Carl Schmitt, Jünger’s Unlikely Friend

 

Unlike Jünger, Spengler and Ernst von Salomon, several renowned intellectuals belonging to the same hard-to-define movement of the Conservative Revolution had initially hoped that the new chancellor would be the providential actor that would bring about their country’s national recovery. I am thinking of the jurist Carl Schmitt, the writer Gottfried Benn and the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was, for a long time, part of the circle of Jünger’s close friends. They had met at the beginning of 1930 and the mutual appeal exerted by these two superior yet different minds had been so great that Jünger would often speak of his ‘unfathomable friend’ and his ‘invigorating’158  company. What had also brought them closer before 1933 was their shared distrust of Western democracies. On the other hand, the two men would have divergent standpoints as soon as Hitler had risen to power.

The great jurist had published his major works at the time of the Weimar Republic: his criticism of political romanticism (1919); his book on dictatorship (1921); and his studies on political theology (1922), on the political form of the Roman Catholic Church (1923), on the notion of the political (1928), and on the concepts of legality and legitimacy (1932). Remaining rather on the fringes of the Conservative Revolution, he was hostile to any and all organismic thought and even rejected an entire part of the German political tradition in order to draw inspiration from Italian (Machiavelli), French (Joseph de Maistre), Spanish (Donoso Cortès) and English (Thomas Hobbes) authors. His Christian faith, which Jünger did not share, and his counter-revolutionary Roman Catholicism served as a basis for his philosophy of the State. He criticised liberalism, as well as the economic and moral doctrine of individualism, which he deemed incompatible with genuine democracy owing to the fact that the latter presupposes a political homogeneity of citizens and a similarity of views between the governing and the governed. In July 1932, he called for a vote against the NSDAP headed by Hitler, whom he considered dangerous due to his ideological and political immaturity. Supporting Chancellor von Papen, he even spoke out in favour of the Reichswehr-based national dictatorship project, arguing for a ban on both the Nazi Party and the Communist Party for being in breach of the Weimar Constitution159  .

Following in von Papen’s footsteps, however, he would align himself with the new power from the beginning of 1933. On 1 May 1933, he would even join the NSDAP, whose ban he had called for shortly before. With regard to this reversal, the question remains open as to the role of Schmitt’s opportunism and career concerns, which may or may not account for this. Appointed to the Prussian State Council in 1933, he also became the head of the National Socialist Association of German Jurists. His ambition was, in fact, to become the official jurist of the new Reich. Philosophically, he hoped to promote the idea of the State (the ‘total’ State, as he himself wrote) at the expense of the notion of Party. His theory was that there is no totalitarian state as such, only a totalitarian party whose ambitions are to be limited by the State.160  At the same time, he firmly upheld the distinction, a fundamental one in his eyes, between what is political and what is not; between the public sphere and the private sphere.

These conceptions would be rejected by the Nazis, who would regard them as a surrendering of the prerogatives enjoyed by the Party and its leader in favour of the State, all the more so since Schmitt was also opposed to any biological racism that contradicted his own philosophy of history. For this reason, he would be targeted by ever-increasing criticism from 1934 onwards. In 1936, he is forced to resign from his official functions, before being subjected to a public trial by the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps,161  in two front-page articles published in December 1936.162  Realising that he had deceived himself, he confines himself to his academic work, adding to the number of those who had embraced ‘internal emigration’, to which Ernst Jünger had long preceded him. This would not stop him, however, from being arrested by the American police in 1945. He would thereafter be imprisoned in Nuremberg until May 1947. In the meantime, he had been expelled from university and was without pension, depending on a few friends to survive. Plummeting into the blackest bitterness, he would thus indulge, on the pages of his own Journal (Glossarium), in venomous attacks against his friend Jünger, reproaching him for his apparent detachment and his gradual return to grace.

Dominique Venner

Ernst Jünger - A Different European Destiny 

To confiscate the word humanity, has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human ...

