bettina bar go levinas politics

8/14/2019 Bettina Bar Go Levinas Politics

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Untying the Utopia-War Opposition in Levinas Or,How did Schmitts Political enter Levinass Totality?

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What is Politics in Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics?

Bettina Bargo (Universit de Montral)

I. Against Hope in Politics

Lawrence Olivier, a professor of political science, recently published a feisty book enti-

tled, Contre lespoir comme tche politique [Against hope as a political task].1

There, Olivier offered a sustained critique of political utopianism. He argued that the log-

ic of human liberation, whatever its specific form, has itself [been] inscribed in larger mech a-

nisms of power [dispositifs de pouvoir], whose primary aim is the creation of the alienated indi-

vidual upon whom it is possible to exert power (CLTP, 112).

The conviction animating utopias and hopes, he continued, la Foucault, is the idea, in-

contestable for Western thought, that man must be led to his humanity. And that this humanity is

the end point for man, the moment in which he attains finally his fullness as a human being.

If this is true, Olivier asks, Why is it that revolutions so often go off course? Why do

projects of liberation invariably finish by themselves becoming oppressive or often worse?

(114).

For him the answer lays in that the preoccupation of man for man consists in a di s-

placement in the exercise of powerall of which is framed in a logic of domination (115).2

There is not enough space to unfold his arguments here. But anyone who has read Fou-

cault and Deleuze can follow them readily enough. Every time we read such critiques of a philos-

ophy of history, the notion of utopianism leaves us feeling abandoned, as if to chimeras.

II. A Non-Utopian Reading of Levinas

For that reason, I would like to follow a different tack in regard to Levinas. I would liketo argue that an interestingreading of Levinas might show that he is not actuallyoffering us a

formal utopia, understood as providing conditions of possibility through which utopia might

take shape. Certainly Levinas offers a principle of hoperealizing that principles function as

grounds, so that further appeals to found them in a prior logic are vaina sort of superbience.


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An interesting reading of Levinas might argue that what he discovers in the face-to-face

relationship had been hinted at in various places in Merleau-Pontys work; notably, in the Childs

Relations with Others(1960), where he speaks of syncretic sociability and an original type of

relation with others;3and again in The Philosopher and his Shadow (1960), in his discussion

of intercorporeal reality.4 This is the anti-subjectivist, chiasmatic dimension of Husserlian in-

tersubjectivity that could not constitute the other first as an alter ego. Levinass approach is dif-

ferent from Merleau-Pontys. But the idea that in a certain moment what we call the Ego isthe

other, or is split by the other, or carries the other, although not in the sense that a substance carries

a predicatethis idea is found in Merleau-Ponty. Is that enough to establish a philosophy close to

Levinass but without a religious dimension? Maybe, yet my interest here is that Levinas not be

taken as a utopian thinker, but rather in his quality as an interpretive phenomenologist who draws

some of his examples from Bible and Talmud. These sources can be read ethically, or ethico-

religiously--that is his teacher Shushanis contribution (since Levinas had scarcelystudied Tal-

mud before meeting him)but the core of the intuition concerns, ultimately, the structure of sen-

sibility, the adequacy of language to convey the density of sensuous investiture, and the dialog i-

cal origin of sayingwhich has roots both in Buber and in the linguist Roman Jakobson. Now, I

think a Jewish, or Talmudic, reading of Levinas is a good thing. But I dont have the knowledge

of rabbinics to explore it. On the other hand, I feel that many of the philosophical arguments he

makes are not so much about utopianism, or redeeming politics, as they are about the non-innatist

origins of responsibility. As such they make an important philosophical contribution, even there

where philosophers have read his ideas as old saws for peace or responsibility. There is a lot more

at stake.

III. The Secular Out of the Religious

Of course utopia isa theme in Totality and Infinity. There, a sort of utopia receives the

name, eschatology. It is tied to a lgos about the end of time, about the eschaton, conceived as

an interruption of duration or of Heideggerian projections. It is an unusual way of speaking of

eschatology, one that once again uses religious terms to bring out themes that are proper to hu-

man experience and, ultimately, taken up by religion.

Nothing so remarkable in that. Otto Pggeler, Marlne Zarader, and Giorgio Agamben

have shown that Heidegger used concepts drawn from the experiences of the early Christian

community, as related in Pauls Epistle to the Romans, in order to reach a d imension, through it,

that was secular and existential. One such term concerns living in wait for the fullness of time,

which Paul called kairos. In short, the strategy Levinas uses, drawing from the prophets, from the


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In Totality and Infinity, eschatology interrupts Being, as conversation. It opens a break in

Being as war and totality. Both the ethical interruption andwar, paradoxically, tear people from

their de facto situations. War tears people from their homes and their habitual acts; above all,

from their morality. The ethical interruption tears people from Being.

What concerns me above all is that these interruptionsafter all, war breaks out even

if commerce, politics, and peacetime diplomacy all bear the marks of strugglethese interrup-

tions stand opposed to each other. Eschatology is the utopian answer that is not a solutionper se

to the violence of war. And war will be equated with politics, just as it is with Being.

V. The Argument: Gravitasin Human Things

If we read the argument in the first four pages of the Preface to Totality and Infinity, we

find a claim that we can easily take either as formally utopian, or as Levinass idiosyncratic v i-sion of politics. In going through this section, I will bear in mind the question: What definition of

the political is Levinas working with here? I would venture that it is the political ofgravitas, the

political that concerns life and death, which is also the notion of the political that aroused debate

in the 1920s and 30s. We find this definition of the political in a thinker whose existential lan-

guage and concern with concrete experience equaled his drive to define the political as a distinct

domainthe way ethics can be defined as founded on the distinction of good versusbad, or aes-

thetics, with itsdistinction of the beautiful versusthe ugly.

These are platonico-aristotelian modes of defining ethics and aesthetics. When CarlSchmitt first published his The Concept of the Politicalin 1927 in theArchiv fr Sozialforschung,

an approach to the essence of the political was his primary concern. This work was debated by

thinkers on the left and the right. Schmitts thought elicited the interest of Walter Benjamin and

Leo Strauss.5 Ill return to that shortly. I am arguing here, firstly, that Levinass conception of

the political does not look like a political whose essence would be communitarian or dialogical.

If there is anything like a social contract to be discerned in his work, even heuristically, it is cer-

tainly not in the political that is equated, here, with Being and with war. Because of that, what

interrupts a political thus equated with war must be situated outside of politics and Being. The

utopian dimension called eschatology turns on a definition of the political that Schmitt would

have approved. It is neither misguided, nor pathological. It is tied to the kind of politics evident in

Weimar conflicts and in the Nazi and fascist period. Thus, it is tied to what was in the air in the

20s and 30s discussion about the specificity of the concept of the polit ical. And it is bound up

with Levinass five years in Fallingsbotel, near Hanover.6We have Howard Caygill to thank for


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the reminder that Levinass thought did not unfold in a philosophical vacuum, uninflected by the

murder of his Lithuanian family and countless others.

My concern is this: a definition of the political such as we find in Totality and Infinity

and in Schmitts The Concept of the Political leaves us with precious little to interrupt or to

change it. Perhaps that is as it should be. The eschatological is one such possibility. It is a po s-

sibility that Franz Rosenzweig himself took up in 1915, after attempting to show in his thesis that

Hegels conception of the political could be enlarged by comparing it with concrete instantiations

of the political in the emergence of the modern bourgeois state. The thesis was a progressive de-

fense of Hegelianism. The War made the project derisory. Yet Rosenzweig published his Hegel

und der Staat in1920 and, the following year, he published his Stern der Erlsung. It was as if he

were saying, This is what I was doing, following my teacher Friedrich Meineke, before I went to

the Front: I hoped to save Hegel from appropriations by those who wanted Bismarcks Prussia to

exemplify the Hegelian state. However he would also add, after my experience of World War I,

during which I wrote the Staron postcards sent to my mother, I turned away from that question of

the political in factical history. I turned to a revelation different from that of reason in history

that optic had become impossible. I turned to revelation in the community of the Law. So much

for the paraphrase of Rosenzweig. I owe its inspiration to Paul-Laurent Assouns Introduction

to the French translation of Hegel and the State, the work whose abandonment gave rise to The

Star of Redemption, which Levinas studied.7

VI. Totality and Infinity: Truth and the Good; War and Navet

Let us walk through the initial argument in Levinass Preface. From there, I will turn to

Carl Schmitt and to some of Leo Strausss questions to him.

