To Carl Schmitt

How can, how does one engage with To Carl Schmitt? For this slim collection of writings, comprising letters and lectures on Carl Schmitt by Jacob Taubes, is a fascinating volume that not only increases our knowledge of Taubes, it also demands a rethinking of the role of Schmitt in twentieth-century thought, in particular theology and philosophy. Most centrally, it forces—or I should say, in a Taubean-style polemic, should force—a reconsideration of what is meant, is undertaken, and eventuates when we use the term political theology to describe a particular intellectual and scholarly endeavor. For political theology of the twentieth century is so deeply intertwined with Schmitt that to undertake it is always, even if unknowingly or silently, to engage in, variously, a conversation, dialogue, debate, or argument with Schmitt. Jacob Taubes found himself in such an engagement from 1948 when he set out his questions and views in a letter that came to the attention of Schmitt. The letters and lectures in this volume chart, rechart, discuss, and attempt to explain at least part of this engagement.

A central recurring theme and self-questioning takes the form of an intellectual confession from Taubes, providing the background for how a Jewish scholar became a “friend” (Taubes’s term) of a jurist of the Nazi state. Just how this came to be is discussed throughout the collection and compels a rethinking of the influence of German thought on twentieth-century thought in the sense that to think philosophically in the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first) in the realms of politics, theology—and where they meet in political theology—is to think in the wake of Schmitt. As Taubes notes, even Walter Benjamin stated his debt to Schmitt.

Schmitt’s response to Taubes’s first letter and Taubes’s wrestling with how and when finally to respond provide a central focus and in turn raise issues for how we read Schmitt today. For this is a very “rich” resource and thus, as well as contextualizing both Taubes and Schmitt and their relationship, there are the wider issues of political theology, twentieth-century political and theological history, and the letter as a resource and text. As such this is also a glimpse into a lost world of conversation and thought that because of the Internet is gone. How many of us save our e-mails for the future? Indeed the e-mail itself seems to encourage a different style of communication, and this has an impact upon what could be called the contemporary history of thought. Letters addressed to an individual come to be collected and read by a wider audience and so change their reception and form. We read them for an insight into what can be called an unguarded moment whereby, in the privacy of words on the page, the writer directly “speaks” to a recipient, yet often with an eye and ear for a wider audience and reception. As such, letters allow the pretense of a privacy that is more often the conduit of public utterance, debate, comment, gossip, and description that sits closer to a conversation than a controlled and ordered paper or exposition. In letters the public-private divide is dissolved, for a letter is always potentially a public document, a public record, yet one controlled and disclosed by the intentions of its author.

Taubes was noted as “a master of smaller scholarly genres such as essays, interventions, reviews, letters and talks.”1 These letters and talks are confessional and digressive, whereby intellectual history, polemic, and questions combine into a distinctly Taubean genre that could also be termed gnostic, for, as other commentators have discerned, Taubes is at heart a thinker who transgresses borders between domains, playing them against each other or blending them.² The relationship with Schmitt, of Jew and German Nazi jurist, is therefore, from Taubes’s perspective, given a gnostic transgression; the central issue of friend-enemy is here remade from the view and position of the one designated enemy. Yet, as will be come clear, what drew them together was antiliberalism, an antiliberalism searching for expression in the face of failed apocalypse, an antiliberalism that gains new urgency in a world where new forms of antihuman (that is antihistorical) apocalypse seem to be resurgent.

It is also important to remember that in this collection Taubes has a central claim that Schmitt is responsible for the recovery of ideology and that ideology in the twentieth century exists in reference—and debt (good and bad)—to Schmitt. In fact, Schmitt himself, in Taubes’s reading becomes what I would term an intellectual sovereign in that he determines the exception that enables this relationship to occur. The Nazi jurist who, as Taubes declares, is by culture and Catholicism an anti-Semite decides in 1948 to make the exception for the Jew who as enemy is the only one who truly understands him. Ideology in the wake of Schmitt must therefore by nature also be complex and open to new relationships—even if firstly as an act toward self-understanding. In short, ideology demands the possibility of the sovereign exception, for, in a secular world, ideology is what premodern faith has become.

It is also important to start reading and engaging with this collection from a position that understands how Jacob Taubes described his relationship with Carl Schmitt: “We knew that we were opponents to the death, but we got along splendidly. We knew one thing: that we were speaking on the same plane. And that was a very rare thing.”3

The writings contained in To Carl Schmitt were originally published in Germany in 1987. While translated versions of three of the writings (“Carl Schmitt: Thirty Years of Refusal,” the letters to Armin Mohler [February 14, 1952] and to Carl Schmitt [September 19, 1979]) have previously appeared as appendixes to Taubes’s The Political Theology of Paul, this new translation by Keith Tribe restores these writings into the larger collection that provides a fascinating, challenging, and important engagement with that “very rare thing,” the relationship between a Jewish intellectual and philosopher of history and a onetime, and unrenounced, Nazi jurist who is the major political theorist of the twentieth century.

Taubes’s statement sets the terms for engaging with this remarkable encounter, for, via Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction they were indeed “opponents to the death” and yet they also were speaking on the same plane, a plane of apocalypticism and counterrevolution.

As such, this introduction is not comprehensive, but any introduction that sought to be would become a separate text in itself; rather it exists as the offerings of one reader, introducing possible ways to read this text and raising further questions to consider. Because Taubes repeats earlier narratives in later presentations, I have chosen to respond to them as I read them—as a reader’s annotative hermeneutics—not to attempt to collate references into a series of defined and ordered subject discussions. For that would be to turn the texts into something other than how they were written—and presented—to be read and responded to. This introduction is therefore a short circuit insertion into what has become the public relationship and debate on the relationship of Taubes and Schmitt. Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben expresses the central importance of citation: “Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writing of the past and present a similar kind of meeting transpires; citations function as go-betweens in this encounter.”7 Žižek’s notion of the short circuit, its “secret meeting,” occurs in this interchange. A major text and or author is “short-circuited” by reading via “a ‘minor’ author, text or conceptual apparatus. … If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions.”⁸ It is also important, in such a reading strategy, to remember that, for Benjamin, “to quote involves the interruption of its context.”⁹ Annotations are of course not quotations, but, in their interruption, they do offer a type of secret meeting and short circuit. What follows is therefore an annotative reading, a short-circuiting of To Carl Schmitt.

