6

Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization
or the ‘Armed’ Question

Following its meaning in German (as in so many other languages), ‘friend’ is originally only the person to whom a genealogical bond unites. Originally the friend is but the friend of blood, the consanguine parent or again the ‘parent by alliance’ through marriage, oath of fraternity, adoption or other corresponding institutions.¹

Carl Schmitt

If, then, you two are friendly to each other, by some tie of nature (phúsei pē oikeioi) you belong to each other.²

Plato

We have become attuned to a certain effect of haunting. Where it seems inaccessible to intuition and concept, the purely concrete starts to resemble the ghost, just when you start to believe that you can tell them apart. This is the tormented experience of the inversion of signs. Such an experience allows itself, then, to be revealed in Schmitt’s obsessional insistence on the ‘concrete’ and on ‘real possibility’, at the very point at which these values were opposed to the ‘spectral’ (gespenstisch). We are constantly reminded that only a concrete, concretely determined enemy can awaken the political; only a real enemy can shake the political out of its slumber and, as we recall, out of the abstract ‘specularity’ of its concept; only the concrete can awaken it to its actual/effective life (as ‘the living fool that I am’, when it bemoans the fact that there is no longer, or not yet, an enemy). But there is the spectre, lodged within the political itself; the antithesis of the political dwells within, and politicizes, the political. The spectre might well be – it might well already have been, in 1932 – this ‘partisan’ who no longer respects the normal conditions and the juridically guaranteed boundaries of war. And this has not begun today, nor did it begin yesterday, or the day before.

Negativity, disavowal and politics, haunting and dialectics. If there is a politicism in Schmitt, it lies in the fact that it it is not enough for him to define the political by the negativity of polemics or opposition. He defines antagonism or opposition (oppositional negativity in general) – which is not at all the same as defining the political – as teleologically political. The political is all the more political for being antagonistic – certainly, but opposition is all the more oppositional – supreme opposition, qua the essence and telos of opposition, negation, and contradiction – when it is political. It is impossible here – as it is impossible in any absolute proposition of speculative idealism, and hence of ideal dialectics – to distinguish between subject and predicate. Schmitt does not so much define the political by oppositional negation as define the latter by the political. This inversion stems from a teleological law of power or intensity. The stronger a contradiction or oppositional negativity, the more its intensity tends towards a limit, the more political it is. Example: ‘Political antagonism (der politische Gegensatz) is the most intense (intensiviste) and extreme (äusserste) antagonism, and every concrete antagonism (Gegensätzlichkeit) becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point (sich dem äussersten Punkte … nähert), that of the friend-enemy grouping.’3

It will come as no surprise when this politicism of oppositional negativity calls on Hegel. The discrimination between friend and enemy would also be, in Hegelian terms, an ‘ethical difference’ (sittliche Differenz), the first condition of ethical determination, which does not mean moral determination. The modern definition of hostility, perfectly distinct from enmity, would be due to Hegel and Marx (despite the economistic and hence depoliticizing tendency that would make the latter a nineteenth-century thinker⁴). And if Schmitt evokes this debt to Marx and Hegel, it is not simply to stress that this concept of hostility – in his view the only purely political concept of the political – is also an ethical concept. He is intent on already denouncing the misunderstanding in which modern philosophers begin to apprehend this logic of the political. They tend to avoid it – qua the political in sum – in so far as it is linked to a certain concept and to a certain practice of war. Although Hegel may at times show a ‘double face’, he must be inscribed in the great tradition of ‘specifically political’ thinkers (Machiavellli, Hobbes, Bossuet, de Maistre, Donoso Cortés, Fichte – ‘as soon as he forgets his humanitarian ideallsm!’) who knew how to break with an optimistic anthropology (‘Man would be fundamentally and originally good’). In this discourse on Man, on his original innocence or on his accidental or extrinsic corruption, Schmitt denounces a strategy too often enrolled in the service of anti-State liberalism. ‘Authentic’ political theories, on the other hand, all presuppose a Man essentially ‘evil’, ‘dangerous’, a ‘dynamic’ and ‘problematic’ being:

Hegel … remains everywhere political in the decisive sense.… Of a specifically political nature also is his dialectic of concrete thinking.…

Hegel also offers the first polemically political definition of the bourgeois. The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death. {Wissenschaftliche Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts (The Methods of the Science of Natural Right), 1802, Lasson edn p. 383; Glockner 1 edn p. 499.} Hegel has also advanced a definition of the enemy which in general has been evaded by modern philosophers. ‘The enemy is the ethical difference [die sittliche Differenz] (not in the sense of morality [nicht im moralischen Sinne], but in the perspective of ‘absolute life’ in the ‘eternal being of the people’), as the Foreigner to be negatived in his living totality (als ein zu negierendes Fremdes in seiner lebendigen Totalität). ‘A difference of this sort is the enemy, and this difference, posited in its ethical bearing, exists at the same time as its counterpart, the opposite of the being of its antithesis, i.e., as the nullity of the enemy, and this nullity, commensurate on both sides, is the peril of battle. For ethical life (für des Sittliche) this enemy can only be an enemy of the people and itself only a people (nur ein Volk). Because single individuality comes on the scene here, it is for the people that the single individual abandons himself to the danger of death.’… ‘This war is not a war of families against families, but between peoples, and hatred becomes thereby undifferentiated and freed from all personal elements (von aller Persönlichkeit frei)’5

To remain consistent with itself, this homage to a Hegelian paternity must reach out and embrace Hegel’s Marxist posterity. This consistency plays no small role in the notable sympathies this hyper-traditionalist jurist of the Catholic right wing will always have inspired in certain circles of leftist political thought. These ‘friends’ on the left do not correspond to a fortuitous or psychological formation born of some interpretative confusion. In question is an immense historico-political symptom the law of which remains to be thought. Be this as it may, Schmitt regrets that Hegel’s spectre has deserted Berlin to reappear elsewhere: with those of Lenin and Marx in Moscow:

The question is how long the spirit of Hegel (der Geist Hegel) has actually resided (residiert hat) in Berlin. In any event, the new political tendency which dominated Prussia after 1840 preferred to avail itself of a conservative philosophy of state, especially one furnished by Friedrich Julius Stahl, whereas Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin. His dialectical method became established there and found its concrete expression in a new concrete-enemy concept, namely that of the international class enemy, and transformed itself, the dialectical method, as well as everything else, legality and illegality, the state, even the compromise with the enemy, into a weapon of this battle. The actuality of Hegel is very much alive in Georg Lukács. [History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Merlin Press, London 1971; Lenin: A Study of the Unity of his Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs, New Left Books, London 1970]6

The salute to Lenin forms the link between the two texts that we have been distinguishing, opposing and comparing, in order to understand how the second (The Theory of the Partisan) confirms the first (The Concept of the Political) precisely at that point where the former seems to contradict the latter.

We are unable to follow in detail the argument of a work which, in its time, multiplies in an impressive and often pointed fashion valuable insights into the many transformations taking place in the political space of modernity. Regarding the classical European jus belli (interstate war between regular armies), and to the extent that its regulation was ever respected, the partisan remains a marginal figure until the First World War. The preferred example of Schmitt, as it was for Clausewitz, is first the Spanish guerrilla fighting against the Napoleonic army. The modern partisan, on the contrary, leaves this initial marginality, expecting from his enemy no respect for the rights of conventional warfare. In the course of civil war, as of colonial war, the partisan transforms the concept of conventional hostility and blurs its boundaries. Apparently the partisan is no longer an enemy, and has no enemy in the classical sense of the term. Real hostility henceforth extends, through terrorism and counter-terrorism, all the way to extermination. Yet the definition of the partisan will long maintain the tradition of autochthony, the telluric dimension on which we have insisted so much. It is, for example, the autochthony of the Russian partisans against the Napoleonic army, then the readaptation of this ‘myth of the national and autochtonomous partisan’ by Stalin in the course of the Second World War. This ‘myth’ serves a worldwide communist politics. With Mao Tse-tung it represents a new stage in the history of the partisan, and therefore in the process of rupture with the classical criteriology of the political and that of the friend/enemy grouping. The partisan not only simply transgresses, he confuses the two classical distinctions (regular/irregular, legal/illegal from the standpoint of constitutional or international law). One of the numerous advantages of these analyses is the precise and differentiated account of the relation to space (land, sea, or aerial space) – that is, first of all to technics or to tele-technology (the speed and expanse of transmission, mobilization and motorization) – as one of the essential factors in the mutation of the classical concept of the enemy and even in what had become the ‘classical concept’ of the partisan.

