|
June 13, 2006
Cross posted at Long Sunday
Can Carl Schmitt's theory of the partisan inform us about what is happening today in the war on terror that we are living? More specifically, how does his theory of the partisan change the way we understand the political as a friend/enemy antithesis (understood in an existential, concrete sense)? Is this friend/enemy understanding of the political, often interpreted as a weapon in the battle against liberalism, an historical one?
In highlighting Schmitt's response to this I am building on a previous post, which was more or less a working through Schmitt's text. This working through is based on an understanding of the political as a basic characteristic of human life.
The suggestions of an answer to the above questions can be found in the last section of Schmitt's text entitled, 'From the Real to the Absolute Enemy'. It is here that Schmitt explores the way in which the conception of the political presupposed in his theory of the partisan mutates into something quite different. He explores so by asking a simple question, 'who is the enemy'? Whilst showing how the legimatization of the partisan is given by a third party, Schmitt introduces a bounded concept of the enemy. He says :
... the heart of the political is not enmity per se but the distinction of friend and enemy; it presupposes both friend and enemy. The powerful third party who is interested in the partisan may think and deal in an entirely egoistic way, but with his interest he stands politically on the side of the partisan. This functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it is not expressed in terms of public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government.
So the theory of the partisan presupposes a bounded concept of enemity. The partisan has a real, but not an absolute enemy. Schmitt reinforces this conception of the political when he says that another boundary of enmity follows from the telluric character of the partisan.The partisan defends a patch of earth to which he has an autochthonic relation. His basic position remains defensive despite his increasing mobility.The real enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, and also is not the ultimate enemy of mankind as such.
Schmitt then argues that a shift has taken place in the bounded concept of the enemy, in that an absolute enemy has been made out of the real enemy. Though Lenin's, professional revolutionary of the world-wide civil war
made the conceptual shift of making an absolute enemy out of the real enemy, the new understanding of the enemy has its roots in the technical-industrial development that has made human weapons into pure means of destruction. Therein lies the danger.
Schmitt says that the weapons of absolute annihilation:
.. require an absolute enemy lest they should be absolutely inhuman. Men who turn these means against others see themselves obliged/forced to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They have to consider the other side as entirely criminal and inhuman, as totally worthless. Otherwise they are themselves criminal and inhuman. The logic of value and its obverse, worthlessness, unfolds its annihilating consequence, compelling ever new, ever deeper discriminations, criminalizations, and devaluations to the point of annihilating all of unworthy life.
There in lies the danger. A nuclear world is one in which the partners push each other in this way into the abyss of total devaluation before they annihilate one another physically. Are we not in Heidegger's world of the planetary dominion of the technological mode of being, in which the world becomes totally enframed as a picture, and integrates the world as standing reserve? A technological ordering in which there is a refusal of limits, a rejection of boundaries and concrete difference and a blurring of borders?
Schmitt says that this gives rise to new kinds of absolute enmity, and he understands this darkly. He says that:
enmity will be so terrifying that one perhaps mustn't even speak any longer of the enemy or of enmity, and both words will have to be outlawed and damned fully before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation thus becomes entirely abstract and entirely absolute. It is no longer directed .. against an enemy, but serves only another, ostensibly objective attainment of highest values, for which no price is too high to pay. It is the renunciation of real enmity that opens the door for the work of annihilation of an absolute enmity.
Being political now means being orientated to dire emergency; as it is a situation in which two orders of what is right confront each other, without any mediation or neutrality. Is this not what we in the war on terror? A war in which the enemy is both external and internal?
Schmitt by making reference to The Nomos of the Earth since nomos is a way to understand the transformation from one historical epoch to another.
|
Dear Mr. Sour,
To communicate effectively, one must use terms that the audience knows instinctively.
"Partisan" is a political term for the loyal or disloyal Parliamentary opposition. Schmitt's lectures are about "guerillas" and the comments should have used the term.
It is clear that the West is under attack from Moslem guerillas who can be effective only when operating from immigrant communities in the non Moslem world.
If the guerilla is a fish swimming in a pond of the the people ( Mao's example) then dry up the pond and collect the fish.