Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Carl Schmitt is criticized for promoting an irrational and vitalist conception of politics (Wolin, Lilla) and is cautiously praised as an important critic of liberalism (Mouffe, McCormick). Through a reading of some of his major works, I offer an interpretation that focuses on the exception as a way to expand the field of politics within the context of liberal democratic regimes. My intent is to make liberalism less susceptible to Schmitt�s critique and enable it to act in a time of crisis but without sacrificing democratic accountability and the rule of law. Exceptions do not necessarily destroy the legal order but should be viewed as possibilities for carefully crafted responses to crisis situations. I deliberately read Schmitt against Schmitt in order to transform the static liberalism he criticizes into one that sees the exception as, on the one hand, inevitably involving painful trade-offs but, on the other, as an opportunity for political invention, debate, and the strengthening of democratic practices within the context of the rule of law.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The 'death of the subject' could well be one of the leitmotifs of the postmodern age. It is not that the postmodern subject does not exist or that it is spectral, or perhaps that it is even a zombie. No, the postmodern subject is an unburied corpse. A corpse, that is, whose very status as unburied, marks both that romantic site to which we may never return and provides evidence of its mode of death; if the subject did die, it was not through natural causes. In this paper I take issue with this death and explore the complex nature of the contemporary 'political subject'. There are two moves to this critique. The first is to resurrect, through the work of Slavoj Zizek, the ontological idea of the subject. The second is to repoliticise this subject through an admittedly dangerous liaison with Carl Schmitt's critique of political romanticism. The political subject that emerges is not one we might like a great deal, but it is the subject that is emerging post-September 11. The irony is that not only is the political subject being resuscitated, but that, and contrary to overblown claims surrounding Globalization, deterritorialisation and the Post-International, the 'subject' of International Politics is also reemerging with a vengeance.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over thirty-five years have passed since George Schwab effectively threw down the gauntlet in the English-speaking world with his groundbreaking study of the controversial German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt, The Challenge of the Exception. Since that time, Schmitt scholars have been attempting to ascertain precisely how Schmitt the thinker and Schmitt the man ought to be interpreted. In particular, there has been a great deal of debate over the extent to which Schmitt�s Weimar political thought represents a thoroughgoing anti-liberalism and whether his Weimar work led him ineluctably to embrace Nazism. Those who maintain that Schmitt�s thought is thoroughly anti-liberal and inevitably resulted in Nazism are generally known as detractors, while those who detect far less anti-liberalism in his Weimar writings are generally known as apologists. Specifically, where detractors discern an unadulterated attack on liberalism, apologists typically detect �political realism.� Moreover, his detractors perceive an intellectual continuity that includes most Weimar and Nazi period writings, at least up until 1938, but his apologists reject this idea, arguing that Schmitt�s work from the Nazi period is fundamentally different from his Weimar writings. Taking my bearings from David Dyzenhaus�s further division of Schmitt�s interpreters into �strong apologist,� �weak apologist,� and, his own interpretation, which I call �strong detractor�, I endeavor to carve out an interpretive space for the additional inclusion of a fourth interpretation of Schmitt. I call this position the �weak detractor� position. In defense of the �weak detractor� position, this paper will attempt to offer an interpretation of Schmitt that takes his anti-liberalism seriously, but does not go so far as the �strong detractor� interpretation of Schmitt as having inevitably and necessarily become a Nazi. My position thus has some overlap with both the �weak apologist� and the �strong detractor� interpretations. I moreover claim that Schmitt studies have become too polarized, with each side largely rejecting most of its opponent�s claims. This is unwise. Though we should not underestimate Schmitt�s anti-liberalism, as his apologists and admirers on both the Right and the Left are often prone to do, we should nonetheless be open, as his detractors typically are not, to the possibility that Schmitt does have much to teach us about politics and about the contemporary global political order.