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

226 S. Prozorov
emphasised that what is at stake in this recasting is not at all an attempt to
recover, in a hermeneutic reading, something that may be called ‘Schmitt’s
ethics’, but rather to explore the possibilities opened by the reconstruction of the
logic of the political in terms of its functioning as an ethical practice. Rather
than try to restore an ethical dimension to Schmitt’s political theory, the attempt
is to develop one on its basis, proceeding ironically from Schmitt’s own belief in
the uncontrollable demonic force that concepts may exercise against their
creator (see Muller 1999). In Foucault’s terms, the purpose of this reading is not
to try to retain fidelity to the author’s thought in the course of interpretation but
‘to deform it, make it groan and protest’ (Foucault 1980: 64). The following
section proceeds in this unfaithful interpretation by two steps: first, relocating
the concept of the political to the level of the individual as a deciding subject,
and, second, juxtaposing Schmitt’s decisionism with Foucault’s thought on the
transgressive practices of the self.
Decision as a transgressive practice: lightness and weight in
Schmitt and Foucault
The ethical reading of Schmitt’s concept of the political entails an important
shift of focus away from the political community towards the individual as an
ethical subject. At first glance, Schmitt’s theory does not appear to warrant this
move because in a conventional reading the political enemy is exemplified by a
collectivity, whose hostility concerns another collectivity: ‘[t]he enemy is solely
the public enemy’ (Schmitt 1976: 28). The reduction of the concept of the political
to the collectivity, which in European modernity takes the form of the state,
would appear to confirm a conventional ‘political realist’ reading of Schmitt in
the context of International Relations. Nonetheless, such a reading would not do
justice to Schmitt’s insight that it is the concept of the state which presupposes
the concept of the political, and not the other way round, and would thus
mistake, for the umpteenth time, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political as the valorisation
of statism. It would also ignore what is arguably most original, disturbing
and haunting about the Schmittian concept of the political: its actively
nihilistic existential decisionism (see Wolin 1992; Zˇizˇek 1999a; Hirst 1999),
which, in affirming the constitutive decision that inaugurates the state, simultaneously
subverts all claims to self-immanence that the state may have (see Prozorov
2004b).
To fully appreciate this subversive force, it is necessary to recognise in the
‘solely public’ enemy the effect of subjective decision, an ontogenetic act of
‘principally unlimited authority’ that is not derived from anything but rather
constitutes the basis of all derivation, a decision ex nihilo (Schmitt 1985a: 12).
The friend–enemy distinction is a sovereign decision par excellence – an act that
‘emanates from nothingness’ (ibid.: 32) – and, as something ‘that can not be
subsumed’ (ibid.: 13) under the universal and the general, can only come as an
exception to any pre-existing norm. Even if one remains confined to the level of
the state, one ought not to forget that Schmitt explicitly rejected legalist, abstract