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 Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” from Telos 157 (Winter 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini’s article “Ongoing Founding Events in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” is a discursive piece seeking to provide groundwork on the conception of the event and its theological and political dimensions. He coins this term “ongoing founding events” as a type of poetic gesture toward the movement of temporality to which events are founded, and which as a consequence of their founding then continue to contaminate the space around them. Bussolini claims that for Schmitt the event of decision generates sovereignty, and that within this basic movement, whether it be mythical or concrete reality at this point is unsure, becomes the generating and maintaining of political order (60).
The article is split into five subsections, which in turn analyze the “decision as founding sovereignty and the event of the exception as crucial to the juridical order,” the “event of the friend-enemy distinction and the event of war as key constitutive elements of the political order,” and the “event of secularization in terms of how theological concepts continue to act in politics and economics according to Schmitt (politics) and Agamben (economics)” (60–61). For Schmitt, the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (61), and naturally it is unclear and intentionally ambiguous to whom this sovereignty will belong, and furthermore when and how this exception will occur. However the connection for Schmitt is clear while bracketing the question of the sovereign and exception of his context. Schmitt then quantifies this ambiguity in that the “exception is that which cannot be subsumed, it defies general codification” (64), so the exception lies outside the capacity for comprehension, and yet the moment of decision disrupts the conditions of norms through their suspension: in this sense, the state of exception is an inherently mythical concept.
To object to this categorization would only result in perhaps minor rearrangements in Schmitt’s schema, but a clear objection can be made on the grounds of his claims that the “exception is more important than the rule for the ‘philosophy of concrete life'” (65). Schmitt alongside other thinkers of political theology problematize the Platonic and hence Christian dilemma of the difference between the abstract and the concrete in terms of oppositions that juxtapose and correlate, to which one can subsume one from the other. However, to what extent can the exception as an abstract concept subsume the concrete life remains questionable in its reliance on the semblance and correlation of the mythical, politico-theological onto the concrete state of things. While remaining negligent of dialectical thought that attempts to solve this inherent reliance on the binary opposition of concrete and abstract, and how the abstract mediates the concrete, thinkers of this vein remain committed to a line of thought that claims it reaches concrete life but through abstraction. However, in reference to Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), the empirical cannot be reached through a series of abstractions, which Deleuze mistakes for Hegel’s dialectic. Similarly, Schmitt cannot reach concrete life through these means that remain divorced from the historical, material, and concrete context from which he attempts to derive these conceptions. The line of thinking that thinks that the concrete is reached through a series of pure abstractions is mistaken. In addition, Schmitt claims that in the “the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (65). Nonetheless, it is justified to question the presupposition that Schmitt has in his conception of the exception, as Derrida later formulates: is not the rule the very exception itself?
Perhaps thinking of Schmitt’s sovereign who miraculously bursts onto the scene and enacts a decision of exception, one should ask to what extent this supposed moment of the ”real life” is in fact a mere continuation of the old, even in its very birth. Is not the moment of exception presupposed by the rule? Bussolini moves onto Agamben’s reading of Schmitt and then deciphers what he takes from Schmitt and critiques of him. Bussolini claims that Agamben sees that the “interest in those theories, like Schmitt’s, that complicate the topographical opposition into a more complex topological relation, in which the very limit of the juridical order itself is at issue” (67). Therefore in essence, for Agamben, Schmitt’s novelty is the conceptual meandering around the founding of the exception as constitutive of the political order itself; it is the twofold nature of Schmitt’s analysis that proves decisive in conceiving of the generation and maintenance of politics as such.
However, despite the ahistorical appearance of Schmitt’s analyses, one wonders about the limits of the historicality of his analyses, and to what extent Schmitt’s work is misguided and limited by its own historical context of Nazi Germany, rife with overestimations and insights. To enact a form of Problemgeschichte at this conceptual point, one might ask what Schmitt’s political theology would resemble had he been Dutch and read Spinoza instead? Would there still be a state of exception, sovereign, friend-enemy distinction, and the political in his political theology? Here, we can witness the plasticity of the contextual issues at stake in such thinkers’ works. However, Bussolini wishes to make clear Agamben’s distinctions from Schmitt in his conception of the state of exception itself.
Agamben thinks that it is important to realize that the state of exception is, as he calls it, a “space void of law.” This is against the plein pouvoir or pieni potestas tradition, which sees in the exception the full presence of legal power. This is also in part a critique of Schmitt, who Agamben worries has followed the “extreme example” of Santi Romano in making necessity the “original source of law” in his theory of sovereignty as decision by giving the Notstand a fundamental position. (68)
Therefore, for Agamben the state of exception is not a dictatorship, but a space “void of law” in which all the “juridical determinations” are deactivated. In relation to the state of exception, Schmitt develops his formulation of the “concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political” (69), which again claims to reach the concrete life but perhaps only in a given historical context which is his own.
In addition to this metapolitical claim of the political that supersedes all others, Schmitt invokes the friend-enemy distinction, which for him occurs “regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics” (70). Here, once again Schmitt claims he reaches concrete life in his dichotomy of the friend-enemy distinction, even though this attempt to keep separate spheres of life inherently connected is a symptom of the bourgeois class to which Schmitt himself belonged and which viewed life in essence as competitive, a struggle and differentiated from itself into several categories. Bussolini correctly ties in Foucault in his article precisely because Foucault’s analyses of the sovereign, the exception, war, and political theology possess far more flesh in both historical analysis and theoretical depth than do Schmitt’s and Agamben’s. Bussolini then concludes with Agamben’s analysis of the paradox of law itself, and Agamben’s thesis in the Kingdom and the Glory that theology and economy are in fact, the same. “He [Agamben] cites a fascinating passage from Photius saying that oikonomia is both the miracle (‘the extraordinary and incomprehensible incarnation of the Logos‘) and the exception which can suspend the law” (82).