The argument of Totality and Infinity begins by informing us that it is important in the

highest degree to know whether we are not the dupes, le dupe, of morality. We have to interpolate

here: duped by the rhetoric of morality, which must be serving master other than the good. Why

does it importe au plus haut point? Why is it important to the highest degree? Because this is a

matter of life and death. What else would qualify for importance in the highest degree? It is a

matter of gravity and seriousness.

Lucidity, tied to one kind of transcendence, that of the truth, teaches us about the per-

manent possibility of war, Levinas argues. This permanent possibility is concretewe learn at

least this from the 20thcenturyandit is metaphysical. Hence the transcendence of the truth will

be opposed, hereafter, to the transcendence of the good. And the two conflicting transcendences


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give rise to a sardonic question: Whether a culture can be tied to both transcendences at once. Let

us add, without one of them giving the lie to the other, within metaphysics.

Levinass argument continues: the state of war, born of its permanent possibility, sus-

pends morality. It trumps the institutions of society; it annuls their eternal obligations. Why so?

Perhaps because in a long tradition of thinking about war, which includes Machiavelli, Grotius,

Hegel, Schmitt, and others, justice is not a category proper to the logic of war. If that surprises

us today, it is because liberal political conceptions impugn this claim. The state of war annuls

their eternal obligations and unconditional imperatives; that is, if war is true, then eternal obliga-

tions and unconditional imperatives are neither eternal nor unconditionalwhich would be the

case if war came before ethics, in an essential though not an everyday sense. Moreover, if war

does suspend obligations and universals, then going to ones death for ones state, in the name of

protecting that state from an enemy or taking from an enemy state some resource, would trump

imperatives like Kants preserving life, speaking the truth, or cultivating humanity. In that sense,

war is an absolute. For my purposes, that means that the politics of war must have a domain of

inquiry proper to an absolute. That domain would be the State, its friends and its enemies. Carl

Schmitt called that domain the political; it was none other than the art, practiced by the state or

its people, of determining who were enemies and who, friends. Of course this determination took

place in a non-permanent way, but it always concerned circumstances of the utmost gravity.8

Levinass argument continues: Winning is the art of wari.e., suppressing or annihilat-

ing ones enemiesand this art is called politics. The art of foreseeing and wi nning war by all

meansthe political (la politique, which does not mean politics but the concept of the political

itself)imposes itself, thence, like the very exercise of reason (TI ix, my trans.). To foreshorten:

the art of war is the political, not everyday politics; we are in the realm of the essential, and of

how something essences in Heideggers sense. The political is opposed to, and trumps, morali-

ty. Reason, and philosophy which is the art of reason, are thus opposed to navet.

VII. Totality and Infinity: Being is War

The second part of the argument claims that Being reveals itself as war to the philosophi-

cal gaze. If Levinas already argued inExistence and Existents, that the Being of beings and their

self-manifesting are one and the same, a tautology, he will now argue that war is the most patent,

i.e. manifest, of facts: war is patency itself, the truth of the real ( la vrit du rel). In war, he

says, reality tears the words and images that dissimulated it, to impose itself in its nudity and in

its hardness (sa nudit et sa duret) (TI, ix).


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Thus, war is produced (we should hear pro-ducere, coming forth, dis-closure, here VII-

E, 1, 151sq), warse produitas the pure experience of pure being, in the very instant (should we

hear event) of its flashing (fulgurance) wherein the draperies of illusion burn. The ontological

event that is sketched in this black clarity (should we hear black Lichtung) is a setting in motion

of beings, anchored up till then, in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objectiveor-

der from which one cannot extract oneself (se soustraire) (TI, ix). One can hear Hegel conjoined

to Heidegger: the objective order or objective logic is pro-duced in a black clarity (noire claret)

that is the ontological event, theEreignisof war. Perhaps we should hear other events, like that of

November 9th, 1938. In fairness, the marriage of Hegel and Heidegger, which results in divorce

further on, is not fair to either philosopher; not fair unless the political really is the summum of

the objective logic and war, the disclosive event of being which is, itself, co-extensive with the

objective-political.

Contrast Levinass argument here with a remark that aims in a similar direction.

The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or

a separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without

having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, sthetic, economic or other distinctions. The

political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically uglyit may even be advantageous to

engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the otherand it is sufficient

for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different or alien, so

that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible (COP, 27).

In this formulation, it is the alienness of the other that grounds the possibility of conflict,

which is also the possibility of a truly political act: i.e., distinguishing, for no other reason than a

political one, between those with whom one remains associated and those from whom one must

dissociate, and fight to the death. The statement is rare in Schmitt who usually speaks of groups

in conflict or association.

In Levinass Preface the objective order is the order of what-is. This is not just for heu-

ristic purposes; it is integral to his logic. What-is is permanently liable to conflict, and conflict as

war is proper just to the political, whose event suspends other domains like economy and morali-

ty, because the political is the decision concerning the fate of friends and enemies, of entire cul-

tures. We should keep in mind that Schmitts otheras enemyis every bit as alien as

Levinass other. Schmitt writes explicitly, the other and like Levinas he adds to this, the

stranger. He insists he is speaking of hostisrather than inimicus, the personal enemy,and that

the distinction goes back to the Greeks polemios (), not ekhthros () (COP, 28-

29). Less surprising than one might think, hostisetymologically gives us both guest and hos-


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tility. And Levinas will remark, midway through Totality and Infinity, that the face is the only

thing that an I canwish to murder.

The Preface to Totality and Infinity draws a triple equation: objective beingcomes to

light as warthe art of objective being is politics. This is the truth of the order called reality,

which is also the order attached to truth or the secular. War institutes an order, he adds, from

which nothing is henceforth external (x). And war is the event (really, the dure)of the totaliza-

tion effected in the highest degree in Hegels political thought.

From there, a strange transition then takes place. As if to show us that the argument of

page ix was hyperbolic, Levinas adds on the following page: the face of being that shows itself

in war is fixed in the concept of totality that dominates Western philosophy (x). The argument

thus divides Being into faces,faces,perhaps the front and the back. So there is another face or

surface of being. The other face of being may make it possible to bear the mocking gaze of

politics. This other face is the certitudeof peace so far as it is able to dominate the evidence

of war (TI, x). Enough evidence, or strong evidence usually makes certitude possible. This is

certainly how it is in Heidegger, where certainty has modes, like convictionabout what is un-

covered or evident, namely, that all men die.9 In Levinas, certitude is counterpoised to evi-

dence, because he realizes certainty is modal, but need not be authenticated by evidence or truth

claims. The mode of certainty Levinas is concerned with arises as the utopian moment of cert i-

tude, though it is a funny utopia since we could never call this certitude unless we were, in fact,

not duped by morality. The only way not to be duped by morality is to accept both faces of being.

The newface de ltre is, Levinas says, a new relationboth originary and uniquewith Be-ing (x). If this is utopian, it is employed as a strategy of demystification. Here, Being has two

faces, one apparently larger than the other. The new relation with Being is not totalized. So it

should not participate in a logic where morality works for being and for politics. The utopian is

born, rather as it is in Adorno, in the possibility of correcting the monolithic triumvirate: poli-

ticsobjectivitytotalization, or again: wartruththe sublation of morality and civilization.

Yet this possibility does not proceed, as in Adorno, from reflection. It proceeds from a

different calling into question, of which we, as lone reasoning beings, would be incapable: the

approach of the other. In 1962, this is the approach of the other who is interlocutor, teacher, the

stranger to be sure, but the widow and the orphanfigures that affect us before we can make a

private friend-enemy distinction.

