|
December 16, 2006
I've started reading Chantal Mouffe's The Return of the Political---or re-reading it as I read it about ten years ago when I first became interested in the work of Carl Schmitt. Mouffe's text is a reflection on the political, on the ineradicable character of power and antagonism, the incapacity of liberalism to grasp the nature and character of antagonism and the evasion of the political. What Mouffe is doing is taking issue with liberalism because it is blind to the specificity of the political in its antagonistic dimension. Hence her turn to Schmitt. She says:
Schmitt's critique of liberalism constitues, in my view, a challenge that we cannot ignore....My objective is to think with Schmitt against Schmitt , and to use his insights to stengthen liberal democracy against his critiques. By drawing our attention to the centrality of the friend/enemy relation in politics, Schmitt makes us aware of the dimension of the political that is linked to the existence of the element of hostility among human beings.
She is right about this. 'Us' (freedom loving peoples) and 'them' (Islamofascists or Muslims in general) is a key part of our political discourse in the context of the 'war on terror'. 'Us' and 'them' is very much a friend/enemy relation and it highlights how our identity (eg., as members of Western civilization) is relational. 'We' are what 'they' are not. They hate us for what we are etc, as the conservatives continually say, as they point to the enemy within--the Muslim immigrants who represent a threat Australia's cultural identity and social cohesion.
Mouffe puts it this way:
In the domain of collective identification , where what is in querstion is the creation of a 'we' by the definition of a 'them', the possibility always exists that this we/them relation will turn into a relation of the friend/enemy type; in other words, it can always become political in Schmitt's understanding of the term.
Such a view, she says, is profoundly at odds with liberalism, which is the reason for the bewilderment of liberalism when confronted by the phenomenon of hostility in its multiple forms.
|
