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