The tensions of language, using certitude against evidence, are more than just a call to

move beyond Husserl and the early Heidegger. They reflect the Hegelian distinction between sub-

jective and objective logics. Certitude has a modality, here, that belongs to particularity rather


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than to universality. Nothing like this is found in HeideggersDasein, becauseDaseincan be sin-

gularized by anxiety, but it is never particular. If something can be beyond the totality without

being outside of time and space, then the strategy can only be one of a particular, which is not just

singular or different from its universal ground. Eschatology sets [us] in relation with being, be-

yond the totalityor history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void

that would surround the totality and where one couldbelieve what one liked and promote, this

way, the rights of a subjectivity free as the wind (xi). Not a new space-time, eschatology hap-

pens like a chiasm. The subject eschatology defends is particular in its event, and generic in its

being. The other is the other and the particular stranger. In this way Levinas short-circuits the log-

ic by which the other is firstly a group of strangers that some Is would war against. The other is,

for him, irreducibly particular though that strategy becomes so problematic that by 1974 the other

is presented as an immanent schism, a split subjectivity, rather than the radical exteriority and

external particularity.

VIII. Peace: Messianic and Otherwise

The great illusion is messianic peace. It is the philosophers utopia, Levinas says; they

benefit from it and deduce a final peace of reason, which plays its game in the midst of ancient

and present wars (x). The philosophers illusion arises from their reasoning and their desire,

which is to found morality on politics. In this illusion we can hear: morality is moral for the sake

of politics. Who wouldnt relish a morality that reforms politics? Would that not be the interrup-tionin the midst of political machinations and terrorof an act called witnessing, protest, or

self-sacrificesome act that stopped political actuality in its tracks and called it to account for

itself?

With politics explicitly defined as war, morality is not moralfor the sake of politics. That

is the philosophers error. Eschatology does not supplement ontology or complete its philo-

sophical evidences (x). Eschatology does not belong to the order of evidence; it is a different

modality of certainty. Though this certainty is not ex-videre, arising from sight, it is re-

flectablethis is more than a metaphor. The beyond of totality is not describedin a purely

negative fashion. It is reflected in theinterior of the totality and of history, in the interiorof expe-

rience (xi). This is the logic of the trace, counterpoised to that of presence.10

Obviously, the interior-exterior distinction is one binarism that cannot be further reduced

here. Later works like Otherwise than Beingwill inflect this binarism so that it no longer matters

where the other is. Of course the intention remains the same. Totality and Infinity argued that


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the eschatological idea of judgment (contrary to the judgment of history where Hegel saw the

rationalization of that judgment)11 implies that beings have an identity before eternity, before

the completion of history that beings exist in relationstarting from themselves and not from

the totality (xi).

In 1961, this relation is dialogue and teaching, with its non-teleological root: signification

without context, unwilled gratuity, such that ethics is a way of seeingseeing others, and seeing

Being itself as total yet chiasmatically interrupted.12

From there, Levinass discussion takes another turn whose importance is hard to deter-

mine. Why does the force of war and the universality of politics not refute eschatology, the way

it refute morality? he asks. His only answer to this is cryptic. He speaks of the duality of alle-

giance, even two ways of being, of an essentially hypocritical civilizationour own. The West

is not just philosophy and religion, it is hypocritical because it has no desire to abandon its alle-

giance to either philosophy and war, or to religion and peace. Indeed, it wants to dialectize these.

But this is more than an allusion to Hegel for whom there was nothing more inPhilosophy than in

Religion. In thePhenomenology, they simply proceeded along different vectors: the Concept for

philosophy, and Representation for religion. But Levinas is more than anti-Hegelian here; it is not

just that civilization is attached to the True and to the Good, henceforth antagonists (xii). Nie-

tzsche saw that much in his critique of values. It is rather that there seems to us to be no where

from which to redirect our attachments, partly because we invariably ask, Is it true? and partly

because everything gets trumped by politics in this logic. An interruption is not a momentary

trumping; it is a gasp, a metaphoric space, or a crossing that does not change the logic. Is the

West addled by lust for power so that it cannot see its dual allegiance? Surely the phrase, dsor-

mais antagonistes means that the true and the good have no meta-discourse, unless that is pre-

cisely the function of eschatology. Yet eschatologys structurethat is, of summoning beings,

interrupting, proceeding as if momentarily ineluctable, and coming from an other who could, un-

der other circumstances, be my enemyeschatologys structure seems to mirror that of war,

which is itself an interruption, a mise-en-mouvement of people uprooted.Mirroring is not identity,

however. It is repetition with difference.

I spent time on eschatology in order to address two questions: 1) How does it change the

equation: warpoliticsreasonbeing? And 2) Is eschatology itself a rival order? To the first

question, it is clear that eschatology may motivatethrough the Tiersa demand for justice. Es-

chatology is produced as a responsible gesture toward even the other, my enemy. But this es-

chatology does not sublate the political. If anything, eschatology comes out as the only possible


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way to explain that life is not like an endless Kristallnacht, since politics trumps ethics, and per-

verts morality into its own rhetoric. The answer to question one is that eschatology changes the

equation of warpoliticsreasonBeing imperceptibly, like the inflection performed by an

adverb. Is eschatology a rival order? If the adverbial question how regroups modalities into an

order, then it is one. But there is no need to assemble and hypostatize in that way. Moreover, the

Goodmeaning, the domain of valuedoes notbelong to the true. Does that mean the Good is

not true? I believe it means, that we can ask What does it mean? but notIs what it means

true? Now, What does it mean? is not enough, for philosophers, to make the Good into an o r-

der that rivals the True. The Good is antagonist to the True, but it is not the rival of Truth. Of

course Nietzsche also saw this and called for a critique of the Western obsession with truth.

Inflecting Being without changing its structure or appearance; no need for a rival order

unless we take Levinass detailed explorations in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being

as explicitly constituting an order. That would be a category error. What-is carries values, yet it

does not determine allvalues.Nevertheless, the little event called the Good, this nothing, has

its necessity in a logic where the political is war, and where Being also is war, and where reason

serves both politics and Being.

IX. Donning the Hegelian Mantle

If we cannot ask Is it true that the Good? We can still ask, Is it true that the politi-

cal?

We can proceed this way. Heidegger did not write about politics directly. Levinas may

have been thinking of Kojve and his Nietzschean transformation of the Master-Slave dialectic.

But Levinas also knew of Jean Wahls reading of Hegel, which privileged the unhappy con-

sciousness as the figure that moved history.13

There is an engagement with Hegel in Levinas. The

engagement is related to Hegels logic and his politics. But it concerns the political as Absolute,

as Absolute Spirit, which is reached, in thePhenomenology, at the end of the section on Morality.

There, the movement of history through the French Revolution and the Terror is doubled by the

passage of Kantian philosophy into Hegelian dialectics.14

On the basis of this, Absolute Spirit was

taken by some commentators to be instantiated effectively in Bismarcks Prussian state.

We should pause here, because the political understood as war itself, comes from a source

other than Hegel. It may come from a number of sources, but one of which is clearly Heideggers

contemporary, touted by many as the twentieth century inheritor of Hegel: jurist and political phi-

losopher, Carl Schmitt. Next to Schmitt, Kojve seems a brilliant Hegel exegete. Unlike Schmitt,

Kojve does not himself unfold an original theory of the political. But the irony about inheriting


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the Hegelian mantle does not stop there. Before the first World War, the young Franz

Rosenzweig, the brilliant student of the Freiburg Hegelian, Friedrich Meinecke, looked as though

he might become the left Hegelian of the 20thcentury with his thesis,Hegel and the State. Once

Rosenzweig gave up his defense of Hegels conception of the universal statea defense that ar-

gued that it was not universal enough)he also gave up completely on a philosophy of history

and politics that would expand Hegels concept of the political into actualEuropean history. Had

it not been for the Balkan trenches, in which he found himself (not to mention the framing of the

Jews after the War as betrayers of the German cause), Rosenzweig might have laid claim to the

heritage of Hegelian thought, over Carl Schmitt. Moreover, he would have inflected it in a cos-

mopolitan direction. In that case, we might have had Derrida but never Levinas. As it was,

Schmitt put on the mantle of right Hegelianism, trenchantly critical of the liberal state. George

Schwab, Schmitts translator and commentator, argues that Schmitt supported a strong executive

branch over the conflicted parliamentarism of Weimar. In his political works, Schmitt was con-

cerned with the immediate centrifugal forces tearing the Weimar state apart and on some of the

intellectual underpinnings of these forces.15 Above all, Schmitt strove to distinguish politics

from the political as a distinct domain. His concern was to keep the numerous political parties

legitimated by the Weimar constitution, the unions, and left movements of his time, from paralyz-

ing Weimars parliamentary system. While this may seem historically understandable, Schmitts

position took an ugly turn following Paul von Hindenburgs surprise appointment of Hitler as

Chancellor,16at which point Schmitt too turned around, and joined the Nazi party. Did he agree

with Hindenburgs advisors that Hitler could be contained and manipulated to their ends?17

It is

hard to imagine anyone joining the Nazis in good faith. What we do know is that he joined the

Party in the same year that Heidegger did, 1933. He remained its ideologue longer than

Heidegger remained the Rector of the University of Freiburg, but both men shared what J. Tamin-

iaux has called that nostalgie de la Grce ancienne.

