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December 26, 2006
We are now in a position to return to Mark Banisch's Derrida, Schmitt and the essence of the political, which I had mentioned in an earlier post here. Banisch talks in terms of depoliticisation of the political and the narrowing of the political field of debate at the commencement of the new millennium. He quotes Chantal Mouffe's introduction to a collection of essays on Schmitt--- The Challenge of
Carl Schmitt--- where she asks some pertinent questions:
Why should we read Schmitt today? Does his friend-enemy conception of politics retain some pertinence in our ‘post-political’ age? Do liberal democrats have something to learn from his critique of liberalism? Is his theory of sovereignty still relevant in a globalised world?
As we have seen Mouffe interprets Schmitt is an adversary who must be dealt with, thereby placing herself places herself in the liberal camp. Her strategy is definitely not to read Schmitt to attack liberal democracy, but to ask how it could be improved. To think both with and against Schmitt- so as to 'rethink liberal democracy with a view to strengthening its institutions' is the thrust of her strategy in The Return of the Political.
So what does Banisch do? He says that:
In order.... to use Schmitt as the basis of a theory and analytics of the political in these “new” times, it is necessary to refine his theory such that it recognises that antagonism and agonism are in fact separable concepts each with its own proper moment and praxis. Before drawing of the work of these theorists (and others) to suggest how this could be done, it is necessary to review Derrida’s reading of Schmitt in the Politics of Friendship (1997). This is a more urgent task particularly as Derrida’s own theory of the specificity of the political as an undecideability inherent in the moment of just decision has many resonances with Schmitt’s decisionism.
I'm unclear why a distinction needs to be made between antagonism and agonism. Banisch suggests this could be done by reviewing Derrida’s reading of Schmitt in the Politics of Friendship (1997) which deconstructs Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. He says:
However, it may nevertheless be true that even with the impurities that Derrida so insightfullydeconstructs, Schmitt’s concept of the political can still be pressed into service --- even domore useful work, if it is understood to be a reflection of the instability of thepublic/private opposition. In this sense as well, Derrida’s insight that Schmitt is trying to stabilise tradition against flux reflects Schmitt’s complex sociological engagement with modernity and differentiation (noting Schmitt’s debt to Weber) and therefore it is likely that Schmitt’s failures will themselves be productive for an analysis of postmodern politics.
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