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

Schmitt, this radically conservative thinker who admired Mussolini, even
accepted communist guerrillas as examples of the power of resistance against ‘a
world organized down to the smallest details along technological lines’ (Schmitt
2004: 65).
Sacred orientation – after all?
A terrifying world without an exterior 217
As a final question, we should perhaps ask: why such enthusiasm for the great
events of the political? Moreover, why did Schmitt identify freedom and
meaning with such events – with the events that suspend and transgress the
ordinary framework of life? To be sure, if a society is conceived of as a self-propelling
machine and as a beehive, it obviously lacks space for anything new to
emerge. However, why should we identify the ordinary with such a machine?
What if the ordinary itself is already an exception, that is, a founding rupture of
existence? What if human existence as such is continuously transgressing itself?
Then the exception would become the rule – and human existence as such, the
mere being in the world, would be disclosed as the constitutive event, as the
event of freedom and meaning. But this view is one that Schmitt would not have
accepted. To him, only an extraordinary, heroic moment of the political, a
violent exception, could be the event that creates meaning. In the final analysis,
this is, I think, the basic reason for his Nazism, which he saw as offering a
chance for the reappearance of lost heroism. In Nazism, he conceived of a counterforce
not only to the natural-scientific rationalist schemes but also to the
liberal order and its bourgeois individualism, which had deprived life of its seriousness.
There is nothing great and nothing serious in bourgeois individualism,
which culminates, according to Schmitt, in the concepts of game and entertainment
(Schmitt 1996a: 53).
In fact, a possible common denominator behind Schmitt’s complaints concerning
late modernity – its rationalistic as well as its nihilistic tendencies – is
the profanity of the epoch. In an absolutely profane world, everything is freely
available for manipulation, because everything is neutral by definition. Nothing
is sacred. Indeed, it is not impossible to see a certain fascination for the sacred in
Schmitt’s critique of late modernity, especially in his critique of the ‘relativistic
bourgeoisie’ (Schmitt 1996a: 68), for the sacred is always something that cannot
be relativized, something ungraspable: ‘No mortal can invent it, no genius can
compose it’ (ibid.: 143). I am not referring here to Meier’s commandments of
God, for Schmitt was never very enthusiastic about the absolute transcendence
characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian, especially the Judaeo-Protestant, God. If
he was looking for God, this God should manifest Himself in institutions on
earth, such as the Catholic Church. But Schmitt was not very optimistic about
Catholicism either, especially after his excommunication in 1926 and even less
so after his turn to concrete order thinking at the beginning of the 1930s. In The
Nomos of the Earth, Heracles becomes his hero instead of Christ. This does not
signify, however, that fascination with the sacred would not be present in this
book. On the contrary, Schmitt identifies legitimacy with sacredness more