Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic by Neil Levi

Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic

Neil Levi

More than twenty years after his death, the works of the German jurist and political thinker Carl Schmitt seem more alive than ever, his influence among political and critical theorists indisputable. Yet interest in Schmitt is almost always accompanied by a certain anxiety. Did he not, however briefly, serve the Nazis by supporting the Röhm purge and calling for “Jewish” influence to be eliminated from German culture? And so, is his thought not in some profound manner “contaminated” by, even ultimately a justification of, such views?

Given his association with Nazism, that regime which is beyond the ideological pale of all postwar political thought, there is something apt about the fact that one of the most fertile ideas in Schmitt’s own thinking is that of the enemy. Indeed, for many, his thought is best emblematized by a single sentence, one that Schmitt himself was very fond of: “Der Feind ist unsre eigne Frage als Gestalt,” which, depending on how one translates Gestalt, can mean either “The enemy embodies our own question” or “The enemy is a figure for our own ques-tion.”1 This line, originally from a poem by one of Schmitt’s friends, Theodor Däubler, evokes what is arguably one of the best-known aspects of Schmitt’s thought: the idea that, just as morality is about the distinction between good

New German Critique 101, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2007DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2007-002 © 2007 by New German Critique, Inc.

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I would like to thank Beth Drenning, Chris Hill, Andreas Huyssen, Fiona Jenkins, Dirk Moses, Anson Rabinbach, and Michael Rothberg for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, which I wrote while a Sesqui Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney.

1. Carl Schmitt, “Weisheit der Zelle,” in Ex Captivitate Salus (Cologne: Greven, 1950), 90; my translations.

28 Carl Schmitt and the Aesthetic

and evil, just as aesthetics is about the distinction between beautiful and ugly, and economics the distinction between profitable and unprofitable, politics can be reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy. “The enemy embodies our own question” reveals something crucial about Schmitt’s understanding of the nature of the enemy, the way the enemy helps us define ourselves, repre-sents and gives form to the question of what makes us who we are.

The present essay takes as its point of departure the fact that Schmitt, a thinker dedicated to demarcating the specifically political domain, is frequently attacked by his own enemies for turning politics into aesthetics—a transfor-mation that Walter Benjamin’s remarks in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” have led many to regard as quintessentially fas-cist.2 Are these opponents—Jürgen Habermas, Richard Wolin, and others—therefore embodying Schmitt’s own question for him, giving it Gestalt? That is not so clear. I have some sympathy for these critical enemies and their objec-tions to Schmitt, but their critiques lack any attempt to pose a question about what it means to call ostensibly political ideas aesthetic. By emphasizing the importance of the question of the aesthetic, I argue for a more complex and polysemous understanding of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. I therefore reject polemical notions of “aestheticized” politics in favor of some broader, more descriptive conceptions of the aesthetic as a mode of presentation and perception that we might see as inherent to political thought.

In the last half of the essay I turn to what Schmitt himself has to say about aesthetics in the book where he also has the most to say about enemies, namely, The Concept of the Political. Schmitt thinks of the aesthetic both as the autonomous realm of art and as a specific mode of perception. I explore the idea that the aesthetic is, on Schmitt’s own terms, an enemy to his conception of the political.3

Schmitt’s IdeasMost readers of Schmitt focus on several political texts he published during the Weimar era, when, according to most scholars, he was opposed to the Nazis: Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923),

2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jen-nings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 3:121.

3. I do not devote any direct attention to the aesthetic aspect of the idea of the enemy itself, espe-cially the idea of the enemy as one’s own question as Gestalt. There is much to be done with this idea, especially via the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, but it deserves an essay of its own. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Criti-cal Inquiry 16 (1990): 291–312.

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and The Concept of the Political (1926, 1932). In both Political Theology and The Concept of the Political Schmitt advocates what is called political deci-sionism. He argues that the law rests not on a particular norm or process but on a decision, an act of will without external justification that imposes order and stability. Politics, says Schmitt, is not about endless discussion, rational delib-eration, or consensus building but about recognizing the usually urgent need to act, having the power to decide what to do in a limited time, and doing it.

Out of this decisionism he develops a distinctive theory of sovereignty and of what he calls “the political.” The sovereign, he announces at the start of Political Theology, “is he who decides on the state of exception.”4 Schmitt loosely defines the state of exception as a situation of extreme danger to the state’s existence. He emphasizes, however, that his definition must remain loose, because the state of exception cannot be circumscribed factually, made to conform to a preformed law, or be otherwise anticipated. Otherwise it would not be exceptional.

