Against Biopolitics: Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben on Political

Sovereignty and Symbolic Order

Author(s): David Pan
Source: The German Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Winter, 2009), pp. 42-62
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German
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David Pan
Un iv er s it y of Ca Ufo m i a, Irv i ne

Against Biopolitics: Walter Benjamin, Cari

Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben on Political
Sovereignty and Symbolic Order1

Recent attempts by Giorgio Agamben to understand the relationship be

tween politics and the human body have resulted in a notion of "biopolitics,"
derived from texts by Walter Benj amin and Michel Foucault, in which there is
a merging of biology and politics into a unified system that subjects the body
to the direct violence of a political order. Though these theories have been
helpful in focusing attention on the particular dynamics that link politics
with the individual subject, the accompanying suppression of a cultural di
mension to this linkage has obscured the role of ideological concerns in deter
mining political events in the modern world. Unexpectedly, Carl Schmitt, one
of the theorists who has been most criticized for reducing politics exclusively
to questions of power, turns out to offer the most consistent attempt to un
derstand the centrality of cultural ideals for the construction of the link be
tween politics and the subject. Though Ellen Kennedy ("Carl Schmitt"
42-45), Agamben {State of Exception 52-64), Horst Bredekamp, and Susanne
Heil have documented the extent of the intellectual connections between
Benj amin and Schmitt, they have not recognized the degree to which Schmitt
more consistently emphasizes the role of culture in the structure of the politi
cal subject. For in contrast to the attempts by Benjamin and especially
Agamben to consider law and politics purely in terms of mechanisms of vio
lence and the body, Schmitt's contribution has been to establish the centrality
of metaphysical ideals in the structuring of subjectivity. Instead of using con
cepts such as violence or bare life, which exclude issues of culture, Schmitt's
meditations on the decision and the enemy place theological and cultural
choices at the center of his analysis, underlining the role of ideology in consti
tuting the subject.

Benjamin on Law and Violence

The differences between Benjamin's and Schmitt's approaches to law and

violence stem from the diverging goals of their analyses. While Schmitt con

The German Quarterly 82.1 (Winter 2009) 42

?2009, American Association of Teachers of German

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 PAN: Against Bio polit i es 43

sistently defends the status quo of a particular political order, fearing the in
stability and chaos that change could bring, Benjamin begins with the idea
that meaningful change is possible and that the current conditions of law and
political order contain elements of domination that can be eliminated
through human action. The key to such a proj ect of emancipation becomes for
Benjamin the disruption of the existing order in a way that opens up unex
pected new possibilities for the future. The primary strength of his approach
lies in the "Doppeleinsicht" that he describes in his Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels and that links a sense for the new with structures of thought and
imagination from the past (1:226). In designating the baroque as an age in
which "Geist... weist sich aus als Macht" (1:276), Benjamin identifies the re
duction of spirit to power as the key source of the melancholy that pervades
the Trauerspiel genre. The only way to escape this world determined by power
would be to leap out of it conceptually into a perspective that denies the neces
sity of power and thereby transcends its facticity through an appeal, in the
case of the baroque, to a "Christian spirit" (Benjamin 1:335; Pan, "Political
Aesthetics" 157-58). Benjamin's strategy for maintaining the presence of a
spiritual alternative to a world dominated by power is then to create the possi
bility for transcending this existing world in a redemptive moment leading
into a new future. He develops this mode of political messianism, for instance,
in his invocation of "profane Erleuchtung" in Der Surrealismus (2:297) and of
"Jetztzeit" in ?ber den Begriff der Geschichte (1:701).
The assumption behind this goal of breaking the historical continuum
through a moment of transcendence is that this continuum extends a rule of
power that undermines the existing law's claim to manifest a higher principle.
As both Jacques Derrida (1017) and Jan-Werner M?ller have documented
(469), Benjamin grounds this assumption in Zur Kritik der Gewalt with the
idea that the origins of law lie in violence. The link between law and violence is
for him more than just a coincidence of violence with justice in a way that
would emphasize their complementary relationship, as when Derrida, expli
cating Pascal, suggests that "justice demands, as justice, recourse to force"
(937). Benjamin describes the violent origins of law not to illustrate the neces
sity of force in establishing justice but in order to argue that law does not es
tablish j ustice at all but is j ust the extension of an act of violence. To the extent
that existing laws refer to an ideal of justice, they are simply establishing a ra
tionale for an underlying violence, and Benjamin, in citing Georges Sorel's
view that "in den Anf?ngen alles Recht 'Vor 'recht der K?nige oder der Gro?en,
kurz der M?chtigen gewesen sei" (2:198), suggests that the idea of justice
within a legal system is just the mask for the manifestation of power. Con
versely, he notes that violence for natural purposes has inherent to it a
"rechtsetzender Charakter "(2:186), even when it is a predatory and purely in
strumental violence. In addition to mentioning the workers' strike and war
(2:185), Benj amin even goes so far as to suggest that "great criminals" have the

