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

The demonic nomos
Nomos: word and myth 249
In his book on Hobbes’s political symbol of the Leviathan (1996b) published in
1938, Schmitt reveals the multiple and symbolic character of the Leviathan
image in Hobbes – at once ‘mortal god’, machine, monster and huge man.
Drawing on the book of Job, Schmitt shows Leviathan to be a symbol in another
kind of geo-mythography. Here Leviathan can be a sea monster, serpent, dragon
or – as we already noted – a whale, which confronts and defeats the land
monster, Behemoth. Mythical images, Schmitt notes, are subject to continuous
metamorphosis, numerous transformations and interpretations. He follows the
mutation of the myth of the Leviathan as reinterpreted in the Middle Ages by
both Christian churchmen and Jewish cabbalists. In the former, the devil is a
Leviathan who is captured by the Cross as fish-hook. In the latter, the two monsters
represent the heathens, the Leviathan land-powers and the Behemoth seapowers.
‘The latter tries to tear the leviathan apart with his horns, while the
leviathan covers the behemoth’s mouth and nostrils with his fins and kills him in
that way’ (Schmitt 1996b: 9). This image, Schmitt observes, is a ‘fine depiction’
of a naval blockade. During this battle, according to esoteric thought, Schmitt
tells us, ‘the Jews stand by and watch the people of the world kill one another’,
and later ‘eat of the flesh of the slaughtered people and are sustained by it’
(ibid.: 9). Schmitt, more than most thinkers, knows the emotional charge that
can electrify symbol and myth. He tells us that we are here confronted in cabbalistic
esoterica with ‘political myths of the most astonishing kind and by documents
often fraught with downright magical intensity’ and that in them ‘the
unique, totally abnormal condition and attitude of the Jewish people toward
all other peoples became discernible’ (ibid.: 8). Schmitt is a powerful ‘geomythographer’,
as his reflections on the land–sea dichotomy and its imagery
attest. But he can use that facility, as here, for a set of multiple and fused purposes:
to gain a perspective on Hobbes’s theory of the state; to bring the antithesis
of land and sea into focus; and to propose an analysis which places the Jews
outside the ‘normal’ order of European peoples. In fact, the question of his intellectual
ethics is more egregious than this would seem. He both appropriates
Jewish mythology and its illuminations and adds to what at times reads like a
sophisticated kind of hate literature. The Jews become the paradigm of the
exception: as Agamben might say, they can only be included by being placed or
taken outside the normal frame of life, a structure the latter would find in ‘the
camp’. There is a psychic economy of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.
Passages such as the one I have just covered present an enormous problem
for those who might be engaged in the critical history of liberalism and who
would regard The Nomos of the Earth as a major contribution to that project in
the sphere of international law. Whatever positive views one might have about
Schmitt’s character and his personal and intellectual biography, and whether one
regards his stance in this book as intrinsically racist or not, there is no doubt that
at the very least the act and timing of such a discourse constitute an egregious
and inexcusable moral lapse of the first order even if we allow for the fear of the