The sovereign is the name of that person (legal or actual) who decides not only that the situation is a state of exception but also what needs to be done to eliminate the state of exception and thus preserve the state and restore order. Note the circularity of these definitions: the sovereign is the one who decides that there is a state of exception; a state of exception is that which the sovereign deems to be so. That is typical of how Schmitt structures his argument.

In The Concept of the Political Schmitt claims that “political actions and motives can be reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy.”5 It is customary to point out that Schmitt means not private enemies and hatreds but collective, public enemies. “An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (CP, 28). For Schmitt, it is the intensity and extremity of this confrontation, the real pos-sibility of war, of being called on to sacrifice one’s own life and take that of others, that makes this antagonism distinctly political. “War,” he says, “follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy” (CP, 33).

As with the state of exception, there are no rational criteria for distin-guishing friend from enemy. All conflict is situational conflict.6 “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position

4. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5. Hereafter cited as PT.

5. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, ed. and trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 26. Hereafter cited as CP.

6. Just as, for Schmitt, “all law is ‘situational law’” (PT, 13).


to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life [Lebensform] and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence” (CP, 27). Like the state of exception, the enemy poses a threat to the state’s existence and is thus ultimately a matter for sover-eign decision. One already begins to get a sense of the importance in Schmitt’s work of the extreme situation, especially the idea of an extreme threat or dan-ger. It is also important to see that what the enemy endangers is not mere exis-tence or survival but a Lebensform, a way or form of life shared and main-tained by the collective. The form of life becomes visible through the “real possibility” of its negation by the enemy. This negation gives Gestalt to the question of who we are.7

Before I turn to the question of the aesthetic, it is worth emphasizing two familiar points about Schmitt’s political ideas. First, there is a certain ambigu-ity in the status he attributes to the political. Sometimes, as I have indicated, Schmitt wants to claim for the political an autonomous realm, constituted by its own proper distinctions, as the realms of morality, aesthetics, and econom-ics are constituted by theirs. At other times the political is defined as an inten-sity, so that any conflict or opposition, once it attains a certain degree of exis-tential antagonism, becomes political. The notion of the political as an intensity becomes more pronounced in the second edition of The Concept of the Politi-cal, revised after Leo Strauss had criticized Schmitt for remaining within the horizon of liberalism by showing respect for the autonomy of each domain rather than transcending that horizon by arguing for the ultimate “sovereignty,” so to speak, of the political.8

That Schmitt tried to respond to this charge brings up the second point: Schmitt is an implacable critic of liberalism—one reason that the Left finds him interesting.9 In many of his works from the 1920s, Schmitt attacks liber-alism for its formalism: its faith in law, norm, and procedure, its belief in value-neutral decision making, and its inadequate grounding in concrete situations and real antagonisms.10 Yet, as many critics, both left and right, have also

7. My understanding of the place of the Lebensform in Schmitt’s thought is indebted to Andrew Norris, “Carl Schmitt on Friends, Enemies, and the Political,” Telos, no. 112 (1998): 68–89.

8. The authoritative account of this relationship is Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

9. And, it should be noted, one reason liberal thinkers try to refute him. See, e.g., the chapter on Schmitt in Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1996).

10. Schmitt’s major scholarly work of the 1920s, Verfassungslehre (1928), is also an assault on formalism; his Legalität und Legitimität (1932) also attacks a proceduralism that does not recog-nize the substantial values on which the Constitution is based.

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observed, Schmitt’s persistent emphasis on concrete situations paradoxically makes his own theory inescapably formalist. The sovereign eliminates the state of exception to restore order, but the content of this order is historically con-tingent, because it is dependent on the sovereign’s will. All that matters to Schmitt is, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “the decision for the formal principle of order as such.”11 Similarly, Schmitt says nothing, can say nothing, about what it is that makes a Lebensform worth defending with one’s life, what substance and concrete content could or should compel one to make such a commit-ment to preserve this form.

The Status of the Aesthetic in Debates about SchmittFor many commentators, the central question about Schmitt is, quite under-standably, whether the major works of the 1920s should be read as ideologi-cally anticipating Schmitt’s 1933 decision to turn to Nazism. Many of Schmitt’s critics on the left who want to suggest that his ideas are implicitly Nazi, or at least protofascist, do so by applying to Schmitt Benjamin’s concept of the aes-theticization of the political. I want to make a few general observations about this strategy before giving a brief critique of one of its exemplars, the promi-nent intellectual historian Richard Wolin.

