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April 5, 2006
Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, argues for a radical separation between the political sphere and other spheres of existence, and he argues that the political is not reducible to any of these domains. The political is about friends and enemies, life and death; it is not about morals, economics or aesthetics. Do we not understand this understanding of the political as the most intense and extreme antagonismfrom living in the so-called cultural wars? Is it not the case that this kind of politics requires you to treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe?
In section 3 of the above text Schmitt says:
The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses. Liberalism in one of its typical dilemmas ....of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary. In the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating adversaries. .... The concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a distinction.... The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.(pp.27-28)
Schmitt goes on to say that:
The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping. In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.....But the fact that the substance of the political is contained in the context of a concrete antagonism is still expressed in everyday language, even where the awareness of the extreme case has been entirely lost. (p. p.29-30)
To determine the enemy is at the same time to determine who will kill and who will be killed. The political decision is a matter of life and death; that is to say, at its extreme, the political is the decision on who lives and dies.
Schmitt argues that the important thing is not just having friends in the political sense but also deciding upon who your friends are. The implication is one that leads to a moment of decision: "who are my friends and who are my enemies?" This establishes a relationship, not only between friends and enemies, and among friends as well.
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First post? :)