This question of technics appears doubly decisive.

On the one hand, although he does not say so explicitly in this form, the question is found to be at the heart of what Schmitt calls ‘a process of concept dissolution’, ‘a remarkable sign of the times’.7 Such a dissolution of concepts induces a ‘metaphoric’ but not necessarily improper use of the partisan concept. Schmitt himself acknowledges having recourse to it. This uncontrollable extension is due in particular to the criteria chosen for the definition of the partisan. These criteria authorize a limitless generalization (‘every human being is a being who struggles’; thus he is found to be ‘his own partisan’, which is practically meaningless). Indispensable as they may be, these criteria are false ones, quasi-concepts, criteria of degree of intensity – that is, indefinitely extensive. Now, along with (1) irregularity and (2) the intensity of political engagement, we find (3) ‘the high degree of mobility of active combat’⁸ – that is, the appropriation of space by the science of the tele-technical prosthesis.

On the other hand, and as a consequence, this speed of motorization, and hence that of tele-technical automation, produces a break with autochthony. This rupture cuts the telluric roots characteristic not only of the classical enemy but of the first form of the partisan guerrilla war. It must be specified that telluric autochthony, ground warfare, the consideration of geographical configurations, and the lay of the terrain no doubt persist throughout this mutation; Schmitt takes note of this and gives numerous examples: Mao Tse-tung, whose revolution has a ‘better telluric base than that of Lenin’,⁹ Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, the war for independence in Algeria, the Cypriot war, and so forth. But also – and first of all – this means that this territorial drive has itself always been contradicted, tormented, displaced and delocalized. And that this is the very experience of place. That is what Schmitt does not acknowledge explicitly. In any case, he draws no visible and conceptually rigorous consequence from it. He shows no interest in the fact that telluric autochthony is already a reactive response to a delocalization and to a form of tele-technology, whatever its degree of elaboration, its power, or its speed. This law undoubtedly governs historically different events, places and contents. But what Schmitt is right in saying of the modern partisan, whose agrarian autochthony is driven by technical and industrial progress, whose mobility is reinforced by a motorization which interrupts the ‘local bond’ and destroys the ‘telluric character’, could have been said of the most ‘classical’ combatant. We should not consider this a simple problem of dating or periodization. At stake are the relations between the history of the political and the structure of theoretical concepts which one claims to articulate upon it. For this is not without effect on the two axes of the Theory of the Partisan. First of all on the juridical axis (the critical examination of ‘equivocations’, ‘floating concept’ and the ‘default of clarity’ in the concepts of the Hague Agreement (1907) and the Geneva Conventions (1949);10 an examination highly ‘motivated’, let us say, by the example of the indictment of German generals after the Second World War). Secondly, the properly political axis which is our main interest here. The case made against the four Geneva Conventions in fact introduces this political axis. Having paid them exaggerated insistent homage (they are admirable for their sense of justice and humanitarian virtue, as well as their respect for the tradition of international law of European origin), Schmitt accuses them of having ‘weakened’ – indeed, compromised – the ‘system of essential distinctions’: war and peace, the military and the civilian, enemy and criminal, interstate war and civil war. From that point, the road was clear for a form of war which ‘deliberately destroys these clear-cut distinctions’. The normalizations of compromise that the law then proposed would be, for Schmitt, but fragile gangways above the ‘abyss’.¹¹

The abyss occasions vertigo, which engulfs, in sum, the conceptual banks of these ‘clear-cut distinctions’. It is definitively sweeping away the reassuring littoral on which it was believed possible to discern, in a word, Man, the humanity of Man, Man as ‘political animal’.

(We shall not multiply the glosses on the edge of this abyss. First of all because to speak of the abyss can be done only from the shore, and there we have a first immoderateness, sometimes even an unbearable indecency. We shall not take advantage of this pretext for pathetic eloquence over the bottomless depths of a chaos which is ours today, this great yawning mouth which cannot ‘talk politics’ without screaming, shouting hunger or suffering, without swallowing in one gulp all the assurances of ‘clear-cut distinctions’ to remain, finally, ‘voiceless’.

To be ready to listen to this screaming chaos of the ‘voiceless’, one has only to lend an ear to any ‘news item’. At the very instant when I am rereading the previous sentence, all points in the world, all the places of the human world, and not only on the earth, and not only in Rwanda and in Italy, in ex-Yugoslavia and in Iran, in Israel and in Palestine, Cambodia and Ireland, Tahiti and Bangladesh, Algeria and France, Ukraine and the Basque Country, etc., are – and will always have been – just so many forms of the abyss for Schmitt’s ‘clear-cut distinctions’ and his nostalgia. Still to give them country names is to speak a language without an assured foundation. To be ready to listen, we were saying: at the very instant when I reread this, a new stage has opened up (but have we not known that for such a long time?) with the ‘Clipper’ chip, a new bugging device – that is, a new stage in modern technics to lose the ‘distinction’ between private and public in the abyss. Why does Schmitt take no account of the fact that the police and spy network – precisely, the police qua spy network (the ‘spectre’ of the modem State of which Benjamin speaks in ‘For a Critique of Violence’) – points to what, precisely in the service of the State, ruins in advance and from within the possibility of the political, the distinction between private and public? What would he have thought of the new cryptographies, and of the unassignable ‘political’ status that is the singular institution of psychoanalysis – of which he never speaks? And what about cybercrime, consisting today in breaking into the electronic files of the State, the army, the police, banks, hospitals and insurance companies? A debate (of course, a hopeless one) is under way today (in the United States, naturally) between the State and citizen associations (all assuredly ‘democrats’ and ‘liberals’) concerned over the right to initiative, invention, communication, commerce, and safeguarding privacy. The citizens contest the state monopoly on the production and control of the ‘Clipper’ chip, designed to protect the secrecy of private communication in an age when, capable of intercepting and recording everything, the highways of numeric transmission leave no leeway or chance to the heart of hearts. Today we have a State just as ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’, just as concerned over its responsibilities, as its citizens, but providing it can maintain its hold on the means of protecting internal security and national defence – that is, the possibility of bugging everything every time it deems it necessary – politically necessary – to do so (internal and external security).

– Fundamentally, one will say that there is nothing new here, despite the leap of technological mutation which also produces structural effects.

– Certainly, but the novelty of these structural effects must not be neglected; this is the entirety of the ‘concrete’ in politics.

The choice of this topical example, among an infinity of others, is designed only to recall that a reflection on the politics of friendship should not be distinguishable from a meditation on secrecy, on the ‘meaning’, the ‘history’, and the ‘techniques’ of what is still called today, with the old Latin word, secret. We shall return to this later – with Kant.)

Let us return to Schmitt, supposing that we ever left his company. When did this abyss open up? Schmitt claims to know. He believes he is able to determine bearings, events, dates. However worthwhile these determinations may be, however interesting and instructive these historical soundings are, they always admit of some counter-example or of an anterior example in an infinite regression. When Schmitt accuses specialists of the right of European peoples with ‘repression’ (these specialists are said to have repressed from consciousness the image of transformations visible from the beginning of this century12) this accusation can be levelled against Schmitt himself. What does he himself do? Does he not situate in this century the mutation whose premisses – and the premisses of those premisses – he is obliged, retreating step by step, to admit without admission? For example: the Bismarckian moment of the acherontic (Acheronta movere, as Bismarck used to say: to foment revolution and to take control at any price of the national forces pitted against the adversary) had a precedent in 1812–13, when an elite corps of Prussian officers sought to mobilize, with all the means at their disposal, the national forces hostile to Napoleon. Even if this was not, strictly speaking, a partisan war, ‘this brief revolutionary moment nevertheless has incredible importance for the theory of the partisan’.¹³ Then Schmitt quotes Clausewitz’s On War, and also an edict of the king of Prussia calling, in sum, for partisan war. Schmitt cannot conceal his admiration for these ten pages signed by a legitimate king. Without hesitation he classes them, in a fervent tremor, ‘among the most extraordinary pages of the world’s collections’. These pages were made to seduce and to fascinate Schmitt: the paradox of a military legality, political legitimacy, Prussian nationality regularly enrolled in the service of the irregularity of a revolutionary war, of a partisan war – against the French emperor! Against, in sum, the occupying forces whose expansionism masked in ‘humanitarian ideology’¹⁴The Concept of the Political had already revealed thirty years earlier. Is it not on account of Napoleon that Fichte and Hegel restored Machiavelli to a place of honour, to allow the German people to resist such an enemy? Along with the Spaniards and all the Europeans, Prussia, the Prussian king, invented partisan war against the French occupying forces. He wrote a ‘kind of Magna Carta of the partisan’. At the end of the book, at the other end of the same tradition, in the same lineage as Clausewitz, Lenin and Mao, in 1962, it is General Salan – yes, General Salan – who, in the eyes of a Schmitt alternately convincing and hardly credible, comes to reincarnate the concept and the determination of this struggle – once again against the French State, even if it be in the name of its former colonial empire.