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 44 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

potential of setting up a new law purely on the basis of their predatory vio
lence (2:186). These examples of a merging of violence and law are all cases of
how "Rechtsetzung ist Machtsetzung und insofern ein Akt von unmittel
barer Manifestation der Gewalt" (2:197-98).
But there is an ambiguity in his characterization of the strike and the great
criminal that makes possible the move to a revolutionary messianism while at
the same time maintaining the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. Whereas
the strike and the criminal are examples of violence, Benjamin singles out
these cases in order to distinguish them from instances of lawful violence. He
then criticizes the connection between violence and law, not in order to imag
ine a law without violence but rather a violence without law. In order to bring
about the end of the mythic violence that grounds the rule of law, Benjamin
constructs his idiosyncratic idea of a "divine violence" that would supersede
mythic violence and be the basis of a revolutionary transformation of society.
"Wie in allen Bereichen dem Mythos Gott, so tritt der mythischen Gewalt die
g?ttliche entgegen" (2:199). The difference between the two does not depend
on the degree of violence, and the move from mythic to divine violence does
not involve the abolition of violence itself (2:196). Indeed, the realm of divine
purposes is itself framed by an ultimate violence. Rather, the difference be
tween mythic and divine violence is based on the idea that past history has
been dominated by the repetition of mythic violence and that divine violence
would introduce a new historical age that puts an end to this repetition. While
mythic violence is linked to existing laws and is thus "rechtsetzend," divine
violence destroys the entire system of laws and is "rechtsvernichtend" (2:199).
In this destruction, divine violence creates redemption by installing the domi
nance of its new order in one stroke, totally annihilating the structure of law
that precedes it.
Divine violence has a revolutionary aspect to the extent that it suspends
law itself and, in establishing itself, founds a new order that replaces law with
divine, and thus metaphysically justified, purposes. This revolutionary qual
ity of divine violence, which Benjamin compares to the political general strike
that seeks to overturn the entire legal order (2:193-95), establishes a kind of
violence whose justification lies in a realm removed from laws and located in a
higher, divine justice that renders all existing law obsolete. Whereas mythic
violence follows a fateful logic, in which the human challenging of fate leads
to the final victory of fate over human endeavor (2:197), divine violence for
Benjamin is a kind of political violence that, in establishing a new order, is not
fateful but unpredictable. Because divine violence has a fundamentally differ
ent structure than mythic violence, Benjamin claims that it supersedes the
entire mythic structure of violence linked to law, establishing "ein neues
geschichtliches Zeitalter" (2:202).
M?ller argues that Benjamin thereby distinguishes mythic violence's laws
from divine violence's "non-representational" quality in order to delineate an

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 PAN: Against Biopol'itles 45