The collection begins with the transcript of a lecture on Schmitt, given by Taubes in Berlin in 1985 wherein Taubes attests to his respect for Schmitt, even though Taubes as a “conscious Jew” is one who is marked as “enemy” (1) by Schmitt.¹⁰ This friend/enemy distinction sits at the center of their relationship and, as will be argued, also sits at the heart of how we, today, engage with Schmitt. In a further direction for our engagement, Taubes at the outset makes the interesting claim that to truly understand Schmitt one should not turn to his “major, clamorous texts” but rather should read his “broken confessions,” which were published as Ex Captivitate Salus in 1950 and include the poem of the same name.

This poem, still only readily available in English via a translation in the journal Telos,11 is perhaps the closest form we have to an autobiographical confessional statement. In it Schmitt describes himself as the one through whom “all the tribulations of fate” have passed; he is acquainted “with the abundant varieties of terror … and know[s] their grip” as well as “the chanting choirs of power and law.”

Via this poem it is apparent Schmitt’s self-positioning as the man through whom recent history has waged its confrontations with terror and chaos sits at the heart of his political theory. For chaos is Schmitt’s great enemy, and the role of the sovereign is ultimately, in the face of chaos, to make the decisive judgment, the decision of the exception, the decision to keep order. In response to his own question “What now what shall I sing?” Schmitt sings anything but his rejected “the hymn of the placebo,” and that is still his great attraction for thinkers on both the left and right; the question is, however, whether Schmittean medicine is really a cure.

What then is of value in being designated an “enemy” by Schmitt? Taubes argues that Schmitt’s “enemy,” defined from the perspective of a legal theorist, offers something that a theological definition does not. For the theological enemy is, according to Taubes (1), usually defined as one to be destroyed. The alternative possibility offered by the nontheological, legal enemy (that is, political theology) is that such an enemy must still be opposed, but not necessarily destroyed, because such an enemy is central to one’s own self-identity. The caution arising is the reminder that to destroy the one who defines you is, in the end, to destroy oneself or, at the very least, to lose one one’s self-identity. Yet the problem Taubes notes is that Schmitt’s unrepentant move into an engagement with and within National Socialism does, however, put the legal theory definition of enemy in subservience to what I would define as the Reich theology definition of the enemy for National Socialism, wherein the enemy is to be destroyed. This question and its issues will continue to be engaged with by Taubes and Schmitt throughout this collection.

Yet, interestingly, such a question was not present for Taubes in 1942, when, aged nineteen and studying at the University of Zurich (his father was chief rabbi, having moved from Vienna in 1937), he came across reference to Schmitt’s Political Theology in Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche. What struck Taubes was Schmitt’s allusion to the concluding verse of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857) wherein Satan is elevated to the throne (and Taubes quotes [5]):

It was this possibility, linked with the wider question of, as Taubes puts it “the problem of the Fascist intelligentsia” (11), specifically Schmitt and Heidegger14 and of their Catholic background, that for Taubes could not be resolved “by appealing to the inner bastard of Nazism” (11). As can be seen in the “Letter to Armand Mohler,” Taubes wrote of these issues to his one-time school friend and now extreme right-wing thinker and secretary to Ernst Jünger, who in turn passed it on to Carl Schmitt. At this same time Taubes was working toward what he terms “the apocalypse of the revolution,” yet “free of the illusions of messianic Marxists” (11), in short, “a new concept of time and a new experience of history opened up by Christianity as an eschatology” (12). For Schmitt, the meeting point with Taubes comes via the notion of the katechon, the restrainer of the Antichrist, and the apocalyptic thought that follows. Yet, if they meet in apocalyptic thought, they come to this meeting place from different directions: Taubes from the bottom up, Schmitt from above, “from the powers that be” (13). What links them is “the experience of time and history as a delimited respite, as a term or even a last respite. Originally that was also a Christian experience of history” (13), and the katechon, as restrainer, is, as Taubes notes, part of how Christianity accommodated itself with the world when the expected End of the World failed to materialize. What is important to note is that Occidental history becomes what Taubes terms “that one-way street” (13) because of that expectation of the end of history. To assign such meaning to history, and to Occidental history within a framework of katechon, also influences how Occidental history is viewed—and experienced. A fascinating sidebar is that not only did Taubes present these ideas to a group at Harvard headed by a young Henry Kissinger, while in America he also taught Torah to a group of future neoconservatives including William Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb.¹⁵ Taubes therefore also played his—unwitting—part in an early exposure of what were to become American neoconservatives to Schmittean-aligned thought, raising the fascinating question as to what degree could neoconservatism also be reread as a form of Schmittean katechon—especially with the influence of Leo Strauss? (It is beyond the scope of this introduction to follow such a line of thought, though it is important to note such possibilities—even for other scholars to contest them).

The relationship of Taubes and Schmitt was the result of Schmitt’s letter to Armin Mohler, which was circulated initially throughout West Germany—and then wider afield—and occasioned Schmitt sending offprints and signed books to Taubes, who, while never refusing them, and reading every line, also never replied. This carries echoes of what Derrida discussed in his work on the gift,¹⁶ which also puts the Taubes-Schmitt relationship in a new light, for this relationship that was to develop did not, on one level, include the indebtedness nor expectation that such “gifting” tends to involve. It is, while not being anonymous, actually far closer to a type of altruistic gifting that Derrida sees as true gifting. Yet conversely, the reason that Taubes did not respond to the ongoing gifting by Schmitt was Schmitt’s “active anti-Semitism” (14), which is, as I will repeatedly remind readers, the issue that overshadows this whole relationship and the material in this collection—as well, of course, the use of Schmitt, especially by those on the left from the mid 1980s. This issue will continue to be raised and discussed as this introduction engages with the material, because each mention of it by Taubes raises slightly different questions.