X. The Concept of the Political

The arguments of the Preface to Totality and Infinitybrought us to the elliptical ques-

tion: Is it true that the political? By this I mean, following Levinas: that the political is

war? that the political is defined as the calculus of war? That it is the domain wherein life and

death, is decided and legitimated?

In his The Concept of the Political,18Schmitts answer to these questions was: Yes, the

political is war, the calculus of the when and the how of war. Now Schmitts answer is deduc-

tive, Aristotelian, its language disconcertingly close to Heideggers hyperbolic, existential reso-


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luteness before life and death. Schmitts response rests on a conception of humanity and Being

shared by thinkers as different as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Fichte, and Marx. This is simply the con-

ception that man is evil in the non-religious sense of being unable, past a certain point, to resist

the power of his own passions. 19,20

The Concept of the Political is divided into eight parts. The first part discusses the diffi-

culty of defining the political. This difficulty is tied to the question: What isthe modern state? We

find general answers in the debates of jurisprudence over the fifty years prior to publication of the

Concept in 1924. Yet that literature continues to grow without a definitive definition of the state.

The question has arisen because the state has gone through three phases between the 18 thand the

20thcenturies: from the absolute monarchies, to the neutral states of the 19

thcentury, to the liberal

bourgeois state of the 20th. The latter has definitively blurred the boundaries between state and

society; as a process, this was noted as early as the years between 1848 and 1870.21 The distinc-

tive feature of the bourgeois state is its capacity to extend into social, religious, economic, and

cultural affairs without being able to assure its own effective independence from these domains .

As we know, Hegels universal state also extends into autonomous domains but does so

while remaining above those domains in matters of war and peace. The state that loses itself

through hyperextension into economic and cultural domains will be called the total state. Its

condemnation by Schmitt follows a certain tradition in political thought, which is justified by its

accompanying depoliticalization, that is, it is no longer clear what the state itself should be or do.

For Schmitt, the answer to depoliticalization is found in a strategy that moves in the opposite di-

rection: toward the universal state. Superficially like the bourgeois state, Hegels universal state

pursues the most vigorous penetration of all societal spheres by the state for thepurpose of

winning for the entirety of the state all vital energies of the people (COP, 25). 22Universality is

unavoidable; the difference turns on the transcendence of the state and, by extension, the autono-

my of the political.

Part II of The Concept of the Political argues that the answer to the question, What is the

State?, turns on a more radical inquiry: should we conceive the political as a domain categorically

distinct from the cultural, the economic, and the moral? If so, then what is its specific difference,

what are the foundational categories of the political? These categories do exist in all simplicity;

they are above all the distinction of public friend versus public enemy (Freund vs. Feind). A

longer work could show, in this regard, that Levinass ethics works on a precise reversal of

Schmitts logic: for Levinas, the other, the stranger is, radically, if not the friend (as Ricur a r-

gued), never the enemy: the peaceable resistance of the face excludes, pre-reflectively, the friend-

enemy distinction.


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15

approach to ontology, for Heidegger, and in virtually all recent approaches to the political, for

Schmitt. The latter argues, The fact that the substance of the political is contained in the context

of a concrete antagonism is still expressed in everyday language, even where the awareness of the

extreme case has been entirely lostWords such as state, republic, society, class, as well as so v-

ereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorshiptotal state, and so on, are incomprehensi-

ble if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combatedor negated by such a term

(COP, 30-31).

For Heidegger, inauthenticity results in death being relegated to an anxious but superior

attitude such that death comes, certainly, but not right away (BT, 302, emphasis mine). Schmitt

contrasts the inauthenticity of party politics with the political properly grasped: in usual dome s-

tic polemics the word political isused interchangeably withparty politics (COP, 32, emphasis

mine). These inauthentic stances cover over the truth of concrete existence, despite appearances

to the contrary. This is true in regard to the meaning of Being in Heidegger, and in regard to the

meaning of the political in Schmitt. Of course neither thinker would allow that such a resolute

approach to the truth of their question implies a concrete plan of action per se. Schmitt urges,

It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war by no means as

though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with the friend-enemy alternative vis--vis

every other nationThe definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor milita-

rism, neither imperialism nor pacifism (COP, 33). And yet his tone will give the lie to this short-

ly, because for a people to stand authentically in the political requires that that people truly

possesses political energy sufficient to group men according to friend and enemy (COP, 36).

Or again, ventriloquizing Hegel this time: The bourgeois is an individual who does not

want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphereHe is a man who finds his compensation for

his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichmentConsequently he wants to be spared

bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death (COP, 62-63). The group, or Volk, that

faces risk and decides to enter, or stand firm in, the political, is the seriouspeople; the one that

has grasped the meaning of the most extreme possibilityhere, not simply of life and death, but

rather of dying-for the group, or destroying the otheras a group. In Schmitt, the emphasis on

the people as a national entity is so strong that it resembles Sartres group-in-fusion and be-

comes in itself a sort of individual. Against Levinassself and other, the individual in Schmitt is

onepeople; the decisive difference is that this singular is neverparticularized.

XI. That Permanent Possibility: War, the Political and its Effacement


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16

Let us recall for a moment what Levinas wrote in the third line of his Preface about

war: Luciditythe openness of the spirit upon the truedoes it not consist in glimpsing the

permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality (TI, ix). We find the same

expression in Schmitt. War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of poli-

tics. If war is not the content of politics, that is because politics eo ipsowas never defined by

Schmitt. No, war is the content of the political, starting from the friend-enemy distinction. He

continues, But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in

a characteristic way human action and thinking (COP, 34). On the following page, What al-

ways matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision

whether this situation has or has not arrived (COP, 35).25

The third section closes with the decla-

ration that Leo Strauss seized upon, fairly: a world without politics, a completely pacified globe

lacking the friend-enemy distinction, would contain many very interesting antitheses and con-

trasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis

whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized tokill other human beings (COP,

35).

While the pacified globe sounds like the best possible state of affairs, Schmitt is not

serious, here. Very interesting antitheses are not serious antitheses, not matters of life and

death. Strauss ventures here that Schmitt is conceal[ing] his moral judgment (COP, 105). That

judgment is none other than that Being political means being oriented to the dire emergen-

cyjust as being authentically in Heidegger means being oriented to ones ownmost possibil-

ity of death. Strauss says, He who affirms the political as such respects all who want to fight; he

is just as tolerant as the liberalsbut with the opposite intention (COP, 105). This tolerance to-

ward all but those who want to fight Strauss calls a liberalism with the opposite pola rity (COP,

105).

Working minutiously, Leo Strauss shows that Schmitt made an unconscious moral judg-

ment here. What is more obvious is the aesthetics of war that animates Schmitts argument. Tol-

erance is the leitmotif of liberalism; but to have tolerance toward all but those who want to fight

really means nothing, since Schmitt will argue that a religious, an economic, or a cultural struggle

becomespolitical at the moment when it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively

according to friend and enemy. Thus, the political does not reside in the battle itselfbut in the

mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility (COP, 37). This is how the fourth se c-

tion of The Concept begins. It explores how a group can enter, or seize hold of, the political.