 From ‘Regulated War’ to the Return of the ‘Just War’

‘Statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies,’ writes Irving Kristol, one of the principal American neoconservatives in the journal of his son William, The Weekly Standard.[29] Carl Schmitt would not have disagreed with this statement; neither in its descriptive aspect nor in its normative aspect. The very essence of politics consists, according to him, not so much in the fact of hostility as in the possibility of making a distinction between public friends and public enemies — not when a conflict has already materialised, but in respect of potential conflicts. Politics, in other words, implies conflict: a strictly pacific vision of social life is an unpolitical vision. Consequently, the uncertainty of the identity of the enemy constitutes one of the greatest dangers in politics. Schmitt, however, does not maintain the famous formula of Clausewitz, according to whom war is only the continuation of politics by other means. On the contrary, he emphasises that ‘its meaning for the understanding of the essence of politics is thereby still not exhausted.’[30] War is itself, just like the state of emergency of which we shall speak again below, a border concept (Grenzbegriff). It is incontestably an extension of politics because politics implies hostility, but it cannot be reduced to this because it has its own essence. Schmitt emphasises that war has its own perspective and its own rules, and that the latter ‘all presuppose that the political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is.’[31] In supporting the view that politics, even in peacetime, possesses a conflictual dimension, Schmitt adopts a position close to that of Clausewitz, but which should not be confused with it; it tends rather to complete it and to go beyond it. Clausewitz sees what is political in war, Schmitt what is conflictual in politics.

Schmitt posits at the same time a political conception of hostility. The enemy must, according to him, be regarded politically: he must remain a political enemy, that is, an adversary that one must fight, certainly, but with whom one can one day make peace. In the perspective of the jus publicum europaeum,[32] peace clearly remains the aim of war: every war is naturally concluded by a peace treaty. And, as it is only with an enemy that one can make peace, that implies that the belligerents mutually recognise one other. Such a recognition (of the Other, both in his similarities and in his differences) is the very condition that makes peace possible, for only a belligerent whom one has previously recognised can be invited to conclude a peace treaty. This is why Schmitt affirms that an absolute war, a total war, would be a disaster from a strictly political point of view since, by attempting to annihilate the enemy, it eliminates the element which constitutes politics.[33]

Of the ‘regulated war,’ characteristic of the Westphalian order founded on the jus publicum europaeum which replaced the old respublica christiana,[34] Carl Schmitt says that it is a war where the belligerents ‘respect each other at war as enemies and do not treat one another as criminals, so that a peace treaty becomes possible and even remains the normal, mutually accepted end of war.’[35] War conducted according to the old law of nations follows rules governing, for example, the conduct of troops towards prisoners and civilians, the respect for neutral parties, the immunity of ambassadors, the rules of surrendering a stronghold, and the modalities of concluding a peace treaty. It almost never aims at overthrowing a sovereign or changing the government of a country, and is usually fought simply to achieve territorial objectives. Finally, it is an exclusively inter-state reality. The state enjoys at the same time a monopoly of legitimate violence (Max Weber) and a monopoly of political decision (Schmitt), meaning that private wars and family vendettas are forbidden (a prohibition that was gradually extended to the duel). This means that individuals can only be public enemies as members or citizens of a state, and not individually in themselves. In the Westphalian order each sovereign’s jus ad bellum[36] is recognised, for it is part of the liberties or rights constitutive of state sovereignty. Such a system excludes the very idea of ‘international police.’ It also recognises the legitimacy of the neutrality of third parties.

In the eyes of Schmitt, the great merit of the jus publicum europaeum has been to substitute for the Medieval doctrine of the ‘just war,’ with its moral origin, a political doctrine of the ‘war within protocols’ or ‘war in due form’ (Vattel).[37] This new doctrine was introduced when the sovereign states asserted themselves, notably in relation to the Roman Church (as a result of the ‘neutralisation’ of the religious wars that had divided and devastated Europe). This development led first to the recognition of the sovereign character, and equal sovereignty, of states, then to the emphasis no longer of jus ad bellum (the rules governing when a war can be lawfully started) but of jus in bello (the rules governing how a war, once begun, should be conducted). From then on, it is no longer the war that is accepted when it is declared ‘just,’ but the enemy who becomes ‘just’ insofar as he is recognised. War between states is thus a fundamentally symmetrical war. It is modelled on the duel, in which the adversaries mutually recognise each other’s equality and both observe the rules of the same code. Thanks to the formal concept of the justus hostis,[38] of the recognised enemy, international law makes war a regulated confrontation between sovereign states that are formally equal, basically amounting to ‘a duel between cavaliers seeking satisfaction.’[39] 

(...)

