Abstract
In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text.
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Notes
Analyses of Derrida’s reading of Theory of the Partisan and ‘Weisheit der Zelle’ will be undertaken elsewhere.
Schmitt (2007a, p. 29 n 9) does not expressly say that stásis is ‘unnatural’, but he could be read to imply this by noting that the idea underlying the distinction which Plato draws between pólemos and stásis is that ‘a people cannot wage war against itself (i.e. stásis is not really war) and that a so-called ‘civil war’ only means self-destruction (Selbstzerfleischung), not however the formation of a new state or even of a new people’.
The Republic (470b–c) refers here to two names for two things.
The barbarians on the other hand are said to be strangers vis-à-vis the Greeks both in respect of kinship ties and origins.
The Menexenus (Plato 1997, p. 950), which consists for the most part of a speech by Socrates in the form of a funeral oration, seems to go even further in this diagnosis of stásis as an illness (Derrida 1997, p. 92). Socrates here (at 244a) denies that enmity (ekhthrós) or wickedness has any role to play in stásis and says that the cause thereof is dustukhia, which can be translated as ‘a fatal disorder, a stroke of bad luck, misfortune’ (Derrida 1997, p. 92). Derrida’s reference to Loraux (2006, p. 252), who refers to stásis as an ‘absolute evil’ and as ‘a parasitic evil grafted onto the good nature of the city’, is important to mention here. See also Derrida (1997, p. 273) where, within the context of a discussion of the notion of crimes against humanity and with reference to Kant, he notes that ‘[f]ratricide is [considered as] the general form of temptation, the possibility of radical evil, the evil of evil’.
Derrida (1997, p. 90) furthermore points out that Plato in the Republic does not simply accept this opposition between stásis and pólemos. He in fact through Socrates calls for its erasure in the form of a law to be laid down. He more specifically admonishes the guardians to treat the barbarians as they now treat the Greeks, that is, they should not ravage their land and destroy their houses (Republic 470a–b).
In Derrida (1997, p. 113–14), this sentence is rendered, correctly, but perhaps a bit simplistically, as ‘such a difference amounts to the same thing… it belongs to the same’. The word ‘revient’ (revenir: return/come back) however suggests that Derrida is alluding here to Freud’s repetition compulsion as well as to his later discussion in ‘Heidegger’s Ear’ (which does not appear in the English translation of Politics of Friendship) where at stake is the originary difference or the event of the gift in its relation to pólemos in Heidegger’s texts (Derrida 1993a, p. 171); see further sect. 5 (Heidegger) below.
Derrida (1997, p. 159), for whom deconstruction can be equated with de-naturalisation, is of course not with his analysis supporting a belief in nature. For now, Derrida is simply following Plato’s terminology, seeking to establish a certain law.
The notion of the ‘foreign body’ (corps étranger) also makes its appearance in other texts of Derrida in the context of psychoanalysis, and specifically the work of Abraham and Torok; see e.g. Derrida (2007, p. 321; 1986, p. 42) on the crypt incorporated in the self. Derrida partly draws on these analyses in Politics of Friendship. The notion of a ‘foreign body’ inevitably raises questions about the relationship between Derrida’s thinking in this regard and Agamben’s homo sacer as well as Girard’s scapegoat mechanism; see Agamben (1998), Girard (1989). Space unfortunately does not allow for such an analysis here.
With this statement, Derrida anticipates his reading of Freud which will be discussed in sect. 4 (Freud) below.
In this reading of Plato, a different ‘structure’ of the political starts to slowly unfold. It is therefore not possible to agree with Filmer (2007, p. 14), according to whom Derrida’s detour through Plato to criticise the distinction between pólemos and stásis is unnecessary.
See Preface to Schmitt (2002, pp. 10–11) and Schmitt (2006, p. 141; 2011, p. 113) where he notes that war during the preceding period (the thirty year war, lasting from 1618-1648) had degenerated into civil war (Entartung des Krieges zum Bürgerkrieg). Schmitt (2006, p. 142; 2007a, p. 114) also speaks in this respect of the ‘liquidation’ (Liquidierung) of civil war through the Westphalia treaty. See further Kochi (2006a, pp. 271–272), and Kochi (2006b, p. 148).
See sect. 5 (Heidegger) below.
Schmitt 2007a, p. 19: ‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’.
Such a reading would seem to go against Schmitt’s earlier reading of Plato in respect of civil war, see sect. 2 (Plato) above.
Schmitt’s example of this distinction with reference to Islam, Derrida (1997, p. 89) notes, casts light on Schmitt’s whole project of defining the political (see also Simon 2008, p. 106). This project, as Derrida points out, is clearly not simply a theoretical one, but also polemical (see also Derrida 1997, pp. 115–18). The political itself (with its distinctions between faith and politics, enmity and hostility, and friendship as alliance or disorder) as a European concept has to be defended against what Islam represents for Schmitt: the enemy of the political, that is, as Derrida reads it, and as we will see below, a force of self-destruction or the command of absolute hospitality which threatens the political.
At stake here for Derrida is, as we will see below, the question whether it is indeed possible to think hostility without affect, especially after Freud; see Derrida (1997, p. 124), read with n 19 at 136.
The re-introduction of the English word ‘foe’ is significant in this respect, as Schmitt (2002, pp. 18–19) notes in the Preface. Private or personal feeling/affect thus intrudes here in the public sphere.
This is perhaps even more so today in the age of the ‘war on terror’, see Derrida (2003, pp. 85–136).
Schmitt (2010b, p. 75) expresses his disagreement with this.
According to Fues (2010, pp. 198–199) the Holy Spirit in Schmitt’s reading ‘would represent the friend/foe-relation between the preserving and the altering God’.