But let us stay with what is most important to us, from the vantage point we have chosen to privilege here: the question of philosophy. Friendship qua philosophy, philosophy qua friendship, philosophical-friendship, friendship-philosophy, will always in the West have been a concept indissociable within itself: no friendship without some philosophia, no philosophia without philía. Friendship-philosophy: from the outset we have been inspecting the political next to this hyphen. Now, here is Schmitt asking us – and it is perhaps not different, since it is still a matter of the political itself – to think war, hence killing, and finally what he calls absolute hostility, as philosophy’s thing. Although this move belongs to the end of the Theory of the Partisan, to an essay registering the evolution of the concept of the political and an evolution contradictorily described in one place as a ‘dissolution’,15 in another as an ‘upheaval’,¹⁶ the reader of The Concept of the Political should not be surprised by this call to philosophy. Philosophy represents the properly productive agency of the purely political, and hence of pure hostility – and this, from within the historical process that develops the concept and the practice of the partisan: that is, that which calls into question the classical and stabilized, the regular concept of the political. Despite certain signs of ironic distrust in the areas of metaphysics and ontology, The Concept of the Political was, as we have seen, a philosophical type of essay to ‘frame’ the topic of a concept unable to constitute itself on philosophical ground. But in the Theory of the Partisan, it is in the same areas that the topic of this concept is both radicalized and properly uprooted, where Schmitt wished to regrasp in history the event or node of events that engaged this uprooting radicalization, and it is precisely there that the philosophical as such intervenes again. Quite precisely at the moment of the partisan’s Magna Carta, at the moment of Prussian, Spanish, and Russian resistance to the Napoleonic armies and their ‘humanitarian ideology’. But why does the philosophical discovery of the partisan occur only in Berlin? Because however Prussian it is, and uniquely Prussian, it owes something to the ‘French philosophy of the Enlightenment’ and to the French Revolution. The Spanish guerrilla war, just like the 1809 uprising in Tyrol and the Russian partisan war of 1812, were, Schmitt says, insurrections of an ‘underdeveloped people’. Catholic or Orthodox culture remained untouched by the Revolution and the Enlightenment. But the latter, on the contrary, are very much present in Berlin, in the age of the philosopher Fichte, the poet Kleist, and even those soldiers ‘of genius and vast culture’: Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz, ‘witnesses to the enormous spiritual potential of Prussian intelligence prepared for action in this critical moment’. Such a nationalism was not one of a simple, illiterate people: ‘The philosophical discovery of the partisan and the historical possibility of its theory took place in this atmosphere, in which an aggravated national feeling united to a philosophical culture.’17

This properly philosophical theory of the partisan could not fail to feature a doctrine of war. Clausewitz had given courses on guerrilla warfare at the Berlin School of War in 1810–11 and had also written in 1809, as an anonymous soldier, a letter to Fichte, author of a study on Machiavelli, author of The Art of War. Yet this philosophical event, this unique and decisive invention of the partisan, was also, to Clausewitz’s great disappointment, an abortive attempt, a semi-failure. On this subject Engels spoke of a semi-insurrectional war. This unaccomplished event betrayed at once both a philosophical default and a political one. Philosophy, here, was not yet philosophical enough; it had failed to realize itself outside of discourse and representation. It remained a still-abstract ‘theoretical form’ and, as such, a spark, a bolt in the dark, a flame, a witness awaiting its heir: ‘The spark which, flashing out in Spain in 1808, had reached the North found in Berlin a theoretical form allowing the flame to be conserved for transmission to other hands.’¹⁸ The Acheron was hidden in the canals of state order: the dominant philosophy of Hegel, and the conservative reconciliation between the State and revolution. But the ‘ideological arm’ remained available, even in Hegel, and always ‘more dangerous than the philosophy of Rousseau in the hands of the Jacobins’. Its immediate heirs, Marx and Engels, were still too purely philosophers, thus by no means philosophical enough: thinkers rather than activists of revolutionary war. A ‘professional revolutionary’ was still awaited: Lenin. The first authentic heir of the Prussian Magna Carta, he is in turn followed and radicalized by Mao. He would replace the classical concept of the political founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the State based on the right of European peoples, and on interstate war, with the revolutionary war of parties. The latter assumes, certainly, in its Clausewitzian form, the friend/enemy distinction, but it becomes radicalized by carrying hostility to its absolute limit. ‘In the eyes of Lenin, only revolutionary war is true war, for it is born of absolute hostility.’¹⁹ Only this absolute hostility confers upon war ‘its meaning and its justice’.²⁰ Only this absolute hostility repoliticizes space throughout a modern depoliticization which will have neutralized political oppositions in the classical age. A single question then remains to be asked, and it is the coincidence of the purest philosophy and the most intense concrete determination: who, in concreto, is the absolute enemy? Response: the class enemy, the Western bourgeois and capitalist, wherever he imposes his social order.

Such was the passage between possible reality, real reality, and philosophical consciousnesss; this was, at present, the ‘alliance (Bündnis) of philosophy and the partisan’. This alliance frees new and unexpected explosive forces, and sets off ‘the splintering of this entire Eurocentric world which Napoleon had hoped to save, which the Vienna Congress had hoped to restore’.21 In this absolute present, in this parousia of the political, the identification of the two movements – depoliticization and overpoliticization – still necessarily leaves some leeway. A diastemic inaduquation gives history its chance. For example: if at last, and in turn, Lenin determines the absolute enemy in a way that is still ‘too abstract and intellectual’,²² Stalin, then Mao (‘the greatest practitioner of subversive war’ and its ‘most famous theoretician’), know how to provide this same war with its telluric rooting. Here would be the absolute accomplishment, the philosophical and historic concretization of absolute hostility.

From this re-tellurization and its analysis given by Schmitt, we shall retain, in the economy of our argument, only one clue. It is of the utmost importance to us, even if it seems non-apparent, or seems to disappear as soon as it appears. We deem it important, in truth, for this very reason and because Schmitt points it out furtively – twice – as if in passing, like a passer-by who would go unnoticed. The double passage of a brother, in effect.

How could a brother be the subject of absolute hostility? The hypothesis will have to be inverted. There can be absolute hostility only for a brother. And the history of friendship is but the experience of what in this respect resembles an unavowable synonymy, a murderous tautology.

The absolute war Schmitt talks about, the revolutionary war that drives the theory of the partisan to its extremity, the war that violates all laws of war, can be a fratricidal war. And thereby have the fraternal figure of the friend return. As a brother enemy. This is an immense tradition, biblical and Greek. The first allusion refers to a Stalinian moment (the ‘fratricidal’ struggle of Tito, ‘helped by Stalin’, against Mihailovič, his ‘enemy from within’, supported by the English).²³ The second allusion recalls the Maoist moment (‘race’ hostility, ‘class’ hostility, ‘national hostility opposed to the Japanese invader of the same race, hostility regarding the brother of the same nation, growing stronger throughout fierce, interminable civil wars’24).

If, in what is worse than civil war, worse than an unleashing of modern stásis, absolute hostility can aim at the brother and convert, this time, interior war into true war, into absolute war, hence absolute politics, does not this vertiginous reversal in the truth of the political occur at the moment when it touches its limit – to wit, itself or its double, the twin, this absolute friend who always returns with the features of the brother? And if the brother is also the figure of the absolute enemy, what does fraternization mean?

(– But, I ask you, what is a brother?

– Yes, what is a brother? Is one born a brother?

