Carl Schmitt delivered his famous lectures on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1938, and they were later published as Die Leviathan in der Staatslehre Thomas Hobbes (The Leviathan in Thomas Hobbe’s Political Theory). In fact, Schmitt was responding to one of his disciples, Helmuth Schelsky, who claimed that Schmitt did not capture the Hobbesian statement about political action. Schmitt's argument follows a line of conservative historicism to read the course of early-modern philosophy: Hobbes’ theoretical revolution consisted in opposing the image of an artificial body to political theology, understood as unity of the state with the totality of the European spiritual being. Therefore, Hobbes incarnates the break between the High Middle Ages and modern political thought. For Schmitt, this picture is beyond any theoretical articulation that Hobbes constructed—he omits the De Cive in his study, and his commentary on the text itself is rather poor. Hobbes would then be the author who reflects the progressive autonomy of the state with respect to the natural law. Years later, the Chilean conservative thinker Mario Góngora claimed this Schmittian approach to the divorce between positive and lateral law—and uses this model to read the derecho indiano (colonial set of laws) in Latin America.
I cannot dwell here on the most controversial aspect of this text by Carl Schmitt: his obsession with showing that behind the Hobbesian enterprise there is a Jewish germ, which later develops in Spinoza and in Stahl-Jolson—who, in a chilling and uncanny image, Schmitt says that “emasculated Leviathan”. These anti-Semitic images, however, still constitute the heart of the text: they denote the need for the German jurist and philosopher to produce an adequate image of his satanic enemy. But what does Schmitt tell us, beyond his philosophical affiliation with the gas chambers in this intriguing and violence-filled book?
Let’s start by saying that the amphibology of the Schmittian text works very well: it is highly difficult to distinguish between the work of Thomas Hobbes, scarcely quoted by Schmitt, and the diagnosis of the epoch. This subsumption of the author in what he supposedly represents in the field of history turns the epoch into a solvent in which, for better or worse, every proper name becomes a rumor. That is why Schmitt can make a list of Jewish names—leaded, paradoxically, by a non-Jewish Englishman (Hobbes): “Rotschild, Karl Marx, Börne, Heine, Meyerbeer and many others [...] Stahl-Jolson is the boldest exponent of this Jewish front” (149). For Schmitt, the trace that goes from the image of Leviathan as deus mortalis to Bolshevism is only one, and he finds there the explanations for the dissolution of the state into a communist regime. The destructive germ against political power and decisionism was already in the struggle undertaken by Hobbes for the constitution of a modern, police state. For this reason, the Leviathan inaugurates an era. In this sense, Jacques Derrida’s critique of the concept is worthy of consideration: the epoch is a concept that manages to classify, enclose a field, and make it visible as a unit. It is what he calls a “gathering gesture”—like the gesture of holding hands together in prayer that Derrida reads in Heidegger.
On the other hand, insofar as Schmitt criticizes the modern opposition between interior and exterior, between form and content, etc., he belongs to the style of thought that he wants to deny in the name of decisionism and partisanism: the thought of the bourgeoisie. Precisely because he does not read in these antinomies the abstract manifestation of a real unity, the abstract “disincorporation” (to use a conservative term) of a problem that touches the limits of bourgeois society: the separation identified by Hegel between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity, which Marx sees originated in the very form of capitalist reproduction. For Schmitt, on the contrary, such oppositions are the real content of bourgeois society. The opposition between interior and exterior thus appears as something consummated. This is only possible through an active vindication of the illusion of a previous moment in which the legal unity was not separated from the experiential interiority of the subjects. From a time when the legal order—to quote Góngora, the Chilean reader of Schmitt again—reflected the total order, and the separation between natural law and positive law was not possible. This original illusion of a union later divided because of an absolute evil (the Leviathan) is typical of conservative thought. Which would imply, of course, rereading Giorgio Agamben.
In Schmitt, history becomes flattened. It buries the classes and their respective parallaxes and position takings. His conservative historicism insists on showing thoughts and theories as discontinuities and continuities located, not in the desires, struggles, and debates of politically engaged and identifiable subjects and partial points of view, but in changes of hegemonical myths and the “spirit of times”. With this, Schmitt highlight something important: that thinkers are concerned with their time. At the same time, however, he loses sight of the fact that these thinkers must have located themselves in one place or another in the struggles. Thus, for Schmitt the difference between Machiavelli and Hobbes is the difference, not between two partialities or parallaxes—the Republican minor plebs or “popolo minuto” and the absolutist monarchy—but between two moments of epochal architecture. A horizontal discontinuity is opposed to a dialectical discontinuity, which must necessarily highlight “unusual” alliances—such as Hegel with Marx or Spinoza. This demonstrates that the epistemic scheme between discontinuities and continuities serves the Catholic motives of Schmitt and his more degraded versions (such as Spengler), but it is insufficient when it comes to exhibiting the class commitments of the texts and of ideas.
The last chapter of Schmitt’s book in this sense constitutes a valuable document for reading the hermeneutical procedures of late reactionarism and the “political philosophy of the counterrevolution”. Schmitt states without shame that Hobbe’s arguments and theorems does not help us to understand the background of Leviathan, which would be an abstract myth located in the title of the book. This distrust in the arguments and in the theory constitutes a relay on the myth as the transcendent element that ghosts both history and reason, desire, and class struggles. It is part of that Schmittian procedures to coincive a theological history, which Góngora also read as a living history in theology. In this, Schmitt is followed not only by Hispanismo, neomillennialism and 20th century Jesuitism, but also by certain more official theologies (Henri de Lubac), and even the “liberation theologies” concerned with the myth of a new people of God. However, we will fall into the same Schmittian error if we assume the power to define an entire era through mere formal similarities. This has been the paradoxical error of Schmitt, a thinker of positionality like Althusser, but destined to flatten positionality, parallaxes and specific distortions produced by the class struggle, and above all, to omit desire.
It is to be expected that a certain unintelligent Schmittianism ends up in a “Hegelianism of the poor”—in a philosophy of history. Precisely here, transcendence appears as the pure immanence of the myth to itself, as a succession of great myths and great self-identities. History remains dusty forever in the notion of epoch and its traps.
Comments
Post a Comment