Benjamin uses the concept of the aestheticization of the political in several essays, but most notably in the 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” which concludes that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” Taking the futurist F. T. Marinetti’s celebration of the beauty of death on the battle-field as his example, Benjamin argues that, under fascism, humankind’s “self alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruc-tion as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”12

There is much to say about Benjamin’s thesis and what it does and does not reveal about fascism.13 Here I want simply to emphasize that Benjamin’s point is not that Marinetti made works of art that celebrated war but that he saw war itself in aesthetic terms, as already a work of art. Aestheticization, then, is a mode of perception, a kind of advanced form of the reversed understanding

11. Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), 18.

12. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 3:122.13. It might well be, as Bruno Latour suggests, time to move on from Benjamin, but as Freud

tells us, moving on might also require some working through. See Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 230.


of the world that Marx diagnoses in the fetishism chapter of Capital, volume 1. Under fascism, argues Benjamin, human beings have not merely changed places with things but developed a subjectivity so divided that they can contemplate their own deaths as if they were spectators to them.14

Despite his own intellectual debt to Schmitt, few critics have hesitated to use Benjamin’s concept of aestheticization against the jurist’s political ideas. Innumerable critics, among whom Habermas, Peter Bürger, and Wolin are only the most conspicuous, have attacked Schmitt’s political thought as funda-mentally aesthetic. Habermas, for example, speaks of a surrealist “aesthetics of violence” in Schmitt’s work, and Wolin, following the cultural critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, an “aesthetics of horror.” Jan-Werner Müller in his 2003 book on Schmitt, A Dangerous Mind, speaks of the “aesthetic dimension” of Schmitt’s fascination with politics.15 These writers insinuate that aestheticized political ideas are ipso facto fascist and, more explicitly, suggest that aestheticized polit-ical ideas are not properly political. In short, they use the concept of the “aes-thetic” polemically and pejoratively.

The idea that Schmitt’s work is fundamentally aesthetic, or has more to do with aesthetic experiences and perceptions than properly political ones, has also not gone unchallenged. Political theorists such as Andrew Norris and Andreas Kalyvas have denounced such aesthetic or “cultural” interpretations of Schmitt and insist instead on the importance of understanding him on his own terms.16 Norris and Kalyvas both argue that we need to take Schmitt at his word when he says that he is locating the distinctive features of the political. They dispute the interpretation of Schmitt as political aesthete to say that Schmitt has made a serious contribution to political philosophy. What seems clear from their refutation, however, is that they too understand the term aesthetic pejora-tively and disavow its connection to Schmitt’s work for that reason.

14. Adolf Eichmann talked about his own execution in just this way. See Hannah Arendt, Eich-mann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 252.

15. Jürgen Habermas, “The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English,” in The New Con-servatism, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 137; Peter Bürger, “Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf Ästhetik,” in Zerstörung: Rettung des Mythos durch Licht, ed. Christa Bürger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 170–76; Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror,” Political Theory 20 (1992): 424–47; Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens (Munich: Hanser, 1978); Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 8.

16. Andrew Norris, “Carl Schmitt on Friends, Enemies, and the Political” and “Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of ‘the Outermost Sphere,’” Theory and Event 4, no. 1 (2000), muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.1norris.html; Andreas Kalyvas, “Who’s Afraid of Carl Schmitt?” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 5 (1999): 87–125; Kalyvas, “Carl Schmitt and the Three Moments of Democracy,” Cardozo Law Review 21 (2000): 1525–65.

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The ongoing dispute about the status of the aesthetic in Schmitt should interest us for several reasons. First of all, it is striking that both sides share the assumption that if Schmitt’s work is aesthetic, then it cannot be properly con-cerned with politics. Those who call Schmitt’s political ideas fundamentally aesthetic do so to damn him; those who say there is nothing intrinsically aes-thetic about his thought do so to save him. From this perspective, the question of the aesthetic is in fact the question of the legitimacy of Schmitt’s political philosophy. One has to wonder, however, if it is possible to read Schmitt’s work as “aesthetic” without that reading being polemical or pejorative.

The assumption that the aesthetic is improperly political is also note-worthy because it is one that Schmitt shares. He too believes that the political and the aesthetic are radically distinct, even opposing domains. Furthermore, Schmitt asserts explicitly that a central task of political polemic is to disqualify your opponent’s beliefs and concepts from the realm of the properly political: “Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as nonpolitical (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as polit-ical in order to portray oneself as nonpolitical . . . and thereby superior” (CP, 31–32). Despite Habermas’s and Wolin’s hostility toward Schmitt, then, their impassioned exclusion of Schmitt’s aestheticized politics from the field of the political bespeaks a classically Schmittian understanding of the importance of controlling the definition of the political itself. For Habermas and Wolin, how-ever, the fact that Schmitt’s is ultimately an “aesthetic” and thus improperly political politics renders it anything but harmless.

