Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:07:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: the influence of Carl Sh(m)it(t)


I've always found Schmitt a very worrying so-and-so - much more than other Nazi sympathisers such as Heidegger, Gentile and de Man (let alone the comparatively innocent Nietzsche), because I think Schmitt really meant it.
 
A certain overlap with the left can be expected because many leftists, especially anarchists and libertarians, have a similar view to fascists as to what state power involves.  In other words, when someone like Schmitt starts saying that liberal ideas of the state as based on consent, peace etc are absurd, when he says that the state is based on violence and on an arbitrary "decision" to impose its power, that its primacy is ungrounded and is self-posited as unconditional, that it is necessarily intolerant, that it is based on a constitutive exclusion of those deemed anti-state, he is attacking liberalism with the same factual arguments one might expect from a certain kind of leftist - Bakunin comes to mind as someone who argues in this way about the state (the state is inherently violent, war is the health of the state, the state requires exclusion, every state must expand through war, etc.).  The disagreement is on the level of principles.  Schmitt is prepared to say that the state
 is all these things and yet still support it, which is in many ways an absurd position, but is also consistent with his fascism.  Bakunin, in contrast, is basically saying "the state is like this, and that's why we need to smash it".
 
Michael Lowy explains in this way why Walter Benjamin was attracted to Schmitt's work.  Benjamin wishes to use for critical purposes the same arguments Schmitt wants to use to eliminate the shackles on state violence.  Benjamin liked Scmitt's claim that the "state of emergency", far from being exceptional, is the basis of state power as such.
 
(The thing about ideological mystifications is that they're a double-edged sword - their main role is to hide state violence beneath a consensual exterior, but they also put limits on what the state can do, if it wants to "keep up appearances" - for instance, it mustn't get caught massacring civilians in Fallujah, so it has to keep the cameras out, make up stories if caught, etc. - the Pentagon has just denied that any massacre is happening by the way...  Of course, fascists want to be able to do all this publicly and be completely unconstrained, so they too want rid of the liberal myths).
 
I think (although I'm not entirely sure) that the link from Schmitt to Hardt, Negri and Agamben is via the distinction between constituent and constituted power and the insistence on the primacy of the former.  This is similar to Benjamin's attraction - the idea that we are in a permanent state of emergency (made strongly in "Empire") as the constituted power of bourgeois society, unable to sustain itself, revives its moment of founding violence, and also the idea that proletarian/multitude power must itself be constructed as a constituent (desire-based, political, self-posited) rather than a constituted (e.g. legal-formal) type of power.  This is also, I suspect, where the overlap with Foucault comes in (which also rapidly leads into another little controversy, because of the Foucault-Nietzsche link and far right appropriations of Nietzsche).
 
The cases of Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek are entirely different, because all these authors accept the silly Lacanian myth of "constitutive lack" and hence the necessity of a master-signifier establishing closure in society.  This means that, like Schmitt, they not only see the state as grounded in violence etc., but also insist nevertheless on supporting the state - an argument leading, not to emancipatory challenges, but to an illiberal, unveiled version of state violence.  Zizek is especially explicit in arguing that the free flow of subjectivity must be brought to an end in a new Terror (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality p. 326) which amounts to a Schmittian decision.  Mouffe similarly claims that violence, exclusion etc. are necessary in order to provide a political and libidinal basis for social order, which she treats as an unproblematically primary good (the most relevant essay on Schmitt is in her book The Democratic Paradox).  
 
This doesn't mean that "radical democracy" is really fascism, but it does show 1) a great degree of confusion, 2) a sympathy to authoritarian criticisms of liberalism and 3) a general tendency to authoritarian statism in their thought.  I have analysed all three authors in some detail and found repeated evidence of statist bias, an uncritical attitude towards the bourgeois state and a blase attitude to social exclusion which is more sympathetic to the euphoric satisfaction provided by to the included than to the suffering of the victims of capitalism.  If anyone is interested in this, send me an email at ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com and I'll forward you a copy of a paper I've written on Laclau and Mouffe.  (It's a long piece so I can't put it on the list).
 
In the game of lesser evils, by the way, Rawls is necessarily the lesser evil compared with Schmitt, because at least he provides a basis (however limited) for attacking capitalism and the state as unjust (but since when has revolutionary politics been about lesser evils?).  There is also, however, a dangerously authoritarian strand in Rawls, because he gives carte-blanche "enabling rights" to the state to impose its power by any means necessary in a context where the "liberal democratic order" is itself threatened.  Of course, these rights only accord to a more-or-less "just" liberal democratic state, but by the time it is finished using its "emergency" powers it is sure to be no such thing...

		
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