– The question seems ridiculous, dear friend. Of course.

– Not likely. Have you encountered brothers in nature? In nature and in so-called animal births? Fraternity requires a law and names, symbols, a language, engagements, oaths, speech, family and nation.

– It is difficult, however, to erase this memory of ‘real’, perceptible birth, and birth of an identical, hence identifiable,²⁵ mother. The memory of an identifiable birth, nature or nation.

– Perhaps it is just the opposite. Well, it is indeed the same thing, if you prefer, but it is perhaps the opposite: instead of saying ‘difficult to erase this memory’, I would prefer to say ‘difficult not to remember’. Now that changes everything. To find the brother, the unfindable brother who is never found in an experience of perception, should you not start from memory’s injunction, and thus from some oath? Do you not think, dear friend, that the brother is always a brother of alliance, a brother in law or an adoptive brother, a foster brother?

– And the sister? Would she be in the same situation? Would she be a case of fraternity?)

It seems to me that Schmitt never speaks of the sister. He speaks little of the brother, but always in a significant and serious way: the originary friend as a brother of alliance or brother by oath, ‘sworn brother’²⁶ (fraternization or fraternity according to the Schwurbruderschaft, in the passage quoted in our epigraph), but also – and this is the same one – the friend killed in absolute war: the absolute political enemy. Much later, as we shall soon see, to the question ‘Who can be my enemy?’ Schmitt will answer: ‘Myself or again my brother’; ‘My brother is found to be my enemy’. But he responds in this way to what, in effect, is in the form of a question; he responds to an enemy question, to the question of an enemy, as if he were speaking to the other qua enemy (‘O enemy…’), to the enemy present in the very form of the question, to what calls the questioner into question. The enemy would then be the figure of our own question, or rather, if you prefer this formulation, our own question in the figure of the enemy. We will hear Schmitt quoting: ‘Der Feind ist unser eigne Frage als Gestalf – ‘The enemy is our own question as figure’.

There would be not a question of the enemy, or of the brother. The brother or the enemy, the brother enemy, is the question, the questioning form of the question, this question that I ask because it is first of all put to me. I ask it only from the moment it descends upon me with blunt violence, in an offensive and in offence. In crime or in complaint. The question injures me; it is a wound within myself. I pose this question only, I pose it effectively, only when I am called into question by the question. Aggression, traumatism, war. The enemy is the question, and through the brother, the brother enemy, it originarily resembles, indiscernibly resembles, the friend, the original friend (Freund) qua brother of alliance, sworn brother, according to the ‘oath of fraternity’ (Schwurbrüderschaft). The question is armed. It is an army, a friend enemy army.

It would be easy to show – but we will not spend too much time doing so – that the history of the question, starting with the question of being, likewise for the entire history governed by it (philosphía, epistémē, istoría, research, inquest, appeal, inquisition, requisition, and so forth), could not have taken place without polemical violence, without strategy and without arms techniques. This should be known, this can be known, without concluding that the question should be disarmed, or that only disarmed questions should be addressed. But without renouncing any question, hence any knowledge, and in order to keep investigating with vigilance, before and outside all war, what enables the deployment of this question of which Heidegger said one day that it was the ‘piety of thought’,27 perhaps once again it will be necessary – and this would, perhaps, be the friendship of the perhaps, the perhaps ‘prior to’ the question, even ‘prior to’ the affirmation that opens it up and of which we were speaking above – to move back up the question, to move back along the question, further back than it, with and without it, next to it before it – at least before it takes form, when the friend and the enemy pass into one another through the figure of the brother. Before any question, before the question mark, an exclamation mark would then have to be heard. And this double clamour would have to be heard again, addressed to the friend who is no longer or who is not yet (‘O my friends, there is no friend!’), as well as to the enemy who no longer is or who is not yet (‘O enemies, there is no enemy!’).

‘“Enemies, there is no enemy!” shouts the living fool that I am’ – would this reversing apostrophe, this cat’ apostrophe, be ours? Can we at least dream of reappropriating it as an event of our times – ‘modem or postmodern’, as some would say? Nothing is less clear. To believe it, we should have, at least, to be convinced that it both affects and characterizes, at its edges, a modernity against which it rises up in indignation, to be sure (modernity, you are losing the enemy and deserting grand politics!, it seems to say; you neutralize and depoliticize; you must find the absolute enemy again!) but against which it also rises up like a figure against a ground. Rising up like a figure against a ground to which it belongs, this cat’apostrophe thus also marks and delimits a landscape, that of a political age for which it is so difficult, as we have seen, to mark off the limits. The ‘living fool’ could certainly want to say, among many other things at least as enigmatic as this one: there is no more politics, there is no more ‘great politics’ – the same news Nietzsche shouts elsewhere. In complaining rather than rejoicing. Deploring, in sum, what Schmitt will call ‘neutralization’ and ‘depoliticization’. But, as we have just seen, this depoliticization broaches and conditions the build-up of an overpoliticization. The figure of the absolute enemy, in this reversing passage, starts to resemble that of the absolute friend: the deadliest tragedy of fratricide.

(We could look for our examples in the Bible, which in sum speaks of nothing else, starting with Cain and Abel, whose ghosts we will see haunting Schmitt in his prison cell. Let us choose Atreus and Thyestes instead. In what is thus doomed to incest and to anthropophagy (to have the sons eaten by the father rather than the father by the sons), the stakes are, among brothers, those of politics, heritage, sharing out and assumption of power. In the absence of the father or the king. This is a matrix for a more strictly political rereading, a conjoined reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’ and the Theory of the Partisan, even the Ex Captivitate Salus. Such a reading would not play on the fact that Dupin introduces himself as a ‘partisan’, and that a certain feminization of the rivals seems to be on the programme. Before copying these lines from Crébillon: ‘“Un dessein si funeste/S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.” They are to be found in Crébillon’s Atrée.’ Dupin had talked politics, he had declared his ‘political prepossessions’ (‘In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned’); he had predicted the end, in truth the political suicide of his rival, the self-destruction of his brother enemy. The latter will vouch for himself, if that can be said, to disappear, he will doom himself to his own political destruction (‘Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction’). But what is it that you do in designating the self-destruction that resembles you like a brother? There are so many contradictory perversions, so many monstrosities (with all these words we are speaking here, of course, of truth as monstrosity). These monstrous truths call up the equivocal admiration of the brother enemy, of the double or the rival; they excite his pitiless sympathy; for if he refuses him all compassion, Dupin has trouble rejecting this feeling so close to, even indissociable from, pity: sympathy. A pitiless sympathy: this would be the most striking figure of war and death among brothers. War to death according to the phantasm of the symbiotic, not far from the genius, the congeneric and the congenital: ‘In the present instance I have no sympathy – at least no pity – for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius.’)

Schmitt has been reproached for making the enemy rather than the friend the ‘properly positive conceptual criterion (das eigentlich positive Begriffsmerkmal)’ of his definition of the political. In the preface to the 1963 edition of The Concept of the Political he responds to this objection, which he considers a ‘stereotype’. In his apparently classical role as logician or dialectician – as didactician too – intent on methodically teaching the topic of concepts, Schmitt invokes the privilege that negation must be maintained in a dialectical determination of the ‘life of law’ and the ‘theory of law’; but also, let us recall, in the life of the living in general. The law of killing (the enemy, war, politics, etc.) no more presupposes a ‘philosophy of death’ – indeed, the essential existence of something like death (for Schmitt, paradoxically there is no death) – than the unceasing insistence on the enemy would in any way imply a prevalence of the negative, or at least the ‘primacy’ of what is thereby ‘negated’. It is as if – in a language which is not literally his own, but which seems to me to impose his own logic – Schmitt responded, in sum: I insist first of all on the enemy rather than the friend, and this is proper strategy because it is correct method. Should I have to start from the friend, as you invite me to do, I would first have to provide its preliminary definition. Now, such a definition would be possible only in reference to the opposed term: the enemy. I must therefore start from this oppositional negativity, hence from hostility, in order to attain the political. ‘To start from the enemy’ is not the opposite of ‘to start from the friend’. It is, on the contrary, to start from the opposite without which there is neither friend nor enemy. In short, hostility is required by method and by definition – the very definition of the definition. By the dialecticity or diacriticity, by the necessity of the topic as well, which cannot function without the possibility of war. There is no space, nor is there any place – neither in general nor for a thought, for a definition or for a distinction – without the real possibility of war.

