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

228 S. Prozorov
also: this is good and this is not.... It becomes a completely personal question,
if I choose, if I want, to take certain courses of action with reference to
prisons, psychiatric asylums, this or that issue. But I say that political action
belongs to a category of participation completely different from these
written or bookish acts of participation. It is a problem of personal and
physical commitment.... The essence of being radical is physical: the
essence of being radical is the radicalness of existence itself.
(Foucault 1996c: 261)
This quotation provides a good illustration of the dimension of lightness in
ethico-political practice, when the latter is conceived on the level of the individual
subject. The radically contingent and undecidable nature of all regimes of truth
and correlate forms of subjectification, demonstrated in Foucault’s genealogy,
itself provides a possibility for a transgression of the limits within which our
subjectivity is inscribed. It is the very gravity of the social space, sutured by
myriad strategies of power, that enables what Foucault referred to as ‘concrete
freedom’ 7 that, rather than being positively identified with any form of order, consists
in crossing its constitutive boundary and dispensing with the very notion of
identity, rather than merely adopting an alternative mode of subjectification:
‘[t]ransgression has its entire space in the line that it crosses’ (Foucault 1977b: 34).
In the absence of secure epistemico-moral foundations, the sole remaining
‘criterion’ for political action is the foundational yet unfounded force of the
subject’s decision. Like Schmitt’s, Foucault’s political ethics is marked by an
existential decisionism, an affirmation of one’s stance combined with the recognition
of the absence of any foundation for the decision. It is important to note
that Foucault’s affirmation of the deciding subject is by no means a return to an
essentialist conception of the subject with its familiar themes of self-discovery
and self-fulfilment.
Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover
himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent
himself. This modernity does not liberate the man in his own being; it
compels him to face the task of producing himself.
(Foucault 1984b: 42)
We may therefore conclude that while the social aspect of existence is in Foucault’s
work endowed with a dimension of gravity, the transgressive element of
lightness is contained within those practices of the self by which a subject
(re)invents her own existence and thereby verifies her subjectivity. 8
The next section will attempt to demonstrate that a similar distinction
between lightness and weight is at work in Schmitt’s political thought. On the
level of the collectivity, Schmitt’s concept of the political presents us with a
gloomy (and arguably irrefutable) vision of an ever present ‘extreme possibility’
of war, delivered in a concise and solemn style which parodies the force of theological
revelation that in Schmitt’s political theology is a metaphysical counter-