Carl Schmitt - Wisdom of the Cell

 

You wish to perceive yourself and (perhaps even more) your real situation? There is a good touchstone for this. Try to notice which of the thousands of definitions of the human being seems immediately clear to you.

I attend to this in my cell, and it becomes immediately clear to me that the human being is naked. At his most naked is the person unclothed before someone clothed, disarmed before someone armed, powerless before someone in power. Adam and Eve already knew all this upon their eviction from the Garden of Eden.

The question immediately arises: On whom must the definition of the human be modeled, on the naked or on the dressed person? On the disarmed or on the armed? On the powerless or on the powerful? And which of the two is closer to paradise? In the paradises of this world today people move about in clothes. It is immediately clear to me that I am naked.

“Now you stand naked, naked as at birth, in desolate expanses.”1 In the desolate expanses of a narrow cell. The articles of clothing left for me confirm only the objective nakedness.

They even underline it in a highly ironic and uncomfortably emphatic way. You see yourself thrown back upon your self and upon your last reserves. What are my last reserves? A remainder of physical force. This is of course easy to extinguish. Nevertheless, at the moment it is still here. I see clearly in an instant:

I inherited
only my own body,
and that I waste away as I live.2

This line is sung by Richard Wagner’s Siegfried in a wonderful, rising and falling interval. A bubbling, physical feeling of happiness seems to be captured here. No later musician or lyricist expressed so much physical joy. The force of this artistic expression still obviously rides the waves ridden by the Revolution of 1848 in Germany. The musical interval comes from Richard Wagner. The line itself, though, can be traced to Max Stirner.3 With this we approach a paradise in which something of paradisiacal nakedness shines forth.

* * *

I have known Max Stirner since Unterprima [the eighth year of German secondary school]. It is thanks to this acquaintanceship that I was prepared for some of what I have encountered to this day, which might otherwise have surprised me. Whoever knows the depths of the European train of thought between 1830 and 1848 is prepared for most of what rings loud in the world today. Since 1848 the rubble field left by the self-decomposition of German theology and idealistic philosophy has changed into a force field of theogonic and cosmogonic approaches. What explodes today was prepared before 1848. The fire that burns today was laid at that time. There are certain uranium mines in the history of ideas. Among them are the Presocratics, a few fathers of the church, and also a few writings from the period before 1848. Poor Max definitely belongs here.

Taken as a whole, he is awful, loutish, pretentious, self-important [renommistisch], a Pennalist,4 a degenerate student, a lump [Knote], an egomaniac, clearly a serious psychopath. He crows in a loud, unpleasant voice: I am Me, I care about nothing but Myself [Mir geht nichts über Mich].
His verbal sophisms are unbearable. The hep cat [Zazou] of his cigar-smoking, basement-bar bohemian lifestyle [Stammtisch-Bohème] is disgusting. But Max knows something very important. He knows that the I is no object of thought. And so he came up with the most beautiful, in any case the most German book title in the whole of German literature: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum [The Ego and Its Own].5 At this moment, Max is the only person who visits me in my cell. This touches me deeply, as he is such a rabid egoist.

He expressed his ultimate motivation in a letter in which he says: then we will become once again like the animals in the woods and the flowers of the field. This is the real yearning of this egomaniac. This is the new paradise. This is nature and the natural law, the suspension of self-alienation and of self-externalization in a problem-free corporeality [Leibhaftigkeit]: the Adamitic happiness of the garden of earthly delights, which Hieronymous Bosch cast in white nakedness upon a panel;6 also the animals in the woods and the flowers of the field; the flight of the midge in sunshine; the completely natural nature and the natural law of the deepest spheres of telluric existence; the utterly unencumbered twittering of Rossini’s thieving magpie;7 the pure identitfication with oneself in the pleasurable feeling of a blissfully accelerated bloodstream. Pan awakens and appears in the earth-conscious circle [erdbewußten Kreis].8 Max is one of the first Panists who later peopled the field of German literature and the paradises of its deproblematization.