No doubt Schmitt’s language is, in appearance, more strictly juridical than this, but his response to the objections moves back up to the very genesis of a juridical concept as such. Hence his response affects the non-juridical or pre-juridical origin of the juridical. It is a question of knowing what to put at the beginning if one wishes to go about thing? in the right way:

The objection claiming that I give primacy to the enemy concept is a quite generally widespread cliché (allgemein verbreitet und stereotyp). It fails to understand that any development of a juridical concept (jede Bewegung eines Rechtsbegriffs) issues, by dialectical necessity, from negation (aus der Negation). In the life of law as in the theory of law, to include the negation means anything except a ‘primacy’ of the negated contents (altes andere als ein ‘Primat’ des Negierten). A trial qua legal action is conceivable only once a right has been negated. It is not a fact (Tat) but a wrongdoing (Untat) that penal action and penal law pose (setzen) at their commencement (an ihren Anfang). Would this, for all that, be a ‘positive’ conception of wrongdoing and a ‘primacy’ of crime?28

Like the Aristotelian discourse on friendship, this argument could also be inscribed in the logic – at least, in one of its moments – of the unsettling logic of Lysis: once the enemy had disappeared, the friend would disappear at once. He would vanish in the same stroke, actually/effectively and virtually, in his very possibility. The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called them up in advance, had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding question, a question of wound. No friend without the possible wound. The tension between friendship and enmity would be pharmacological. Friendship to remedy a wrongdoing, friendship to answer a possible wrongdoing or crime, friendship of consolation or of mourning, friendship of reparation – in the hypothesis that there could ever be another. But it is true – there are quite a number of differences – that this passage from Lysis represents only a stage in a process. It is equally true that Lysis names the friend rather than the enemy. And, what is more, the enemy is ekhthrós, not polémios:

For if there is nothing any more to hurt us, we have no need whatever of any assistance (oudemias ōphelías deoímetha). And thus you see it would then be made apparent that it was only on account of evil that we felt regard and affection for good (dia to kakon tagathon egapômen kai ephiloumen), as we considered good to be a medicine (ōs phármakon) for evil, and evil to be a disease. But where there is no disease, there is, we are aware, no need of medicine (nosḗmatos de mē óntos ouden dei pharmákou).… It follows, then, I think, that the original thing to which we are friendly, that wherein all those other things terminate to which we said we were friendly for the sake of another thing, bears to these things no resemblance at all. For to these things we called ourselves friendly for the sake of another thing to which we were friendly, but that to which we are really friendly (to de tô ónti phílon) appears to be of a nature exactly the reverse of this, since we found that we were friendly to it for the sake of a thing [we could go so far as to translate: by reason of, in view of, indeed by virtue of the enemy, thanks to the enemy, ekhthrou éneke] to which we were unfriendly, and, if this latter be removed, we are, it seems, friendly to it no longer.29

Here the analogy between the foregoing argument and Schmitt’s would end – or so it would seem. After this logic of contradiction (the friend as the adverse response to the enemy, the friend as the rejoinder to the enemy) Lysis seeks another reason to love, another cause of loving and being loved (alle tis aitia tou phileîn te kai phileisthai). In order to prevent the foregoing from becoming ‘idle talk’, a kind of ‘lengthy poem’, the hypothesis of desire (épithumia) is then put forward: the friend is the friend of what he desires, but if he can desire only that which he lacks, and if what is lacking can be only that of which he has been deprived (that which has been taken away), then one must indeed imagine that before this feeling of privation, and precisely in order to experience it, friendship (philía), qua érōs and epithumía, must indeed be found to be linked to what is proper, suitable, appropriate and familiar (oikeios) to it.

The value of oikeiótēs dominates the end of the dialogue. It is most often translated as ‘suitability’. It frequently qualifies the bond of friendship itself, an always natural bond (we necessarily recognize in phileîn some kinship or natural familiarity, to men dē phúsei anagkaion ēmin péphantai phileîn,³⁰ but it forms an indissociable network of significations which are of import to us here, a semantic locus totally assembled, precisely, around the hearth (oikos), the home, habitat, domicile – and grave: kinship – literal or metaphorical – domesticity, familiarity, property, therefore appropriability, proximity: everything an economy can reconcile, adjust or harmonize, I will go so far as to say present,³¹ in the familiarity of the near and the neighbour.

(If the hearth is found within the semantic locus of philía, and if philía cannot function without oikeiótēs, then little would stand in the way of saying that the central question of this essay – and we have already seen why this ‘question’ comes ‘before’ the question – indeed, ‘before’ the affirmation that precedes it, from the moment of the perhaps that they both presuppose – would be that of a friendship without hearth, of a philía without oikeiótēs. Ultimately, a friendship without presence, without resemblance, without affinity, without analogy. Along with presence, truth itself would start to tremble. Like this prayer which, as Aristotle reminds us, could be neither true nor false. Is an aneconomic friendship possible? Can there be any other friendship? Must there be another? Can one answer this question otherwise than with a ‘perhaps’ – that is, by suspending in advance the very form of a ‘question’, and the alliance of the ‘yes’ – in order to think and to dream before them? And must not this reflection account for a certain end of Lysis, in its final leavetaking? Must not this question take as its starting point this place where it is avowed, after the ordeal and the experience of oikeiótēs, after the so strong distinction between ‘oikeion’ and ‘hómoion’: between the familiar and the proper on the one hand and the homogeneous and the like on the other: ‘we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend’. Departure after the departure of certain ‘pedagogues’, these ‘demons’ who speak ‘bad Greek’ (upobarharizontes). They have, then, departed, those who seemed ‘hardly fit to talk’:

We owned ourselves vanquished, and broke up the party. However, just as they were leaving, I managed to call out, Well, Lysis and Menexenus, we have made ourselves rather ridiculous today, I, an old man, and you children. For our hearers here will carry away the report that though we conceive ourselves to be friends with each other – you see I class myself with you – we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend.

The structure of this conclusion announces the reported statement of Aristotle – such, at least, as it is most often translated. Here, too, someone is addressing friends. He speaks to them to tell them, in the vocative élan of the apostrophe: we who are, among ourselves, friends, my friends, we who call ourselves friends, we do not know what a friend is. And we should have to imagine, we should never exclude the possibility, that perhaps, therefore, there are none. Or perhaps so few.… Exactly how many friends, if there are any, are there, my friends?)

Let us return to Schmitt, and expand our perspective. That which a macroscopic view is able to align, from afar and from high above, is a certain desert. Not a woman in sight. An inhabited desert, to be sure, an absolutely full absolute desert, some might even say a desert teeming with people. Yes, but men, men and more men, over centuries of war, and costumes, hats, uniforms, soutanes, warriors, colonels, generals, partisans, strategists, politicians, professors, political theoreticians, theologians. In vain would you look for a figure of a woman, a feminine silhouette, and the slightest allusion to sexual difference.

At any rate, this seems to be the case in the texts that deal with the political, with the political as such (The Concept of the Political and the Theory of the Partisan). Granted, there are indeed these two allusions to fratricide, but they are so brief. They lead to no reflection on the difference between a brother and a sister. Sisters, if there are any, are species of the genus brother. In this Christian space (we will speak later of the Christian scansion in the history of fraternity), one remembers that letter of the great and good Saint Francis of Assisi, who could not help but write to a nun: ‘Dear Brother Jacqueline’.