After the First World War, a persistent current continued to fight for the suppression and criminalisation of war. It is this mistaken position, and also the persistent ideal of a world where war has been eliminated forever, which leads today to the reappearance of the concept of the just war, and to the legitimation of war by a moral doctrine based on the ideology of human rights. This makes possible once again the war of annihilation, while technological progress permits the development of more powerful weapons than ever before. It is no longer a question of just war in the Medieval sense, which still recognised certain limitations, but the just war conducted in the name of ‘humanity,’ of ‘freedom’ and of ‘right.’ Already, with the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, it is not so much war in itself which was condemned as the right of nations and states to wage it. In this way, wars based on national interest were decreed to be unjust, whereas international war, war conducted in the name of humanity, became the new ‘just war.’ The danger of this development ‘is that it […] imposes on politics the mortal snare of a perpetual peace that has every likelihood of transforming itself into endless war.’[54] It is summarised in the formula, ‘Perpetual war for perpetual peace.’

According to Carl Schmitt, ‘The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.’[55] The reason for this is that humanity is either a biological category or a moral category; it is not a political concept. Schmitt cites here the famous phrase of Proudhon: ‘[W]hoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.’ ‘When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity,’ he explains, ‘it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent.’[56] ‘The concept of humanity,’ he adds, ‘is an ideological instrument especially useful to imperialist expansions. Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being — and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. […] To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolise such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.’[57]

In France, on 7 August 1793, the deputy Garnier de Saintes, had already proposed to the Convention[58] that the English statesman William Pitt should be declared ‘the enemy of mankind,’ in order that everybody may have the right to assassinate him. To fight in the name of humanity in fact means that one places oneself in the position of decreeing who is human and who is not. That is the paradox: all discussion that claims to efface the boundaries between men to extend the notion of ‘us’ to the totality of the human species ends in recreating in the midst of humanity itself a line of division and exclusion more radical than the ones preceding it. ‘Only when man appeared to be the embodiment of absolute humanity did the other side of this concept appear in the form of a new enemy: the inhuman,’ writes Schmitt.[59] War in the name of morality is thus the very model of the most inhumane warfare. Abstract universalism makes absolute enemies of its adversaries and transforms ‘humanitarian’ wars into wars of extermination.

Following the example of revolutionary France, the United States has never stopped proclaiming that the causes which it defends are consistent with the interests of humanity. ‘[The American] flag,’ said Woodrow Wilson already, ‘is the flag not only of America but of humanity.’[60] ‘We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders,’ noted Irving Babbitt in 1924.[61] ‘This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind,’ George W. Bush stated in a speech on 11 September 2002, one year after the attacks in New York and Washington.[62]

Instead of ‘humanity,’ Schmitt could just as well have spoken of ‘freedom.’ In the course of history, freedom has also constantly been cited by the United States to justify its enterprises of conquest or annexation. It was by the concept ‘empire of freedom,’ theorised by Jefferson, that it justified its first territorial conquests at the expense of Spain (in Cuba) and Mexico (in Texas). The intervention in Vietnam was also conducted in the name of ‘freedom.’ The same goes for the war on Iraq, which plunged that country into civil war and chaos. In his State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003, George W. Bush proclaimed, ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.’

