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

The ethos of insecure life 231
it. Such a limitation of life to the situation of the limit is not reducible to the
‘conservative revolutionary’ aesthetics of horror, frequently deemed synonymous
with the exaltation of the virtues of war (see Huysmans 1998; Wolin
1992), but rather concerns any experience that is transgressive in the Foucauldian
sense: an awareness of the limits of our constitution that is simultaneously
a step beyond them, a step that, it should be recalled, has its entire space
in the line of the limit. The ethical substance of Schmittian ethics is thus that
narrow segment at the extremity of one’s existence, the traversing of which via
the decision returns the subject to the void, to which he owes his subjectivity.
What is affirmed in decisionist ethics is not the certainty of presence of the
grounds of the good, it is rather the proximity to the void, that space of nothingness
from which the decision emanates and which provides access to ‘real life’.
This vitalist understanding of ethics carries an affinity with Gilles Deleuze’s
reading of Foucault’s notion of resistance:
Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object....
When power becomes bio-power, resistance becomes the power of life, a
vital power that cannot be contained within . . . the paths of a particular
diagram. Is not the force that comes from outside a certain idea of Life, a
certain vitalism, in which Foucault’s thought culminates? Is not life the
capacity to resist force? . . . There is no telling what man might achieve ‘as a
living being’, as a set of forces that resist.
(Deleuze 1988: 92–93)
Although this notion of life as an ontological precondition of subjectivity
appears to betray a residual naturalism, it is necessary to note the nuances in this
conception of ethical substance. The ‘ethical subject’ for both Schmitt and Foucault
is not an anterior vital force that resists but that which emerges in the act of
resistance to all externally instituted identities. Freedom, therefore, does not
consist in letting the primal forces of life be but in their confrontation with that
which permanently threatens to enclose them within the limits of a positive
order. Transgressive resistance is not protective, but constitutive of, free subjectivity
as, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘something one has and does not have, something
one wants, something one conquers’ (Nietzsche 1977: 271).
Mode of subjection: existential decisionism
The second component of the Foucauldian reconstruction of Schmittian ethics
concerns the mode of subjection, ‘the way in which people are invited or incited
to recognise their moral obligations’ (Foucault 1984a: 353). While a subject may
be (self-) subjected to a certain practice via its claim to rationality, its conformity
to a divine, natural or positive law, its accordance with the epistemicopolitical
standard of ‘normality’, Schmitt’s active nihilism leaves no possibility
of linking ethical practice to truth, either of divine or human origin. Since the
decision ‘emanates from nothingness’, it is by definition deprived of a ground