Pro Aris et Focis : Schmitt's Partisans in Munkler's Theory of War

Abstract

display of the principle of absolute enmity based on the opposition of friend and foe explored in his earlier work. Lenin is, for Schmitt, not just an illustrious representative and a radical one, too of such a pure hostility, but in a tradition whose first moment, in The Theory of the Partisan , is extremely difficult to determine (Derrida 1997, 124). His great friend Ernst Junger was in no doubt about the proximate source of it. As he wrote Schmitt in a letter of 1933 in praise of his concept of the political in the just-issued book of that title, so categorical a principle of enmity is not of a modern sort (Junger and Schmitt 1999, 18). It imports the traditional diremption of good and evil, seen in a painting of Hieronymus Bosch described by Junger, into an amoral modern climate that had abolished the concept of evil. Schmitt's portrait of modern history driven by partisans of hatred is remarkable in retrospect for the hatreds that it does not include: no Armenian massacre, no Soviet purges, and of course no industrial death camps. Schmitt's partisan is not a perpetrator but a victim: of foreigners, imperial armies, laws not his own. His final sublimation as Kosmopartisan