What brought Taubes to reconsidering Schmitt was the challenge, in Berlin in 1967, of learning that the Russian-French Hegelian philosopher Alexander Kojève was going to Plettenberg to talk to Schmitt, identifying him as the only person in Germany worth talking to. Taubes, in considering this, tiess the common threads of apocalypticism in all three thinkers—himself, Schmitt, and Kojève—yet he, as one of the “chosen people,” symbolized the subject of envy of those who considered themselves to be members of apocalyptic nations, that is, those who viewed themselves as the supersessionist nation, wherein nationalism exists as a version of replacement theology. It took years for Taubes to finally meet Schmitt in person, in Plettenberg, whereupon he and Schmitt had the “most violent” (15) discussion Taubes had ever undertaken in German, a discussion about historiography and myth. In referring to this discussion, Taubes focuses on the conflict between mythic images and terminology and positivism and historicism, a conflict in which Schmitt and Benjamin found themselves on the same side.

What does this mean for us today? Perhaps, if, as the American cultural critic Greil Marcus has noted (via Leslie Feidler), in the world of popular culture we are all imaginary Americans,17 then in the world of political theology we are all imaginary Germans, or at least Weimar Germans. This claim is deliberately provocative, yet it might provide a way to understanding how and why the radical left—raised, as it were, on Benjamin—also came to see Schmitt as a friend-enemy ally from the mid 1980s onward.¹⁸ If in political theology we find ourselves still in a mind-frame constructed by the debates of Weimar Germany, then our sources and solutions are going to be those who engaged in debate, discussion, and dialogue at that time. In effect, Schmitt creates the basis for modern political theology and so, dialectically, even to oppose him is to create a synthesis in which Schmitt is present, albeit transformed. Taubes notes this is what Benjamin did, inverting the “state of exception” from a dictatorial conception, “dictated from above” into “a doctrine in the tradition of the oppressed” (17). The result for both, according to Taubes, involves “a mystic conception of history whose principal teaching relates the sacred order to the profane” (17). This profane is not something that can be constructed upon a theocracy; thus, for both Schmitt and Benjamin, in Taubes’s view, theocracy has “solely a religious significance” (17). According to Taubes’s reading of Benjamin, secularization is the public face of rthe Pauline-derived inner freedom of God’s children, that is, secularization is the true outward expression of Christianity. Yet here Taubes suddenly concludes with a long quote from a 1924 review of Political Theology by the poet and Dadaist Hugo Ball in which the central claim is that Schmitt is responsible for the recovery of the respectability of ideology. Reading this via Taubes, the conclusion seems to be that ideology in the twentieth century followed (in all its variety of engagements) in the wake of Schmitt. Today, reading Taubes and Schmitt, at the conclusion of this first document, a question arises that takes us on from that earlier one of political theology being a form of imaginary Weimar Germany. If we remember the challenge of Benedetto Croce’s maxim “We cannot not call ourselves Christians,”¹⁹ perhaps we who engage in ideology, political theology, and associated philosophical undertakings find ourselves, at some point, confronted with the our own version of Croce’s maxim whereby “We cannot not call ourselves Schmittean”?

We need to hold the tension of these questions as we turn to read that fateful letter, the letter that drives this whole collection, the one that instigates the relationship between Taubes and Schmitt, the “Letter to Armin Mohler” (14 February 1952).

This letter acts as type of theological hand grenade, forcing a reconsideration of what is involved in and with political theology, a debate that still rages today: for how do we and can we engage with one who aligns himself with/in National Socialism? This is, as Taubes notes at the time, a question also for Heidgger. There is a possible reading—that I acknowledge for many will be seen as a misreading—that here Taubes points toward assigning Schmitt to a type of sovereign—wherein the exception becomes problematic. The exception decision is that of deciding to align with National Socialism, for in a world where “humanism has run dry” (21) the question arises of who is sovereign now and what are the new states of exception, especially in the wake of the horrific consequences of the National Socialist state of exception. What is the new nomos—and can this only really be decided by those who posses “an inner connection to Germany” (21) to attempt to “explain, if at all possible, what happened and why?” (21).

Taubes’s letter is followed by short passages from letters from Schmitt to Mohler. The first sets the frame for what eventuates: Taubes’s interaction with Schmitt is not only “astonishing” (25), it is also found to be very moving by those Schmitt shows it to. This is in itself revealing, for remember this is only seven years after the end of the war. The important element is the final fragment, where Taubes’s insight that today everything is theology except what is taken to be theology is recognized as his central brilliance (26). This in turn raises issues about what is theology in our contemporary world: is theology actually political theology and its associated relocations and associations into Continental philosophy? Is this in fact the triumph of theology in a secular society, and is this why, in particular, sociology appears to have lost its way? Recall that sociology was meant to replace theology; this was the drive from Comte through Weber and Durkheim; further, recall that the young Taubes traced the first appearance of Schmitt’s political theology in volumes dedicated to Weber (4). And, yet, is not Habermas’s turn to religion actually more a turn to theology than to religion itself, and did not Derrida declare to the American “death of God” theologian Altizer that he would pay to be a professor of theology (moreover, Julia Kristeva asked Altizer to think of her as the French death of God theologian)?20 These digressions are in fact central to what sits at the heart of the Taubes-Schmitt relationship and why it continues to have such resonance: what if theology is what still drives us when we think most deeply philosophically and politically, when we think most deeply intellectually? Whether Jew or Gentile, atheist or believer, left or right, theology—and, it increasingly seems, the theology of Paul—shapes and drives our thinking, our wrestling, our questioning, our politics, our philosophy, our cultures, our very identities, yet, as Taubes notes—and Schmitt agreed—in a world in which we have to live in a post-Christian manner.