See Derrida (2004, p. 206) where he notes that in the philosophical tradition, phûsis has no other, and no outside.
Freud’s thinking on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 2001, XVIII pp. 7–64) is transformed in Derrida (1987). In brief, this involves the positing of a relation between an absolute a-stricture and the binding thereof by virtue of the drive for mastery. See also Derrida (1997, p. 165) where he quotes Schmitt (2010a, p. 90) to the effect that ‘all extermination is but self-extermination’.
As Derrida (1997, p. 136 n 19) points out, the words ‘enmity’ and ‘hostility’ are not strictly distinguished in everyday language and these words share a common root with words such as philía, friendship and love, which all include some element of feeling; see eg Benveniste (1973) Book 1 chapter 7 (hospitality) and Book 3 chapter 4 (phílos). See also Derrida (1997, p. 124) where doubt is likewise cast on Schmitt’s attempt to construct a pure hostility without affect or at least without private affect (with reference to a footnote added by Schmitt in the 1963 version of Der Begriff des Politischen).
The co-determination of the concepts of friend and enemy at stake here stems from the criterion which Schmitt adopts to characterise the political, that is, the possibility of distinguishing between friend and enemy.
This may appear irrelevant, but, as we saw earlier in sect. 3.1 (Pólemos and stásis), the regulation of inter-state war goes hand in hand with the repression and delegitimisation of civil war (including private violence) in the interests of state sovereignty. Hobbes already taught us this; see also (Kochi 2006b, p. 149).
We find a similar kind of argument in Derrida (1999a, pp. 88, 90) where Levinas’s notion of perpetual peace is at stake (as a beyond to the political), which is said also to inhabit war (as well as hostility and murder) as a testimonial trace.
In chapter 3 of Derrida (1997) on Nietzsche this form of love is described inter alia with reference to the gift, disproportion, dissymmetry, ‘a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality’ (at p. 62, 63), and ‘a love more loving than love’, i.e. that no longer wants to possess (at pp. 64–65).
In support of Derrida’s reading, it can be noted that elsewhere Schmitt (2010c, p. 25) makes a similar statement in another context (when he points to concept dissolution) that ‘[i]n a figurative sense one can say that to be a human being is to be a combatant [In einem übertragenen Sinne heiβt ja “Mensch sein ein Kämpfer sein”]’. Later in the French version, Derrida (1994, p. 361; 1993a, p. 177) will likewise note with reference to Heidegger that ‘Kampf belongs to the very structure of Dasein’.
The English translation of Collins (Derrida 1997, p. 123) is problematic here. It reads as follows: ‘This does not mean so much that the being-for-death of this human life cannot be separated from a being-for-putting-to-death or for death-in-combat’.
A ‘commonsensical’ understanding of this phrase would perhaps be that Schmitt is simply saying that war, hostility and combat can at any time become a reality; see Simon (2008, p. 119).
For Heidegger death is the possibility par excellence, as well as Dasein’s most proper possibility: ‘Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unüberholbare] (Heidegger 1962, p. 294; 2006, pp. 250–251; see also Derrida 1993b, pp. 63, 64; and De Vries 2002, p. 358).
Field and Polt (Heidegger 2000, p. 65) translate the passage as follows: ‘Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as the free.’
In Derrida’s linking of Heidegger and Schmitt, he at times opposes them, and at other times seeks a reading of Schmitt which accords with that of Heidegger; see e.g. Derrida (1993a, p. 204) concerning Schmitt’s theoanthropolemology and Heidegger’s reading of the Heraclitian fragment.
Hence also the heading/title of this (part of the) text: Philopolemology.
The argument in Plato’s Lysis, which Derrida (1997, pp. 153–155) briefly analyses, seems to have a similar structure.
See also Derrida (1997, p. 139) where, in introducing the reading of Theory of the Partisan, he notes with reference to The Concept of the Political that for Schmitt antagonism or opposition is in essence political and the more opposition or antagonism increases in intensity, the more political it is: ‘opposition is all the more oppositional—supreme opposition, qua the essence and telos of opposition, negation, and contradictional—when it is political.’ Derrida has been (wrongly) accused of overlooking this all-important aspect of ‘the intensity of association or disassociation of human beings’ (Schmitt 2007a, p. 26, quoted in Derrida 1997, p. 245) in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and thus for reading Schmitt as positing an independent domain of the political; see Meier 2013, p. 178 n 37; Marder 2010, p. 68. This aspect, as should appear from the analysis undertaken here, is central to Derrida’s reading of Schmitt.
See Derrida (1997, p. 249) where he comments that both Schmitt and Heidegger give credit to ‘oppositionality itself, ontological adversity, that which holds adversaries together, assembling them in lógos qua ontological pólemos’.
‘That this case only arises exceptionally, does not abolish its determining nature, but instead underpins it’.
As Derrida (1997, p. 247) points out, Heidegger would have called this depoliticisation ‘nihilist’—the truth ‘of the metaphysical concept of politics carried out to its culmination’. For Heidegger even the world wars are signs of the abandonment/withdrawal/retreat/dissimulation of Being (at 248). Derrida (1998), however, does not view the withdrawal of Being as a fall; the withdrawal actually gives rise to metaphysics.
See also Derrida (2007, pp. 393–394, 396, 404–406) where he brings together the phantasm of the total destruction of nuclear war with Heidegger’s gift of Being.
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Acknowledgments
The financial assistance of the South African National Research Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Symposium for Phenomenology, Perugia, 8–12 July 2013. I would like to express my thanks to the participants as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
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de Ville, J. The Foreign Body Within the Body Politic: Derrida, Schmitt and the Concept of the Political. Law Critique 26, 45–63 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-014-9144-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-014-9144-6