Ifthe economic, cultural, or religious counter forces are so strong that they are in a position to


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decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality be-

come the new substance of the political entity (COP, 39).

On the other hand, if no group proves so strong as to decide on friends and enemies,

then the political entity is nonexistent (Ibid.). There follows a critique of German and Anglo -

Saxon pluralist theories. At the heart of this sectionbeyond Strausss observation about its mor-

al judgmentis the following claim: whatever its original charactereconomic, religious, or cul-

tural (cf. COP, 42),26thepoliticalentity, the entity becoming-politicalremains above all the other

antitheses in society. The section is concerned with Schmitts conception of transcendence. His is

a violent, realpolitiksituation of transcendence, to which Levinas contraposes his analytic of eth-

icalparticularity(the particularity of enjoyment, that of the other, that of responsibility) and in-

terruption. The ever present possibility of a friend-and-enemy grouping suffices to forge a deci-

sive entity which transcendsthe mere societal-associational groupings (COP, 45). A Schmittian

equation arises: transcendence is sovereignty; transcendence characterizes the state just as the

authority of the will to life and death characterizes the political (COP, 45-47). The exception,

actual war, proves to be the rule of the political. This exception is a permanent possibilityas

permanent as Being itself.

The neo-Hegelian theme of the transcendence of the state continues through Section Five,

justifying itself by appending a critique of liberalism: Under no circumstances can anyone de-

mand that any member of an economically determined society, whose orderis based upon ra-

tional procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operationsThe individual may die

for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualist liberal

society, a thoroughly private matter (COP, 48).27

Possible arguments about economic or cultural ways of resolving a differend, or neutral-

izing an enemy are dismissed as trivial.28

To demand seriously of human beings that they kill

others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry can flourishor that the pu r-

chasing power of grandchildren may grow iscrazy (COP, 48). Yet the observation leads him

to two conclusions. First, there exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how trueno so-

cial ideal no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other (COP,

49). War has no justification, hence no justice. This is also why morality could not but dupe us

about war; morality cannot justify war and both Schmitt and Levinas realize this. As proof of the

pudding: attempts at regulating war, infusing justice into it, or outlawing it have all failed (COP,

50-52). The world will not thereby become depoliticized, and it will not be transplanted into a

condition ofpure morality, pure justice, or pure economics (COP, 52). His second conclusion is

that the political is as ineradicable as the conatus is natural. If a people no longer possesses the


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energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics,29[the political] will not thereby van-

ishonly a weak people will disappear (COP, 53). A conclusion that Lev inas would have to

accord, the moment war and being are equated. In Schmitt, the equation war-being is not yet ex-

plicit, but it imposes itself swathed in his sthetic jargon of the strong versus the weak people.

Like Levinas, Schmitt will accord that humanity is not a political concept. In a more

ambiguous vein, Schmitt remarks that humanity is both a social ideal and a system of relations

between individuals (COP, 55).This furthers his argument that where or whenever there is one

state, there are really at least two states. A League of Nations or international body could only be

political if it could remove the right of war from its member states, while not itself seizing that

rightlest the become a mega-political formation. No political humanity, no world state is possi-

ble, unless it were in truth a social entity like that of customers purchasing gas [sic] from the

same utility company (COP, 57). In that case, like liberal society and liberal politics, the interna-

tional body would just oscillate between economic concerns and moral ones, which is the lamen-

table essence of bourgeois individualistic society. Schmitts disdain here grows so ponderous that

it turns on him and he concedes that he is finally lead to an anthropological profe ssion of faith

(COP, 58). That profession is none other than that evil, stripped of its metaphysical sense as

sin, amounts to animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy)

(COP, 59). Schmitts undiscriminating aggregate of physical drives, emotions, and passions is

polemical. Like Kant, passions for him are pathologies that must be checked. The inclination to

slide from passion to evil is the principal feature of human nature (COP, 59), that nature which

Levinas called the conatus. Such a human natureand Schmitt insists it must be accepted by an-

yone who consider himself a political thinker30is the anthropological rock against which liberal

and anarchist thought both run aground. Marxism is more consistent; at least it accepts human

evil. Schmitt posits his claim about evil as a fact and drives it home with a shower of di sdain

heaped on the sycophants who argue that man is good in order to gain a political upper hand or to

attack the state.31Above all, it is Schmitts root. It is the reason why he claims that the political,

the other as enemy, and some kind of state institution, are ineradicable.

TheConcept of the Politicalculminates in a loose syllogism to the effect that: human na-

ture makes the political unsublatable; the political concerns groups not individuals; liberal society

depoliticalizes all groups that participate in it.32Therefore, liberal society is a new leviathan and

hypocriticalsomething Levinas might have sanctioned in 1961: recall his the evidence of war

is maintained in a civilization essentially hypocriticalattached at once to the True and to the

Good (TI, xii). Schmitt would argue that in liberal society the good is the ideal of humanity,

while the true is what those societies actually enact; the unsublatability of the political, combined


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19

with liberal depoliticalization means that the liberal parliamentarianism will often be unable to

rise over and control the pre-political struggles, which arise in times of unrest. Perhaps Schmitt

would concede that the hypocritical attachment applies to authoritarian regimes as well. In any

event, the attachment to the good and the true is arises from the strife of reason and passions, both

of them being as apt to serve desire and rage while, on other occasions, the authoritarian re-

striction of those excesses.

One conviction is constant: liberal society cannot eliminate the political. Worse, liberal-

ism is but a critique of politics not a theoryof the political argues Schmitt. There is no specific

difference in liberalism, which would let us define the genre called the political. But therein lies

the rub: in an odd twist that doubles his arguments for the ineradicability of the political, Schmitt

adds that liberalism has still not been replaced in Europe today (COP, 71). This is because,

while it is not a theory of the political, liberal thought shows an incredibly coherent systematics

(COP, 71).33Why is this? Liberal thought fuses with political concepts the double face of ethical

or moral pathos and materialist economic reality (COP, 71). This dualism of the ideal and the

moral sensibility, coupled with hardnosed materialism, should suffice to doom liberalism. Now

this double face of morality and economics woven into political thought is what the critics of

post-World War II liberalism borrowed from Schmitt, justly enough. While never espousing the

platforms of authoritarian parties, Levinas himself rarely proves all that fond of liberalism. In

his 1984 talk Peace and Proximity, he reiterates his preferred litotes: It is not without i m-

portance to knowand this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century

whether the egalitarian and just State in which the European is fulfilledand which it is a mat-

terabove all of preservingproceeds from a war of all against allor from the irreducible re-

sponsibility of the one for the other34 But this is over twenty years after Totality and Infinity.

And before that, in his 1934 essay Reflections on Hitlerism, Levinas was more skeptical still

about liberalism. In the liberal state, where freedom constitutes the whole of thoughts digni-

tythought becomes a game. Man revels in his freedom and does not definitively compromise

himself with any truth. He transforms his power to doubt into a lack of convictionSincerity b e-

comes impossible and puts an end to all heroism. Civilization is invaded by everything that is not

authentic, by a substitute that is put at the service of fashion35

How can we fail to hear in this

early critique, Schmitts argument that the decline of an autonomous political domain promises

the advent of masked conflicts, and ushers in the reign of economy, morals, law, art, entertai n-

ment, etc. (COP, 53)where entertainment sums up the basic lack of seriousness and focused

power that characterizes such a society. My point is simply that Levinass stance toward liberal


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20

society moves from deep skepticism to a reserved toleranceprovided one knows, in the mode

of certainty set forth in Totality and Infinity, what the true ground of society is.

The principal thrust of Levinass remarks is always the question of the priority of the o r-

der of Being-War or the interruption of proximity, which sometimes rings foundational. Even if,

by 1984, the liberal state had persevered for almost forty years, even if it is deliberately set forth

against the inegalitarian state, it can and indeed has slid toward war. For it is unthinkable that the

interruption of Beingof the Being that is also Schmitts existential-politicalcould itself be-

come an order rivaling Being. Levinass ethical interruption may hold the political in abeyance.

