Comments on: On Bad Ways of Reading Schmitt

By: Nate

Nate — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:55:19 +0000

hi Craig,
So, you’re saying that schmitt’s becoming Schmitt (I mean, the stuff that made that happen) has made him more susceptible to a type of bad reading, yeah? That makes sense. Presumably some other thinkers are just as susceptible to bad reading if one looks solely at the work and how hard they are but the obscure ones among those texts are read less (presumably only by people who are really dedicated to them, like say medievalists or whatever) and there’s less interests/overdetermining factors involved that make bad reading more likely. Is that a fair paraphrase? If so, I’m convinced.
take it easy,
Nate

By: Craig

Craig — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:02:03 +0000

I think Schmitt can be read as a closet-Hegelian such that the only complete definition is circular; i.e., a totality. But I think you are forgetting the distinction between “public” and “private” – while the life/death distinction is “authoritative,” it isn’t necessarily political. First, recall (and Foucault and Agamben – but also the early modern theorists of sovereignty – remind of us this) the right of the father to kill his children; second, the blurring of the political that occurs with the rise of the social.

By: bajkad

bajkad — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:51:18 +0000

Is Schmitt’s definition of the political circular? The political distinction is the distinction between friends and enemies. The distinction between friends and enemies is the life and death distinction. The life and death distinction is political because it is authoritative. The authoritative distinction is the distinction between friends and enemies. The political distinction is authoritative because political and political because authoritative.

By: barret

barret — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:21:27 +0000

couldn’t agree more…

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:12:03 +0000

From the perspective of the present, any reading of Schmitt is hopelessly overdetermined, in part due to his involvement in politics, his institutional location during his own life, and the politics of his subsequent reception. That Schmitt came to be Schmitt – at least in North America – is entirely fortuitous and there is nothing in his writing as such that would ever have predicted his post-humous career. All the same, there are texts which have provoked strong responses – both at the time of their publication – and in the present: Machiavelli’s The Prince, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Spinoza’s Ethics, Hobbes’ Leviathan and, of course, Schmitt and Strauss.

By: Nate

Nate — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:03:43 +0000

hi Craig,
do you think it’s a Schmitt-specific problem, or is this a common bad way of reading? Having asked it now seems obvious to me that it’s the second. I wonder what the conditions are that make such readings more likely, whether it’s something in a type of conversation, some institutional factors, something in the writers themselves, etc…
cheers,
Nate

By: Barret

Barret — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:45:58 +0000

Well, yes, I think that this does expand beyond Schmitt in many ways. That is the major problem I’m having with this project. Even though I believe that concerns of sovereignty are important for contemporary analysis of politics and power (God knows the nation-state is not withering away as is supposed), Schmitt doesn’t provide us with much of a way out of law-sovereignty models of power. In that sense alone, a direct extension of his work may be less than fruitful today. This is why people like Peter Hallward have warned against a return to a neo-Schmittian Eurocentric politics.
Also, although Schmitt does not theorize “the event” per se, he is very concerned with “the concrete” as you no doubt know.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:21:31 +0000

The problem with that reading, Barret, (and this could be a problem for Schmitt as well) is that it tends to present a rather anachronistic concept of the state such that a particular form of the state is projected backwards (and, from our perspective) forwards through time. In short, there were politics in feudal regimes, but it is quite difficult to coherent speak of a feudal state – hence, the corrective offered by those such as Strauss or Lefort (or, looking to the past, Montesquieu) is quite helpful. I’m hesitant to reduce the exception or the friend/enemy distinction to just the state and, further, to attach a cynical intentionality to it (the state produces) and this is my fault because I used the language of production which implies intention. Rather, I think it is more fruitful to attach an analysis of “the event” or of the “aleatory” to the exception and to the friend/enemy. Hence, the question, as I tried to indicate in my original post, is how do these come about? That is, what are the conditions that must exist so as to allow the exception to emerge?

By: barret

barret — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 03:20:34 +0000

True enough Craig. The ‘state of exception’ and the ‘friend-enemy distinction’ are indeed over-used and over cited for the most part today. However, these are both fundamental concepts towards a proper understanding of Schmitt (particularly his early work).
The key point that you have missed is not that the friend-enemy is about ‘us’ making distinctions. Rather, it is about the possibility of the state representative apparatus doing so. ‘State thinking’ is what Schmitt feels has been lost given the naive conceptualizations of power following increasingly strident forms of liberalism in the 19th century. So, to properly represent Schmitt’s work, in my view (and my thesis depends on it), it must be understood in relation to his central concerns regarding the sovereign state. The later ‘Theory of the Partisan’ is all about the problems that the decline of the nation-state represents for contemporary conceptions of war and politics. ‘Internationalism,’ presupposing the possibility of ‘one’ world state, does not understand that the state is predicated on an ability to define itself by distinguishing between friend and enemy. In a sense Negri is correct: no obsession with state sovereignty, no Schmitt.

By: old

old — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:16:17 +0000

I still feel the weight of owing a post to the Schmitt symposium. Couldn’t do something quickly because of how important, timely, and rich the theory of the partisan was; very much appreciated being compelled to read rather than simply borrow and repeat two Schmittian maxims.