From this perspective, it is no coincidence that the epoch in which human rights have been proclaimed most forcefully is also that in which the wars fought have proved to be the most inhumane. This observation, according to Carl Schmitt, is not at all paradoxical since it is when fighting in the name of humanity that one is justified in considering one’s enemies as inhuman. Proclaimed humanism ends in actual dehumanisation. The Kosovo War, conducted in the name of ‘human rights,’ resulted in a systematic violation of the rights of the Serbs, as well as a good amount of ‘collateral damage.’ The war conducted against Iraq in the name of ‘freedom’ ended in what General Tommy Franks characterised as a ‘catastrophic success.’ Another reason is that there cannot be timeless fundamental rights, for what is fundamental is always determined by a specific epoch or culture.[63]

Total war marks not only the return to the ‘state of nature’ as Hobbes imagined it. The wars where the enemy is considered as a criminal or an outlaw thereby betray their theological or religious character. Like the crusades, the wars of religion or wars conducted against the heretics or pagans, these are wars without limits, wars taken to extremes, because they come under moral categories between which there can be no reconciliation. ‘It goes without saying,’ notes Norbert Campagna, ‘that evil cannot enjoy “equality under the law” with the good side: the forces that fight for “the good” lay claim to all of the rights, while the forces that are ranged on the side of “evil” find themselves, for their part, deprived of all rights, for it is inconceivable to let the forces of evil enjoy any rights whatsoever [...] The “good” can drop bombs on civilian populations; the “bad” have no right to do so [...] If the cause for which one fights a war is just [then] all hostile acts one commits in it are intrinsically just, however little care one takes to wage it according to the rulebook.’[64] The fight in the name of good authorises not only the interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states (in the name of humanitarianism, freedom, democracy or human rights) but also the restriction of freedoms, the opening of camps that permit the internment of prisoners without any legal status, the bombing of civilian populations, the destruction of industrial infrastructure, the recourse to torture, the use of napalm or white phosphorus, depleted uranium projectiles, cluster bombs, anti-personnel mines, and so on. In a public debate on CBS in 1996, the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was questioned by Leslie Stahl on the necessity of establishing a blockade against Iraq, thereby bringing about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children (‘We have heard that a half-million children have died [in Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?’). Albright’s reply was unequivocal: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.’[65]

The consequences of equating the enemy with a criminal who should be punished, are therefore considerable. ‘That ends,’ writes Jean François Kervégan, ‘in the transformation of international law into an annex of the penal code, and war into a police action aimed at repressing the guilty.’[66] The repression of crimes and offences being traditionally under the jurisdiction of the police, the military gradually assumes the character of a police force. Already in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt declared that in the future the United States could indeed find itself forced to ‘exercise [the power] of the international police.’[67] In the period between the wars, at the time of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the ‘prohibition of war’ would lead belligerents to redefine their interventions as so many international police actions in order to avoid the criminalisation of their enterprises. Today, notably in the context of the war on terror, we are witnessing a revealing blurring of the distinction between police and army: while the police are increasingly made to ensure internal order by military means, the army undertakes wars which are regularly presented as international police actions.

In much the same way, the boundary between domestic and foreign politics, that is, between international conflicts and civil wars, is breaking down. As Claude Polin observes, ‘The new wars are and can only be universal (world-wars), merciless (without quarter), unlimited (total) and without rules (these are international civil wars).’[68] Carl Schmitt emphasises on many occasions that the just war inevitably leads to civil war by virtue of the fact that it can be conducted without consideration of the rules of the jus in bello. One of the essential rules of the ‘war in due form’ is the distinction between combatants and non-combatant, between soldiers and civilians. This distinction is automatically effaced in the just wars of modern times, where one tends to consider that the entire enemy population is guilty. The recourse to indiscriminate aerial bombardment, with its destructive power and at the same time anonymous and ‘cold-blooded’ character, is one of the logical consequences of this development.

Today, we also see the proliferation of non-state actors (non-governmental organisations, private and multinational foundations, financial interests, lobbyists, etc.) in all the domains of international life. This evolution has redefined the relationships between the public and the private spheres, and between the civilian and military sectors. Whereas soldiers become more and more ‘technicians’ or ‘civilians in uniform,’ we simultaneously see an accelerated privatisation of all that relates to security (or to preventing insecurity). The privatisation of war does not result merely from the fact that, in many theatres of operation, the belligerents are civilians who have taken up arms, or from the fact that certain criminal organisations now have recourse to veritable private armies, as is the case with drug-traffickers. Another notable fact is the reappearance of private mercenary armies, notably in the United States, where in the absence of conscription, enrolment in the regular army is relatively small in relation to the total population.