But it neither changes Being nor redeems it. The interruption is simply as old as the order in

which Being is equated with the political and with war.36

XII. What are Human Things, What is Culture?

In that sense, while he supposes a political37 disturbingly close to that of Schmitt,

Levinas proves ultimately more consistent than Schmitt was. Schmi tts own Introduction and

Appendices to the 1963 German edition (eliminated from the English translation), explains that

his concern is with the order of the human things. 38 Can the question of the state really be

coextensive with the order of human thingswithout making the state the ultimate raison

dtre for humans? The essence of the political lies in the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt roots

that distinction in the thought of Machiavelli and Hobbes.39But Schmitts conception of the polit-

ical amounts to the collectivization (groups at war) of what was, for Hobbes, individuals in the

state of nature.40

Strauss reminds us that Hobbes devised the state of nature for the purpose of

heuristics: to describe how human beings probably act if unrestricted. Moreover, Hobbess con-

ceived his heuristic state of nature to show why it was desirable, even imperative, to leave it be-

hind. Given human culture, which is arguably as old as any political formation, Schmitts state of

nature is not always on the verge of breaking out. Man may be a dangerous, passionate animal,

but unless we ignore the gravitas of culture, war is not our ever-present possibility. Schmitt ad-

mitted that war between groups could be deflected through economic or cultural means. His

prompt abandonment of this point goes unexplained, but it is understandable. When it serves as a

secular theodicy, politics must ignore a realm (like the cultural) in which humans realize them-

selves spiritually. This is also why a notion like political culture must see its ability to alter politi-

cal life denied. War must be its own court of appeal. Its ethic and its aesthetics must be deter-

mined only by energies and the Will of a people. The autonomy of the political that Schmitt se-

cures through his definition confers on it the status of a theodicy, or an 'ontodicy'. As Strauss puts

it, The political is thus not only possible but also real; and not only real but also neces-


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sarybecause it is given in human nature (COP, 95). This can only be achieved by wholly di s-

crediting the meaning of human activities whereby conflict is disarmed through cultural practic-

es.41

Levinas worked with a Schmittian conception of the political from 1934 through 1961.

The equation: Being-politics-the permanent possibility of war establishes an order, which is

crossed by an interruption. Our interest in ethics arises from that interruption, as does our interest

in utopia. But the interruption, called eschatology, is utopian only because the political has

been extended to the entirety of Being. Eschatology must, therefore, be transcendencethe coun-

terweight of Schmitts transcendence of the political. That way, eschatology looks utopian b e-

cause it is not attached to evidence, the true, or the verifiable. Its mode of certainty admits the

possibility of doubt. The purpose of the present essay was both to show a significant root of

Levinass notion of the political and to pose this question: if politics is notmade coextensive with

Being, and defined as the activity of distinguishing between friends and enemies while negating

the stranger and the enemy, then would Levinass interruption by the other have to be deemed

utopian?

To answer this, Strauss had recourse to the meaning of culture today. We might ask

whether pluralist political theories serve no other function than to depoliticalize society, as

Schmitt argued. Above all, we should ask whether the so-called incredibly coherent systematics

of liberal thought is due simply to its appealing individualism or its anti-categorial sloppiness

(blending the ethical with the economic and losing the political in the process). Rosenzweig

abandoned the Hegelian projectat least the left Hegelian one. What shall we do with the right

Hegelian critique? There is little irony in the fact that right Hegelians witnessed the devastation,

by Hitler, of the liberal political system in 1933the very system they had execrated publically

as late as 1932, when The Concept of the Political appeared as a monograph.

1Lawrence Olivier, Contre lespoir comme tche politique, suivi de Critique radicale: Essai dimpolitique(Montral: Liber, 2004). Olivier is professor of Political Science at the Universit de Qubec Montral.

He has published on Foucault and on relativism in politics.2The thesis is somewhat false, of course. Political utopianism is older than the Enlightenment hope of im-proving man. Plato sketches a utopia, with two provisos: 1) that it is more concerned with what is good

for us, than with what is possible for us: it is not a matter of programmatic utopianism, it is an atopian uto-

pia; 2) that it works only if but no one group occupies more than its one type of task: money makers can

make money, traders trade, poets must leave, and philosophers, always the aspirant meddlers, can meddle

only if they have mastered a program of education that leaves them ready to rule at the youthful age of fif-

ty. At that point, it is to be hoped that their education and age may assure them that their thumosis effec-

tively allied with their reason, permitting a certain control over pleonexia. We are familiar with critiques of

Plato and the kallipolisof hisRepublic, Nietzsche among them.


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Political utopias are anything but children of the Enlightenment. Yet Law rences protest against secular

utopianism remains compelling in its staunch, pessimistic refusal to give way to a liberal interest. 3 See The Childs Relations with Others in M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other

Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, James M. Edie, tr.,

(Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 135, 140. He points out that, before the child ac-

quires a sense of its body as spectacle, and even well after this, we find the phenomenon of transiti v-ism, i.e., the absence of a division between myself and others that is the foundation of syncretic sociabi l-

ity. For we must consider the relation with others not only as one of the contents of our experience but as

an actual structure in its own right. We can admit what we call intelligence is only another name desig-

nating an original type of relation with others (the relat ion of reciprocity)4See Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Richard C. McCleary, tr., (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1964,

French edition 1960), pp. 168-70. My two hands coexist or are compresent because they are one single

bodys hands. The o ther person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs

of one single intercorporeal reality. If the other person is to exist for me, he must do so to begin with in

an order beneath the order of thoughtwhich is more dispossession than possession.The whole riddle of

Einfhlung lies in its initial esthesiological phase. For Husserl the experience of others is first of all es-

thesiological.5The debate about politics, then as quite recently too, concerned the legitimacy of pluralist theories of the

political in contemporary liberal states. These debates, as must have been clear to their participants then as

now, inquire into the reality of liberalism and its ability to protect society and minorities in keeping with its

own doctrines. As John P. McCormick has pointed out, in his book on Carl Schmitt, The prevailing notion

of pluralism, whether in its existential warring-gods, Weberian manifestation or its more mundane Amer-

ican post-World War II variety, are rightfully challenged today for their insensitivity to concrete cultural,

economic, or gender-based specificity. But the advocates of identity and difference qua concrete otherness

ought not to leave wholly unexamined their own potential essentializing of themselves or others in their

challenges to traditional pluralism. When both sides foreclose the possibility of commonality and mutual

rational exchange, they consequently leave the public sphere vulnerable to those who would seek to enforce

a stable and unifying order from above and who would exploit concrete othernessin a strategy aimed at

naked political gain. Schmitt himself was aware of this sort of exploitation of difference in pl uralist poli-

ticshe was a bitter critic of just such hypocrisies. But he was also a proponent of a unifying order im-

posed from the position of transcendence proper to the state as instance of the political. See McCormick,

Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), p. 310. McCormick and others, like Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, find themselves thusopposed to post-modern positions like those of Deleuze and, to a lesser extent, Iris Marion Young. See

McCormick, Op. cit., p. 310 n. 25. The pathosof the pluralist position appears to be that, even in insisting

upon integrating the demands of excluded others into consensual agreement andfully democratic legiti-

macy (ibid.), there seems little in these theories to protect one against the imposition from above of part ic-

ularist (economic-political) interestsoften presented in guise of defensive strategies, or outright wars, to

protect a putatively threatened homeland or way of life.6See Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Lvinas: La vie et la trace (Paris: J.C. Latts, 2002), p. 83ff, for a de-

scription of life in the camp, Stalag XIB, to which Levinas was deported.7See Franz Rosenzweig,Hegel et ltat, Grard Bensussan, tr., Paul-Laurent Assoun, intro., (Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France, 1991; first published in 1920).8 For a discussion of the significance of seriousness, gravitas, in Schmitt, see Leo Strausss critical en-

gagement with The Concept of The Political, Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, J. Har-

vey Lomax, tr., in The Concept of the Political, George Schwab, tr., (Chicago, Ill.: University of ChicagoPress, 1996), pp. 83-107. Of Schmitts arguments about the appearance of a world in which the political, as

the friend and enemy distinction and as war, had ceased to exist, Strauss writes, Schmitt thus makes it

clear: The opponents of the political may say what they will; they may appeal on behalf of their plan to the

highest concerns of man; their good faith shall not be denied; it is to be granted that weltanschauung, cul-

ture, etc., do not have to be [mere] entertainment, but they canbecome entertainment; on the other hand, it

is impossible to mention politics and the state in the same breath as entertai nment; politics and the state

are the only guaranteeagainst the worlds becoming a world of entertainment; therefore, what the oppo-

nents of the political want is ultimately tantamount toa world without seriousness.[This] is only possi-

ble if man has forgotten what genuinely matters p. 101.