It is hard to escape a certain ambivalence about the “sides” in the debate about Schmitt and aestheticization. Those who deny the aesthetic dimen-sion of Schmitt’s ideas are excellent scholars of Schmitt who read him care-fully and illuminatingly. It is easy to understand how their critical reaction to Habermas and Wolin could lead them to downplay the aesthetic elements of Schmitt’s work, although doing so is, as I suggest below, a mistake. On the other hand, Habermas, Wolin, and company, who do recognize that there is, as it were, something aesthetic about Schmitt, make their case in a remark-ably blunt, polemical, and narrow manner. For one thing, they take for granted that certain kinds of phenomena and language are innately and self-evidently aesthetic.17 Yet surely just what is at stake in such a discussion, what makes it worthwhile, is exploring just what it means to label as “aesthetic” ideas that are presented as “political.” Admittedly, as soon as we start asking what we

17. Bürger’s brief, lucid essay “Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf Ästhetik” is an exception.


mean by “the aesthetic,” we risk getting caught up in a game of definitions: make the definition too broad and everything is aesthetic; make it too narrow and we learn only what kinds of art someone likes.

The second frustrating feature of the work of those who charge Schmitt with aestheticization is that they do not pay attention to the discourse about the aesthetic in Schmitt’s work itself. In particular, they say nothing about his own anxious insistence on how different the aesthetic is from the political. What if, instead of applying a preexisting understanding of the aesthetic, we tried to work out how Schmitt himself imagines its relationship to the political?

In the next section, then, I want to offer a few more reflections on the charge of aestheticization by addressing Wolin’s widely cited essays on Schmitt. In trying to build on critiques of Schmitt by Habermas, Bürger, and Bohrer, Wolin insists more vehemently than most that Schmitt’s ideas are fundamen-tally aesthetic. I am interested in picking up on and making productive Wolin’s intuitions by considering what it means to think about political ideas in aes-thetic terms.

Aesthetic ValuesWolin targets one of Schmitt’s most frequently cited pronouncements on the state of exception. In Political Theology Schmitt writes:

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its exis-tence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. (PT, 15)

Wolin comments:

Schmitt grounds the foundational concepts of his mature political philosophy in a fundamental existential value judgment: a condemnation of the prosai-cism of bourgeois normalcy combined with an exaltation of the capacities for transcendence embodied in the emergency situation. The latter, which Schmitt characterizes as “more interesting than the rule,” thereby receives a quasi-aestheticist justification.18

18. Wolin, “Carl Schmitt,” 434. See also Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State,” in The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Post-structuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 83–104; and scattered remarks in The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), including a repeated citation of the passage in question on pages 238–39.

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Wolin’s account of Schmitt’s aesthetics draws, as I have noted, on Bohrer’s Aes-thetics of Horror. Bohrer groups Schmitt together with Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler as pseudopolitical thinkers who celebrate rupture, discontinuity, and shock, which Wolin describes as “aesthetic values.”

Yet Wolin never tells us why Schmitt’s interest in exceptions, hardly unusual in the humanities and social sciences, is “quasi-aestheticist,” never explains why rupture, discontinuity, and shock are especially “aesthetic val-ues.” He takes their status as such for granted and does not ever seem to find it necessary to explain what he means by the term aesthetic. Nor does he recon-cile his claims about Schmitt’s aesthetic interest in exception, rupture, and shock with what he knows to be Schmitt’s overriding concern to establish and maintain order and stability. Schmitt may find the exception more interesting and instructive than the rule, but that does not mean that he thinks it is better. He may vitalistically equate the state of exception with real life, but his ideas about order make it clear that he thinks real life of this kind is good for us only in very small doses.

Yet Wolin’s sense that there is something “aesthetic” about Schmitt’s proclamations on the state of exception is understandable. The notion of the extreme has a certain fascination that one might compare to that exerted by certain transgressive works of art. To dwell on the state of exception is obvi-ously to dwell on the more dramatic aspects of political life, on moments that are conflictual and intense. But do these considerations make an interest in the extreme situation quasi-aesthetic? Here again one wishes Wolin had explained what he meant by the word. Perhaps we need to recall that when Wolin first wrote about Schmitt, in the mid-1990s, it seemed plausible to many to think that Francis Fukuyama was right, that History was over and that the great con-flicts, crises, and cataclysms that had punctuated it were no longer important to serious political thought. In the contemporary climate it is easier to believe the reverse, that political thought must in some way be able to address extreme situations to be worthy of the name. That is surely one reason, perhaps the main reason, why Schmitt’s work seems to so many people to speak to the present.

