Carl Schmitt and the Question o the Aesthetic

Neil Levi

More than twenty years ater his death, the works o the German jurist andpolitical thinker Carl Schmitt seem more alive than ever, his inuence amongpolitical and critical theorists indisputable. Yet interest in Schmitt is almostalways accompanied by a certain anxiety. Did he not, however briey, serve theNazis by supporting the Röhm purge and calling or “Jewish” inuence to beeliminated rom German culture? And so, is his thought not in some prooundmanner “contaminated” by, even ultimately a justifcation o, such views?Given his association with Nazism, that regime which is beyond theideological pale o all postwar political thought, there is something apt aboutthe act that one o the most ertile ideas in Schmitt’s own thinking is that o theenemy. Indeed, or many, his thought is best emblematized by a single sentence,one that Schmitt himsel was very ond o: “Der Feind ist unsre eigne Frage alsGestalt,” which, depending on how one translates

Gestalt

, can mean either “Theenemy embodies our own question” or “The enemy is a fgure or our own ques-tion.”

This line, originally rom a poem by one o Schmitt’s riends, TheodorDäubler, evokes what is arguably one o the best-known aspects o Schmitt’sthought: the idea that, just as morality is about the distinction between good

New German Critique

I would like to thank Beth Drenning, Chris Hill, Andreas Huyssen, Fiona Jenkins, Dirk Moses,Anson Rabinbach, and Michael Rothberg or their comments on earlier drats o this essay, whichI wrote while a Sesqui Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University o Sydney.1. Carl Schmitt, “Weisheit der Zelle,” in

Ex Captivitate Salus

(Cologne: Greven, 1950), 90; mytranslations.

28 Carl Schmitt and the Aesthetic

and evil, just as aesthetics is about the distinction between beautiul and ugly,and economics the distinction between proftable and unproftable, politics canbe reduced to the distinction between riend and enemy. “The enemy embodiesour own question” reveals something crucial about Schmitt’s understanding o the nature o the enemy, the way the enemy helps us defne ourselves, repre-sents and gives orm to the question o what makes us who we are.The present essay takes as its point o departure the act that Schmitt, athinker dedicated to demarcating the specifcally political domain, is requentlyattacked by his

own

enemies or turning politics into aesthetics—a transor-mation that Walter Benjamin’s remarks in “The Work o Art in the Age o ItsTechnological Reproducibility” have led many to regard as quintessentially as-cist.

Are these opponents—Jürgen Habermas, Richard Wolin, and others—thereore embodying Schmitt’s own question or him, giving it

Gestalt

? That isnot so clear. I have some sympathy or these critical enemies and their objec-tions to Schmitt, but their critiques lack any attempt to pose a

question

aboutwhat it means to call ostensibly political ideas

aesthetic

. By emphasizing theimportance o the question o the aesthetic, I argue or a more complex andpolysemous understanding o the relationship between the aesthetic and thepolitical. I thereore reject polemical notions o “aestheticized” politics in avoro some broader, more descriptive conceptions o the aesthetic as a mode o presentation and perception that we might see as inherent to political thought.In the last hal o the essay I turn to what Schmitt himsel has to sayabout aesthetics in the book where he also has the most to say about enemies,namely,

The Concept o the Political

. Schmitt thinks o the aesthetic both asthe autonomous realm o art and as a specifc mode o perception. I explore theidea that the aesthetic is, on Schmitt’s own terms, an enemy to his conceptiono the political.

Schmitt’s Ideas

Most readers o Schmitt ocus on several political texts he published during theWeimar era, when, according to most scholars, he was opposed to the Nazis:

Political Theology

(1922),

The Crisis o Parliamentary Democracy

(1923),

2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work o Art in the Age o Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans.Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in

Selected Writings

, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jen-nings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press o Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 3:121.3. I do not devote any direct attention to the aesthetic aspect o the idea o the enemy itsel, espe-cially the idea o the enemy as one’s own question as

Gestalt

. There is much to be done with thisidea, especially via the work o Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, but it deserves an essay o its own.See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes,

Criti-cal Inquiry

16 (1990): 291–312.

Neil Levi 29

and

The Concept o the Political

(1926, 1932). In both

Political Theology

and

The Concept o the Political

Schmitt advocates what is called

political deci-sionism

. He argues that the law rests not on a particular norm or process but ona decision, an act o will without external justifcation that imposes order andstability. Politics, says Schmitt, is not about endless discussion, rational delib-eration, or consensus building but about recognizing the usually urgent need toact, having the power to decide what to do in a limited time, and doing it.Out o this decisionism he develops a distinctive theory o sovereigntyand o what he calls “the political.” The sovereign, he announces at the starto

Political Theology

, “is he who decides on the state o exception.”

Schmittloosely defnes the state o exception as a situation o extreme danger to thestate’s existence. He emphasizes, however, that his defnition must remainloose, because the state o exception cannot be circumscribed actually, madeto conorm to a preormed law, or be otherwise anticipated. Otherwise it wouldnot be exceptional.The sovereign is the name o that person (legal or actual) who decidesnot only that the situation is a state o exception but also what needs to be doneto eliminate the state o exception and thus preserve the state and restore order.Note the circularity o these defnitions: the sovereign is the one who decidesthat there is a state o exception; a state o exception is that which the sovereigndeems to be so. That is typical o how Schmitt structures his argument.In

The Concept o the Political

Schmitt claims that “political actions andmotives can be reduced to the distinction between riend and enemy.”

It iscustomary to point out that Schmitt means not private enemies and hatreds butcollective, public enemies. “An enemy exists only when, at least potentially,one fghting collectivity o people conronts a similar collectivity” (

, 28).For Schmitt, it is the intensity and extremity o this conrontation, the real pos-sibility o war, o being called on to sacrifce one’s own lie and take that o others, that makes this antagonism distinctly political. “War,” he says, “ollowsrom enmity. War is the existential negation o the enemy” (

, 33).As with the state o exception, there are no rational criteria or distin-guishing riend rom enemy. All conict is situational conict.

“Only theactual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concretesituation and settle the extreme case o conict. Each participant is in a position

4. Carl Schmitt,

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept o Sovereignty

, trans.George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5. Hereater cited as

.5. Carl Schmitt,

The Concept o the Political

, ed. and trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 26. Hereater cited as

.6. Just as, or Schmitt, “all law is ‘situational law’” (

, 13).