It is useful to digress to two American thinkers who offer a way to engage with these issues. Carl Raschke, tracing a lineage back to Kant, argues, “To think intensely what remains concealed in the depths of thought is to think theologically,” and yet, because of the Enlightenment, such theological thinking has become “a very difficult, if not impossible, peculiar labor.”21 But today theology is also in a dialectic with deconstruction, whereby in post/modernity theology is now “a thought that has learned to think what is unthought within the thought of itself.”²² Or, as I would state, in post/modernity theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and “religion.” Philosopher of religion Charles Winquist notes the self-reflexivity of theology—that is, thinking about thinking—demands that then “we have to decide why we are calling any particular datum religious.”²³ To this I would add the futher decisions regarding the designations sacred, profane, and secular as they have come to be used both in political theology and wider modernity. For secular, in particular, needs to be separated from secularist; that is, secular, as in “this-wordly” or, in the phrase of Gabriel Vahanian, “a world of shared human experience,”²⁴ is different from a position of being actively opposed to religion. Politcal theology operates, or has come to operate, as also a form of secular theology, and this is what is meant by Schmitt’s statement (via Taubes): “today everything is theology, with the exception of what the theologians talk about” (26). Half a century on, it is still only the secular theologians and those influenced by Continental thought who have come to recognize that “everything is theology” and this is what puts them in opposition to theologians who still, paradoxically, talk about everything that is not theology. Or, as Taubes notes in his 1979 “Letter to Carl Schmitt,” Erik Peterson identifies “the theological impossibility of a political theology” (28), which, in my reading could be countered by a view that political theology is theology versus theology, as theology in and of the katechon. Of course, this does not, as yet, take us any further.

So what is it that we need to talk about, if we wish to locate ourselves, our readings, our writing, our arguing within the theology that is not theologians’ theology? Perhaps it is to deal with those central issues raised by Taubes and Schmitt, issues that are still yet to be resolved—if they indeed could be.

An issue to be resolved is that of “friend”; this arises from Schmitt’s redefinition of politics along the divide of friend-enemy, and yet here, in Taubes’s “Letter to Carl Schmitt,” we have Taubes calling, in fact defining, Schmitt as “friend.” This makes us redefine what is and can be meant by such a term, for we have the one who was, in Schmittean logic, the enemy of the Nazi state calling the one who defined Jews as the enemy “friend.” Yet, as Taubes wryly, tragically observes, Jews were spared one thing in the horror that unfolded: they did not have to make a choice as to where they stood vis-à-vis Hitler and the Nazis, for Hitler made Jews “into absolute enemies” (27), and this disaster, a disaster for Jews and for everyone else, especially—so it seems to Taubes—for Germans, raises issues of how can we understand “the eschatological aspect of the disaster” (27). The critiques of Schmitt by Erik Peterson are discussed by Taubes in his letter, along with a reference to the psalmist’s “true are the wounds that the arrow of a friend inflicts” (28); in fact, this appears to be a reference to Proverbs 27:6: “Better are the wounds of a friend, than the deceitful kisses of an enemy.” If Peterson’s critiques of Schmitt are those of the Christian “friend,” is Taubes establishing himself as the Jewish “friend” inflicting wounds of truth? It would appear to be so, and this wounding by and of a friend is what sits at the heart of this correspondence, a wounding in the name and pursuit of truth.

Central to Taubes’s questioning is how, in spite of the injunction of Romans 13 on obedience to the ruling state, the German Church was able to support a political “theozoology” (29), that is, a theology of classification in line with Nazi race theory. This is a question that has to go back before one of support for the ruling authorities to a question of creating and implementing a political theozoology that not only aligns with obedience to the ruling authorities but also underwrites, theologically, the creation of enemies and justifies attacks upon them. For Taubes, reading out of Hobbes’s Leviathan, identifies the state as a mortal god that exists under the immortal God; therefore Jesus the Christ is that which/who can always overturn the mortal state in that the state, attempting to be immortal, sets itself against the immortal God. The task of political theology is thus to constantly redraw the boundary between the spiritual and the worldly, between what was the ecclesiastic and the civil power. Political theology is to ensure that there is a distinction between them, and to ensure that the civil power (the mortal power) does not usurp or attempt to overcome the distinction between it and what is today—in a post-Christian world—spiritual power, which is in reference to the immortal. In this discussion are the echoes of the claim by Taubes that he “had quickly come to see Carl Schmitt as an incarnation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor” (7): as one who defends the subversion of the Church to the interests of the State—even against the basis of the faith itself. For those then who follow in the wake of political theology, what may arise of Taubes’s critique—if correct—that political theology is too often the theology of the Grand Inquisitor, whether that of Dostoevsky or, more recently, the Grand Inquisitor of Plettenberg? For if political theology, especially under Schmitt’s direction, took on the role of the Grand Inquisitor, perhaps it was and is only the friend who is enemy—that is, those likewise involved in political theology who yet critique the Schmittean inversion of civil and ecclesiastic power—who can most truly wound, and wound in the name of truth. For central to political theology is the act of marking out the differences within political theology. And this act of marking out the difference is also central to Taubes’s engagement with Schmitt.

Speaking in 1986, Taubes makes it very clear that, firstly, he is no German, but neither is he an apologist for Schmitt (33–34), rather his “very difficult problem” (34) is that he is a Jew, and this raises a central issues of how to judge. For, in having no choice, how can he judge? In short, Jews did not have to make the decision whether to and how to participate. For judgment can only arise, it appears in a Taubean conception, if you in some way can understand the possibilities, choices, and motivations of the other, of those who you are called upon to judge. What is left is a “problem of fascination” (34), a problem that for Taubes is exemplified with the decisions of both Schmitt and Heidegger to, in short, choose the Nazi alternative. For there seems to be, for Taubes, no way of understanding this from the perspectives of either contemporary history or the historical sciences (34). Further, in having made such a liaison, how could Schmitt and Heidegger meaningfully apologize, and indeed, how could all of those who made a similar choice of what Taubes defines, perhaps most tellingly, as “a phenomenon of violence”? (35). So Taubes’s ongoing fascination with Schmitt is driven by his desire to understand National Socialism, and this also points to why Schmitt was so open to Taubes’s questioning. For here was the enemy who asked the question expected to come from the friend: how could you have made such a choice? How do you explain your choice? In fact can you explain such a choices? And these are different questions from one of judgement, a question of judgement that as Taubes identifies, also involves those who were able to make such a choice now engaging in acts of forgetting, suppressing and displacement (35). The challenge is that of understanding “what kind of glittering dross this was” (35), a question all the more pertinent today with the return of extreme right-wing, nationalist movements across Europe. How could and why do such able minds succumb to the lure of glittering dross? Perhaps this is a question that can only be engaged with if asked in the nonjudgemental approach of the one made enemy without choice, for the betrayal here is so complete.