It therefore seems mistaken to reduce Schmitt’s interest in the excep-tion to the realm of “aesthetic values.” He focuses on the exception because it shows us something important about the foundations of political order and stability. The exception, that is, makes visible something that we could not see otherwise. There is, of course, a tradition, starting with Plato, that identifies the realm of the aesthetic, of aisthesis, with perception or, as the French philoso-pher Jacques Rancière translates it, the partition of the sensible/perceptible. According to Rancière, politics and aesthetics are therefore always inextricable,


because politics just is, by definition, the realm concerned with this partition: with deciding who gets to speak and to be heard. True politics, he says, takes place when those who have previously been unseen, those Rancière calls “the part who have no part,” demand to be seen, when the invisible are made vis-ible, the voiceless given voice.19

Rancière’s conception of the link between aesthetics and politics would therefore cast an interesting light on Schmitt’s notion of the exception. Schmitt’s focus on threats to the body politic as a whole displaces attention from antago-nisms within the body politic itself to identifying external threats.20 In making visible the foundations of political authority in a sovereign decision, Schmitt draws our attention away from what is excluded from the body politic and toward the will that stands outside and above it.21 Indeed, not only is Schmitt uninterested in the voices of the voiceless, but his attacks on liberal parliamen-tarianism in works such as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy show his contempt for those whose voices are heard. For Schmitt, the sovereign deci-sion on the exception renders moot the chatter of professional politicians.

Finally, it is worth noting that Schmitt’s notion of the exception breaking through the crust of a torpid mechanism also evokes the Russian formalists’ idea of estrangement, or ostranenie. Like the formalists’ paradigmatic work of art, Schmitt’s exception interrupts mechanical habits and provides new per-ceptions. The difference is that a formalist such as Victor Shklovsky identifies estrangement with a progressive calling into question of outmoded moral and political conventions, whereas Schmitt’s estrangement seems designed rather to give one a sense of the awesome sovereign power authorizing and enforc-ing the laws that govern everyday behavior. Shklovsky’s estrangement ruptures everyday conventions to change the status quo; Schmitt’s exception works to reinforce it.22

None of these suggestions about what might make Schmitt’s ideas about the exception aesthetic is immediately polemical or pejorative. Yet, as

19. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review, no. 14 (2002): 133–51.

20. Žižek makes a similar point in relation to Rancière, without addressing the aesthetic dimen-sion (“Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” 27).

21. This idea of Schmitt’s might usefully be compared with Georges Bataille’s two notions of heterogeneity as elaborated in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Les-lie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137–59.

22. Victor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991).

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I have tried to indicate, each suggestion has all the more critical force pre-cisely because it does not assume that the aesthetic component of a political idea automatically disqualifies it from the realm of politics proper. From this perspective, the aesthetic elements of Schmitt’s thought deserve criticism not simply because they are aesthetic but because they serve political ends with which we may well want to take issue.

What I have bracketed from this discussion so far are Schmitt’s own views on aesthetics and politics. As it happens, Schmitt takes great pains to encourage his readers not to think about politics as aesthetic. What is ulti-mately so interesting, even amusing, about the charge of aestheticization against Schmitt is that it targets precisely those situations that Schmitt himself thinks distinguish the political from the aesthetic: the extreme, life-and-death cases, what he calls the Ernstfälle (cases of utmost seriousness). It is Schmitt’s own separation of the territory of the political from the aesthetic that I want to turn to now. The aesthetic functions as a kind of disturbing presence that Schmitt repeatedly disavows. And disavowal, as all readers of Freud know, is a mode of defense, a refusal to recognize something about either reality or oneself.

The Aesthetic as the Enemy of the PoliticalAs I have noted, in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt writes that all politi-cal terms are polemical, especially the word political itself (30–32). These words are bound to a concrete situation, contribute to the formation of a friend-enemy grouping, and lose their meaning when that situation and grouping dis-appear. On Schmitt’s own terms, then, The Concept of the Political must itself be regarded as a polemic. Schmitt more or less tells us as much when he indi-cates that he expounds the friend-enemy distinction and the concept of the political because they are under existential threat, from mortal enemies. The Concept of the Political, in other words, is a polemic directed against the ene-mies of the political itself.

I want to use Schmitt’s defense of his concept of the political against its enemies as a license to suggest that in the Schmittian universe there are such things as enemy concepts and that Schmitt sees the aesthetic as the conceptual enemy of the political. When Schmitt talks about the aesthetic, he means the realm of the autonomous production and evaluation of art, art governed by its own laws and sovereign figures, functioning independently of political, reli-gious, or moral strictures. He also employs a notion of “aesthetic consumption” that is akin to Benjamin’s notion of aestheticization. Like aestheticization, aes-thetic consumption imports the mode of perception usually brought to works of art and to nature to other spheres of human activity, especially politics.