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9 See Heidegger, Being and Time, John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson, trs., (New York: Harper and

Row, 1962), 52, esp. p. 301; German edition p. 257.10Like what Emile Benveniste, historian of semantics, called the second sight beyond everyday vision.

superstes, super-stare, superstitio. See Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-europennes (Paris: Minuit),

Vol. II.11

The French text reads, Lide eschatologique du jugement (contrairement au jugement de lhistoire oHegel a vu tort la rationalization de celui-l) implique que les tres ont un e identit avant lternit

Celui-l, a masculine pronoun, either refers to the judgment tied to eschatology, which Hegel mistook for

that which is rationalized by the judgment of history, or it is an error in the text.12We should remember that Heidegger also argued that The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar

tendency-of-Being, though this optic as Levinas puts it, belongs to everydayness and can be called

curiosity [Neugier], not cognition, but nevertheless a certain understanding, in the sense of the genuine

appropriation of those entities towards which Dasein can comport itself in accordance with its essential

possibilities of Being, seeBeing and Time, Op. cit., 36, p. 214 (German edition, p. 170).13Because Hegel was, on Wahls account, a thinker deeply influenced by, and concerned to distinguish

himself from, the Romantics.14 See Emanuel Hirsch, Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phnomenologie in Hans Friedrich

Fulda and Dieter Henrich, eds., Materialen zu Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1973), p.246. It is easy to say in a general sense, from which world the historical forms [Ge-

stalten] are taken, that is, those forms which provide the material and the background of the Section on

Morality. Immediately prior runs the subsection on absolute freedom and the Terror, in which Hegel has set

the French Revolution and Napoleon in the magic picture [im magischen Bilde festgehalten hat]and, at

its close, he clearly pronounced the passage from France to Germany. Toward the end of the Section on

Morality itself, however, the absolute Spiriti.e., the highest thought of Hegelian philosophyis attained.

Therewith, the movement through the forms of morality falls together with that of the movement of Spirit

in Germany, which is itself contemporary with the movement of the French Revolution. Now the move-

ment of Spirit to Germany has its origin in Kantian philosophy and its goal or end in that of Hegel. The

attraction or stimulus proper to the whole Section is thereby almost already perceived: Hegel speaks here of

the becoming [vom Werden] of his philosophy, out of that of Kant, refraining from all the questions which

stand in the foreground of the well known essay on Glauben und Wissen. He is attempting, ratherto make

comprehensible the philosophical significance the transformation of the Ethos [den Wandel des Ethos]

from Kant to Hegel. If for this reason only, it is not a matter of indifference if wewhile letting the Forms

that Hegel himself has us passing over, here, as pure nameless Spirits [also reine namenlose Geister]arereally able to find [these forms] in the outer bounds of a delimited historical sphere. The matter here of

course is the relationship of the Phenomenology, and above all, of Absolute Spirit, to factical, historical

moments. In her With What Must the Science End?, Gillian Rose argued that we can think the absolute

by acknowledging the element of Sollen [ought] in such a thinking, by acknowledging the subjective ele-

ment, the limits on our thinking the absolute. This is to think the absoluteand to fail to think it quite differ-

ently from Kant and Fichtes thinking and failing to think it. Thus: Thinking the absolute means recog-

nizing actuality as determinansof our acting by recognizing it in our acts This is way of thinking the

absoluteif surprising in its apparent modestyresembles what Adorno called his utopian element. A

utopia of reflection; and one not completely alien to Levinas, at least in 1961, when the approach of the

Other inaugurates response and conversation. What is reflection if not the immanentization of response and

conversation? See G. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology(London and Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1981, 1995), p.

204.

I pursue this at length because such an utopia both is and is not Levinass eschatology. That is, his es-chatology is conversation and aptitude for speech. But it is also and massively the counterpoint of a vision

of history that is unlike Hegels; Levinass history, if it evinces a dialectical movement at all, moves in no

direction and, if this is too easily said about Hegel, Levinass history carries no ought. It only reflects

something like an ought, though the modalities of that reflectionwhere and how it happensare not too

clear.15 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, With Leo Strausss Notes on Schmitts Essay , GeorgeSchwab, tr. and J. Harvey Lomax, tr (Strausss essay) (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

The work Der Begriff der Politischen firs t appeared in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und

Sozialpolitik, Vol. 58, No. 1; it was 33 pages long. The year it appeared was the same as that in which


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Heidegger publishedBeing and Time, 1927. The Conceptwas expanded and republished in 1932 under the

same title, in Munich. Hereafter cited in the text as COP. The present citation is from George Schwabs

Introduction, see COP, pp. 12, 14-15 Schmitt, toward the end of the Weimar period, sought to strengt h-

en drastically the presidents hands, and hence he developed the idea of a presidential systemHe was

willing to sacrifice a part of the constitution in order to save and strengthen the existing statehe would

accept political parties and the Weimar parliament only on the condition that they be subordinate to andunited with the president in search for solutions. This reading of Schmitts hopes makes him appear like a

German Madisona move that proves, at best, exaggerated when one recalls his numerous anti-Semitic

writings and the vacillation in The Concept that has it defining an internal enemy as a group that saps the

state of its political power and authority and as something logically impossible (sometimes an enemy re-

quires its own geographic boundaries, other times, it threatens civil war).

Against Schwabs rather heroic Schmitt, Hans Mommsen provides us a quite different story. He writes,

The presidential cabinets of the early 1930 were accompanied by concerted attempts to replace the parli a-

mentary system with a system of constitutional rule by the administration. Ideas in this direction had been

maturing over a long period. They were the products of the traditional view of the bureaucracy as repre-

sentative of the common interest which accompanied the widespread criticism of political parties for their

alleged inability to handle questions of stateThis objective [protecting the status of civil servants] pe r-

vaded the writings of Arnold Kttgen, the constitutional lawyer. In this he was representative of a broad

school of contemporary thinking, one of the mostinfluentialof which was Carl Schmitt. Such protec-

tion did not end there. On the basis of Schmitts Verfassungslehreand writings on institutional guaran-

tee, the Brning government began a limited rule by decree, which was supported by the Reichgericht

(Republic court) and its rulings, like that authorizing salary reductions by emergency decrees. See H.

Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, Philip OConnor, tr., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1991), p. 82, and for Schmitts contribution to the discussion of rule by emergency decree, see p. 144ff.

The ultimate question, here, concerns the relationship between German thought, from Kantor especially

Fichtethrough Heidegger, Judaism (and Jewsnow the extension of Judaism, now a de factogroup

which theory should not touch). Andre Lerousseau has recently published a valuable study of this

question, see Le Judasme dans la philosophie allemande: 1770-1850 (Paris: Presses universitaires de

France, 2001). Marlne Zarader discusses the relationship between Heidegger and Jewish sources of his

thought in La dette impense: Heidegger et lhritage hbraique (Paris: Seuil, 1994), English translationforthcoming from Stanford University Press.16Olivier Beaud, professor of public law at the University of Lille, points out that, after the fall of the Brn-

ing Administration, and against the largely Catholic Zentrum in parliament, Schmitt struggled famouslywith the prelate Kaas, who argued against any exceptional measures in regard to the Weimar Constitution.

