The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (Review pt 3)

In Carl Scmitt in the Age of Post-Politics Slavoj Zizek takes the reader through Freudian themes that would strive to reveal some psychological and theosophical underpinnings behind Schmitt's decisionism and priority of the sovereign. First in Oedipus we explore the unconscious drive towards enjoyment through the parricide of the father, the figure of authority and monopolizer of enjoyment so that he may consummate his incestuous love with the maternal object. Oedipus is the exceptional figure, the one who casts aside the taboo, to only find in this fulfilling of desire his own destruction. The lesson would seem to suggest it is a permanent prolonging of enjoyment and the permanence of the prohibiting father which allows the maternal link to continue (albeit tension ridden). But according to Zizek the Oedipus story only partially describes the castration process and requires the supplement of yet two other myths, that of Judas and King Lear.

In Lear we uncover the kings personal impotence and discover that the strength we perceived in the man is actually the place he occupies in the symbolic order. In Judas we learn that the betrayal of the king is necessary if he is to occupy the status of symbolic prohibition as the agent of castration. For in killing the symbol we elevate him to the status of the symbolic matrix, or as Zizek says, 'he returns in the form of his name' (though his death he has risen to the glories of spirit). Thus the person of Judas is actually quite necessary to prevent the person of Oedipus from reappearing. Of course it is our being within culture (the rituals of distance/closeness with the maternal object) that has succeeded in always having had killed the father of prohibition, but this is not to deny that the passage from systems of brutality (domination) to systems of symbolic authority (civility) require the act of criminality (revolution) to ensure its progress.

Thus in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud describes the first form of society as the pact between brothers to murder their father and divide the spoils. But Zizek informs us it is not until the murder of Moses that we find the first appearance of Modernity. Because where oedipus's father was the name of a certain taboo, and thus the structure of a symbolic constellation, Moses was the father of monotheism that represented the nature of uncontaminated will. Through a god that is grounded in himself we experience the gap between order and content, where content losses any necessary quality. It is the omnipotent and deciding god who brings about the death of the many sexualized and human like gods of traditional philosophy and marks the beginning of theology. Zizek would have us meditate on the french mathematician Pascal who declared that 2+2 would equal 5 if god declared it so. It is the sovereign who creates the structure of the symbolic playing field, by means of his 'positive act of willing' who without which we would seem to be doomed to the fate of a million oedipistic murders for all time throughout all society. Thus the one god can rightfully command Abraham to murder his son, to contradict the religion he has set out for him, because to do so asserts his authority as the source of all normative content. It is as if god was mimicking Socrates who when wrongly condemned to death defended his sentence by asserting that the value of law is not found in any particular ruling but within obedience to the voice of law as such.

What Zizek takes from this narrative is the lessons of modernism, a political ontology that is grounded in decision, and the shutting out from standards of legitimacy any normative criteria. The historical potential in our liberal institutions is found for Zizek, in the experience of material/subjective excesses "a history of that for which no structure can account but without which no structure would exist" (Gorelick/Kerr). Sovereignty here is experienced as a status-quo, a discredited state from the standpoint of a potential infinitude of political outsiders. A post modern politics then would seem to consist in an opening of the gate to the small guy, the outside, or say if you will as Mouffe does, a deepening of democracy. Through the circuitous route from Schmitt via Frued, to Hegel and Ranciere, Zizek's solution to this predicament is the instituting of a permanent dimension of political antagonism, a dialectical struggle that is a permanent vying for the place of decision, and for which particular struggles are set upon the task of eternally positing their normative programmes as the universal benchmark. Through a critique of Schmitt's uber-politic (the hyper aggressive politics-as-war, or the eradication of other), while still asserting its own positive content. What he achieves is a way to engender and dignify a politics without having to rely on an ideal speech situation or revert to a pure decisionism. Simultaneously invoking the Rortian 'ironist', and a Gramscian 'war of position', what Zizek fails to do is depict a community that could forge the link between such forces of struggle. If a hope for politics is found with a privileged actor as Zizek would suggest, the fate of an inclusive politic seems rather dubious; conversely, for the actor he identifies the model politic would consist in a perpetual revision of sovereignty, and so we are lead back again to the dregs of Oedipus. What he seems to have forgotten is one of the very first lessons that Schmitt offers us: the unity of a state is found in a commonality that is prior to law and systems of governance, and is integral to the friend-enemy distinction where a common ground or shared language is never given. This is why universal concepts like democracy constitute no society or concrete culture, at best they still remain merely the language games that are played within it.