A conceptual enemy will not fulfill all the terms of Schmitt’s definition of the enemy: for example, a concept is not a collective. But it will satisfy some important requirements. To say that Schmitt sees the aesthetic as the enemy of the political will be to say that he sees the aesthetic as that which negates and threatens, but also brings to light, the political’s distinctive features.

If the enemy embodies our own question, then the enemy cannot be merely an alien, opposing force. To embody a fundamental question we have about ourselves the enemy must also have a distinctive relationship to us. In “Weisheit der Zelle” (“The Cell’s Wisdom”), in which Schmitt delivers the line “The enemy embodies our own question” for the first time, he also asks, “Whom can I recognize as my enemy? Clearly only he who puts me into ques-tion . . . and who can really put me into question? Only I, myself. Or my brother. That’s it. The other is my brother.”23

Schmitt then comments that human history begins with Cain and Abel. Perhaps his point is that the brother is the one who reminds you of what you can least tolerate in yourself or who knows how to ask the questions that get right under your skin. Perhaps it is that the brother who resembles me puts into question my uniqueness in the eyes of others. Cain wanted to be special, too. In any case, if we follow Schmitt here, then my enemy is neither an uncanny Doppelgänger nor a total alien but one who is both significantly different from and disturbingly similar to me. And if the enemy is in some sense my brother, then between enemy concepts there will be something like an unsettling fam-ily resemblance.

Schmitt sees the aesthetic as the existential negation of the political in two apparently contradictory ways. On the one hand, he suggests that the dom-inance of aesthetic perception is a precursor to destruction of the Lebensform, to political defeat: “Everywhere in political history the incapacity or the unwillingness to make [the] distinction [between friend and enemy] is a symp-tom of the political end” (CP, 68). For example, before the Revolution the Rus-sian bourgeoisie romanticized the Russian peasant, he says, while “a relativis-tic bourgeoisie in a confused Europe searched all sorts of exotic cultures for the purpose of making them an object of its aesthetic consumption” (CP, 68). For Schmitt, romanticization and exoticization of the other are modes of aes-theticization. Aesthetic consumption, he thinks, is a condition, like consump-

23. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, 89; my translation. These lines come fourteen years after the authoritative edition of The Concept of the Political: they are rather different texts, written in very different situations. The collective enemy of The Concept of the Political gives way to “my enemy,” who puts “me” into question. Nevertheless, these reflections are still a useful point of entry to ask questions of the earlier book that it does not seem keen to ask of itself.

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tion proper, with fatal consequences. It negates political perception—negates, that is, the ability to recognize a mortal threat when one sees it.24

On the other hand, Schmitt believes that if the friend-enemy distinc-tion and, with it, war itself vanished from the earth, the world that remained would be, so to speak, an aesthetic world. Schmitt writes that if war became impossible, then “the distinction of friend and enemy would also cease” and what remained would be “neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, and so on” (CP, 53). Comment-ing in the 1930s on this list of remainders, Strauss pointed out that “the ‘and so on’ following on ‘entertainment’ hides the fact that ‘entertainment’ is in actual fact the final member of the series, its finis ultimus. . . . what the oppo-nents of the political have in mind is to bring into being a world of entertain-ment, a world of fun, a world devoid of seriousness.”25

Schmitt himself recommended Strauss’s commentary to his friends as one that he believed saw right through him like an X-ray. For Schmitt, then, the world of arts and entertainment is the world of the decadent Euro-pean bourgeoisie become universal: a world in which everything is inter-esting but nothing is taken seriously. One thinks of contemporary diatribes against postmodern irony, especially during the soul-searching that took place in the United States for a few weeks after September 11, 2001, weeks in which the idea of the enemy could still raise questions about one’s own form of life.

24. There is something plausible about Schmitt’s ideas, a kind of right-wing Frankfurt School–style critique of mass culture, where the culture industry is seen not only as mass deception but as mass depoliticization, which can manifest itself as sheer indifference to the existence of political conflicts or the failure to recognize that conflicts presented as struggles on behalf of humankind against unspeakable evil are in fact political. One might also wonder what Schmitt would say about the relationship of state to entertainment in the contemporary United States, where it has become de rigueur for presidential candidates to appear on comedy shows: Leno and Letterman, but also The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live. But the candidate is not the sovereign, any more than the suitor is the husband. Once elected, the president, especially the president who assumes sovereign powers in Schmitt’s sense, deciding on the state of emergency, friends and enemies, and the sacrifice of human life, no more readily subjects himself to such indignity than he did, say, to ques-tions from the inquiry into 9/11. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of how politics still trumps the aesthetic in the state of emergency came a few weeks after September 11, 2001, when Saturday Night Live returned to the air for the first time since the attacks. After a solemn tribute to the New York Fire Department, the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, held a staged conversation in which he asked permission to restart the show from then mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani, in many ways the sover-eign of the city in those weeks, told him that resuming the show was an important part of returning to normal life. “So it’s alright to be funny?” asked Michaels. “Why start now?” replied the mayor. The norm had to be reestablished properly; the sovereign had to be the one to make the first joke.