But this poor Pan was not equal to the challenge of modern natural science. Today his happiness is not even an illusion any longer. It is the pleasure of the poor holidaymaker escaped from the big city into the countryside, the fleeting awakening of cheerful feelings in the holiday child—or, for that matter, the blissful feeling of a poetry award winner. Their desire is no longer for eternity. It moves within the frame of a right to vacation. It still naturally creates an appetite for more, but submits itself, in resignation, to the fact that the vacation cannot be eternal. This poor ego can only wed itself to its echo; and in this infertile, self-indulgent marriage it is no longer lonely [vereinsamt] but by now organizationally appropriated [vereinnahmt]. Planning has appropriated it long ago.

The plan appears and Pan stops smirking. Pan sinks, the plan appears on the scene [der Plan tritt aufden Plan]. A nice example of the immanent oracular character of our German language.

* * *

New paradises beckon now: this time the paradises of a thoroughly planned world, with all the glories of unchained forces of production and a power of consumption increased to infinity, as well as with generously extended leisure time, endowed with the appropriate recreational activities. It is the paradise of a technicized earth and its thoroughly organized humanity. The natural barrier falls; the limits of society capture us in its place. They not only capture us, they change us. The matter is not one of recognizing the world and the human being any more, but rather of changing them.

For 10 years we have occasionally seen how quickly the artificial paradises of technology change into real hells. We learned this lesson especially clearly in the cold winter of 1946/7 in Berlin, as burst pipes destroyed the wastewater system and the downside of paradise became visible. But these are disruptions that can be avoided. Also, they impact just the vanquished. One only needs to find and isolate the source of the trouble, the disrupter, and the problem is solved. We will find the disrupter. The disrupter is the guilty party and the guilty party is the disrupter. Who this is in each concrete case will be communicated to us by the responsible agencies. We will nevertheless reach the goal of technology.

We? Fifty years ago our progressive grandparents told us: in 50 years we will fly. In fact flight is a reality today.

But neither our long-deceased grandparents nor we, their grandchildren, may fly. Not we, but others fly. This we of our progressive grandparents had something touching about it. It rested on a naïve identification with the masters of the world, who would be supported by technical means in 50 years’ time and whose wishes the unleashed productive forces would fulfill. All myths of progress are based upon such identifications, that is, upon the childlike assumption that one will be among the gods of the new paradise. In reality, however, the selection process is very rigorous, and the new elites take care to keep a sharper watch than the old. We should thus pause before growing enthusiastic about the new paradise. One cannot reasonably say more today.

Perhaps in 50 or 100 years humans will be free of misery; those who live today, in any case. The others will no longer interest themselves in our current misery. For this reason we do not intend either to chase after them or to run ahead of them. I am only interested for the moment in whether the human being in the new paradise of technology is naked or clothed. The clothing industry will probably undergo such an upswing and unleash such productive forces that we will be able to afford new, fantastic costumes daily. Charles Fourier may paint this in detail. The prophesy of Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue, that the wool of lambs will grow in the most beautiful purple all by itself,9 then, seems old-fashioned and indeed reactionary. But perhaps our dream of fantastic quantities of incessantly new clothing is itself old-fashioned and reactionary. Perhaps there will be no clothes and costumes at all. Technology will advance so far that we will be able to wrap ourselves in envelopes of light and warmth.

Wonderful. Yet there is more. We will transform even the material of our body into radiation. This is, then, the technically transfigured body, just as our pilots are the technically perfected angels. We—that is, then, only the select few of the new paradise, of course: the new elite.

Hence they are neither naked nor clothed. The distinction loses its sense in a new stage of being [Daseinstufe]. They are no longer humans at all; they are the entirely other. A few theologians today say that God would be the entirely other. But what is entirely other is entirely unpredictable. Why should the new man not be the entirely other? The human being, as we know it, is something that has to be overcome. Why should it not be overcome in this way? It will then be no longer procreated, no longer conceived, and no longer born. Th en Aldous Huxley’s brave new world,10 with its consistent, highly scientific planning of offspring, becomes obsolete as well; and so does our question about the definition of the human being. Everything, then, is just radiation.

Am I on this earth for the purpose of working so that technology may transform us into radiation? If so, under whose authority should I place myself in order to take up the work? For I have long ceased to exist for myself, alone and in isolation; I have long been organizationally appropriated.

