The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

210 M. Ojakangas
transcendent foundations of meaning and order, from theistic Revelation to
deistic Nature and from Enlightenment Reason to romantic Tradition, have
fallen apart. Hence, although in the 1960s Schmitt defined his concept of the
political, the famous antithesis of friend and enemy, in terms of an openness of
order towards transcendence (Schmitt 1963: 121–123), the transcendence in
question, as Carlo Galli has also pointed out (Galli 2000: 1607), 5 is not to be
understood as a substantial foundation of order. It should be understood as the
very openness itself, as the very event that introduces a rupture in the closure of
order immanent to itself. All of Schmitt’s central political concepts – including
the sovereign decision, the constituent act of a people, and so on – denote this
transcendence, transcendence not beyond but within immanence. These concepts
denote an event of resistance as regards the absolute closure of immanence.
The event of the political, however, is not only a figure of resistance. It is
simultaneously a foundation. The event of the political is the constitutive event
of meaning and order. This is why Schmitt’s central concepts are not only
counter-concepts (Gegenbegriff), signifying the intrusion of pure contingency,
but simultaneously fundamental concepts (Grundbegriff). A good example of
the double function of Schmitt’s central political concepts is the sovereign
decision. From the perspective of domestic legal order, the sovereign decision
‘emanates from nothingness’ (Schmitt 1985: 31–32). It brings about a rupture –
‘new and alien’ (ibid.: 31) – in the immanence of the system of norms and eventually
in the legal order itself. According to Schmitt, however, the sovereign
decision is also the foundation of legal order: ‘It is the decision that grounds
both the norm and the order’ (Schmitt 1993a: 23). The sovereign decision is the
‘absolute beginning’ and the ‘ultimate origin’ of order (ibid.). In other words,
the sovereign decision is not only a rupture in the immanence of order, but it is
also the event that founds the order. It is simultaneously both, that is, a founding
rupture. In Political Theology, Schmitt expressed this double meaning in one
concept: Grenzbegriff, the borderline concept.
This also explains why Schmitt continuously emphasizes exceptions and
extreme cases. The extreme case ‘exposes the core of the matter’ (Schmitt
1996a: 35). The exception – that which is taken out (excipio) – transcends the
closure of immanence, because it is something that ‘cannot be anticipated’
(Schmitt 1985: 6), something absolutely new and alien. The exception is a
rupture within a system. However, the exception also founds the system. Every
system is built on the ultimate origin of exception, which is not, from the most
human perspective, an exception at all, but a rule, the rule of meaningful
existence:
A philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the
extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. The exception
can be more important to it than the rule, not because of a romantic
irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper
than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself.
The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the