Granted, there is this remark that we picked up on a ‘stasiology’ that was to deal with civil war within the Holy Family or with a conflict interior to the Trinity – and it seems to us potentially ripe with the most serious consequences. But Schmitt does seem to give it short shrift – at least, in so far as it concerns sexual difference. Granted, too, there is this essay on Hamlet or Hecuba, but that deals more with ‘the queen’s taboo’ and with being an accomplice, perhaps, to a fratricide.32

What could, then, be massively evident in this immense, modern and ageless procession, in this theory of the political working its way in the middle of the desert, what strikes us in this philosophy of merciless war, in this staging of ‘physical’ killing, in this implacable logic of absolute hostility, what should be massively evident but goes as unnoticed as absence itself, what disappears in becoming indiscernible in the middle of the desert, is the woman or the sister. Not even a mirage. Nothing. Desert and absolute silence, it would seem. Not even a woman-soldier. Not even in the theory of the partisan is there the least reference to the role played by women in guerrilla warfare, in the wars³³ and the aftermath of wars of national liberation (in Algeria today, for example – for another liberation, since Schmitt speaks of the Algeria of Salan). Never a word for the action of women in resistance movements (Schmitt is then more eloquent, let it be said in passing, when he evokes the resistance against the Napoleonic empire, against French imperialisms in general; and he remains so discreet on the subject of those women whom the Nazi occupation forces encountered not so long ago; they could nevertheless have provided him with interesting examples at the time of the theory of the partisan). If the woman does not even appear in the theory of the partisan – that is, in the theory of the absolute enemy – if she never leaves a forced clandestinity, such an invisibility, such a blindness, gives food for thought: what if the woman were the absolute partisan? And what if she were the absolute enemy of this theory of the absolute enemy, the spectre of hostility to be conjured up for the sake of the sworn brothers, or the other of the absolute enemy who has become the absolute enemy that would not even be recognized in a regular war? She who, following the very logic of the theory of the partisan, becomes an enemy all the more awesome in not being able to become a female enemy (une ennemie); in his blurring, in her blurring and interference with the reassuring limits between hostility and hatred, but also between enmity and its opposite, the laws of war and lawless violence, the political and its others, and so forth.

Is this a question? Is it a question in the form of an objection?

Nothing is less certain.

If it were the rhetorical ploy of an objection – a ‘rhetorical question’, as it is called in English – it would be so foreseeable, so massive (which does not mean, for all that, unjustified), that it would undoubtedly issue in an amused and condescending protestation on the part of Schmitt. He would hardly put himself out, he would hardly lift his little finger, to start up the argumentative machine which has proved its worth. ‘Of course,’ he would say, ‘there is reason to be worried about the absence of woman in this analysis; one can even find therein what you are calling her clandestinity. One may, on the subject of woman, pursue sociological or psychoanalytical explanations. You can even protest in the name of morals, justice, or the universal equality of the Rights of Man. This may all be legitimate, even urgent, and I would be ready, under certain conditions, to join you, and to share in your interest in the cause of women – who, moreover, are indeed indispensable in the formation of enemy groups and peoples without which there would be no politics. But mind you, such a cause may derive from all these disciplines: psychoanalysis, morals, law, even religion; and you may even deal with the question from the vantage point of economics. But it remains the case that all this has no political pertinence as such. All this is undoubtedly – like love or friendship in general, between men, between women, between men and women – a universal human cause, but I have shown that what concerns humanity in general, and as such, had no political significance. Reread the sixth chapter of my Concept of the Political. I explain that the concept of humanity is an efficient “ideological instrument of imperialist expansion”; and, “in its ethico-humanitarian form, a specific vehicle of economic imperialism”. The universal concepts of humanity, the earth, or the world are, by definition, foreign to the political. What you call “globalization” is a strategy of depoliticization enrolled in the service of particular political interests. What is more, the analysis I propose – in which, in effect, sexual difference plays no part, and the women never appears – is above all a diagnosis. It is a matter of saying what is: the subject of the political is genderless; moreover, it has always been, in fact and as such, a man, a group of men determining his or their enemy and determined to “physically kill him”, as you have just explained. I never do anything but diagnose.’

How are we to respond to this rejoinder? We have already called into question this pretension to diagnosis and to the pure delimitation of regions, the very topic of this discourse. We shall not return to that, although we could now add the hypothesis according to which Schmittian strategy – as well as his topology, perhaps – has as its clandestine finality only this sealing away, this clandestine house arrest, this phallogocentric neutralization of sexual difference. In question would not be waging war on this being called a woman – or the sister – but repeating and consolidating in the diagnosis a general structure keeping under control and under interdiction the very thing which constitutes it – and which has for so long been called the political – indeed, the theologico-political.

There would, then, remain only one choice, and it would call for a decision:

1. Either to admit that the political is in fact this phallogocentrism in act. Schmitt would record the fact; and we could not fail to recognize that indeed, so many indications attest to it in all European cultures, in the Bible and in the Koran, in the Greek world and in Western modernity: political virtue (the warrior’s courage, the stakes of death and the putting to death, etc.) has always been virile virtue in its androcentric manifestation. Virtue is virile. Woman’s slow and painful access to citizenship would go hand in hand with the symptoms of depoliticizing neutralization noted by Schmitt. This structure can be combated only by carrying oneself beyond the political, beyond the name ‘polities’; and by forging other concepts, concepts with an altogether different mobilizing force. Who would swear that this is not in progress?

2. Or else keep the ‘old name’, and analyse the logic and the topic of the concept differently, and engage other forms of struggle, other ‘partisan’ operations, and so forth.

If there were a single thesis to this essay, it would posit that there could be no choice: the decision would once again consist in deciding without excluding, in the invention of other names and other concepts, in moving out beyond this politics without ceasing to intervene therein to transform it.

For example, here. This double gesture would consist in not renouncing the logic of fraternization, one fraternization rather than such and such another, therefore one politics rather than some other, all the while working to denaturalize the figure of the brother, his authority, his credit, his phantasm. The preference given to one or another fraternization (the democratic one) presupposes such work, presupposes that the brother figure not be a natural, substantial, essential, untouchable given. This same work would affect, in changing it, democratic fraternization – everything which, in democracy, still presupposes this natural fraternity, with all the risks and limits it imposes.

To be consistent with this de-naturalization of fraternal authority (or, if you prefer, with its ‘deconstruction’), a first necessity, a first law, must be taken into account: there has never been anything natural in the brother figure on whose features has so often been drawn the face of the friend, or the enemy, the brother enemy. De-naturalization was at work in the very formation of fraternity. This is why, among other premisses, one must recall that the demand of a democracy to come is already what makes such a deconstruction possible. This demand is deconstruction at work. The relation to the brother engages from the start with the order of the oath, of credit, of belief and of faith. The brother is never a fact.

Nor any bond of kinship. Thus when Schmitt classes the ‘oath of fraternity or the fraternity of the oath (Schwurbrüderschaft)’ among bonds of birth or alliance implied in the ‘originary’ concept of the friend, when he sees it only as a case or an example, he still argues for a distinction between the bond of alliance and the natural bond, between the structure of credit (or of faith) and a ‘natural’ attachment which would go beyond credit. Now, such a distinction, however powerful its effects, remains a phantasm. It rises up on the background of that phantasmatics or that general symbolics in which, in particular, all bonds of kinship are determined. If, elsewhere, Schmitt privileges the brother, even in the fatality of fratricide, it is still in the vigilance of the frightened watchman. A watchman on edge [aux aguets] would still protect himself: in his watchtower, in the fort of a fortress, from the tower or the loophole, he would remain in this logic of the political that we think is deconstructible, in the process of deconstruction.

‘Wisdom of the prison-cell’:34 after the war, through his prison experience, Schmitt recalls Max Stirner. Stirner is convoked like the phantom of Schmitt’s childhood. Like a brother as well, an admirable but estranged brother. ‘Max Stirner kenne ich seit Unterprima.’ For he had read Stirner in his public-school years, this ghost, this childhood friend, this same Stirner whose spectres The German Ideology was already conjuring up. Schmitt then acknowledges his debt, knowing that Stirner had prepared him for what would happen to him today, which would otherwise have surprised him. ‘Poor Max’, he notes just before 1948, belongs part and parcel to ‘what is exploding today’ and to what ‘was in preparation before 1848’. And now Stirner ‘pays him a visit’ in his prison cell, the spectre of the man who invented ‘the most beautiful tide in German literature: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum’. Schmitt cites The Ego and its Own; he paraphrases it, he plays in its wake with the words Pan and Plan, ‘this beautiful example of the oracular power immanent in our German language’. Having meditated on nakedness and on its opposite, on economic planning, productivity, technics, the ‘technologized earth’, the new Man and the new paradise, he takes up the theme of deceit or imposture – more precisely, of illusion about oneself, the ‘deceiving oneself (Selbstbetrug), of this Narcissus victim of the ‘dupery of self proper to solitude’, of this ‘poor Self who can only marry his own Echo’ (as if Echo could not have been able to speak in turn, and Schmitt quickly forgets his Metamorphoses; yes, as if Echo had not invented the necessary ruse for speaking in its own name, for reclaiming the floor, for calling the other while feigning to repeat the ends of sentences). The prisoner evokes, then, the terrible anxiety of Descartes pursued by the evil genius, the deceitful one par excellence, by the other spirit, the spiritus malignus. In the anxiety of dupery, the philosopher masks himself, he shields himself from nakedness. Larvatus prodeo. Schmitt quotes and echoes, in the first person: he speaks of himself in taking on the mask of Descartes. From one end to the other of these red-hot and despairing pages – haughty ones, too – whose rhetoric does not always avoid, with a certain pride, a landscape and commonplaces only too familiar today, they are the confession of one who confesses his doubts about confession. The anxiety is all the more terrifying, he admits, when it gives birth to new impostures. He throws himself headlong into this anxiety, having imagined himself, in order to conjure it away, confronting deceit head-on: ‘Imposture of feeling and understanding, imposture of the flesh and the spirit, imposture of vice and virtue, imposture of husband and wife.’ These vis-à-vis are all equivalent. Then comes death: ‘Komm, geliebter Tod’, ‘Come, beloved death’. These words appear to close a chapter; they follow immediately the sigh of the deceit of man and woman (Betrug des Mannes und des Weibes).

