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

232 S. Prozorov
such as the truth of divine law, rationality or even pragmatic utility. The only
mode of subjection that Schmitt’s ontology permits is what we have referred to
above as existential decisionism, a commitment to a position in spite of the
impossibility of its grounding. This stance can be described in Paul Veyne’s
terms as a fulfilment of nihilism. Veyne approaches nihilism as ‘a name we give
to periods of history when thinkers feel that truths are without foundation’
(1992: 242). In this understanding nihilism is constituted by, first, a recognition
of the absence of foundations of truth, morality and politics and, second, the
desire to have such foundations. The properly nihilistic response to this existential
condition may consist either in the hypocritical attempts to invent new
foundations for judgement (‘incomplete nihilism’ in Nietzsche’s terms) or in the
passive-nihilist abandonment of all judgement due to its necessary contingency.
In contrast to such critics as Michael Walzer (1986) and Nancy Fraser (1995),
Veyne interprets Foucault’s work as the ‘fulfilment of nihilism’ that accepts the
first assumption of nihilism but rejects the second, claiming instead that it is the
very impossibility of founding norms that makes possible ethical action. Similarly,
Veyne suggests that the absence of secure foundations does not disable
judgement, but merely disables giving one’s judgement the force of truth or
moral law. ‘What remains is to live and to want what one wants without justifying
oneself and saying that one is right’ (Veyne 1992: 243).
It is important to distinguish this affirmation of decisionism from the deconstructionist
understanding of the ‘impossibility’ of decision, highlighted in the
‘ethical’ writings of the later Derrida (1992, 1996). Like Schmitt’s insistence on
the decision emanating from nothingness, deconstructionist ethics affirms undecidability
as the condition of possibility of every decision. In Derrida’s supplementary
deconstruction of Schmitt’s approach, any decisionism necessarily
contains the ‘aporia of decision’, the passage through the ‘ordeal undecidable’,
the experience of the ‘perhaps’ that is both traversed and effaced (but not
annulled) in the act of decision (Derrida 1996: 67). It is this effacement that
deconstruction seeks to restore to the decisions already taken in order to reassert
their radically undecidable nature, irreducible to the procedure of derivation. As
we have seen, Schmitt may be considered a devout Derridean in this aspect,
given his insistence on the impossibility of grounding a genuine decision. It is
rather in assessing the consequences of this originary undecidability that Schmitt
and Derrida part ways. In contrast to Schmitt, Derrida is characteristically hesitant
to affirm the necessary effacement of undecidability in the very act of
making the decision. Instead, his deconstructed decisionism appears to be locked
in a self-imposed suspension over the abyss of undecidability in the desire to
refrain from the closure that every decision inaugurates, which makes it, in Derridean
ethics, always inadequate and irresponsible.
The deconstructionist ethics of (in)decision therefore remains suspended in
irresolution and impotence, a deadlock which can only be broken via its supplementation
with a Schmittian decisionism, of which it is allegedly itself a supplement.
The insistence on the need to decide despite the a priori ‘ethical
inadequacy’ of every decision is necessary for deconstruction not to appear, in