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

The ethos of insecure life 235
differences does little more than subsume one’s existential singularity under its
own teleological or procedural normativity. If truth is a thing of this world, then
any consensus that emerges in discussion will be always already permeated by
power relations; that is, it will always emerge as a result of an unfounded
decision, however much the event of the latter is disavowed:
[e]very consensus, even a ‘free’ one, is somehow motivated and brought
into existence. Power produces consensus and often, to be sure, a rational
and ethically justified consensus. Conversely, consensus produces power,
and then often an irrational and – despite the consensus – an ethically
repugnant one.
(Schmitt 1999: 202)
Aware of the eradication of difference inherent in the drive for consensus, a
decisionist ethics values difference without a liberal ‘safety mechanism’ of postulating
the underlying identity of ‘humanity’, which in Schmitt’s astute observation
merely serves to deny the enemy the existential status of being human,
reducing him to a ‘total non-value’ (Freund 1995: 19), and has ‘incalculable
effects [since] a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’
(Schmitt 1976: 54). Just as Schmitt’s political realism on the level of interstate
relations affirms pluralism in the domain of the international, while privileging a
minimal degree of domestic homogeneity, a decisionist ethics emphasises the
maintenance of difference in intersubjective relations while simultaneously privileging
a resolution of interdependence with the positive other via a clear act of
self-distinction and self-delimitation. In this manner, a decisionist ethics posits a
telos of sovereign subjectivity.
Telos: sovereign to oneself
The telos of sovereignty is the final component of Schmittian ethics. The ultimate
goal of the art of making enemies that nurtures the ethical substance of real
life by permanently returning to the originary void of the decision is ultimately
to emerge from a state of unbearable gravity of epistemico-moral subjection into
the condition of lightness, in which one assumes mastery over one’s own existence.
This mastery marks a synthesis of Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty as the
decision on exception and Foucault’s notion of transgression as an experience of
the limit. As we have argued elsewhere, in Schmitt’s approach sovereignty is
irreducible to the affirmation of supreme authority within a positive order, but is
rather exhausted by a negative operation of transgression, the capacity to
suspend the normal functioning of order (see Prozorov 2005). The sovereign is
simultaneously inside positive order as the source of its foundational principles
and outside it as something that ‘can not be subsumed’ under these principles, a
supplement that is always unfathomable, monstrous and obscene in relation to
every positivity. We may then redefine the sovereign as the transgressor in relation
to the order of his own creation and the transgressor as sovereign over his