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April 6, 2006
In The Concept of the Political Schmitt links the conflict between enemies and friends to the ultimate conflict--- war is the most intense and extreme form of antagonism. This does not mean that the political signifies nothing but devastating war, or that every deed is a military deed, or that war is the very content of politics.
Schmitt says:
For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid(pp.32-33).
War is the ever present possibility and this is what matters, for it is from this extreme moment that human life derives its specificially political tension. It discloses what underlies the political--namely the distinction of friend and enemy. This is the decisive grouping.
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