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Bodily Negation: Carl Schmitt on the Meaning of Meaning

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2006.0021

1080-6598

Sarah M. Pourciau,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

The critique most commonly leveled at the decisionist theories of the jurist and political thinker Carl Schmitt accuses him of an aestheticizing formalism that serves primarily to protect the political status quo. To endorse the purely formal structure of decision without regard for the specificity of its content means, so the argument runs, to abandon humanity to its present corrupt conditions, since a political theory devoid of a substantive, normative thrust cannot hope to produce a coherent notion of progressive change.1 Such accusations cast Schmitt in the role of the political romantic—a role that would have been an anathema to Schmitt himself, whose early work includes an extended polemic against the political impotence of nineteenth-century Romantic "occasionalism," and its arbitrary assignation of subjective meaning to the reified forms of an increasingly mechanized world.2 In the course of this polemic, Schmitt attempts to demonstrate that Romanticism must be understood in its historical concreteness as a supplemental, ultimately uncritical response to the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, and that Romantic aestheticization and technological industrialization constitute the two faces of a specifically modern, experiential bifurcation.3 It is this bifurcation that liberalism, in his view, both embraces and sustains, and against which he polemicizes in most of his work. In other words: critiques that focus on Schmitt's aestheticization of an otherwise empty political form implicitly take him to task for succumbing to the very binaries he tries hard to transcend. They are right to do so. The traditional critique of Schmitt's aestheticization of [End Page 1066] form, however,takes aim at the wrong level of the argument, for Schmitt does indeed have a notion of political content—one he affirms throughout The Concept of the Political in the polemical guise of a neutral, diagnostic formalism, and in the face of an equally political alternative. The result is a polemic in favor of pólemos, of war to the death against a real, blood-spilling enemy as the only possible ground for the "existential meaning" ["existenziellen Sinn"] with which Schmitt wages his bloodless war on liberal "abstraction." After demonstrating the significance of the polemical for a Schmittian theory of signification, I will go on to argue that Schmitt's failure to overcome the liberal binaries has less to do with the emptiness of his forms than it does with the formlessness of the category "Freund." In the indeterminacy of the relation between sovereign and self lies the point where these binaries unmistakably reappear in his thought. I Schmitt makes clear from the beginning that his reflections on the political will turn on the problem of definition: A definition of the political can be obtained only by uncovering and determining the specifically political categories . . . The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content. (26, translation modified) [Eine Begriffsbestimmung des Politischen kann nur durch Aufdekkung und Feststellung der spezifisch politischen Kategorien gewonnen werden. . . . Die spezifisch politische Unterscheidung, auf welche sich die politischen Handlungen und Motive zurückführen lassen, ist die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind. Sie gibt eine Begriffsbestimmung im Sinne eines Kriteriums, nicht als erschöpfende Definition oder Inhaltsangabe. ] (26)4 The "specific political distinction" performs only the Aristotelian function of delimiting an autonomous categorial space—"specific distinction" translates Aristotle's eidopoios diaphora—and must therefore remain purely formal. For the friend-enemy opposition to be meaningful even as a formal criterion, however, its terms require some elaboration, and Schmitt therefore goes on to define the enemy. Rejecting what he sees as liberalism's unjustified psychologization of an originally collective concept, he insists on a "concrete" notion of the enemy as public threat, anchored in the equally concrete possibility of bloodshed: [End Page 1067] Just as the term enemy, the word, combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential...