As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Joseph Diaz’s “Schmitt and Marcuse: Friends, Force, and Quality” from Telos 165 (Winter 2013).
It seems necessary in contemporary critical circles to construct a history of natural histories, because the presuppositions of philosophical systems have become more and more prominent while being in need of closer investigation. Within the history of natural histories is the history of the presupposition. Joseph Diaz’s article discusses the basis of political friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics in order to contextualize the work of Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. These two thinkers existential presuppositions are perfect examples of the forms of natural histories that underpin such elaborate individual philosophical projects. Diaz explains that:
For Aristotle, the distinction between facts and feelings is vital, as the conception of friendship to be discussed does not appeal to material conditions, but rather has its justification in its very struggle for existence. . . . But is this all that is needed for the engendering of friendship? Both of these theorists focused on the reality of opposition, enmity, and conflict, . . . rendering intelligible the potential for a fruitful encounter between two twentieth-century German political philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse. (137)
Thus, Diaz’s central thesis is that Marcuse’s thought, with regard to the one-dimensionality of society and the repressive tolerance thesis, takes into account and goes beyond Schmitt’s metapolitics of the political and the friend-enemy distinction. However, it is the basis by which Marxism in turn encapsulates existential and metapolitical aspects within its dialectical structure that overrides Schmitt’s arguments. The same is true of any other non-dialectical approach to political reality, since it is not self-conscious, nor self-reflexive. Hence, the basis by which such distinctions can be made is ungrounded. Diaz elaborates this comparison, despite the evident gap in the conceptual meaning of Schmitt’s concreteness and Marcuse’s concrete actuality:
Schmitt founded his concept of “the political” around the friend-enemy distinction, highlighting the constitutive character of the distinction. Marcuse in his writings discussed, among other topics, the dark shadow cast by the totalitarian administrative state’s one-dimensionality, the liquidation of the mere potentiality for oppositional consciousness, as well as the production and manipulation of against-itself class-consciousness. . . . Rather, this risk of the imagination will seek to put the two thinkers in a dialectical relationship with an eye toward engendering a robust political complicity that can be rendered operative in twenty-first-century political philosophy. (138)
While Schmitt’s and Marcuse’s diagnoses of the liberal closures on oppositional politics are strikingly similar, their projects remain distinct in terms of their method. Schmitt proposes a concreteness of existence through theological concepts that mediate the actual through their mythical element to universalize experience. Marcuse, on the other hand, describes the phenomenon of an absent oppositional consciousness in more detail compared to Schmitt’s political and friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt’s simple binary distinction appears to capture the reality of things. Yet, the simpler things appear, the more complex the truth of the phenomenon becomes as they attempt to describe their simplicity. In addition, Schmitt attempts to obfuscate the historical reality of the friend-enemy distinction beyond class, but the reality of things, in fact, describes class relations. Due to this foundation in class, Schmitt’s distinction is misguided as an attempt to forget class, since class remains the very antagonism he wishes to describe. It seems, in essence, that Schmitt and other thinkers produce mythical, fuzzy concepts. On one side, they capture the apparently, intuitive, irrationalist reality of human experience. Still, on the other side, the phenomenon they describe remains in the shadow with little higher explanation and detail of the objects such as the friend-enemy distinction they import.
The experience of an unstable Weimar Germany uniquely impacted Carl Schmitt’s thought. The precariousness of the prevalent constitutional order due in large part to the presidential review clause of Article 48,2 which dealt with states of emergency, or exceptional political periods, very concretely formed Schmitt’s concerns. Political Theology begins, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Building on the work of sixteenth-century theorist Jean Bodin, Schmitt asserts that what lies at the heart of sovereignty is the power to make a decision. The ultimate decision to be made is that of “what constitutes public order and security, in determining when they are disturbed, and so on.” (138)
Despite the unconvincing yet thought-provoking comparison of Schmitt’s and Marcuse’s constructions of the concrete between the mythical and dialectical, Diaz correctly historicizes Schmitt’s writings on the exception. It does not reduce Schmitt to his historical situation but explains the devices by which Schmitt employs medieval concepts in a concrete, historical reality.
Sovereignty is generated in the moment that the ability to stipulate a set of conditions in and through which a political order can exist is exercised. Sovereignty realizes itself in its own becoming, and this content-less moment of decision will condition the ensuing order. This is the emergence of the political, from which politics, the filling out of the content of the political form, follows. . . . The foundational assertion that “the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm” reveals the existential essence of legality. It is not the instantiation of Justice that enables agents to be engaged in the movements of political reality; it is the flow of political reality that enables agents to make the prior decision of whether or not Justice has a legitimate claim to fulfillment. Schmitt’s concern with the moment of human agency that characterizes the decision speaks to an irreducible element of the political, which also serves as its point of emergence. (139)
After Diaz contextualizes Schmitt’s political concepts, he then turns to the point of depoliticization to draw further parallels between Schmitt’s and Marcuse’s diagnoses of the violence of liberalism to eradicate oppositional politics.
