 70–118, and for analysis De Ville (2011a: 107–11).
43 See also PoF 161.
44 Schmitt (GL 220) charges Germans with at first seeing in every non-I the enemy, and then, in coming to their senses, treating the whole world as friend.
45 This appears to be an allusion to, on the one hand, all the ‘enemies’ to ownness, which Stirner detects in the family, community, society, state, nation, mankind, religion, fixed ideas, etc. and, on the other, to Stirner’s epoch of egoism where there will be a union of egoists [Verein von Egoisten], but where one will nonetheless continue to live egoistically (Stirner 2006: 161/1845: 196).
46 See likewise GL 217: ‘History in a nutshell. Friend and enemy. The friend is the one who affirms and confirms me. The enemy is the one who places me in question (Nürnberg 1947). Who can then place me in question? In essence after all only me myself [nur ich mich selbst]. The friend is our own question as figure [Gestalt]. Concretely this means: only my brother can place me in question and only my brother can be my friend.’
47 This should be read with PoF 273/PA 303 where Derrida refers to the crime against humanity (which Schmitt was accused of) as ‘the crime of crimes’ and contends that this crime should be understood in terms of fratricide as ‘the general form of temptation, the possibility of radical evil, the evil of evil’. See in this regard also Section B above.
48 We nevertheless saw in Sections A and B above that the attempts by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political and ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ to guard the borders of the self ultimately fail.
49 For a more detailed discussion see De Ville (2011a: 95–112).
50 That is, if one loses the enemy, as Schmitt in The Concept of the Political complains is happening in the twentieth century.
51 See Hegel (1977: 111/1986: 145): ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. [Das Selbstbewuβtsein ist an und für sich, indem und dadurch daβ es für ein Anderes an und für sich ist; d.h. es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes.]’ See Ottmann (1993/94) for the important role that Hegel plays in Schmitt’s thinking as a whole, and in particular in respect of the political.
52 See Balakrishnan (2000: 112); Kennedy (2004: 101–2).
53 See Rissing and Rissing (2009: 68); Meier (1998: 15, 54, 65); Müller (2003: 95–6). See also CoP 74/BdP 73 where Schmitt, after referring to Hegel’s dialectic, notes that ‘the triple structure weakens the polemical punch of the double-structured antithesis [[d]er Dreigliedrigkeit fehlt … die polemische Schlagkraft der zweigliedrigen Antithese]’.
54 See also Strauss (2007: 111).
55 See Simon (2008: 88).
56 Derrida (PoF 164–5), with reference to Schmitt’s remark in the quotation above that all destruction amounts to self-destruction, points out that at stake here is the Hegelian notion that the infinite passes through the annihilation of self. Schmitt himself in the same passages points to the biblical and Greek origins of enmity of brothers and posits the Hegelian infinite between these two heritages.
57 ‘Etwas im Urteil verneinen, heißt im Grunde: “Das ist etwas, was ich am liebsten verdrängen möchte.” Die Verurteilung ist der intellektuelle Ersatz der Verdrängung, ihr “Nein” ein Merkzeichen derselben, ein Ursprungszertifikat etwa wie das “made in Germany”.’
58 ‘Die Bejahung – als Ersatz der Vereinigung – gehört dem Eros an, die Verneinung – Nachfolge der Ausstoßung – dem Destruktionstrieb.’
59 At stake here for Schmitt, as Derrida (PoF 153) points out with reference to what Schmitt says about the genesis of legal concepts, is also the pre-legal origin of the legal.
60 The relevance of the brother here appears from Schmitt’s own designation of civil war as a savage war between brothers; see ‘TP’ 38–9, 41/TdP 59, 63 as discussed in Section B above; and ECS 56–7. See further Schmitt’s reading of Heraclitus’s saying that ‘war is the father of all things’ as a reference to civil war (ECS 26); and the reference to the killing of Abel by Cain in the quotation from ‘Weisheit’ above, which Schmitt (ECS 89) refers to as lying at the origin of history.
61 Such a reading of Schmitt would be in line with a certain reading of the passage in Freud on ‘Negation’ quoted above as well as Derrida’s reading of Freud on Empedocles’s two fundamental principles (attraction and repulsion) as outlined in Section A above.
62 See in this regard Hyppolite’s reading of negation/death in Hegel (Hyppolite (1974: 18); read with Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977: 19)): ‘Whereas in nature death is an external negation, spirit carries death within itself and gives it positive meaning. The whole Phenomenology is a meditation on this death which is carried by consciousness and which, far from being exclusively negative, an end point in an abstract nothingness, is, on the contrary, an Aufhebung, an ascent’; see also Derrida (B&S II 152–3).
63 See Meier (1998: 23–5, 50–4) who understands this centrality of the enemy as ultimately a reference to ‘the Old Enemy’, i.e. Satan. The question that Derrida would be likely to pose to Meier, even whilst accepting the coherence of this reading, is what Satan ultimately represents for Schmitt, beyond consciousness and the unconscious.
64 See likewise GL 60.
65 Ruhe also has the meaning of ‘resting place’ or ‘death’: die ewige Ruhe/die letzte Ruhe finden.
66 See likewise Schmitt ‘Raum und Rom – Zur Phonetik des Wortes Raum’ in SGN 491–5.
67 See Connors (2011: 148).
68 See also Connors (2011: 146–7).
69 This interlinkage between life and death again returns us to the question of spectrality; see B&S II 117.
70 See likewise SQ 97–107 on Paul Celan’s poetry, more specifically the impossibility of appropriating language, as well as its spectrality.