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

230 S. Prozorov
material, including one’s everyday existence, can become enveloped in an aesthetic
project of creating oneself as a ‘work of art’. Far from being a vacuous
valorisation of ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’, characteristic of contemporary
neoliberal individualism, Foucault’s ‘work of art’ primarily refers to the ceaseless
work of confronting any prescribed regime of ethics that promises the individual
access to the truth of his being and a pathway to self-fulfilment.
Foucault’s ethics is ‘the philosophy for a practice, in which what one is capable
of being is not rooted in a prior knowledge of who one is. Its principle is
freedom, but a freedom which does not follow from any postulation of our
nature or essence’ (Rajchman 1994: 192). In the absence of any knowledge
about who one is, freedom takes concrete shape in the cultivation of a style of
existence, a sensibility that is aesthetic rather than epistemic. Posing the question
of Schmittian ethics in these terms requires a reconstruction in the existential
decisionism of Schmittian political theory of the four aspects of ethics that
Foucault distinguishes: ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work and
the telos of the ethical subject.
Ethical substance: proximity to the void
Trying to identify an ethical substance in Schmitt’s political theory may appear
paradoxical in light of the preceding discussion of the thoroughgoing negativity
that characterises his concepts of the political, sovereignty and the exception.
Yet the notion of ethical substance in Foucault’s usage refers to the aspect of
existence that is problematised, the object of ethical practice rather than its
content (Foucault 1990a: 26). We may venture that the ethical substance of a
Schmittian political realism is contained in the notion of ‘real life’, the access to
which is provided by the exception:
The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not
only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception.
In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism
that has become torpid by repetition.
(Schmitt 1985a: 15)
This attention to the practice of fostering ‘real’, unmediated life arises from
Schmitt’s ontological extremism that derives a political theory of normal order
from a moment of exceptional decision, an act of unlimited authority that
emanates from nothingness and has no content other than the intensity of its
ontogenetic force.
Thus, in the absence of a positive ethical substance, Schmittian political
realism offers a notion of ‘life’ which is as holistic and all-encompassing as it is
restricted to the absolute minimum, its entire ‘reality’ contained in the exceptional,
critical, boundary or limit experiences. 9 These experiences both serve as
conditions of possibility of ‘ordered life’ and affirm its ultimate impossibility,
relegating it to the order of ‘mechanism’, done away with by taking exception to