In a letter addressed on 29 January 1933 to Chancellor Schleicher and to the Reichs president, Schmitt

defended his call for an adjournment of the elections on the basis of a state of exceptionto keep Hitler

from being named chancellor himselfthat, though the circumstances did not necessarily point precisely to

such a state in the present case (one should not cry wolf, he insisted), any violation of the constitution

[Verfassungsbruch] had to be understood in light of the political situation at hand. It was therefore the

political realitywhich he therein called the constitutional realitythat determined the authentic inter-

pretation of a constitutional text. This is why, in The Concept of the Political, as elsewhere, Schmitt

stressed the autonomy of the political (though notof politics). He added, in his discussion of the herme-

neutics of the Weimar Constitution, that there existed four possible sub-systems to the parliamentary sys-

tem under the Constitution of Weimar. The best system, under the circumstances, had to be determined

according to the Schmittian hermeneutic [such that] in a determinate situation, any word can acquire a

political interest and thus become immediately conflictual. In short, constitutional institutions are mean-ingful only if they rest upon a real political force, which is another way of arguing that law cannot i m-

pose itself on political reality. This, in a nutshell, is why Schmitt always stood by the transcendence of

the political, over law, economics, and morality. It was a significant aim of his to re-read the Weimar Con-

stitution in such a way that Hitler could not, in fact, be nominated to the position of Chancellor. See Beaud,

Les derniers jours de Weimar: Carl Schmittface lavnement du nazisme (Paris: Descartes et compagnie,1997)., pp. 191-93. Here, we see a Schmitt who, while clearly conservative, is dedicated, above all, to the

idea (and ideal) of constitutionalityeven to the paradoxical point of promoting a sort of coup dtat topreserve a system that recognized constitutionality, over a state of affairs in which its meaning would be

effectively eroded. This is not without interest for many of us, today.


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17As Hans Mommsen reminds us, the illusion that Hitler could be used to conservative ends was fostered

by the same tactic that allowed Hitler to consolidate his regime. The explanation of the national socialist

regimes relative stability is that, during the Seizure of Power phase [1933-34], Hitler had been obliged to

make far-reaching concessions to the conservative elite controlling the army, economy and administra-

tionAlthough indirectly annulled as time went by, these concessions acted as a brake, enabling the re-

gime to consolidate itself with remarkable success before the movements destructive forcescould bringabout a final overstretching and overtaxing of available resources Mommsen, Op. cit., p. 145.18Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Op. cit. 19Incidentally, it really is a matter of man and men here. There are no women in Schmitts work be-

cause it is his primary concern to maintain complete detachment vis--vis man as individuals; he insists

his concern is with peoples, Vlkeranother crossing point with certain remarks of Heidegger. See for

instance, his Beitrge zur Philosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65, (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann,

1989), p. 319, 196 Da-sein und Volk: The essence of the people [des Volkes] is to be grasped only

starting from Da-seinand that means, at the same time, to know this: that the people can never be a goal

and a purpose [nie Ziel und Zweck], and that such meaning is only a folkish spreading of the liberal

Ego-thinking [des liberalen ich-gedankens] and of the economic idea of the preservation [Erhaltung]of life. Like Schmitt, the condemnation turns toward the moral-economic double face of liberal thought

and its disingenuousness in regard to, among other things, peoples.

The question of whether the feminine might represent an aspect of humanity, and what that aspect might

be in regard to peoples (is the feminine absorbed in the collectivity that evinces only masculine a s-

pects; is the situation more complex; are there peoples that are less masculine than othersif these ques-

tions seem redolent of bad 19thcentury ethnologies, they concern positionings, dominance and subaltern

status; and they are asking this: is peoples an overly abstract concept in political philosophy(versusjuris-

prudence)? And what happens to the political if it is so?) These questions should remind us that the Fe m-

inine also has no status other than hearth and seduction in Levinass 1961 work.20Using Machiavelli as his legitimation, Schmitt writes, what Machiavelli wants to express everywhere

is that man, if not checked, has an irresistible inclination to slide from passion to evil: animality, drives,

passions are the kernels of human nature (COP, 59).

Clearly, Schmitt felt a psychological kinship with Machiavelli. Toward the end of his essay, he added a

note, In actuality, Machiavelli was on the defensive as was also his country, Italy, which in the sixteenth

century had been invaded by Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and TurksAt the beginning of the 19 th

century the situation of the ideological defensive was repeated in Germanyduring the revolutionary and

Napoleonic invasions of the French. When it became important for the German people [sic] to defendthemselves against an expanding enemy armed with a humanitarian ideology, Machiavelli was rehabilitat-

ed by Fichte and Hegel in COP, p. 66 (emphasis added). We see, here, his characteristic cynicism vis --vis

humanitarian ideologies. Such a dsoeuvrementis understandable, but it is not possible to follow the posi-

tive prescription: rehabilitate Machiavelli (were we ever free of him?), establish the State as transcendent to

all factions, movements, parties, enshrine the political as the sole domain in which a people d ecides who

is a friend and who, an enemy, and thereby self-arrogates the right to murder entire groups of enemies.

Even if Schmitts critique of the individualism, the anti-political yet hyper-politicized operation of the

bourgeois liberal state is of real interest, he has nothing to put in its place and, by the end of his essay, he

appears to conceded this. Given his joining and defense of the Nazi Party, one has to ask whether a Fichte

traumatized, say, by Weimar upheavals would have joined such a party. The question can be extended fur-

ther. The responses would be irreconcilable. If one adds that, like Heidegger as Rektor-for-a-year in Frei-

burg, Schmitt too got into significant trouble with the Nazis. Tracy Strong reminds us that the SS journal

Das schwarze Korpsaccused him of the anathema, neo-Hegelianism, and that he had to find protectionunder Herman Gring, see Tracy B. Strong, Forward, COP, x. 21Schmitt points out that it was discussed by men from Lorenz von Stein to Rudolf Gneist, both opponents

of Napoleon, to Jakob Burckhardt, see COP, 23-4.22Here, Schmitt is citing Rudolf Smends Constitution and Constitutional Law [Verfassung und Verfas-

sungsrecht] of 1928. Smend is citing H. Treschers 1918 dissertation on Hegel and Montesquieu. It is not

that Schmitt approves these two strategies of integration (i.e. that of the total state and that of the univer-

sal state). He seems to recognize that, after Bismarck, the integration is inevitable. Still, it is better if socie-

ty integrates the state than if the state dissolves into the society. In the former case, he and others argue,

political sovereignty is preserved and social or economic institutions do not thereby become political rivals


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with it or for its power. In the latter case, the total stateno longer knows anything absolutely unpolitical,

the state which must do away with the depoliticalizations of the nineteenth century andputs an end to the

principle that the apolitical economy is independent of the state and that the state is apart from the econo-

my COP, 25. The interest that Schmitt held forleft and right critics of liberalism lies here, in the question

of what the political becomes when everything is political. Everything has become potentially p olitical,

clearly, but that means, for Schmitt, that in every domain of society, the distinction between friends of thestate and enemies of the state can, and will, be made. It is not absurd to remark that Guantanamo and The

Patriot Act denote one side of this process.23Totalit et infini, Op. cit., p. 52 Nous rservons la relation entreltre ici-bas et ltre transcendant qui

naboutit aucune communaut de concept ni aucune totalitle terme de religion.

Recall Levinass equation of the proto-ethical with religion meant religion as tied to legare rather than

to ligare; religion denotes intersubjective tiesonly late, in the Christian era, where it was a tie of piety.

Formed from ligare,religiorepresents, a hesitation that holds one back, a scruple that hinders and not a

sentiment that directs one to an action or incites one to practice the cult. This is Ciceros interpretation, read

by a linguist who began his reflective life in yeshiva as a Talmudist: Emile Benveniste. Levinas knew of his

work in historical semantics. I suspect he was not about to equate his sense of religion with the ties of

piety (religare). Cf. E. Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes, Vol. II Pouvoir,

Droit, Religion (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), pp. 267-273.24Heidegger writes, The ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not to be outstripped, is certain.

The way to be certain of it is determined by the kind of truth, which corresponds to it (disclosedness). The

certain possibility of deathdiscloses Dasein as a possibility, but does so only in such a way that, in a ntic-

ipating this possibility, Dasein makes this possibility possible for itself as its ownmost potentia

bettina bar go levinas politics

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