The concept of the political is pivotal for Schmitt, precisely because he reads modern history as the carrying out of fundamental depoliticization. Through the concept of the “central domain,” or the prevailing intellectual set of resources through which all problems of a given historical epoch are worked out, Schmitt characterizes the different stages of this process. Successive intellectual central domains are laid out as follows: the sixteenth century is that of the theological; seventeenth, metaphysical; eighteenth, humanitarian-moral; and nineteenth, economic. The movement from one domain to the next comes about due to a domain’s internal political inefficacy. The pivotal historical movement, as Schmitt notes, occurred between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as, “theology, the former central domain, was abandoned because it was controversial, in favor of another—neutral—domain.” Modern political history is thus a progress of distanciation from political agency, from the making of decisions, or, depoliticization. (141)
Thus, the political remains for Schmitt a metapolitical concept that explains and sustains politics, but it is suppressed by liberalism and torn asunder in other modes of life that negate it. Diaz then turns to Marcuse’s characterization of depoliticalization, which adds more flesh to the bone. Schmitt’s mythical definition merely obfuscates the historical reality of the phenomenon, and the means by which to overcome it as a result.
Marcuse’s political philosophy works with concepts both familiar and unfamiliar to Schmitt. In his major work, Eros and Civilization, Marcuse evades the political by delving into a neo-Freudian analysis of capitalism’s restraints on the pleasure principle. Through capitalism’s historically contingent norms and expectations, a repressive “performance principle” is produced. The central movement of this text is found in the following sentence: “The hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization must be theoretically validated first by demonstrating the possibility of a non-repressive development of the libido under the conditions of mature civilization.” (142)
Here, I would remark that Marcuse, in fact, does not evade the political as Diaz proposes, but instead deals with it head-on through the neo-Freudianism and Heideggerean philosophy he attempted to synthesize. The political as defined by Schmitt as a metapolitical construct is explored by Marcuse in regard to why and how this antagonism as a mythical device. In Schmitt’s usage, it comes about through libido, the human psyche and its drives and desires.
We can see here that Marcuse agrees with Schmitt in rooting out the political nature of depoliticization. For Marcuse, liberalism militates against opposition to the legal-procedural system itself by declaring it intolerable insofar as it is outside the scope of the Process. Depoliticization occurs through the envelopment of society in pre-formed processes upon which a fabricated politicization supervenes. In particular, liberalism’s boundaries prevent the identification of its own order not only as an enemy but as itself political, as its constitutive agentic decision to be a particularly interested order is publicly disavowed, ostensibly so that the Enemy that “must be” confronted, will be. (145)
Marcuse’s neo-Freudianism proposes a more elaborate version of the political that is not mythically eternal, like Schmitt, but historically and psychically conditioned. Hence, Marcuse is able to explain his and Schmitt’s own historical reality with greater insight. With Marcuse, we could write a psychohistory of both Nazi Germany and Schmitt’s own life as well as reveal a more telling account of the political through Marcuse’s synthesis of Freud and Heidegger. Diaz, however, correctly identifies a key point about how the political can be mediated and brought back into view under the veil of liberalism.
Both Schmitt and Marcuse identify the theoretical domain in which they locate the possibility for the rupture of the positive, through which negative thought can produce political opposition. Marcuse declares that “art creates another universe of thought and practice against and within the existing one. . . . Rather than being the handmaiden of the established apparatus, beautifying its business and its misery, art would become a technique for destroying this business and misery.” (147)
For Marcuse, the aesthetic is the means to negate the one-dimensional society and the liberal bludgeoning of oppositional politics. However, Schmitt does not have a very clear or conducive response on the question of illuminating the political. He simply holds that liberalism precludes it, and the life and death struggle remains the political despite liberal market-based competition as the basis of human existence. The metaphysical image of his thought produces only mythologies, but his political metaphysics is only concrete when mediated by it.
Marcuse goes further than Schmitt’s criticism of depoliticization and neutralization, but his evasion of the emergent moment of such regimes impairs his ability to find a remedy that is political to the point that it can meet the enemy in combat, the only place where it has the potential to overcome that enemy. It is precisely at this point, the entry into political combat, that the return to political theology becomes necessary. “The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of political organization,” Schmitt writes. To combat a politicized neutralization, a thoroughly political metaphysics must be deployed. But as Schmitt noted, metaphysics as such came about through the flight from controversy, the escape from the political. This is precisely why the return to theology and the controversial can enable the political to manifest itself within intellectual life with potency—what is important is rendering possible the ability to identify and combat the enemy. (148)
Fascism is the use of fuzzy concepts sustained with an aura of mythical violence, which recognizes neither itself nor any forms outside itself for that matter, while critical thought remains self-conscious of the limits of its own method, always already open to the future potentiality of new concepts.
These are merely suggestions of discriminatory schemata that could round out a political vision. Any way, to erase the political is to expose oneself to political erasure. To resurrect the political at this historical moment is to risk controversy. And to risk controversy is to fight. (150)