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Ethics, and especially the liberal universal ethics animating much of world politics, has been criticised by scholars as being politically imperialist and culturally insensitive. Others have suggested that there can be no ethics without politics and others still that there is little to universal claims to ethics but abstracted yet, nevertheless, localised habituation. These critiques, however, do not articulate a perspective against ethics as such. This paper revisits Carl Schmitt�s particular critique of the universal ethics of humanity but advances this further by using, first, the recent translation of Schmitt�s Theory of the Partisan and also Michel Foucault�s understanding of governmental practice as leading to an ethics of enforced freedom. Schmitt�s discussion offers, it is argued, two iconographies of enmity: the accounts of limited and absolute enmity significant for mapping the contemporary world order. Together with Foucault, Schmitt helps articulate a notion of world-political obligation which is against ethics but for the openness of the political as a pluriverse. To this openness �enmity� is central.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Interwar German influences on Classical Realist thought are frequently cited as having had a formative effect on core ideas of such authors as Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. Ideas novel to American political thinking are presented as having their roots in Weimar Germany, where these ideas had been purportedly commonplace. Relevant names mentioned in this context include Friedrich Meinecke, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. This paper attempts to provide a more fine-grained analysis of this continental European genealogy by highlighting the Realist reception and reinterpretation of some of Schmitt’s key ideas on the sovereign state and on politics.The fundamental argument of the first, analytical section of the paper is that Classical Realism accomplished a radical inversion of Schmitt’s key tenets. While indeed integrating a number of ideas, Realist authors changed the modalities of these ideas, turning what was embraced by Schmitt into the tragic predicaments of international relations. This transformation had far-reaching consequences for practical prescriptions in politics. “Exception”, the foundational event of Schmitt, became a periodical and inescapable recurrence to be held to minimal frequency. The Political, the founding concept or Grundbegriff of state and community, to be rescued from liberal “technicity” and “neutralization” according to Schmitt, was reinterpreted as what needs to be contained by the technique of international diplomacy. Perhaps most tellingly, the ideal type of the individualized sovereign (Reichspräsident or Führer), embodying and (re)founding the political community through decisions taken in cases of exception was replaced by its very counter-image, that of the diplomat – a figure detached from his own state and devoted to an international system/society. Thus, Realist wisdom prescribes the moderation of the Political (the state) by international politics.This anti-Schmittian world-view, still heavily indebted to Schmitt, is profoundly anti-existentialist and anti-essentialist, harbouring a notion of politics and of the state which re-includes elements of just the kind of technicity in their image that Schmitt had abhorred and sought to banish. The final section of the paper seeks to engage the products of this anti-Schmittian re-reading of Classical Realism.If the insistence on the autonomy of foreign policy is revealed as more than just an anti-liberal catchphrase and is shown to include the consideration of preserving or restoring technicity in international politics, one is left with an image of the international system as eternally suspended between the “natural” aggression of the sovereign as foundational acts of domestic politics (“revolutionary states” and the rise of nationalism) and the fragile secondary order of international society. This dualism, however, produces a catachresis: the diplomat as agent of the state nevertheless needs to work to restrain the state from rejuvenating itself. The more devoted to international politics he is, the less he remains a functionary of state politics and of the Political.The disjunction of the two types of politics causes Classical Realism to fall back to its core myth of the Schmittian Leviathan. Pessimism triumphs over transformational potential not as a result of logic, but as a result of the incomplete revision of Schmitt’s theory of state. Classical Realism identifies at least one type of agency needed for transformation (a cosmopolitan diplomat), the mode that permits such transformation of the international system (an ethics of mediating between preferences and constructing meanings), but leaves potential vistas of the agency’s transformational work unexplored. The state (the Political) and diplomacy (politics), in the best possible scenario considered by Realists, virtually cancel each other out, yielding the pragmatist-technical maxim of “interest defined in terms of power”, rather than the primordial desire to engage the “foe”. This “satisficing” position is tenable as long as the assumption about the primacy of the state holds. If, for various reasons, the state’s position of defining domestic preferences falters, diplomacy, having lost its principal, could for the first time engage in a transformational enterprise. Unless – of course – James Der Derian’s “anti-diplomacy” or any other mode of producing meaning without the possibility of mediation between meanings, in a sense the new form of the Political, overtakes what’s left of politics to build on.