escape from mythic law into "an extrahistorical, redemptive realm of non
violence" (469-70). Similarly, Honneth emphasizes that for Benjamin divine
violence creates a zone free of domination, regulated by uncodified customs
and rituals of politeness that are based on the idea, "da? sich in den mensch
lichen Lebensverh?ltnissen eine herrschaftslose Alternative zur Zwangsinsti
tution des Rechts auffinden l??t" (198). But if M?ller and Honneth invoke a
realm of freedom from all external constraints and purposes, Benjamin him
self is not so sanguine about this possibility. When he describes the freeing of
violence from the status of means toward an end, the alternative understand
ing he proposes is violence as a manifestation of anger: "Was den Menschen
angeht, so f?hrt ihn zum Beispiel der Zorn zu den sichtbarsten Ausbr?chen
von Gewalt, die sich nicht als Mittel auf einen vorgesetzten Zweck bezieht.
Sie ist nicht Mittel, sondern Manifestation" (2:196). If Benj amin imagines vi
olence here generally to be a manifestation rather than a means, then violence
would have in itself a certain quality that relates it back to its source. Accord
ing to this perspective, violence expresses the peculiarities of its source, and
consequently Benjamin does not so much distinguish between a mythic and a
divine order but between mythic and divine violence, thereby shifting the
source of distinction from symbolic mechanisms to the visceral dimension of
anger. He differentiates mythic violence as "Manifestation der G?tter," "Man
ifestation ihres Daseins" (2:197), from a divine violence that expresses itself
"durch jene Momente des unblutigen, schlagenden, ents?hnenden Voll
zuges," but which is nevertheless "vernichtend" without any "Rechtsetzung"
(2:200). Divine violence, rather than following laws, strikes arbitrarily in mo
ments of annihilation that simultaneously expiate, and Benjamin provides
the example of God's judgment upon Korah and his company (Benjamin
2:199; Numbers 16.1-35). While Benjamin thereby seeks to shift the focus
from laws to be followed to an informal sphere in which commandments are
understood as a "Richtschnur des Handelns" (2:200), his emphasis on modes
of violence as the indicator of this shift obscures the cultural dynamics in
volved in the distinction between formal laws and informal guidelines for
behavior.
Though he tries to emphasize the unmediated quality of divine violence,
Benjamin still cannot keep it free from external purposes so that it could be
come "etwas Selbstreferentielles," as Axel Honneth contends (208). Instead of
imagining a space of freedom that would result from the receding of power
and ideology, Benjamin contends that divine violence is linked to a "religi?se
?berlieferung" and manifests itself "als erzieherische Gewalt" (2:200). Even if
divine violence does not obey any laws, it is not therefore self-referential and it
is still a manifestation. If the point of divine violence is to establish an order
based on justice and on instructional violence rather than on power and law,
this justice comes with its own set of divine purposes. "Gerechtigkeit ist das
Prinzip aller g?ttlichen Zwecksetzung, Macht das Prinzip aller mythischen

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 46 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

Rechtsetzung" (2:198). While he affirms here an orientation toward divine

purposes over mythic law-making, his vision of justice, while seeking to sepa
rate justice from both power and law, still imagines a set of purposes that give
his sense of justice specific cultural characteristics. His references to purposes
and pedagogy indicate that, in spite of the fact that it supersedes mythic
law-making, justice is not completely universal or self-referential but is still
subordinate to a specific orientation.
This subordination to divine purposes does not involve a system of law for
Benjamin, however, but "a sort of justice without droit" (Derrida 1023-25).
Using a conception of judgment that is similar to Schmitt's in its emphasis on
"the irreducible singularity of each situation" (Derrida 1023), Benjamin tries
to maintain the particularity of divine violence by noting that a set of just pur
poses can only be valid for a single situation. "Denn Zwecke, welche f?r eine
Situation gerecht, allgemein anzuerkennen, allgemeing?ltig sind, sind dies f?r
keine andere, wenn auch in anderen Beziehungen noch so ?hnliche Lage"
(2:196). He contrasts these just purposes based on individual judgments with
purposes based on laws, which do not function from case to case but are per
ceived to be both "allgemeing?ltig" and "verallgemeinerungsf?hig" (2:196).
But in rejecting the generalizability of justice and concentrating on the justice
of the individual decision, Benjamin is not describing a kind of justice without
law but in fact comes very close to a Schmittian decisionism that sees the legal
judgment, not as a consequence of prior laws, but as an independently deter
mining act {Politische Fheologie 37-38). Like the Schmittian decision, divine vi
olence is not predictable but sui generis, this particularity offering an escape
from the fate that law has become in a positivist understanding that sees each
judgment as a simple application of a rule. But as Schmitt's analysis demon
strates, this singularity of every judgment is in fact a characteristic of judg
ments within every legal system as well.
But if Benjamin is in accord with Schmitt's prioritization of the decision
over the rule and the critique of legal positivism (Honneth 200-02, 204), he
veers from Schmitt's analysis to the extent that he attributes the systematic
form of law, in which the individual case is just the application of the rule, not
just to legal positivism's interpretation of law but to law in general. Conse
quently, Benjamin feels that, in order to move toward a true notion of justice
based in the freedom of the decision, he must reject all law and imagine a new
form of violence to replace the mythic violence that he links to law. He criti
cizes law for being a "mythische Manifestation der unmittelbaren Gewalt,"
(2:199) rejecting the world of myth and the rule of fate that these myths jus
tify. The lawfulness of violence becomes for Benjamin a measure of its fateful
ness and his attempt to escape fate leads him to sketch out an alternative to
mythic violence that is both Marxist in its treatment of legal authority as a
kind of false consciousness and messianic in its imagining of a total and sud

