Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt

Abstract

This article compares Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the figure of Hamlet. This comparison evaluates Schmitt’s response in Hamlet or Hecuba to Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘exception’ in Origins of the German Tragic Drama. ‘Deciding upon the exception’ is a defining characteristic of sovereignty, so that the comparison between Schmitt and Benjamin is also an evaluation of their respective theories of sovereignty. It will appear that the notion of the aesthetic is crucial in understanding this constellation of ideas.

Notes

¹ Translator’s note: The word ‘Enstfall’ has been rendered throughout as ‘state of emergency’ while the ‘Ausnahmezustand’ has become ‘state of exception’. (The only exception is the subtitle, where ‘Ausnahmezustand’ has been translated as ‘exception’ for brevity.) In general, ‘Erstfall’ refers to a situation of emergency which gives rises to (or causes) a suspension of law or a ‘martial law’. This suspension is referred to in German legal terminology as ‘Ausnahmezustand’. The first sentence of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology defines sovereignty thus: ‘The sovereign is he who decides on the exception [Ausnahmezustand]’. However, Schmitt frequently uses the two terms interchangeably. The translator would like to thank Patrizia Hucke and Clare Monagle, as well as Professor Jürgen Fohrmann, for commenting on earlier drafts.

² The relation between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt requires a whole article. If one wanted to determine more clearly the relation, the contrasting texts – to name only the most significant ones – would have been, on the one hand, Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (1919) and Benjamin’s The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (submitted as a dissertation in 1919 and published in 1920), and, on the other hand, Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) and Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (submitted as an habilitation in 1925, published in 1928).

³ I refrain here from defining ‘political theology’, since it will progressively unfold as a concept in the development of the argument. For the role of transcendence in Schmitt, see Meuter (1991).

⁴ Translator’s note: The Roman law maxim ‘princepts legibus solutus est’ literally means that ‘the prince is not bound by the law’ or that the sovereign is above the law.

⁵ Translator’s note: English in the original.

⁶ See also Balke’s (1996) subtle analysis of causa and occasion.

⁷ Translator’s note: Schmitt derives the constitutive relation between nurture or Hegung and the law or nomos through a reference to Jost Tier’s ‘Zaun und Mannring’ (1942) – see Schmitt (2003: 75), translation modified.

⁸ Translator’s note: The author here uses Schmitt’s interplay of the Greek verb nemein (meaning primarily to take, but it is also the root for the word nomos or law) and German words ‘nehmen’ (to take), ‘Nahme’ (seizure, commonly used as a compound, e.g. ‘Landnahme’ meaning land appropriation) and ‘das Genommene (that which is taken). This interplay between words is impossible to retain in English. See Schmitt’s article ‘Nomos – Nahme – Name’, translated in Schmitt (2003: 336–50).

⁹ This is simultaneously a fight against ‘immanent speech’; see on this Brokoff (2001).

¹⁰ On a history of the concept ‘political theology’ and a re‐evaluation of the meaning of the theologisation of political concepts see Assmann (2006); see also in the same book Heinrich Meier’s introductory comments.

¹¹ Translator’s note: Schmitt has actually slightly changed the citation from Theodor Däubler, who had written ‘The enemy is your [deine] own question as figure’ (1916: 58). Schmitt returns to Däubler’s verse – again rendered with the pronoun in the plural – and develops it further, in Schmitt (1975: 88).

¹² About Schmitt see Brokoff (2001: 33) which also contains the relevant literature.

¹³ This conception of the outside can be distinguished from Levinas’s extrapolation of religion. This point cannot be taken up here. See Levinas (1996).

¹⁴ This recognition is both programmatic and methodological for Derrida, at least since his ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (in Derrida 2002).