Therefore, in reading this correspondence, it becomes evident that Taubes’s engagement with Schmitt is in both the realm and form of political theology, which became, of course, a modern nomenclature claimed by Schmitt for what he undertakes. Further, Schmitt, while being antiliberal, was not antidemocrat, but was in favor of a democratic dictatorship over and against liberalism. Therefore Taubes, in growing to understand Schmitt, also comes to understand the seeming oxymoron of democratic dictatorship and especially what can be said to be its lure for antiliberals of both left and right in the twentieth century. And in our understandings of Taubes and Schmitt we can also come to understand how the left, post–cold war, have come to engage with Schmitt as one offering what seems a way forward against liberalism and, more pertinently, against neoliberalism. As Taubes raises, there is an important question here in that what does the left’s fascination with Schmitt tell us about the left? (36). How can the left turn to an extreme right theoretician and jurist to attempt to articulate a way forward? Yet this is nothing new, for the Frankfurt School, as Taubes comments (36), had been influenced by Schmitt in Weimar days; and such an influence continues, for Schmittean topics cross over into concerns also of the left for both left and right are concerned with what seems to them to be the failures and failings of liberalism.

It is here that friend-enemy becomes identified as the central concept, the concept that allows, if at first seemingly paradoxically, for the left to use the right-wing Schmitt or for the Jewish Taubes to be Schmitt’s friend-enemy. The issue is firstly one of the justification of the distinction, a justification that is a justification from power, that is, it is a classification inherently linked to the power of the one who makes the classification. Taubes quotes from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political a most telling description in which it is the intensity of the relationship, a relationship determined by “union or separation” that is expressed as “association or disassociation” (37); the political enemy is first and foremost one who exists on the level of theory and practicality, that is, one who is “the other, the stranger” (37) and in that allows and in fact demands a identity from the one who classifies. In the Schmittean world, the only two identities that count are those of friend or enemy, everyone else is not worthy of notice or engagement; in fact they could be viewed as impediments to the real business of the friend-enemy engagement. They are impediments because they do not take seriously the questions that friend-enemy raise for both engaged in this relationship. In short, you have friends and you have enemies, and your enemy is also one who in an inverted sense is your friend because they ‘get’ what you get—but from the opposing perspective: they are engaged in a similar struggle, in similar questions, in similar dilemmas, if, from necessity, a point of opposition. As Taubes explains, Schmitt, in a private note written in a copy of Ex Captivitate Salus, made a claim that “affects us all: ‘The enemy is our question given form’, that is, one can see oneself in it” (37). In the discussion leading up to this statement, Taubes uses the example of how to classify war and the dangers arising if we decide to rebrand the one we oppose in war as a criminal instead of as an enemy. For if we do not allow war to exist as something we do as humans, something that we engage in, but an engagement that brings about peace, then war and engaging in it, and, most importantly, those who oppose us, who “provoke us” into a state of war, are criminal/criminals, and as criminals to be eliminated. So the liberalism that seeks to criminalize war, in fact, by criminalizing, seeks to eliminate those against whom one is forced into war; what this does is to overturn the traditional friend-enemy relationship, and instead one’s identity is defined by an opposition to the criminal, who must be eliminated in order for us not to be defined by the criminal. Therefore, the question raised by Schmitt’s note is whether it is better to have enemies as questions or enemies as criminals (37). And this is a relationship, a question that exists as the inverse, that is, Schmitt is the enemy as question for Taubes. Therefore friend-enemy are poised in a mutual interquestioning, an existential question to each other, a relationship in which, in effect, all others are excluded as those who are unable and incapable of asking, let alone answering the question/s. This is what the left and right, joining in Schmitt’s friend-enemy against liberalism, do, for what they both get (that is, what they mutually understand)—from differing perspectives—is the problem of liberalism.

Yet for Taubes—and for all who read Schmitt in particular post-1945—there remains the central question of anti-Semitism. Schmitt is a Catholic thinker, and the position of the Catholic Church toward the Jews throughout most its history makes for a shameful record in the main. Protestants and Orthodox are likewise not excluded from this shame, this horror, and this is because of a Christian self-conception as to where it saw—and in the majority of believers, still sees—Christianity in relation to Judaism and Christians in relation to Jews. The question, baldly put, is whether Christianity the end, that is the supplanter, the supersessionism, of Judaism and therefore the rejection of Judaism’s continuation. The Church that looks to a Jew as its savior is also the body that for much of its history persecutes, rejects, denies the validity of Judaism—and Jews as individuals. The culture of Christianity is a culture that ended in the death camps, in the Shoah. This is the central struggle that all Christians, in fact, that all who live in the wake of Christian culture must still wrestle with, must undertake and consider. Asked whether Schmitt—as a Catholic, as a theorist of Christian culture, of culture that arises out of a Christian society—is anti-Semitic or not, Taubes replies, “the Church is anti-Judaic, anti-Semitic” (38). The point is clear, the Church must first and foremost reconsider its identity, for the identity of the Church determines the identity of the culture and the individuals within it; even, as Taubes notes, in a society with a declining belief, the underpinnings of theology and the Church can too easily be manipulated to express a “theozoology” that replaces theology.