The private military companies, or PMCs, independent or not of the military-industrial complex, today occupy a rising position in the architecture of the American military and national security (especially since their use compensates for the reluctance of Congress to put in regular troops on the ground). The turnover of such companies, in some cases listed on the stock market, is constantly growing. The best known are DynCorp Inc., Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), Kellogg Brown & Rott (KBR), Blackwater Security Consulting, Erinys, Sandline, Titan and Caci International. KBR, which belongs to the Halliburton multinational, where several members of the Bush government hold personal interests, signed a 200 million dollar contract with the Pentagon on 13 June 2003. The security company Blackwater has itself deployed almost 50,000 mercenaries around the world. These private companies, which are always looking for new markets related to defence and security, have been pivotal in the redeploying American power in the Persian Gulf. Today, they are especially active in Iraq, where nearly 20,000 mercenaries provide logistical support for the regular forces, without any excessive care of the choice of means (and without their deaths being counted among the losses suffered by the American military). These auxiliary combatants, who are sometimes paid as much as 1,000 dollars per day, are not subject to any rules, conventions or regulations. Their status is eminently paradoxical for, although legally employed by the United States, under international law they are considered illegal combatants.[69] ‘The private military companies employed by the Pentagon (sometimes at unreasonably high costs),’ writes Sami Makki, ‘have become essential for a new interventionist strategy based on the capacity to rapidly deploy forces anywhere in the world.’[70] The mercenary ‘market’ is today estimated at 100 billion dollars a year.[71] Concomitantly, but in an opposite direction, we see a militarisation of humanitarianism, due to development and humanitarian aid themselves becoming auxiliary instruments in the fight against asymmetric threats, as well as in the expansion of influence on the international scene.

The effacement of boundaries between the classical categories of aggression culminates in the confusion of the notions of war and peace themselves. When the enemy is set up as a figure of evil, it is no longer possible to make peace with him, for to make peace would be to compromise with evil. In the old law of nations (jus gentium), defeat was considered sufficient ‘punishment.’ Now, one has to impeach before tribunals those whom one stigmatises as ‘responsible’ for the war. The indefinite pursuit of war, even in times of peace, then becomes a moral imperative. Carl Schmitt saw that the Treaty of Versailles and the Kellogg-Briand Pact created an intermediate state between war and peace in which peace became a sort of pursuit of war by other means.[72] This situation has not ceased to evolve ever since, ending up as near-indistinguishability. The ‘just war’ of modern times no longer ends in a peace treaty in good and due form, but is pursued in peace under other forms. Once the guns have fallen silent, the guilty should still be punished, while the enemy population should possibly be ‘reeducated.’ The wars no longer end: they become interminable, for it becomes much more difficult to put an end to them when they are pursued also in peace. ‘Cold war’ or ‘hot war’: aggression becomes, under different forms, a permanent condition. It is at the same time an eradication of the border between the exception (which is war) and the norm (which is peace). Finally, given that according to Carl Schmitt, politics implies the recognition of the enemy, Clausewitz’s classic formula that war is the continuation of politics by other means is reversed: war becomes instead ‘the destruction of politics by every means.’[73]

This erosion of the border between war and peace is much more damaging to the concept of peace than the concept of war. There are two reasons for this. First, because the concept of peace cannot be interpreted in as many ways as the concept of war (there is at most only one form of peace while there are numerous forms of war). And second, one wages war to obtain peace and not peace to obtain war, and the end should always be more clearly defined than the means of arriving at it.

Alain de Benoist

Carl Schmitt Today

Terrorism, ‘Just’ War, and the State of Emergency

Carl Schmitt - Song of the 60-Year-Old

I have lived through destiny pulling on the reins
Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations,
Inflations and deflations, bombardments,
Defamations, regime changes and burst pipes,
Hunger and cold, camp and solitary confinement.
Through all of this I have passed,
And all has passed through me.

I know the many forms of terror,
Terror from above and terror from below,
Terror on land and terror from the air,
Terror legal and extralegal,
Brown, red, and checkered terror,
And the worst, which no one dares to name.
I know them all and I know their grip.