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 PAN: Against Biopol it ics 47

den "Vernichtung" of the mythic violence upon which all existing law is based
(2:199).
This schema contrasts with Schmitt's foregrounding of the exception
before the rule, in which he does not reject the rule outright but merely places
it in a subordinate position with respect to the decision on the state of excep
tion (Politische Theologie 19,21). Schmitt's inclusion of both the decision on the
state of exception and the rule in the normal situation as two complementary
elements of a legal order derives from a different understanding of the relation
between law and violence from Benjamin's. Whereas Schmitt imagines that
the informal sphere of the decision and the formal sphere of the norm and laws
always work together to establish a particular legal order, Benjamin sees only
the two options: law as a manifestation of a mythic fate or the elimination of
law as the overcoming of fate in the justice of divine violence. The elimination
of law can be emancipatory for Benjamin because he considers mythic fate not
as a necessity but as a remnant of a barbaric age and the continuing expression
of fate in law as a tool of the powerful to advance their interests. Once he takes
fate to be avoidable, violence and law (as an expression of fate) can no longer
be mediated with one another in a system of justice, and Benjamin under
stands the abolition of law as the overcoming of fate and the only path to jus
tice. But because the only source of distinction and patterns that could replace
law would be the character of divine violence as unpredictable rather than
fateful, there is nothing to prevent this notion of justice from becoming com
pletely unpredictable and arbitrary By contrast, Schmitt does not admit the
possibility of escaping fate altogether. Linking fate to the external forces and
necessities that affect a society's functioning, he attempts to understand law
as a mechanism for channeling the violence of external necessities, made ex
plicit in the state of exception, into forms that are acceptable for a culture's
self-understanding. Thus, while each judgment is still a unique and unpredict
able event for Schmitt, this judgment is not arbitrary but rather maintains a
relationship between external forces and a cultural dimension that underlies
all law.
If Schmitt tries to establish a rough commensurability between fateful
violence and legal violence, Benj aminian divine violence knows no constraints
because such limitations are no longer deemed necessary in a situation where
humans are free of fate. But if the external necessities that give rise to fate are
still relevant for the modern world, then divine violence can only be distin
guished from tyranny by the claim to universal validity. This monotheistic
claim of universality then becomes crucial to Benjamin's argument, which
seeks to establish a universal justice established by a single moral authority
against the competing claims of particular political systems. The underlying
assumption here is that the existing variety of political systems is not the re
sult of equally valid but competing claims to truth, but of a rejection of truth
in favor of power, resulting in the proliferation of self-interested groups that

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 48 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

use a predatory violence to enforce their domination over others. Benjamin's

alternative is the post-historical era of an overarching, monotheistic unity in
which laws are no longer necessary because domination has been replaced by
the general acceptance of the divine order and a subordination of self-interest
to the general good.
The messianic structure of Benjamin's argument indicates a specific politi
cal theology that is grounded in his basic stance that the modern world can
put fate behind it and advance to a new stage of freedom. The theocratic char
acter of divine violence that Honneth notes becomes evident at this point as a
commitment to the absolute and universal validity of divine violence as a
transcendent structure against which all prior legal and political systems are
merely forms of self-interest (Honneth 209). Benjamin shares in an implicit
rejection of any competing understandings of the general good that marks
movements such as Nazism and communism that claim to have achieved a
final truth based on the objective results of biological or economic analysis and
that then seek to institutionalize this truth in a revolutionary upheaval, as, for
instance, when Benjamin, in ?ber den Begriff der Geschichte, indicates: "Gewin
nen soll immer die Puppe, die man historischen Materialismus nennt" (1:693).
Historical materialism in this later text is not just a particular position, but
one that Benjamin supports because it offers a perspective that is not defined
by domination but by an existence "unter dem freien Himmel der Geschichte"
(1:701). The connection to Zur Kritik der Gewalt is clear in the way that histori
cal materialism plays the role of an emancipatory perspective, whose superi
ority would justify the possible divine violence necessary to establish it. As
Derrida points out, divine violence, while bloodless, is just as lethal as mythic
violence for Benjamin, and in some ways is even more horrifying, to the point
where Derrida compares divine violence to the violence of the Nazi holocaust
and Honneth labels Benjamin's notion of right as "terroristisch" (Derrida
1044-45; Honneth 209).
Yet one of the strengths of Benj amin's thinking is that his revolutionary re
jection of law and fate is still coupled with a sense of the abiding significance
of tradition. The puppet of historical materialism is after all controlled by the
hunchback of theology (1:693). While one might argue that Benjamin turns
theology into a tool for a secular, historical materialist project, the theological
perspective that Benjamin invokes does not function according to an instru
mental logic of control but rather according to an unpredictable process,
summed up in his notion o? Jetztzeit, whereby a forgotten tradition suddenly
becomes relevant to the present. In contrast to a manifestation of an unmedi
ated, lethal violence, such a return to a forgotten tradition depends upon a re
vival of the symbolic aspect of mythic violence.
Benjamin maintains a sense for a symbolic tradition in his discussion of
"das blo?e Leben," in which he criticizes the mechanistic quality of mythic
violence and law for reducing life to "das blo?e Leben" and describes how

