Some very short and incomplete thoughts on Schmitt and Heidegger

In the May/June issue of Radical Philosophy, Stuart Elden had an article entitled, "Reading Schmitt Geopolitically". It's a smart and provocative article, and I hope most of you take the time to read it. I read it when it first came out, and wanted to respond. The problem (and also one of the strong points of the article) is that it tends to be specific to the use of Schmitt by political geographers, and basically the only political geographers I have read are Harvey, Elden, and Shapiro. So, I certainly assume that Elden has a better sense of what is going on in those circles than I. But I recently saw that a new English translation of Schmitt's Dictatorship is coming out, and I've decided to come back to some of the things I was thinking when I first read Stuart Elden's article. To clarify, this post isn't a response to Elden in particular, but rather about my own generic experiences with the way people have adopted Heidegger and Schmitt.

As we all know both Heidegger and Schmitt were members of the National Socialist party. The degree to which they were down for the whole genocide and pure fascism part will remain heavily debated by biographers, historians, and the rest of us. However, we know both of them had reactionary, far-right politics. For those of us who hold radical, left-wing political positions I think both Heidegger's and Schmitt's political involvement should give us pause. So often discussions of Heidegger's Nazism tends to revolve around two questions: What is the essence of Nazism (the Naziness of Nazism), and did Heidegger actually support or reject this essence? The other question tends to be some variation of if the whole Nazi thing is just an ad hom, and if his philosophical corpus should at all be treated differently because of his political commitments (or his political lapses, in the terminology of some of his defenders)? The debates around Heidegger have been raging for decades now, but Schmitt is a relatively new beast. Departments that are comfortable with teaching Heidegger have a far more uneven relationship with Carl Schmitt. For example, a professor in the philosophy department at Duquesne recently told a friend that their faculty have been having debates if they should even teach Schmitt. Perhaps this uncomfortableness comes from a belief that the answers to the questions of Heidegger's Nazism are far more clear cut with Schmitt. Regardless of the reason, the unease is far from universal and new scholarship into Schmitt continues at a rapid rate, and I am certainly one of those who have read largely of Schmitt's work and found it useful. For me it comes down to how Schmitt, and for that matter Heidegger, are being read.
Schmitt remains an obvious far right thinker, and radicals should approach his work with that fact in mind. A certain critical distance will be necessary when engaging with Schmitt, certainly at his solutions, but even at his problematics. I occasionally fear that Schmitt will start being read less and less with a critical distance, in other words he will be more and more like Heidegger. My hope is that the debate around reading and engaging Schmitt might start provoking more a critical distance by those engaging Heidegger. Though Stuart Elden and I seem to disagree about the importance of actually reading and engaging Schmitt, we share a concern that certain thinkers are beginning to read Schmitt with little of that distance.

It's like Matt Yglesias has never read Carl Schmitt

But if Scooter Libby obstructs justice, the president has an un-reviewable, un-checkable power to offer him a pardon or clemency. If Bill Clinton wants to bomb Serbia, then Serbia gets bombed. If George W Bush wants to hold people in secret prisons and torture them, then tortured they shall be. And if Barack Obama wants to issue a kill order on someone or other, then the order goes out. And if Congress actually wants to remove a president from office, it faces extremely high barriers to doing so.

Whether or not you approve of this sort of executive power in the security domain, it’s a bit of a weird mismatch. You would think that it’s in the field of inflicting violence that we would want the most institutional restraint. Instead, the president faces almost no de facto constraints on his deployment of surveillance, military, and intelligence authority but extremely tight constraint on his ability to implement the main elements of the his domestic policy agenda.

This is response to the revelation that Obama has continued a Bush era program to allow assassinations of American citizens deemed in league with 'terrorists.'

Some thoughts on Simon Critchley and non-violence

I was at conference recently where Simon Critchley was the keynote. He was funny and engaging, the opening line was "Slavoj Zizek has been telling lies about me." The presentation itself was uneven, and clearly still very much a work in progress. It was also mostly a polemic against Zizek, focusing on their differing views of violence. And, I want to make three points here on Critchley's view of violence both in the speech he gave, and also in Infinitely Demanding.

(1) For some, still unexplained reason, Critchley associates anarchism with non-violence. I don't know why, considering most historical anarchist leaders are not exactly pacifists. Someone got to ask him this question at the speech, and his response was less than satisfying (as a matter of fact, he gave no reason why anarchism was connected to non-violence, and leninism to violence). He argued that there was a difference between (and here I wish I had written down his original terms) individual anarchism and ethical anarchism based on community. And, Critchley is concerned with promoting ethical anarchism. I want to return to this point below.

(2) Critchley was also concerned to change his views on violence since he wrote Infinitely Demanding. He has decided that non-violence cannot be absolute, but rather it has to be a guideline. Non-violence, thou shalt not kill, is not universal just usual, but sometimes an exceptional circumstance demands violence. Critchley is aware that this word exceptional draws to mind Schmitt, but didn't spend any real time answering what the problem might be, here. It seems to me that this brings decisionism in through the back door, and that is probably the worst way to bring decisionism in. If any of you are familiar with William Rasch's book on Schmitt, Sovereignty and Discontents, I think he makes this argument very effectively there. Orders that pretend that the political no longer exists become harder to contest. And remember your Schmitt, it isn't that violent acts are necessary for the political, but that the possibility that violence is necessary is what guarantees the political. Those orders that refuse the violence inherent in the political are all the more violent in trying to defend peace. If non-violence is a guideline, then who decides when the exceptional case presents? Who decides when violence is necessary? If one argues that each individual has the power to decide, than each individual is sovereign. And we are right back to the individualist anarchism, and we have failed to think an ethical anarchism. The question of decisionism needs to be confronted directly.

(3) Critchley also said that the acts of violence must give us shame. Now, as I said above, this talk was in work as he gave it, so I don't know how much importance should given this word "shame," but let's take it seriously for a bit. I'm not sure, first of all, what use shame is in thinking through an ethical system. I feel that shame brings in through the back door idealism. Shame is only a grounding in a ethics, if that ethical system is an idealist one. If Nietzsche teaches us nothing else, one assumes he has taught us this. If the question of decisionism remains with us, so too does a question of idealism.


He might have answers to all of these points, but I would be interested in finding out. The projects of ethical anarchism and non-violence are projects I have a lot of sympathy for, but sometimes sympathy isn't enough.