Whereas, in the context of Schmitt, Taubes sees this as a widespread Catholic issue, we today must not fall into a simplistic trap of seeing this as a particular, or even a majority, Catholic issue. Anti-Semitism is a Christian issue, a Christian culture issue, and an issue of the post-Christian and secular society that has arisen out of the collapse of Christendom; for while Christendom may have collapsed, anti-Semitism has not, and the roots of this are grounded in the attitudes, beliefs, and teachings of the Church over millennia. However, as can be also gathered from the reading of these letters, it is this that sits at the heart of the friend-enemy because, for Christians and Christianity, Jews and Judaism can, in the Schmittean sense, be seen as “the enemy is our question given,” for “what does it mean to be Christian?” cannot be answered except with central reference to Judaism—then and now. That Schmitt and Taubes are friends-enemies is also part of their friend-enemy approach to the apocalyptic. The question of apocalypse from above is given form in apocalypse from below and vice versa. In all such questions is that central one of ontology: the one I see most clearly as not me demands a question to myself of what am I to be? This also is the reason the left turns to the right in the wake of the collapse of communism in 1989: what enables the right to survive when the left did not? Why did liberalism destroy the left and not the right? What can Schmitt—as central theorist of the right—tell the left as it seeks to redefine, relocate, resituate itself ? For, as Taubes comments in his discussion on liberalism, liberalism comes at the cost of others; even if one would want to be liberal, “the world is not so made that one can be liberal” (38): if we are liberals who pays the cost—if liberalism triumphs, who pays the cost? For, in a line developed from Taubes, liberalism involves, in the end, a denial of the cost others suffer by our being liberal. That is, liberalism is not a neutral state of being, nor a neutral society, but a claim that is inherently oppositional and judgmental, with associated decisions and implementations, and such decisions are primarily focused on the benefits to the victors in what is seen as the inevitable march of human progress. Taubes’s point is that liberal democracy fails to see what happens in history, which is a history of brutality. In short, liberals have too high a view of humanity and human nature, views that a realistic encounter with and examination of human history would quickly overturn.

Taubes is fascinated by Schmitt because in 1929 Schmitt stated that Central Europe lived in a crisis of legitimation, in effect between revolution and counterrevolution, existing under the eye of the Russians for over a century; Russians who, Schmitt claimed, would control the destiny of the century. And nothing had changed for either Taubes or Schmitt post–World War II compared to the world after World War I. In short, how does one restore a society where the choice seems to be a default one for a “depoliticized conventionality” (39), or a “depoliticized normality,” a “cultural ‘neutrality’” (39) that both Taubes and Schmitt, as counterrevolutionaries, view as the expression of liberalism? Thus, for Taubes, Schmitt is compared to a prophet of crisis, counterrevolution, and antiliberalism, someone important for what he enables—and, in fact, demands—us to understand regarding Western history. And part of this is also what Taubes then identifies: that the state of exception is a fiction that happens just once in a lifetime (40). And therefore, following Taubes’s provocation, the possibility emerges that Schmitt has been all too often misread, for the issue is not that of the sovereign deciding the exception but rather what does decision mean, and here reference is made back to Kierkegaard and the centrality of dialectical theology for the state of exception. Out of this discussion arises what can possibly be identified as the central tension of political theology, that is of both the Schmitt text and disciplinary definition, but also, for us today, of the political theology that has enjoyed both an intellectual and political resurgence: what does pure mean and thus, dialectically, what does impure mean? These are central to political theology, for impure is that which arises out of experience, language, and history; therefore pure—in the sense of a pure decision—is that which attempts to act outside of experience, language, and history, in short, that which attempts to act outside the reality of human existence. The decision, made by the human sovereign, is therefore always an impure decision and impure exception because it is made from within and in reference to human experience, language, and history.

In discussing this, Taubes makes use of Hans Kelsen who, in 1925, argues a line combining pure theory with strict positivism and is, when the emergency occurs in Weimar, unable to combat despotism because the despotic state is taken to be representative of legal order. To extend Taubes’s insight, pure theory, whether of law, history, morality, or value, because it does not take account of actual history, has no way to stand against the realities of human history when they occur. On the one hand, the pure theorist is left stating an idealism that is too easily, and all to quickly, silenced, overcome, or easily discarded and repressed; more often, under the emergency and despotism, the pure theory becomes the claim of state that must be obeyed. That Schmitt saw the dangers of such a pure theory, even though he himself became “sucked into” (42) the despotism of the emergency proclaimed in Germany, in fact, speaks to the ongoing and dominating power and control of actual history: none of us is free from experience, from language, from history, and holding onto pure theory will not save us, at best it will make us an irrelevance.

Other issues identified by Taubes include the problems of violence and the ongoing concerns regarding anti-Semitism and Catholicism (42). Taubes, as a narrativist, decides to tell stories as the way to express his thoughts and, in fact, is always engaged in types of narrative: more than a conversation, less than a monologue, a voice at once personal yet reserved (more expressive of learning and knowledge than of the personal). Regarding the problem of violence, Taubes reports how in two cases philosophy does not want to deal with the question, the problem of violence because it is impure, for violence is too tied into the actors and actions of impure history. The implication is clear, Schmitt is one of the few thinkers who will take the problem of violence seriously, whether from the viewpoint of law or from philosophy, because “law does have a relationship to the problem of violence and power” (43). This relationship is what brings both radical right and radical left together in their use of Schmitt, because Schmitt, in his rejection of the liberalism of Weimar, is one of the very few prepared to take violence and power seriously in a way that takes account of the impurity of human history.

Both Schmitt and Taubes realize that, in the modern world, in the face of the claim in The Communist Manifesto that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy profaned,” identity—identity of race, of ethnicity, of blood and soil nationalism, of antimodern religion—became the claims of the solid, of that which attempts to holds out against the melting influence of modernity. Specifically for Schmitt it is Catholicism, a right-wing Catholicism Taubes understands as similar to that of Jacques Maritain, wherein they are connected by Leon Bloy. This is because such Catholic thinkers, especially Schmitt, rethink history in and against modernity as containing an antiliberal teleology that brings theology back into philosophy. Taubes seems to be arguing that Schmitt returns historical time to theology, against liberalism, and in this is part of a wider theological refutation of liberalism, including the Römerbrief of Karl Barth that similarly sought to overcome the limits and limitations of nineteenth-century German idealism (in Barth’s case from a Protestant perspective).

