From: "Anthony iles" <a_529-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: AUT: the influence of Carl Sh(m)it(t) (Benjamin - Schmitt)
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 13:49:07 +0000


I had know very little about these neo-conservatives/paleo??conservatives 
interests in Schmitt, and the references to Tel Quel's relationship to this 
odious figure are very revealing too. I may have missed some of this 
discussion, but are you saying there is a Schmitt revival going on across 
the political spectrum?
Re:
>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.
>


What Andrew and Michael pointed to as Negri/Hardt, Agamben's (and I would 
add Paulo Virno's) interest in Schmitt as a critic of the Liberal state and 
identification of the state of exception/emergency as a foundation of state 
power,  I find this pretty spot on. Agamben’s (via Benjamin) retort to 
Schmitt’s support of the National Socialists is that the Third Reich was not 
a facist state proper at all, even/especially by Schmitt’s analysis, it was 
merely a democracy functioning under a momentary (15 years or so) suspension 
of the constitution and all rights, laws etc. as Benjamin was looking for 
exactly the same things as Schmitt, but trying to go one further in 
realizing the status of ‘revolutionary violence’ as the only violence that 
can found true human community that (Benjamin) is communism. Agamben 
theorises the two strands of the tendency, one which founds/reinvigorates 
the state and the one which separates lifes’ subsumption under law…

‘Benjamin formulated the opposition newly in order to respond to Schmitt. 
Once all possibility of a fictive state of exception, in which exception and 
normal case are distinct in time and space, has been excluded, the state of 
exception “in which we live”, and which is absolutely undecideable with 
reference to the rule, is now effective. All fiction of a link between 
violence and Law has disappeared here: there is only a zone of anomie where 
violence acts without the least juridical appearance. The attempt by state 
power to annexe anomie through the state of exception is unmasked by 
Benjamin for what it is: a fictio juris par excellence which pretends to 
maintain law in its suspension even as force-of-XlawX?[3]. In its place 
appear civil war and revolutionary violence, that is to say a human action 
that has renounced all relation with Law.’

For more of Agamben’s re-evaluation of the controversial relationship 
between Benjamin and Schmitt see the (workinprogress) translated excerpt 
from his book ‘Stato d’eccezione –State of Exception/Emergency’ –  
<http://workinprogress.omweb.org/modules/wakka/StateOfException>

Anthony



>From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>Subject: AUT: the influence of Carl Sh(m)it(t)
>Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:07:21 -0700 (PDT)
>
>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 meone 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 t
>  he 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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