I know the megaphones of power and of law,
The amplifiers and meaning distorters of the regime,
The blacklists with many names,
And the card files of the persecutors.

What should I now sing? The hymn Placebo?
Should I unproblematically envy the plants and the animals?
Quake in panic in the circle of Panists?
In the bliss of the midge that bobs in?

Three times have I sat in the belly of the fish.
I looked in the eye death at the hands of the hangman.
Yet the word of sybilline poets surrounded me protectively
And a saint from the East redemptively opened the door for me.

Son of this consecration, shiver not—
Hark and suffer!
June 11, 1948

From the Real Enemy to the Absolute Enemy

The theory of war is always about the distinction of enmity, which gives war its meaning and character. Every attempt to contain or limit war must be based on the awareness that, in relation to the concept of war, enmity is the primary concept, and that the distinction between different types of war is preceded by a distinction between different types of enmity. Otherwise, all efforts to maintain or limit war are only a game which cannot withstand the outbreaks of real enmity. After the Napoleonic wars, irregular war was pushed out of the general consciousness of European theologians, philosophers, and jurists. There were indeed friends of peace who saw in the abolition and proscription of the conventional war in the Hague Convention the end of war in general; and there were jurists who considered any doctrine of just war to be eo ipso just, because Saint Thomas Aquinas had already taught such things. No one suspected what the unleashing of irregular warfare would mean. No one considered what the victory of the civilian over the soldier would mean if one day the citizen put on the uniform while the partisan took it off to continue the fight without it.

It was this lack of concrete thinking that first completed the destructive work of the professional revolutionaries. This was a great misfortune, because with those limitations on war, European man had succeeded in something rare: the renunciation of criminalizing the wartime enemy—that is, the relativization of enmity, the negation of absolute enmity. It is really something rare, even incredibly humane, to get people to renounce discrimination and defamation of their enemies.

The partisan now seems to be calling this into question again. His criteria include the extreme intensity of his political commitment. When Guevara says “The partisan is the Jesuit of war,” he is thinking of the unconditional nature of political commitment. The life story of every famous partisan, beginning with the Empecinado, confirms that. In enmity the partisan without rights seeks his justice. In it he finds the meaning of the cause and the meaning of justice, when the shell of protection and obedience which he has hitherto inhabited breaks, or the web of norms of legality from which he could previously expect justice and legal protection is torn apart. Then the conventional game ends. But this cessation of legal protection need not yet be partisanship. Michael Kohlhaas, whom the sense of justice made into a robber and murderer, was not a partisan because he did not become political and fought exclusively for his own violated private law, not against a foreign conqueror and not for a revolutionary cause. In such cases, irregularity is apolitical and becomes purely criminal because it loses its positive connection with a regularity that exists somewhere. This is what distinguishes the partisan from the robber chief, whether noble or ignoble.

In discussing the geopolitical context (see above), we have emphasized that the interested third party performs an essential function when it provides the connection to the regular, which the irregularity of the partisan requires in order to remain in the realm of the political. The core of the political is not enmity per se, but the distinction between friend and enemy, and presupposes both friend and enemy. The powerful third party interested in the partisan may think and act entirely selfishly; with his interest he is still politically on the side of the partisan. This has functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it does not lead to public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government. The Empecinado was recognized as a political entity by his people, the regular army, and the great power that was England. He was no Michael Kohlhaas nor Schinderhannes, whose interested third parties were gangs of criminal fences. Salan's political situation, on the other hand, went down in a desperate tragedy, because he became illegal in his own country, and outside, in the realm of geopolitics, not only did he not find an interested third party, but, on the contrary, he encountered the consolidated enemy front of anti-colonialism.