These are questions it is no longer permissible even to ask. You have nothing more to ask, rather only answer the questions posed to you. Not we, but others formulate the questionnaires that call you and your questions into question. Understand at last what this means. It is tasteless of you to use the luxury of solitary confinement to indulge in the illusion that you are only isolated and not thoroughly appropriated by now.

Do you want to succumb once again to deception?

* * *

Self-delusion is inherent to loneliness. The solitary person thinks with himself and talks to himself, and in talking to ourselves, as we know, we are talking to a dangerous flatterer. The moralists were right to consider autobiography a sign of vanity. Yet vanity would still be the most harmless and endearing of the motives under consideration here. The saints write no autobiographies. At the deepest core of the cell lie the internal dialogue and the self-delusion.

Terrible is the fear of Descartes, who philosophizes at the stove in his lonely room and thinks only of escaping the evil, deceptive spirit, spiritus malignus, against whose tricks we are never secure—and least of all when we feel secure. In fear of deception, Descartes becomes a masked man, l’homme au masque. He is no longer naked, but no longer clothed either. He is masked. Larvatus prodeo [“I advance wearing a mask”]. Fear is all the more terrible as it becomes the source of ever new deceptions. Whoever thinks of escaping the deception runs headlong into it. Deception of feeling and of the understanding, deception of the fl esh and of the mind, deception of vice and of virtue, deception of man and woman.

I always succumb to deception again and again. I have escaped it again and again. I will also succeed with the final leap. Come, beloved death.

* * *

Death can betray us as well. Both death as a leap into the realm of freedom and the heath/ens’ soft death. All deception is and remains self-deception. The self-armoring of Max Stirner is the highest self-deception. It is for this reason that his mixture of harmlessness and cunning, of honest challenge and deceitful swindle is so ugly. Like any egomaniac, he sees the enemy in the not-I. Thus the whole world becomes his enemy, and he imagines that it would have to fall for him if, remaining free, he were to offer it the brotherly kiss. In this way he hides from the dialectical power of ego splitting and seeks to elude the enemy by means of deception. But the enemy is an objective power. He will not escape it, and the real enemy will not let itself be deceived.

Who is my enemy, then? Is my enemy the person who feeds me here, in the cell? He even clothes and shelters me. The cell is the clothing he donates. I ask myself, then: Who can my enemy be? To be sure, I do it in such a way as to be able to acknowledge him as enemy, and in fact it must be acknowledged that he acknowledges me as enemy. In this mutual acknowledgment of acknowledgment lies the greatness of the concept. It is not very appropriate for an age of the masses with pseudo-theological enemy myths. What is more, the theologians tend to define the enemy as something that must be destroyed. But I am a jurist, not a theologian.

Whom in the world can I acknowledge as my enemy? Clearly only him who can call me into question. By recognizing him as enemy I acknowledge that he can call me into question. And who can really call me into question? Only I myself. Or my brother. The other proves to be my brother, and the brother proves to be my enemy. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humankind. This is what the father of all things looks like. This is the dialectical tension that keeps world history moving, and world history has not yet ended. Take care, then, and do not speak lightly of the enemy.

One categorizes oneself through one’s enemy. One grades oneself through what one recognizes as hostility. The destroyers, who justify themselves by claiming that the destroyers must be destroyed, are of course bad. But all destruction is only self-destruction. The enemy, by contrast, is the other. Remember the great sentences of the philosopher: the relation in the other to itself, that is the real infiity. The negation of the negation, says the philosopher, is no neutralization, rather the real infinite depends upon it. But the real infinite is the basic concept of his philosophy.

“The enemy is our own question as form.”11

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

Woe to him who has no enemy, for I will be his enemy on Judgment Day.

* * *
This is the wisdom of the cell. I lose my time and win my space. Suddenly the calm that holds the meaning of the words overcomes [übereilt] me. Space [Raum] and Rome [Rom] are the same word. Wonderful are the spatial force [Raumkraft] and the germinal force [Keimkraft] of the German language.It has brought about the rhyme between word and place.It has even preserved the spatial sense of the word rhyme [Reim] and allowed its poets the dark play between rhyme [Reim] and home [Heimat].

