Future Impossible

Abstract

For more than a decade, work of Carl Schmitt, one-time leading jurist for Third Reich, anti-Semite, and proponent of authoritarian state and German nationalism, has been undergoing a revival. What is surprising about this flood of new interest and new scholarship is source: is not just Right but also Left in both Europe and United States. Why? What is about his political philosophy that appeals to so many people today? Perhaps what is tempting in Carl Schmitt is way in which he seems to speak to our political philosophical condition with his famous definition of political as depending on distinction. Our philosophical condition: that means, thinking in absence of transcendental principles of legitimation such as universal rationality, natural law, or God. Such a world, Max Weber explained, knows only an unceasing struggle of gods with one another. Or, as he says, speaking plainly, ultimately possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a conclusion. Thus, he concludes, it is necessary to make a choice. This decision on value, which must, in any case, be made without grounds, means that when we choose to serve one god we must reject others. According to our ultimate standpoint, Weber tells us, the one is devil and other God, and individual has to decide which is God for him and which is devil.1 It is no wonder, then, that discussion of political-especially for those, who like Weber, are influenced by Nietzsche-is dominated by metaphorics of war: agonism, polemos, strategy, tactics, power, resistance, force and violence. A politics grounded only on a decisive choice can be nothing but war as exclusive values or conceptions of good life struggle for position and dominance. Perhaps, then, what is most attractive in Schmitt is his recognition of just this condition and along with his rejection of faith in rational discussion and negotiation as paths towards peace and harmony among competing interests. Schmitt would, in this sense, be one who clearly recognized and unapologetically articulated fact that political is grounded in nothing but a decision out of nothingness2 and that any concept of political has to address irresolvable struggle between threatened and threatening forces fighting for their own preservation and dominance.3 While drawing on Schmitt's recognition of unavoidable necessity of a decision between us and them. and axiom that there are always human groupings that fight other human groupings in name of justice, humanity, order and peace, Mouffe goes on to call for a politics that rejects essentialism especially with regard to political identities. In doing so however, she must give up theses central to Schmitt's very concept of political keeping only positions which could be derived from others in Neitzschean tradition, Foucault for example. For instance, she forswears killing of concrete human being, stipulating that struggle for destruction is to be restricted to subject oppositions and institutions (25). She expands friend/enemy struggle to include any number of groups occurring in multiple political spaces cutting across individuals who may be dominant in one struggle and oppressed in another. But beyond this stripping down of Schmitt's concept of political, we will see that Mouffe's non-essentialist identities nevertheless do not go as far as possible in moving away from subjectivism of Schmitt's decisionism. Her notion of intersecting identities, above all seems to draw on Homi Bhabha's hybridity and may have (regardless of whether this is case in Bhabha's notion) connections with identity politics. However, despite possible affinities with his diagnoses of our times (Zeitdiagnosen), any appropriation of Schmitt's concept of political and decisionism at its core, must proceed with caution. …