Schmitt / Agamben

 

Giorgio Agamben (tr. Attell)

State of Exception

Chicago, 2005

Agamben’s State of Exception seems to be about George Bush’s lawless  personal rule and his imperial ambitions, and it seems to be making the forbidden comparison with Hitler or perhaps with Mussolini (i.e., Hitler without death camps). Given the neocon dreams of a liberal imperialism, preemptive war, “preponderance”,  and a monopolar world, and given Bush’s dismissive attitude toward any political, constitutional, or internationalist limits to his power, this is all to the good. (Just the other day the TV screamer Chris Matthews explained that for a President, breaking the law can be a necessary part of his job – and Matthews is not the worst of the bunch.)

Walter Benjamin’s post WWI debate with Carl Schmitt is the ostensible topic of Agamben’s book, and once again my problems with the German Seriousness,  as well as my lifelong difficulties with critical theory (sensu lato), stand in the way of my liking the book much.  Benjamin’s debate with Schmitt, like Strauss’s, focussed on the boundaries and limits of liberalism and constitutionalism, with which none of the three had much sympathy.

Benjamin was a revolutionary (presumably an ultra-leftist), while Schmitt was an authoritarian conservative who later became a Nazi. In their different ways, both valorized the violent, extra-legal prerequisites for legality and civility, and both of them were concerned that political action (revolutionary in Benjamin’s case, and authoritarian in Schmitt’s) not be excessively constrained by legalities – though given what we know about subsequent history, their worries were unnecessary.

If you trace any legal system back to its beginnings you will find that it was founded by extralegal violence, so if the real nature of a thing is to be found in its foundation, then the essence of law is extralegal violence. Likewise, in a  familiar Hegelian way of thinking,  the legal order is knowable only from its contrast to illegality and disorder; and furthermore, as we all know, the state is by definition the monopoly of legitimate violence.  But Schmitt and Benjamin (pp. 23,54) show far too much enthusiasm for this line of thinking, defining the “state of exception” (the “limit concept of law which is neither external nor internal to law”, i.e., the suspension of law in martial law or the state of emergency) -- as the essence of law:

 “Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the meshes of the logos.” (p. 59).[1]

In the Schmitt / Strauss book legalistic liberalism was the big question, whereas in the present book it seems to be utilitarianism. Again, while utilitarianism may be an inadequate philosophy, the answer does not seem to be to declare an  absolute indifference to results. I’ve liked some of Benjamin’s writing, but some of the Benjamin passages here seem like nothing more than meaningless verbiage justifying a mystified violence:

“Here appears the topic…. of violence as “pure medium” that is, as the figure of a paradoxical “mediality without ends” – a means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of the ends it pursues.  The problem, then is not that of identifying just ends but that of “individuating a different kind of violence that certainly could not be either the legitimate or illegitimate means to those ends but is not related to them as means at all but in some different way.”  (p. 62).

Much of Agamben’s book consists of an intrinsically interesting discussion of auctoritas and potestas in the Roman tradition, and perhaps this does illuminate the thought of Strauss, Schmitt, and Benjamin. But Agamben, quite rightly, ends up speaking primarily to contemporary concerns. This passage looks promising:

“As long as the two elements [auctoritas and potestas ] were correlated, yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome’s contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe’s contrast between the spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic – though founded on a fiction – can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridicio-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.“ (p. 86).

However, his ultimate conclusion seems close to Benjamin’s, and is to me unintelligible:

“To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.”  (p. 88)[2]

According to the jacket blurb, Judith Butler understands Agamben’s book thus:

“This is an erudite and provocative book that calls us to ‘stop the machine’ and break the violent hold that law lays upon life”.

This may also what Agamben thinks, but to me it's all wrong. If the lawless state of exception has become the basis of modern state power, it would seem that the corrective would be a return to lawfulness. Butler is apparently talking about something like Benjamin’s “pure violence”, outside the law, to counter the lawlessness of the state of exception, but for a variety of reasons I think that that proposal is ludicrous. As I’ve said elsewhere, the German Left between the two World Wars has to be regarded as the most unsuccessful political movement of all time, and seems unlikely to provide us with a usable model for our own practice. Furthermore, the violent potentials in the world of today seem almost all to be from the right, and it seems ill-advised to dream of “pure violence”.

Like many others I’ve been looking for a vantage from which to resist the rightist hegemony. The US has been permanently mobilized since 1941, before I was born, and an authoritarian form of militarism seems to be on the point of wiping out all domestic resistance.   But I don’t find  Agamben’s book, well-researched and well-written though it is, to be of much help.

(Crossposted at Adam Kotsko)

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NOTES

[1] Actually, this is Benjamin speaking of Schmitt, rather than stating his own view, but Benjamin shares Schmitt’s contempt for bourgeois legality. Agamben carefully describes a “debate” between Schmitt and Benjamin, but I do not think that the terms there are well-defined enough for it to be a real debate -- mostly because of the mushiness of Benjamin’s concepts. I am reminded of the duel of grimaces in Gombrowicz’s Pornografia, or the mime debate in Rabelais, in both of which the criteria for a successful argument are unknown to the reader, though we are assured in each case that one of the contestants was triumphant.

Agamben seems a little tentative about Benjamin's approach, but he does not reject it:  "Under extreme conditions (that is to say, under the conditions that best define it, if it is true that a legal institution's truest character is always defined by the exception and the extreme situation)....” -- p. 79, my emphasis. (A Straussian could probably read  this passage as a coded statement of something or another).

While law can indeed be defined in terms of the state of exception, just as life can be defined in terms of death, there are a lot of reasons to define things in terms of their messy, perishable, unexciting middles, rather than in terms of their serious, profound Grenzbegriffen.

 

[2] Agamben’s identification of law and the state of exception, respectively, with  langue and with  parole strikes me as terribly farfetched (pp. 36-7, 60).  Parole does not suspend langue.

 

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