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 PAN: Against Biopotitics 49

divine violence redeems life in its true metaphysical significance. His descrip
tion of this spiritual notion of life indicates a cultural specificity that is incom
patible with his idea that divine violence is unmediated. He states specifically
that existence understood as "blo?es Leben" is lower than a just existence
(2:201), and he differentiates between life understood as "blo?es Leben" and
life understood as the life within a human that transcends physical existence
and death. Since the sacred element in man consists of "dasjenige Leben in
ihm, welches identisch in Erdenleben, Tod und Fortleben liegt" and there is no
sacredness that attaches to "sein leibliches, durch Mitmenschen verletzliches
Leben" (2:201), life requires a metaphysical quality, which can only be mani
fested through some symbol, in order to transcend physical destruction
(Weigel 75).
Though Benjamin interprets mythic violence to be a violence that seeks to
preserve itself by establishing its bloody violence over "das blo?e Leben,"
mythic violence's subjection of human life to its laws also involves a subordi
nation of human endeavor to a sacred ideal, leading to the affirmation of a
symbolic dimension in which humans can survive spiritually beyond their
mere physical existence. Symbolic determinations constitute the cultural
realm in which they can make the existential trade-offs that are necessary for
dealing with external violence. A view that emphasizes the unavoidability of
violence sees law as the culturally mediated reaction to the necessities of fate.
When Benjamin writes, however, that divine violence rules over all life
"um des Lebendigen willen" (2:200), he undermines any distinction between
"das blo?e Leben" and this "Lebendige" because the latter can only go beyond
bare, physical life if it can maintain some kind of symbolic identity, which, in
establishing continuity through life and death, also entails the specific cultur
ally marked identity that comes with every symbol. Since divine violence
exists only "um des Lebendigen willen," there could be nothing beyond mere
life that could pull this life out of its physical context and into a metaphysical
one. By cleansing divine violence of any symbolic qualities, Benjamin also
makes it impossible for divine violence to treat life as anything but bare life.
Moreover, because divine violence relinquishes any demand for sacrifice and is
content to accept it (2:200), such violence remains without any abiding con
tent or idiosyncratic structure that could give to the "Lebendigen" a symbolic
meaning that could transcend mere physicality.
Perhaps in a recognition of these difficulties, Benjamin explicitly reintro
duces a measure of cultural particularity into divine violence in a final move at
the end of his essay, thereby undermining his own distinction between
mythic and divine violence: "Die g?ttliche Gewalt, welche Insignium und
Siegel, niemals Mittel heiliger Vollstreckung ist, mag die waltende hei?en"
(2:203). As opposed to the mythic violence that Benjamin refers to as "schal
tende" and "verwaltete" and therefore "verwerflich," divine violence, as "In
signium und Siegel" rather than a "Mittel" of execution, retains a trace of a