25. Leo Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen,” in CP, 98.


The world of art and entertainment that Schmitt and Strauss imagine, however, is not populated by those who fail to recognize or ask questions about their enemies: it is a world in which there really are no enemies. The distinc-tion ceases to exist. Schmitt tries to describe the Gestalt of such a world: “It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, autho-rized to shed blood, and kill other human beings” (CP, 5; my italics).26 The fantasy of a world without politics brings the distinctive features of the politi-cal into view. Politics alone makes life not just interesting but meaningful, because politics alone has life-and-death stakes. Note again the circular logic: in political conflicts, you might have to kill or die, and therefore the stakes must be particularly meaningful, but it is because the stakes are particularly meaningful that you might have to kill or die for them.

What I want to emphasize about Schmitt’s approach here is that the aes-thetic is not simply contrasted with the political but imagined to negate its very existence. That existential negation is what makes the aesthetic not simply a rival term to the political but its enemy. This negation also functions as a rhe-torical device: imagining the disappearance of the political is a way to argue for its preservation—indeed, for its serious defense.

We should also note that the presentation of the aesthetic as the negation of the political is itself an aesthetic strategy of Schmitt’s. It makes visible the distinctive features of the political and gives them a Gestalt. In this sense, the two scenarios that Schmitt offers, one in which aesthetic consumption leads to political destruction, one in which the aesthetic destroys and replaces the polit-ical itself, are actually complementary. Both are negative images of the politi-cal; they are simply produced from different perspectives.

Yet if the enemy is my brother, he negates me not only by opposing what is distinctive about me but also, perhaps even more threateningly, by being like me in ways that I do not wish to recognize. The question, then, is whether there is a significant family resemblance between Schmitt’s conception of the politi-cal and (a certain understanding of) the aesthetic. Since Schmitt’s project in The Concept of the Political is to assert the distinctiveness of the political, we should expect that he would be loath to acknowledge unsettling similarities between the two. Addressing this question therefore necessarily takes us into

26. Schmitt continues, “For the definition of the political, it is here even irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation” (CP, 5). This disavowal of value judgment is in obvious bad faith.

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more speculative territory, into examining what Schmitt does not, or does not quite, say.

Consider, first of all, the problem of formalism. As I pointed out earlier, for all the talk of concrete situations and life-and-death commitments, Schmitt is ultimately indifferent to content so long as the principle of order itself is asserted and maintained. To the extent that the aesthetic, too, is identified with autonomous form and an indifference to content, might it not embody precisely this problem for Schmitt? Notably, in other works of the 1920s (Roman Cathol-icism and Political Form, Political Theology) Schmitt repeatedly insists on the difference between political form and aesthetic form and yet never explains or shows where that difference lies. Insistence without explanation: the rhe-torical form par excellence of disavowal.

It is also striking that when Schmitt criticizes the social fragmentation wrought, he says, by liberalism, he turns first to the aesthetic: “Outside of the political, liberalism not only recognizes with self-evident logic the autonomy of different human realms but drives them toward specialization and even toward complete isolation. That art is a daughter of freedom, that aesthetic value judgment is absolutely autonomous, that artistic genius is sovereign—all this is axiomatic of liberalism” (CP, 72). Schmitt gives other examples of this specialization and even says that economic laws and norms are the most impor-tant example of autonomization. But that is to be expected, since, as I have shown, the aesthetic embodies for Schmitt that which is interesting but not serious. Besides, Schmitt also links the aesthetic to the economic: it is through aestheticization, he says, that objects become commodified and enter the eco-nomic realm.

More striking about this passage for our purposes, however, is Schmitt’s use of the term autonomy coupled with that little word so central to his thought: sovereign. Like the parapraxis of a patient in analysis, the diction practically invites us to consider structural similarities between the autono-mous realms of the aesthetic and the political. One might note, for example, that after Flaubert anything could be literary content, which meant literary content did not need to be anything in particular. Flaubert’s example not only sets up the artist as, precisely, sovereign but also exposes to the charge of formalism all those who write, paint, and compose in his wake. Needless to say, a defiant indifference to content and an explicit preoccupation with form also mark a dominant strand of modernism, which flourished in the same years as Schmitt developed his ideas about the political. It seems pos-sible, then, to see the aesthetic realm as representing to Schmitt both what is wrong with modernity—the specialization and isolation of different realms


of activity—and what is wrong with his own theory, that it is subject to some of the same problems that he diagnoses in the rest of the world.

