Subject: AUT: Negri/Hardt and Carl Schmitt
From: Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 08:29:49 -0700


<URL: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm >
> ...Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi 
> commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to 
> comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul's College, 
> Oxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that 
> attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that Schmitt's spirit pervades 
> Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization 
> movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the 
> writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in the 
> news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York 
> University as a protest against America's decision to fingerprint 
> overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).

When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and social 
science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the efforts of 
the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference on Schmitt's 
thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor who informed me that 
he was not going to give any more of his money to an institution 
sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that fascist." I was tempted to tell 
him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had become the rage in 
leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968 dedicated to bringing 
European critical theory to American audiences, had started a campaign in 
the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed by his no-nonsense 
attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian idealism. A 
comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings, Gopal Balakrishnan's The 
Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt's 
conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, 
for it gives the left hope that its present stalemate will not last 
indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal 
Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt's 
ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's political views. But they 
recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed 
humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a 
perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel 
Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.

Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the 
collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking. Yet in 
turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to an 
authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century thinkers 
as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn't just been Schmitt. Telos, 
in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist thinkers and 
movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would be better than 
Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.

Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has taken a different course. 
In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in Italy, Alain de 
Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing to the magazine 
Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing 
Schmittians in the United States are not as numerous, but they include 
intellectuals -- often described as paleoconservative -- who expend 
considerable energy attacking neoconservatism from the right. One of them, 
Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in 
Pennsylvania, is especially prolific. Himself an occasional contributor to 
Junge Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting "the view that 
every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by self-appointed 
victims of the Holocaust." No wonder he has a soft spot for Carl Schmitt. 
Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term "fascism" in quotation 
marks, as if its existence in the European past is somehow open to 
question.

But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place 
anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative 
political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would 
surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, 
Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary 
zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so 
prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the 
ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often 
reluctantly, defend themselves.
<SNIP>
-- 
Michael Pugliese


-- 
Michael Pugliese


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