In rhyme the word seeks the filial sound of its meaning. The German rhyme is not the beacon [Leuchtfeuer] of the rhymes of Victor Hugo. It is echo, clothing, and decoration and at the same time a divining rod for the location of meaning. Now I am seized by the word of sybilline poets, my dissimilar friends Theodor Däubler and Konrad Weiß. The dark play of their rhymes becomes meaning and appeal.

I listen for their word, I listen and suffer and understand that I am not naked but rather clothed, and on the way to a house. I see the defenseless, rich fruit of the years, the defenseless rich fruit from which meaning springs by right [aus der dem Recht der Sinn erwächst].12

Echo grows before each word;
like a storm from the open place
it hammers through our gate.

13 April 1947

1 Translator’s note: Th eodor Däubler, “Perseus,” in idem, Der sternenhelle Weg [The Starlit Way], ed. Harald Kass. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag (available online at http://www.gedichte.eu/ex/daeubler/der-sternehelle-weg/der-nachtwandler.php).

2 Translator’s note: Richard Wagner (1985 [1876]), Twilight of the Gods [Götterdämmerung], trans. A. Porter. London: Calder Publishers, Act I, Scene 1, line 2. This translation of the opera’s text can be found at http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/ gotterd/e-gott-a1s2.html.

3 Translator’s note: Stefan Pegatzky suggests that the line from Wagner’s opera paraphrases a passage from Max Stirner; see Stefan Pegatzky (2002), Das poröse Ich: Leiblichkeit und Aesthetik von Arthur Schopenhauer zu Th omas Mann [The Porous I: Corporality and Aesthetics from Arthur Schopenhauer to Th omas Mann]. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, p. 188, n. 425. See also Max Stirner (2016 [1844]), The Ego and Its Own. N.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, p. 257.

4 Translator’s note: Pennalism denotes a hierarchical relation of service between newly matriculated and older members of regional student fraternities (Landsmannschaften), largely at Protestant universities, especially in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries.

5 Translator’s note: See above, n. 3.

6 Translator’s note: The Garden of Earthly Delights is the title later  given to a triptych painted by Hieronymous Bosch between 1490 and 1510, which is now housed at the Prado in Madrid.

7 Translator’s note: This is a reference to the eponymous character in Gioacchino Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), first performed in Milan in 1817.

8 Translator’s note: “Earth-conscious” [erdbewußt] is an allusion to Däubler’s Northern Lights, which contains lines such as “Die alle Erdenbrunst in das Bewußtsein leitet.” See Theodor Däubler (2013 [1910]), Das Nordlicht (Florentiner Ausgabe). N.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. The full text of this epic poem is available at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/das-nordlicht-2075/1 (Text im Projekt Gutenberg).

9 Translator’s note: Virgil (2009), Th e Eclogues and the Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis. Oxford: Oxford Classics, p. 19. Th e  Notes to pages 68–74 89 Fourth Eclogue is famous for the interpretations it had generated over the identity of its subject—a savior and future ruler of the world, whose birth this poem celebrates.

10 Translator’s note: Aldous Huxley (2007 [1932]), Brave New World. New York: Vintage.

11 Translator’s note: From Theodor Däubler (1916), Hymne an Italien [Hymn to Italy]. Munich: Georg Müller.

12 Translator’s note: Paraphrase of a line from the opening stanzas of Konrad Weiß’s The Christian Epimetheus. The translation above, “from which meaning springs by right,” is at odds with that given by Jacques de Ville: “upon which the law of meaning grows”; see Jacques de Ville (2016), “Schmitt’s Weisheit der Zelle: Rethinking the Concept of the Political,” in Law, Memory and Violence: Uncovering the Counter-Archive, ed. Stewart Motha and Honni von Rijswijk. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 228. De Ville’s translation, probably suggested by word order, runs against the syntax of cases (dem Recht, dative and der Sinn, nominative).

13 Translator’s note: Konrad Weiß (1933), Der christliche Epimetheus. Berlin: Edwin Runge (available at http://www.seiten-der-dichtung.de/konradweiss/dce.html).

From: Ex Captivitate Salus Experiences, 1945–47 Carl Schmitt Edited by Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein Translated by Matthew Hannah