Schmitt-Political Theology I.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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Foreword The Sovereign and the Exception: Carl Schmitt, Politics, Theology, and Leadership In memory and appreciation of Wilson Carey McWilliams, 1933–2005 He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Political Theology is about the nature, and thus about the prerogatives, of sovereign political authority as it develops in the West, about its relation to Western Christianity, and about some of its foremost exponents. While by no means the first writing of Carl Schmitt, it is perhaps the piece that best serves as an introduction to his thought. Schmitt was a—perhaps the—leading jurist during the Weimar Republic. In May 1933, he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party), the same month as did Martin Heidegger, the leading philosopher in Germany. In November of that year he became the president of the National Socialist Jurists Association. He published several works that were supportive of the Nazi Party, including some that were anti- 1. G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000). Balakrishnan argues that until the last years of the Weimar Republic Schmitt expressed no anti-Semitic views and that during the Nazi period, he “became skilled at transforming crude anti-Semitic ideograms into a higher order theoretical discourse.” See also the exchange between him and Scheuerman, “Down on Law: The complicated legacy of the authoritarian jurist Carl Schmitt” in Boston Review (April–May 2001). vii
viii Tracy B. Strong Semitic. 1 All did not go smoothly: one tends to forget that there were diverse factions in Nazism, as there are in all political movements, and Schmitt found himself on the losing side of several controversies. Criticized in several official organs, he was protected by Hermann Goering. He remained a member of the Party as well as professor of law at the University of Berlin between 1933 and 1945, and was detained afterwards by the victorious Allies, but never charged with crimes. He died in April 1985. 2 As early as 1938 and again after World War II, Schmitt was fond of recalling Benito Cereno, one of Herman Melville’s novels, in obvious reference to his choices in 1933 and after. 3 The novel was translated into German in 1939 and was apparently widely read and discussed in terms of the contemporary political situation. 4 The title character in Benito Cereno is the captain of a slave ship that has been taken over by the African slaves. The owner of the slaves and most of the white crew have been killed, although Don Benito is left alive and forced by the slaves’ leader, Babo, to play the role of captain so as not to arouse suspicion from other ships. Eventually, after a prolonged encounter with the frigate of the American Captain Delano during which the American at first 2. See the discussion in my “Dimensions of the Debate Around Carl Schmitt,” Foreword to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), x–xii, and the references cited there for further discussion of these events. 3. Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950), 22–77. Thanks to John McCormick for this reference. Let me take this occasion to pay tribute to McCormick’s wonderful book on Carl Schmitt, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), from which I have learned a great deal. 4. Schmitt notes that “Benito Cereno, the hero [!!] of Herman Melville’s story, was elevated in Germany to the level of a symbol for the situation of persons of intelligence caught in a mass system.” Schmitt, “Remarks in response to a talk by Karl Mannheim (1945–1946),” in Ex Captivate Salus. Experiences des années 1945–1947. Textes et commentaires, ed. A. Doremus (Paris: Vrin, 2003), 133.
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1 Definition of Sovereignty Soverei
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Index "Age of Neutralization and De
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