The partisan then has a real enemy, but not an absolute one. This follows from his political character. Another limit of enmity follows from the partisan's tellurian character. He defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous relationship. His basic position remains defensive despite the increased agility of his tactics. He behaves exactly as Saint Joan of Arc specified before the ecclesiastical court. She was not a partisan and fought regularly against the English. When she was asked by the ecclesiastical judge the question—a theological trick question—of whether she wanted to claim that God hated the English, she replied: “Whether God loves or hates the English, I do not know; I only know that they must be driven out of France.” This answer would have been given by any normal partisan to the defense of the national soil. With such a fundamentally defensive stance comes the fundamental limitation of enmity. The real enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, nor the ultimate enemy of humanity in general.53Lenin shifted the conceptual focus from war to politics, i.e. to the friend-enemy distinction. This was sensible and, according to Clausewitz, a logical extension of the idea of war as a continuation of politics by other means. Only Lenin, as a professional revolutionary of the world civil war, went even further and turned the real enemy into the absolute enemy. Clausewitz spoke of total war, but still presupposed the regularity of an existing statehood. He could not yet imagine the state as an instrument of a party, and a party that commanded the state at all. With the absolutism of the party, the partisan had also become absolute and was elevated to the bearer of absolute enmity. It is not difficult today to see through the conceptual trick which brought about this change in the concept of the enemy. On the other hand, it is much more difficult today to refute another way of making the enemy absolute, because it seems to be immanent in the present reality of the nuclear age.

Technical-industrial development has increased the weapons of man into pure means of annihilation. This creates a provocative imbalance between protection and obedience: one half of mankind becomes hostage to the rulers of the other half, who is armed with nuclear weapons. Such absolute means of annihilation require absolute enmity if they are not to be absolutely inhuman. After all, it is not the means of annihilation that destroy, but humans that destroy other humans with these means. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes grasped the core of the process as early as the 17th century (de homine IX, 3) and formulated it with great accuracy, although at that time (1659) the weapons were still comparatively harmless. Hobbes says: “Man is more dangerous to another man of whom he believes himself endangered than any animal, just as much as the weapons of man are more dangerous than the so-called natural weapons of animals, for example: teeth, paws, horns or poison.” And the German philosopher Hegel adds: “weapons are the very essence of the fighters themselves.”

In concrete terms this means the supra-conventional weapon supposes supra-conventional man. It does not presuppose him only as a postulate of a distant future; it rather presupposes him as an already existing reality. The ultimate danger, then, does not even lie in the presence of the means of destruction and a premeditated malice in man. It consists in the inescapability of moral compulsion. Men who use these means against other men see themselves as obliged to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They must declare the other side as a whole to be criminal and inhuman, to be totally worthless, otherwise they are criminal and inhuman themselves. The logic of value and unworthiness unfolds its entire destructive consequence and forces ever new, ever deeper discrimination, criminalization and devaluation, up to the destruction of all life that is unworthy of life.

In a world in which the partners push each other into the abyss of total devaluation in this way before they physically annihilate each other, new kinds of absolute enmity must arise. The enmity will become so terrible that one may not even speak of enemy or enmity, and both may even be formally ostracized and condemned before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation will then become quite abstract and quite absolute. It will no longer be directed at an enemy at all, but only serve the supposedly objective enforcement of the highest values, for which, as we know, no price is too high. It is the denial of real enmity that will clear the way for the work of annihilation of an absolute enemy.

In 1914 the peoples and governments of Europe staggered into the First World War without any real enmity. The real enmity arose only from the war itself, which began as a conventional war of states under European international law and ended with a world civil war of revolutionary class enmity. Who will prevent the unexpected emergence of new types of enmity, in an analogous but still infinitely increased way, the implementation of which will cause unexpected manifestations of a new partisanship?

The theorist can do no more than preserve concepts and call things as they are. The theory of the partisan leads into the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and a new nomos of the earth.

[←53] “Such wars (as actually pass for ultimate wars of mankind) are necessarily especially intensive and inhuman because they exceed the political in treating the enemy as a sub-moral and even sub-categorical monster, one who must not only be defended against but definitively annihilated, so that he can no longer even be a demonstrably bounded enemy. The possibility of such wars suggests that it could still happen, depending entirely on the distinction of friend and enemy and the political recognition involved in it” (Der Begriff des Politischen, 37).

From: The Theory of the Partisan 

An Interjection to the Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt 

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