The second place to look for family resemblances between the aesthetic and the political in Schmitt is all too obvious: on the battlefield. For Schmitt, war and killing are what most dramatically distinguish the political from the aesthetic. Is the point of their most determined differentiation also that of their most telling relationship? Evoking the battlefield scene cannot but bring to mind—what else?—Benjamin’s own central example of the aestheticization of the political: Marinetti’s celebration of war. For Marinetti, death on the battle-field is beautiful in itself, what Benjamin calls “an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” As shown above, Benjamin believes a commitment of this kind entails radical self-alienation, contemplating one’s own death as a spectator. Noth-ing could be more political for Benjamin than insisting that war is a purely aesthetic experience.

Schmitt, on the other hand, claims that death on the battlefield is primar-ily, even purely political: you do not take life, he thinks, out of aesthetic inter-est. Yet death in Schmitt, as in Marinetti, also seems to entail a form of self-alienation. Schmitt too seems to encourage contemplating one’s own death as a spectator. In The Concept of the Political, death on the battlefield is sublated into a vision of the continued life of the collective Lebensform, much as Mari-netti’s soldier’s life is transfigured into a work of art. Furthermore, war and kill-ing can no more escape the charge of formalism than anything else in Schmitt’s conceptual system. Although they are meant to guarantee the realm of politics as distinctively meaningful, Schmitt’s own perspective on battlefield deaths can only be that they are radically contingent, the result of a commitment that could be otherwise, had the sovereign decision been different. Signs of substan-tial commitment, they are, at a certain level, structurally empty.

Despite Schmitt’s claim that he is talking about real war and physical killing, I am trying to suggest that there is a way in which war and killing ultimately function in Schmitt’s argument in the same manner as do the ideas about genius and independent judgment that he recites about the autonomy of art: as symbols of what is proper to the distinctive, specialized domain of the political itself. Schmitt’s extreme situations possess an irreducibly formal aspect that constantly invites comparison with his own disavowed version of the aesthetic.

Seen from this perspective, one might wonder about going a step closer to Habermas, Wolin, and company, to suggest that war and killing might also be regarded as material for Schmitt’s readers’ aesthetic consumption: Schmitt uses them to make the stakes of the political visible in a particularly spectacu-

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lar fashion. But the point here would not be that Schmitt takes the same kind of pleasure in the scene of violent death as Marinetti does, let alone that his interest in extreme cases and situations is in some way “inherently” and improperly unpolitical, as Habermas and Wolin suggest. Rather, the extreme case makes visible at the same time both the seriousness of the political—its life-and-death stakes—and its aesthetic-formal component, its dependence on the sovereign will and the structurally empty principle of order itself. The aes-thetic aspects of Schmitt’s vision of the political do not mean that the extreme case is not political but raise the possibility that the very intensity of the politi-cal both draws on and is shadowed by elements that we might regard as irre-ducibly aesthetic.

Finally, if for Schmitt the aesthetic represents empty form, then the ques-tion posed by the aesthetic to the political might be understood as a question about when it is legitimate to sacrifice human life. Schmitt defines battlefield death as meaningful by fiat: a political death is meaningful because politics is the realm of the serious. But what haunts his reflections is the idea of the wasted life, the life whose destruction is not redeemed by a higher purpose but is lost for no real purpose at all.

I began with the claim that Schmitt’s ideas are as alive as ever. How “alive,” then, are his views on politics, aesthetics, and death? There are clear differences between Schmitt’s understanding of the stakes of war and those conflicts that are central to our current predicament. Yet these wars clearly also possess an inescapably aesthetic dimension. As Gopal Balakrishnan writes of the Iraq war, “It is in the very nature of this war that a bombing any-where in the world seems to verify, on the screens that both Westerners and Muslims watch, the existence of a vast, many-headed foe.”27 The real test of whether the debates about aesthetics and politics inspired by the Weimar period still speak to us may lie in determining whether they help us under-stand this strange contemporary intertwining of death, politics, and aesthetics, whether they can point us to our real enemies, and whether they can help us hear the questions our enemies, real and otherwise, pose to us.

27. Gopal Balakrishnan, “States of War,” New Left Review, no. 36 (2005): 5.

Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic by Neil Levi

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