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

Conclusion
The ethos of insecure life 237
This ethical disposition is evidently easy to dismiss as empirically impossible,
romantically naive or politically dangerous. Any thoroughgoing decisionism is
arguably constituted by such a mix of naivety and dangerousness that quixotically
affirms, against all odds, the possibility of the impossible. However, we are
in agreement with Slavoj Zˇizˇek that it is precisely the dimension of impossibility,
of the danger of assuming a position in proximity to the void, that is the condition
of the authentic political act as, in Lacanian terms, an encounter with the
Real: ‘[t]he point is not that the Real is impossible but rather that the impossible
is Real. A trauma, or an act, is simply the point when the Real happens, and this
is difficult to accept’ (Zˇizˇek 2004b: 70). The ethos of insecure life that we have
elaborated connects with Zˇizˇek’s ‘ethics of the Real’, which is squarely Schmittian
in its decisionist emphasis on the act as a radical rupture in the existing
space of possibilities that takes the infinite risk of willing the impossible. Such
an ethics of subjectivity clearly runs against today’s mainstream narratives of
globalisation, in which the very subject, who is consecrated as the foundational
figure of the ‘post-statist’ cosmopolitan order, simultaneously becomes epiphenomenal
to global processes, flows and forces which are granted the status of
objective reality, to which one must adapt one’s existence. In this regime of
objective necessity, which arguably marks the final stage of the proverbial
‘decentring of the subject’, the success of existential decisionism is only thinkable
in terms of a miracle, which of course is the theological correlate of a
Schmittian decision. And yet, perhaps a certain belief in miracles is precisely
what is lacking in today’s critical thought:
[t]he truly traumatic thing is that miracles – not in the religious sense but in
the sense of free acts – do happen, but it’s very difficult to come to terms
with them. [The] Real is not this kind of thing-in-itself that we cannot
approach; the Real is, rather, freedom as a radical cut in the texture of
reality.
(ibid.: 166)
Perhaps, then, the contemporary importance of Schmitt lies precisely in this
affirmation of freedom as the infinite risk of decision that breaks out of the existing
coordinates of the possible, with nothing but the void to guide one’s orientation
to the future. Our argument has sought to demonstrate the possibility of
reading Schmitt as an ethical thinker who sought to affirm life in the disenchanting
condition of nihilism, rather than as a war-mongering ‘conservative revolutionary’,
relying on the combination of violence and traditionalist mythology to
challenge the bourgeois routinisation of life. Such a deconstructed Schmittian
approach is arguably a productive intervention into the poststructuralist discourse,
an approach that offers an alternative to the influential Derridean resolution
of the question of a ‘postmodern ethics’, which also operates with the
central concepts of decision and alterity. In contrast to the deconstructionist