Morality is important to Schmitt because for him politics is not the domain of a political scientist (he is, we must always remember, a jurist and a philosopher)—and because politics is a degree of intensity—everything can become political. Schmitt reminds us that politics is what we do, what we do within limited time as limited humans, and so anything, within an intensity, is politics, is political when we do it, we practice it: when we act. In short, politics is an attitude of and reaction to what can be termed an event—especially those events that become matters of identity, of life and death, or if the event is that of an emergency. Therefore what Schmitt offers is way of freeing the historical intensity of the event of the political from the idealism of politics. What Schmitt offers is a new concrete thinking approach to politics, an approach anchored in the events and intensity of real people in history and time, a concrete thinking that Taubes views as similar to that of the Marxist Ernst Bloch (46), an intensity, a concreteness that Taubes traces back to Simmel (46). Then, in a typically Taubean narrative, unable or unwilling to state what it is about Schmitt that fascinates him (despite having earlier stated it was Schmitt’s counterrevolutionism), Taubes both deflects and intensifies the question by reading out a letter from Walter Benjamin to Schmitt written in 1930. We need to note that just previously Taubes has linked Schmitt to those other Jewish left-wing thinkers Bloch and Simmel. Now he quotes Benjamin thanking Schmitt for the influence on his own work of Schmitt’s writing on sovereignty and the state, and then Taubes concludes by adding his esteem and devotion to that offered by Benjamin. In an instant, Taubes makes us reconsider Benjamin, Taubes, and Schmitt, furthermore making us reconsider how the Frankfurt School might find an unlikely ally in Schmitt (and in this echoing the much later Telos debate). For further remembering Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, only the friends-enemies can understand each other and work with and against each other. To understand the concrete politics, the concrete political of the modern world, the antiliberals of the modern world must engage in an ongoing constructive friend-enemy dialectic. For, against Schmitt, against Bloch, against Simmel, against Taubes, against Benjamin, the liberals of Weimar, the legacy of Weimar liberalism, seek to separate us from concrete history, from concrete philosophy, from being able to respond to concrete events. This is what, via Taubes, we can come to describe as the commonality of the problem of the middle. And yet, what eventuates with the problem of the middle is (we must remember) that which Taubes notes, which actually began the friend-enemy relationship of Taubes and Schmitt; for how, wondered Taubes, first privately and then in the letter to Armin Mohler, could such intelligent men, such important philosophers as Heidegger and Schmitt have “flirted” (which is, we are now aware, a completely inadequate understatement) with Nazism? Or, to put it in a different way, is it a response to the failure of the middle, that is, the failure of Weimar liberalism, the failure further of liberalism per se, that can cause a misjudgment of such a “flirtation,” a “flirtation” with an antiliberal idealism that masquerades as history? Schmitt, in response to the letter, famously anoints Taubes “a Jewish intellectual, who understands more about me than all the rest” (50). Yet what a burden this is. Remember this is very soon after the end of the war, but also at a time (1948) when the planned Israeli constitution was being worked on with the only copy available in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem of Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre. So there is a tension here, a tension between what Schmitt’s political theology offers, especially to those who wish to take theology and politics seriously, who wish to take history and time and the impure actions that eventuate seriously, and the possible implications when the wrong choice is made versus the false attempt of idealism to flee time and history and create a society of the middle. Remember Taubes finds a reception in America, a reception offered by a young Henry Kissinger at Harvard that enables Schmitt to be heard anew because his political theology is presented by a Jew, in America. Taubes, having been “spotted,” as he puts it (51), both in Germany because of his letter to Mohler and in America because of his Harvard lecture, gets drawn into what was, for a long time, a one-sided correspondence with Schmitt.

How can we think of this correspondence? Schmitt sends Taubes his writings, with dedications and references and instructions for further readings. Taubes uses the word pedagogical (51) for the notes, but perhaps we can read the whole relationship as pedagogical, and, further, Schmitt, sensing perhaps the ideal pupil, the one who will not uncritically accept, but rather engage constructively, also knows that he has discovered the ideal reader, for, as Taubes comments, “he is sure that I have read it” (51). This raises a most interesting and important question: is the friend-enemy the most important and most valuable relationship for any teacher, any writer, any thinker? Are we perhaps most understood by those who are in a friend-enemy relationship, unless of course we are of—and write for, the middle? And, of course, if we are of and for the middle, we are against history, against time, against the concrete experiences of being human in all its political impurity.

Taubes is forced to consider such questions and, in the process, is further forced to consider his response to Schmitt’s Nazi “flirtation.” For a constant refrain from Taubes is that if he has learned anything he has learned it from Schmitt, and this further leads him to a position in which he cannot be the judge of Schmitt because, as a Jew, he could not be party to the same temptation that Schmitt suffered, because he was “not allowed” to (52). Now it is this phrase, the “not allowed to,” that must remind us of that earlier debate on the betrayal of Jews by the German liberals in the nineteenth century as part of Emancipation. Because here Taubes speaks of the tension of what could be termed the German Jew and Jewish German, those who lived the friend-enemy relationship most centrally, most personally—in fact within the core of their emancipated liberal identity. Taubes, in a moment of great confessional honesty, states that in the face of such an event as the Nazi period, to have experienced it on the inside, from within Germany or Austria, as a German, he cannot say that he would not have succumbed and gone mad for at least a couple of years.

In acknowledging this, Taubes rises a further question as to whether it is only, truly, Jews, or at least Jews who takes Taubes’s position of not being a judge, who can now, post-1945, really read Schmitt and, to a lesser degree, Heidegger. For all of us who are non-Jews can and, I would argue, must, first and foremost, read Schmitt and Heidegger as if we too were and are allowed to make their decision or reject it in the face of their temptation. For Schmitt defended, to the end, his decision and statements made during the Nazi state, and Taubes finds himself in a situation whereby he cannot think about it. So, for those of us who are non-Jews, when we read and use Schmitt, this must be not without sharing the possibility of the temptation to which he succumbed. And this is not just because Schmitt, as earlier noted, challenges with what he sees as the necessary anti-Semitism of Christian identity. For, in the West, we who are not or even no longer Christian must also remember we exist in what I term an Italian hermeneutics, somewhere between Ignazio Silone’s “Christian without a church and communist without a party”25 and Benedetto Croce’s “we cannot not call ourselves Christian.”²⁶ So a post-Christian or anti-Christian reading, even a Marxist reading of Schmitt, is also linked to the Schmittean problem of Christianity, for Christianity is that which has formed the culture we exist within—or against. The temptation is part of a further, larger one of what choices we might have made, what choices we have made or would make in the face of the failure of liberalism. In the face of such a decision, what choices do we find ourselves facing, and can we read Schmitt properly without being self-aware of this? For Schmitt can only be properly read by us today if we too, by reading him, by making use of him, by engaging in political theology, open ourselves up to the same temptations and the same possibilities unless we wish to remain—or become—liberals.