Yet another chapter, for there is more: ‘death can also abuse us’. It is the next-to-last chapter; a ‘fraternal kiss’ will be spoken of. The phantom of the friend, Stimer’s phantom, has returned, the phantom of the thinker of phantoms. Everything the latter will have done to shield and to barricade himself is but the ‘greatest deceit of self. ‘As anyone is mad with self, mad with the I (Ich-verrückte)’, mad with me – sick of me, as we say – ‘he sees the enemy in the non-I (sieht er im Nicht-Ich den Feind)’. ‘Then the whole world becomes his enemy.’ For now we have him imagining that the world should let itself be caught when, ‘guarding its freedom, it offers him the fraternal kiss (den Bruderkuss)’. He then hides from the ‘dialectical dissociation’ of the ego, and seeks to escape from the enemy in the very time of deceit. ‘But the enemy is an objective force.’ It is impossible to escape him: ‘the authentic enemy will not brook deceit’.

This last phrase then opens a brief meditation, a few lines, on the enemy. The enemy in the figure of the brother. We see Schmitt, the thinker of the enemy, he who in this century will have become famous for having made the enemy his theme, his concept, his theatre, in his prison putting his head in his hands and beginning the final anamnesis. He is ready to put himself in question, precisely on the subject of the enemy. He will not do so, he will never do it, no more than he will ever avow or disavow his Nazism.35 But he will attempt to say – on the subject of what calls into question, of what calls me into question – something that will still be called the enemy, the brother enemy. The question that resounds in this cell is not the converse of the question in Lysis (Who is the friend?), nor even the general or ontological question (What is the enemy? What is hostility or the being-hostile of the enemy?). No, it is the question ‘who?’ as the concrete question I put to myself, and for which I will have to conclude that with this question the enemy puts me in question. It is the question ‘who’, to be sure, but first of all or simply ‘who for me?’ ‘Wer ist denn mein Feind?’ Who, then, is my enemy, mine, here, now? ‘Is it my enemy, he who feeds me in my cell? He even dresses and houses me (Er kleidet und behaust mich sogar). The cell is the piece of clothing that he has offered to me. I therefore ask myself: who can finally be my enemy? ‘Wer kann denn überhaupt mein Feind sein?’

Before this question, the jurist finds a second wind; he is willing to confess, but he recalls, across general considerations, that he is a jurist, not a theologian. These general conditions redialecticize the question. A dialectic of recognition (Anerkennung): in order to identify my enemy, I must recognize him, but in such a way that he recognizes me also: ‘In this reciprocal recognition of recognition resides the grandeur of the concept.’ That is hardly a fitting piece for an ‘age of the masses’ and its ‘pseudo-theological myths of the enemy’. ‘The theologians tend to define the enemy as something which must be annihilated (vernichtet). But I am a jurist, not a theologian.’

Oh really? What does he mean, exactly? That contrary to what certain ‘theologians’ claim, the ‘enemy’, the concept of enemy, must not be annihilated? This, indeed, is exactly what he has always maintained. Or else that the enemy himself would not be ‘something which must be annihilated’? But had he not defined the enemy in these terms, and more than once? Had he not repeated that the enemy is first and foremost he who must be ‘physically’ killed? And as for his refusal to be a theologian, one wonders who said – and often in so convincing a manner – that all the concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularized theological concepts, and that one must start from theology if one is to understand them, and if one is to understand the concepts of decision, exception and sovereignty.36 What game is this man playing, then, when he says he is a ‘jurist’, not a ‘theologian’? Should he not be the first to smile at this distinction?

After this dialectical exercise (a Hegelian one, it must be said), the question returns, more or less identical, literally. One simply passes from being-enemy to the recognition of the enemy – that is, to his identification, but to an identification which will carry me to my identification, finally, myself, with the other, with the enemy whom I identify. Previously, the sentence was: ‘I wonder, then, who can finally be my enemy?’; now it is: ‘Whom may I finally recognize as my enemy?’ Response: ‘Manifestly, he alone who can put me in question (der mich in Frage stellen kann). In so far as I recognize him as my enemy, I recognize that he can put me in question. And who can effectively put me in question? Only myself. Or my brother. That’s it. The other is my brother. The other is revealed as my brother, and the brother reveals himself as my enemy.’³⁷

The power and the sleepwalking levity of this progression. The prudence and the sureness of a rhetoric. The prisoner gropes about in the night, from one corner of his cell to another. He hazards a step, then another, then stops to meditate.

1. We first went from a question (Whom can be my enemy? Whom can I recognize as such?) to the preinscription of the question itself, as a calling into question, in the ‘who’ to be identified, in the enemy as he who calls into question. Who is my enemy? How is he to be recognized but in the very question, which puts me in question? The question is no longer a theoretical question, a question of knowledge or of recognition, but first of all, like recognition in Hegel, a calling into question, an act of war. The question is posed, it is posed to someone; someone puts it to himself like an attack, a complaint, the premeditation of a crime, a calling into question of the one who questions or interrogates. It is posed to oneself in terms of a break into the other, or its breaching. One cannot question oneself on the enemy without recognizing him – that is, without recognizing that he is already lodged in the question: this is what the ‘wisdom of the cell’ teaches the solitary prisoner. The enemy is properly unavoidable for the person who thinks a little – if, at least, thinking begins with the question. The quotation of a verse by Däubler will express this in a moment: the enemy has the figure of the question, of our question – he is ‘our own question as figure (als Gestalt)’.

2. Another step in the night – we then went from ‘calling into question’ to ‘calling oneself into question’. The enemy in question is he who calls into question, but he can call into question only someone who can call himself into question. One can be called into question only in calling oneself into question. The enemy is oneself, I myself am my own enemy. This concept of ‘one’s own enemy’ at once confirms and contradicts everything Schmitt has said about the enemy up to now. It confirms the necessity, so often stressed, of correctly determining, concretely, one’s enemy; but it contradicts the same necessity, for nothing is less proper, proper to self, than one’s enemy. The solution to this problem – the response that comes from a word like a key found inside the home, whereas it was being sought outside – is ‘Oder mein Bruder’. The ‘or’, the ‘or else’, oscillates between the oscillation of the alternative or the equivalence of the equation (aut or vet). Who can put me into question? Myself alone. ‘Or my brother.’ Oder mein Bruder.

This is an a priori synthesis of the following sequence (I am, myself, the other who puts me in question, puts myself in question, the other is my brother, my brother is my enemy, and so forth). The a priori synthesis, the armed tautology, the genetic pleonasm comes down to making the enemy he who is at one and the same time the closest, the most familiar, the most familial, the most proper. Oikeiótēs would gather up the totality of these values to define the friend in Lysis. But now oikeiótēs characterizes the enemy, my own enemy, in the brother figure, myself as my brother: myself or, if it is not me, my brother.

Such would be the originary complaint. We shall abandon as of little interest the question of knowing if that reverses or repeats Platonism. One does not exclude the other, since thanks to my brother, on his account, I am the other, and the closest is the most removed, the most proper is the most foreign.