Themes of Carl Schmitt

The first contribution is given by Paul Hirst a professor of social theory at Birbeck College, a basic overview where he characterizes Schmitts ideas as decisionism and his major themes as taking issue with 20th century liberal democracies. Schmitt takes issue with parliamentarianism for mistaking politics for a kind of utopic ideal speech situation that doesn't exist because any political inside requires a political outside. He is equally contemptuous of liberal-constitutionalism for rendering the state impotent by a rule-bound legalism. These theories presuppose an already existing state but fail to recognize how the state arises and continues by means of political struggle and thus cannot comprehend the extra-legality of true state sovereignty. Because the construction of any inside presupposses and outside, politics is the relationship of enmity between freinds and enemies, and a process of statecraft cannot rely on any certain rational or legality but instead is dependent on the capacity of the sovereign to decide and uphold power. These are the dynamic tensions that Hirst seems to consider somewhat alien to internal workings of modern day democracies, but very relevant to Foreign policy relations especially in the field of nuclear proliferation.

Challenge of Carl Scmitt (Review)

This will be the first book review i've done in quite some time, the last time i was in college over two years ago. I'm pretty sure that almost nobody reads this blog, not that it matters because i like to think that with this blog i keep myself sharp enough to return to college at some point, or maybe i'll just write books when i get old, not sure yet. But the truth is that i barely ever update this thing and all i really do besides reading is argue with my roommates and friends who have very different scholastic interests than myself. For example, the most critical topic of conversation in last nights discussion was whether or not class inequality could be considered a kind of slow or passive eugenics....as you can see from other posts, tis not really my forte'. I really need to find a critical discussion group, hopefully one where people have moved past talking about Foucaults concept of all-pervasive power and so forth. So... on to the Schmitt.

Was a great man. This book is a collection of articles edited (with one contribution) by Chantal Mouffe, including a first-ever published english translation of Schmitt's article Ethic of State and Pluralistic State. Scmitt's basic interest lies in how to think of order, or political unity. For him it is a normative or ethical concept, in the sense of he depicts unity as virtue, or the basis of virtue. As a political unity is the basis for the state or a normal situation, all personal and social freedoms emanate from it, and hence an ethic of state for him (as a realist) is the key to ethics in general. Consequently liberal rights take backstage in his theory, as do issues of participation or overt political freedoms. Does this sound reminiscent of a Hobbsian theory of the Leviathan? Thats because it is, but what separates Schmitt from a thinker like Hobbes most pointedly (other than the eras of these authors) is his commitment to a basis for legitimacy other than a guarantee of order, and his committment to politics which he deems neccessary and perminant to the social link. Indeed the political is constitutive of the social whole, and so legitimacy is a question of the sovereigns ability to represent or construct a substantive unity of the 'people'. This is what gives the ruler his appropriateness, or historical rightness which differentiates the dictator from the tyrant whos rule is arbitrary and not bound by normative elements (chapt 7). In this way his theory is prevalent with democratic aims, but not in the usual sense, because for him democracy is not found in a set of procedures nor-like in Plato or Marx-in the people themselves, but in a sovereign who realizes the spirit or substance of a people.

It would seem that many of the authors find his most valuable contribution to be his critique of liberal ambivalence towards political unity, and his clarification of the fact that universalistic ideals such humanitarianism and constitutionalism constitute no basis for such a unity. Chantal Mouffe indicates that such a theoretical stance leaves one without the ability to speak coherently about community, or a political ethic. Thus some of the authors are poised to use his critique to inform a theory of community, the status of which has been dominated in the last century by proponents of economic liberalism and technocrats where it is based on somewhat empty concepts like citizenship, or a negotiations of interests. And so goes the introduction.