Schmitt and Taubes are, of course, not liberals—and it can be proposed that both of them are, today, most read and used by those who would not self-identify as liberals: being rather readers from either a right or left perspective. Instead, we may read Schmitt from a perspective demanded by Taubes that there was never an inevitability in German history that ended in Hitler, that is, we cannot read German history, and especially, Taubes emphasizes, we cannot read Weimar history from the consequence, the standpoint of how it ended. Rather, and more challengingly, Schmitt writes from one side of what Taubes identifies as a global civil war, a war between those opposed to liberalism, a war that Taubes claims Schmitt is the only one to have noticed. Therefore Taubes alerts us further to what we do not want or wish to be alerted to, and it is Taubes the Jew who reads Schmitt who understands, precisely, yet again, because, while he is likewise antiliberal, he is not tempted as Schmitt is by the Nazi possibility, but more because he is not allowed to be so tempted.

But in the midst of this civil war, a civil war brought into startling clarity by the willingness of the Telos left to read and make use of Schmitt in their battle against liberalism, we must read without false genealogies of inevitability, genealogies that make us puppets of history and not actors.

For history is lived always open to possibilities, open to consequences, and so decisions must continue to be made, decisions that are real—very real decisions and not just the unfolding of teleological inevitability. A central point made here is that liberal democracy—which allows participation even by those determined to overthrow it—is not actually in the best interests of the wider society. Liberal democracy, in short, with its open inclusion, can find itself too easily overtaken, controlled, and remade by those who are opposed to its very principles. As the exile Dr. Jochum comments in Malcolm Bradbury’s 1965 novel Stepping Westward: “Someone once defined liberals as people who embrace their destroyers. I think protected democracy is proper in a world where there are many destroyers.”27 Or, as the recipient of this advice, the English “angry young man” novelist James Walker is forced to consider that “the speciality of liberalism is the betrayal of the society in which liberalism is permitted to exist.”²⁸ This is the circumstance in which Weimar Germany found itself—a circumstance Schmitt sought to oppose. Today, with the resurgence of ultra-right and ultra-left antidemocratic movements, is a liberal democracy actually the best option—or do we need to limit democracy in order to preserve it? Our answer will depend, as Taubes noted, on the perspective through which we come to understand the world (54). Schmitt, as a lawyer, seeks the end of chaos: his aim is to keep chaos at bay and, via the law, to institute order. Once the state has let chaos in, the task became how to order the chaotic state. Conversely, the philosopher and the theologian do not necessarily so fear chaos, for chaos can be part of a transition to a new situation: chaos can be the working out of justice, truth, or grace. Schmitt as kathechon was opposed to the theologian and the philosopher because as the lawyer he has an investment in the world as it is. Taubes, self-described as an apocalyptic (54), reads Schmitt as the kathechon and on so doing again situates himself as the one who Schmitt sees understands more than anyone else. For what we have presented to us with Schmitt-Taubes is an extension of the friend-enemy: German-Jewish, lawyer-theologian, kathechon-apocalyptic. The central irony is that Schmitt’s kathechon becomes participant in a form of apocalypse that unleashes more chaos than it could ever hope to contain. And yet, as Taubes ruefully concludes: “here was someone who posed substantive questions, just like Heidegger. That was the fascination” (57).

Taubes, writing elsewhere on the issue between Judaism and Christianity, stresses the importance of “the fundamental issue, which is theological and from which all the social and political questions spring originally.”²⁹ This issue, the difference between the Jewish and Christian religions,³⁰ sits at the heart of the relationship between Taubes and Schmitt, and their relationship is a reminder of this. How we read their correspondence will, to a greater or lesser degree, also be influenced by this difference, as will our reading of their individual works. Further, the issue between the two (Christian-Jew, Schmitt-Taubes) begins, as Taubes states, from the Christian side,³¹ and this is the first instance and origin of what in Schmittean terms is civil war, and it is also therefore the beginning of friend-enemy in Western and Christian thinking, becoming most fully expressed in John’s Gospel and by Paul. For the Jewish Christian (to avoid being a heretic) needs the friend-enemy of continuing Judaism, and the Gentile Church, by claiming the new identity that originates within Judaism, extends it with an apocalyptic identity that is expressed as the end of the law because of the coming of the Messiah. The Messiah is the sovereign who decides the exception (and its promised future resolution), yet when the Messiah fails to return, the Church becomes sovereign in place of the unreturned Messiah, and it takes on the role of earthly sovereign in his stead. With Schmitt the jurist we see the return of law as normative, in effect an overturning of the sovereign exception of the Messiah, but while the exception of the Messiah was enforced via the new law that was of the Church, now, in the age of Schmitt, even the law of the Church is overturned and superseded by the new sovereign of the state. What we get, as Taubes describes, is opposition to the theological-hierarchical order of the universe by the strongly antitheological basis of secular jurisprudence.³² However, theological reason and juridical reason both stand strongly opposed to economic reason and also to later technological reason, which is why Schmitt and Taubes as so linked, for both stand opposed to these later forms and governmentality of reason. But here too is the understanding of why, in opposition to economic and technological reason, there has been such a turn to Schmitt—even by the left. For the alternative, as so presented, is to turn to theological reason, and Schmittean juridical reason allows the opposition to theological reason to continue, even as one stands opposed to economic and technological reason. And what we must remember is that theological reason and juridical reason stand as friend-enemy to one another in a way in which economic and technological reason allow no such relationship, for while the theological and the juridical may be engaged with each other in a state of war, in contrast, the economic and the technological are encountered as the expression of apocalypse; there is not civil war with the economic or technological, for they are expressions and visitations of a completely new order.