Why do we suspend the question of Platonism or its reversal? To some extent because for some time now it has been slightly wearisome. But above all because what follows and finishes this brief meditation brings together in the filiation of the brother a biblical lineage and a Greek lineage. And we are all the more intent on marking off this genealogical bifurcation, which will divide the history of friendship qua the history of fraternity, given that it announces the argument of subsequent chapters of this work. Which brother are we talking about? Who are these brother enemies? And which one is their father? Where were they born? On biblical or Hellenic ground? In a finite family or an infinite one? And what if these two families of brothers were precisely giving birth (procreating) the brother enemies, the true brothers truly enemies? And what if both, twice two – what if these two couples of brother enemies had exactly in common the fact that they never renounce either belonging (to a natural ethnic group or to a group of choice, to the family and to the fatherland, to the phratry, to the nation, to blood and to the earth) or the universalism for which they claim responsibility (‘all men are brothers’38), a responsibility that is always, of course, exemplary?

The powerful and traditional logic of exemplarity would allow all the brothers in the world to reconcile the two imperatives. To believe it possible, in any case, to allow it or to have it believed. A brother is always exemplary, and this is why there is war. And among all the meanings of this exemplarity we do not exclude that of the exemplar, this Ciceronian model of friendship with which we decided to begin, a model at once both the original and the copy, the face and its mirror, one and the other.

In the very next paragraph, Schmitt grafts one family on to another. And again dialecticizes. Deliberately or not, he names Cain and Abel, then a ‘father of all things’ who cannot not cite a certain Heraclitean pólemos (‘Pólemos pantōn men patér esti’).³⁹ The Bible and Greece:

‘Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humanity. That is how the father of all things appeared. It is the dialectical tension that maintains the history of the world in movement, and the history of the world is not yet over.’

Between the Greek family and the biblical family appears the thinker of the infinite – the thinker of the ‘true infinite’, not the ‘false infinite’. He has the features and bears the name of ‘philosopher’. We recognize the spectre of Hegel, even though he is not explicitly named. Schmitt ventriloquizes once again, to recall that the infinite passes through the annihilation of self. An allusion to all the exterminators face to face with one another; we are in the aftermath of the war, Schmitt writes from his prison:

Prudence, then, one does not write in levity of the enemy. One is classed according to one’s enemy. One situates oneself according to what one recognizes as enmity (hostility, Feindschaft). The exterminators are assuredly sinister, who justify themselves in the allegation that the exterminators must be exterminated. But all extermination is but self-extermination. The enemy, on the other hand, is the other. Remember the formidable propositions of the philosopher: the relation to oneself in the other – there we have the true infinite. The negation of the negation, says the philosopher, is not neutralization; what is truly infinite on the contrary depends on it. But what is truly infinite is the fundamental concept (der Grundbegriff) of his philosophy.

Then he quotes Theodor Däubler’s verse: ‘The enemy is our own question qua figure’: ‘Der Feind ist unser eigne Frage als Gestalt,’40

Immediately afterwards, just before the epilogue, a double echo resounds in this prison cell. The ‘wisdom’ of the solitary one lets two apostrophes ring out: one attributed to Aristotle, the ‘dying sage’, and the one that Nietzsche cried out, in the name of the ‘living fool’. Two grievances, two complaints and two warnings name here the friend, there the enemy; each time the friend or enemy one has not. A double echo, to be sure, both wise and mad, but yet another language – that of the man who is undoubtedly awaiting judgement:

Woe to him who has no friend, for his enemy will sit in judgement upon him.

Woe to him who has no enemy, for I shall myself be his enemy on judgement day.

Epilogue. Here everything is in the form of epilogue and epitaph. Everything chimes with this dying voice [in English] of which Schmitt speaks so much in his Hamlet or Hecuba. Will it be said once again, in conclusion, that the sister is altogether mute in this interminable and eloquent dialectic of inimical brothers? And Antigone between all these families, finite or infinite, of inimical brothers.⁴¹ No, one would do better to become attentive to several enigmatic signs in the epilogue of this ‘Weisheit der Zelle’. Something of a eulogy to Echo can be heard; her name appears twice. It is true that she speaks German, and celebrates her belonging to the German language. ‘Such is the wisdom of the cell’, Schmitt notes. ‘I lose my time and gain my space.’ He then pulls up short on the word space: Raum. The same word as Rom. He is admiring the marvels of ‘the German language’, its potential and its powers, its spatial energy and its generating force, its spatial and germinal dynamic (die Raumkraft und the Keimkraft der deutschen Sprache). In his own language speech and place rhyme (Wort und Ort). His language was able to safeguard in the word ‘rhyme’ its spatial sense and its space-of-sense (seinen Raum-Sinn), while bestowing on its poets the ‘obscure play’ that brings together, untranslatably, Reim and Heimat, rhyme and the motherland, rhyme and the ‘at-home’ [le chez-soi] (let us not attempt to translate the assonance, for that would be to translate what should not be translated: precisely the untranslatable, that which does not have the good fortune of echo in another language, another nation, especially France, as we shall see).

And here it is: no, not yet Echo’s sister, but already the kinship of brother-and-sister: in the very rhyme in which the word seeks the fraternal resonance (den geschwistelichen Klang) in its sense [à son sens] (Im Reim sucht das Wort den geschwistelichen Klang seines Sinnes). But geschwisterlich qualifies the fraternal qua kinship between brother and sister. And the fraternity of this rhyme is German, ‘German rhyme’, not the ‘traffic signal’ (Leuchtfeuer) or the ‘fireworks’ of a ‘Victor Hugo’! ‘She is Echo (Er ist Echo), the clothing and the finery’ (the heart of the text is the theme of nakedness and clothing); she is the ‘witch’s broomstick’ for the place (Ort) of sense – its location and its dislocations.

Schmitt then evokes the speech of ‘sibylline’ poets, his ‘friends’, in fact, Theodor Däubler and Konrad Weiss. ‘The obscure play of their rhymes becomes sense and prayer.’

This is the obscure friendship of rhyme: alliance, harmony, assonance, chime, the insane Unking [appariement] of a couple. Sense is born in a pair, once, randomly and predestined.

The friendship of these two friends (and that makes three) would opportunely remind us that a friendship should always be poetic. Before being philosophical, friendship concerns the gift of the poem. But sharing the invention of the event and that of the other with the signature of a language, friendship engages translation in the untranslatable. Consequently, in the political chance and risk of the poem. Would there not always be a politics of the rhyme?

The prisoner lends an ear to the speech of his poet friends; he is suffering, and sees that he is not naked but ‘dressed and on the way home’ (bekleidet und auf dem Weg zu einem Haus).

The last words are those of a poem. As untranslatable as its rhymes. Naming Echo, it calls out to her as, naturally, she is born, grows or matures (wächst), like púhsis, in front of each word, before all speech; and she in effect comes first, she is the first word of the poem.

Echo wächst vor jedem Worte.

Everything begins with Echo. But only in a language, for a people, and for a nation. Rhymes sign, and in cadence seal a belonging. Rhymes attune the word of a language with place, then with a place’s gate, an ‘open place’, but ‘our gate’. And the stamp of the rhyme, like the hammer of a storm, bestows on Echo – we will be hearing it – an accent as exalted as it is sinister:

wie ein Sturm vom offnen Orte

hämmert es durch unsre Pforte.

A sinister exaltation, for one would have had to remind Schmitt – among so many other thing?, so as to warn him, if it were not too late – that in all languages – all languages – and therefore for all peoples, a rhyme can become a ‘traffic signal’. And sometimes worse still. Such a risk is inscribed flush with the structure of rhyme, in the insane couple it forms with itself, in the philautie of its linkage. It is also a technique, and can become mechanized to serve the law of the worst. To speak, soberly, only of traffic signals – all languages fall prey to them, as do the great poets of all languages. And nothing looks more like the traffic signals of one country than those of another, in Europe or elsewhere: this is the law.

On another occasion, we shall say something different to honour Echo – the Echo of the Metamorphoses, in any case. This is not the place.

Here, in its ‘obscure play’ – yes, in what such play recalls of what is most sombre – a particular German Echo retains the power to make both those who agree to hear her and those who prefer to remain deaf tremble.

We shall therefore translate neither for the former nor for the latter:

Echo wächst vor jedem Worte

wie ein Sturm vom offnen Orte

hämmert es durch unsre Pforte.