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December 30, 2006
It is in Chapter 4 The Politics of Friendship entitled The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of Democracy) that Derrida engages with Schmitt. Derrida says that for Schmitt the political arises in its possibility with the figure of the enemy:
It would be unfair... to reduce Schmitt's though to this axiom, as is often done, but it nevertheles be indispensable to this thought, and also to his decionism, his theory of the exception and sovereignty. The disappearance of the enemy would be the death knell of the political as such. It would mark the beginning of depoliticization ... the beginning of the end of the political.....Schmitt claims that he awakened a tradition that was begnning to lull. Whether we can substantiate them or not, some of his remarks must claim our attention here. We should underscore two of them. They deal on the one hand with the opposition between public/private, and on the other with a certain concept of ethics.
On the public/private opposition Derrida says that Schmitt consider the enemy to be a public enemy as the concept of a private enemy would be meaningless. Derrida then loosens up the public/private duality.
He says that according to Schmitt the antithesis of friendship in the political sphere is not enemity but hostility:
....the friend (amicus) can be an enemy (hostis); I can be hostile towards my friend, I can be hostile towards him publicly and conversley I can, in privacy, love my enemy..From this everything woudl follow, in orderly, regular fashion, from the distinction between private and public. Another way of saying that at every point when this border is threatened, fragile porous, constestable...the Schmittian discourse collapses.
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