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

238 S. Prozorov
insistence on undecidability and hence the impossibility of every decision,
which leads it into an ethical impasse, our approach connects with Zˇizˇek’s recent
reaffirmation of decisionism in conceiving of undecidability as the instance of
radical negativity that is simultaneously the condition of possibility of every
political act (see Zˇizˇek 2004a; cf. Prozorov 2005).
The reading of Schmitt espoused in this chapter, has admittedly privileged the
disturbing and destabilising force of Schmitt’s existential decisionism rather than
his well-known personal preference for the stability of any order, once it is formed
in an act of exception. The possibly un-Schmittian effects that Schmitt’s conception
of the political may induce in its ethical reconstruction testify to the demonic force
of the borderline concepts of decision, exception and sovereignty that turn against
their creator, for ever to haunt any valorisation of security and stability. Gilles
Deleuze once wrote that his practice of philosophical reading consisted in ‘taking
an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet
monstrous’ (Deleuze cited in Zˇizˇek 2004a: 46). In the case of Schmitt, for all the
‘groans and protests’, it is arguably his own mischievous offspring of ontological
extremism that takes incestuous frivolities with the father of political realism.
Notes
1 The renewed interest in Schmitt in political and IR theory is particularly evident in
the aftermath of the influential readings by Derrida (1996) and Agamben (1998). See
also Mouffe (2000), Hirst (1999), Zˇizˇek (1999a), Ojakangas (2000, 2004), Huysmans
(1998), Rasch (2000, 2003), Turner (2002), Prozorov (2004b, 2005).
2 See Prozorov (2004a, 2005, 2007) for a series of attempts to synthesise the philosophical
projects of Schmitt and Foucault.
3 For the most authoritative commentaries on this aspect of Foucault’s work, see
Deleuze (1988), Bernauer (1990), Rajchman (1985), Simons (1995), Dumm (1996).
4 See Levinas (1969). For an insightful reading of the parallels between Schmitt’s and
Levinas’s constructions of self–other encounters, see Sims (2005). The simultaneity
of the emergence of the self and the other in the act of their distinction logically
entails the postulate of ontological and ethical equality between the two figures,
which contradicts Levinas’s thesis on their originary asymmetry and the privileged
ontological status of the Other. This postulate of asymmetry is the object of Derrida’s
(1972) early critique of Levinas that renders this asymmetry conditioned by a more
fundamental symmetry, inherent in the understanding of the Other as alter ego.
5 See e.g. Jünger (1993) for an exemplary statement of the conservative revolutionary
position. See also Wolin (1992) and Huysmans (1998) for the argument that associates
Schmitt’s thought with the discourse of conservative revolution and Ojakangas
(2004) for a detailed criticism of such association.
6 See however Wolin (1992), Muller (1999) and McCormick (1997) for the discussion
of Schmitt’s aestheticism.
7 See Prozorov (2004a, 2007) for the detailed reconstitution of a Foucauldian ‘concrete
freedom’ and its relation to identity. For a wider discussion of Foucault’s thought on
freedom see also Dumm (1996), Rajchman (1985) and Bernauer (1990).
8 This notion of ‘verification’ has been developed by Jacques Ranciere (1995) and
highlights the unity of demonstration and proof in political struggle, whereby the very
manifestation of an action serves as a vindication of the ‘truth’ that it affirms.
9 See Foucault (1977b). For the discussion of the importance of vitalism for Foucault’s
philosophy see Deleuze (1988: 91–93, 124–133).