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

13 The ethos of insecure life
Reading Carl Schmitt’s existential
decisionism as a Foucauldian ethics
Introduction
Sergei Prozorov
As the contemporary discourse on ethics is ever more suffused with answers to
the question of what makes a decision or an action ethical, it appears timely to
engage with the ethical thought of a philosopher who infamously affirmed the
autonomy of the decision from any ‘ethical criteria’. In contrast to numerous
contemporary studies that take Carl Schmitt’s political realism as the object of
criticism in the name of a variably construed ‘political ethics’, in this chapter we
shall venture to recast the most controversial or even scandalous aspects of
Schmitt’s thought as ethical in their own right. 1 Our contention is that rather
than serving as an easy target of deconstructionist or genealogical criticism, a
Schmittian political ontology functions as an irreducible limit of this criticism,
serving as the ‘undeconstructible’ remainder of political realism. The argument
of this chapter is that this remainder also marks a locus for an ethical discourse
that is both commensurable with the ethical drive of current poststructuralist
criticism and able to transcend its limitations.
More specifically, the chapter seeks to explore the affinities between the work
of Schmitt and Michel Foucault. In his studies of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy in the
context of the political thought of late modernity, Mika Ojakangas (2001, 2004)
has argued that the approach of the two thinkers is marked by the same conceptual
logic that locates the foundation of order in the founding rupture of the exception,
a logic that we have elsewhere termed ‘ontological extremism’ (Prozorov 2004b).
Nonetheless, there are also crucial divergences between Schmitt and Foucault,
most notably regarding their relation to the principle of sovereignty. In contrast to
Schmitt’s valorisation of sovereignty, Foucault has famously dismissed the very
problematic of sovereignty in contemporary political theory with his call to ‘cut
off the head of the king’ and his argument for the decentred and immanent character
of power (Foucault 1977b, 1990a). However, as we have argued elsewhere, it
is both possible and fruitful to reintroduce the question of sovereignty, in its
Schmittian ‘quasi-transcendental’ sense of the constitutive decision on exception,
into the Foucauldian genealogical problematic. 2 Moreover, as we shall suggest
below, Schmitt’s political ontology strongly resonates with the work of Foucault,
particularly his writings on freedom, transgression and the aesthetics of existence. 3