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 50 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

proper name in the insignia that guarantee that the move from mythic to
divine violence is a move from mere material life to a sacred life. Benjamin
seeks to distinguish the symbolic aspect of divine violence from the mechani
cal aspect of mythic violence as a mere "means."
Yet, the situations that Benjamin links to divine violence?the "true war"
and the "crowd's divine judgment upon the criminal"?are ones in which cod
ified law recedes in favor of a kind of self-righteous feeling for justice within
the people. To the extent that he decouples this feeling for justice from a
mythic content and a legal tradition, he is left without any institutional con
trols or any responsible authority to constrain the crowd. Benjamin runs here
into a basic contradiction between the unmediated character of divine vio
lence and his insight that it must have a proper name as well. If the primary
task of divine violence is to establish the "insignia and seal" of sacred execu
tion, then it is based in a sign with the significance of a proper name within
which sovereignty functions. The establishment of the domination of this
proper name becomes for Benjamin the primary task of a divine violence that
seeks to preserve the sacred.
But this link between insignia and sovereignty is precisely the structure of
the normal functioning of sovereignty, according to Schmitt's idea that the
key issue is "who decides" {Politische Fheologie 40). The decision on the state of
exception institutes the proper name of sovereignty in competition with
other possible names, and in doing so establishes a specific subject whose sym
bolic connections define a particular tradition, for instance the specific rituals
of a peace ceremony. But while Benjamin criticizes such a ceremony as part of
the occupation process, after a military conquest, of sanctioning the new
power relations as law (2:186), it may in fact be that the priority is reversed:
the ritual may form the larger symbolic context within which the violence
must take place, if the law it establishes is to gain legitimacy. If divine violence
is not about specific punishments or physical effects but is primarily con
cerned with establishing a new tradition, then divine violence cannot be im
mediate, but must be linked to insignia, that is, to precisely the type of cultur
ally specific rituals and mythic traditions connected to a proper name that
relate a metaphysical perspective to specific laws. The way to preserve life as
part of a sacred context rather than "blo?es Leben" would not be to reject the
mythic grounding of law, but to see in the symbolic traditions underlying
myth the spiritual mediation of an administrative task. By contrast, if the
coming of divine violence as an immediate violence had no connection to in
signia, it could not inaugurate the rule of justice that replaces the rule of power
with an orientation toward the sacred. The establishment of such a "name
less" immediate violence in place of mediation through myth would reduce
order to pure power, without the help of ideals that themselves must incorpo
rate an invocation of a proper name in the insignia in order to operate. Though
Benjamin only gestures toward this symbolic context in his reference to insig

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 51

nia in Zur Kritik der Gewalt, by the time of ?ber den Begriff der Geschichte, he
speaks explicitly about the importance of the "Bestand der Tradition" (1:695)
and of the way in which even the French Revolution understood itself as "ein
wiedergekehrtes Rom," thus citing the proper name of Rome "wie die Mode
eine vergangene Tracht zitiert" (1:701).

Agamben and Bare Life

Benjamin's failure to adequately account for the particularity of ideals in

Zur Kritik der Gewalt has major consequences for Agamben's reading because
the latter focuses primarily on the idea of mere or "bare" life as essential to the
notion of sovereignty. Because he ignores the dynamic in which the supersed
ing of juridical violence in divine violence also involves an invocation of a
symbolic dimension, Agamben's argument, though less contradictory than
Benjamin's, ends up being even more emphatically destructive of the sacred
element that could prevent the reduction of humans to their bare life. In
taking over the concept of bare life from Benjamin, he levels the distinction
between bare life and sacred life that would provide the possibility of recog
nizing a symbolic and spiritual aspect of human life. In a move that William
Connolly has criticized for unduly limiting our notion of the sacred (28-29),
Agamben equates bare life with sacred life: "The life caught in the sovereign
ban is the life that is originarily sacred? that is, that may be killed but not sac
rificed? and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity
of sovereignty" (Homo Sacer 83). Whereas Benjamin insists on the difference
between bare life and sacred life, Agamben folds the two into each other.
When Benjamin criticizes the "dogma of the sacredness of life" (2:202), he is
referring to the idea of the sacredness of bare life as opposed to the idea of
sacred life which is "identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife. " But
as Connolly has suggested (29), when Agamben equates bare life with sacred
life, he conceptually forecloses any way of understanding sovereignty in
terms of a cultural system.
Like Benjamin, Agamben commits himself to a project in which the goal is
not only to overcome a political structure of sovereignty that he argues is
linked to bare life, but also to supersede law itself. Yet, it is difficult to imagine
the character of this new order beyond law, since Benjamin already, to the ex
tent that he rejects all previous myth and law as fateful violence, also disposes
of the very traditions that could be the basis of cultural order in the future.
Agamben "purifies" Benjamin's approach by adhering to an "absolute" de
cisionist understanding of law when he argues that "the sovereign is the point
of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence
passes over into law and law passes over into violence" (Homo Sacer 32). Ar
guing that there is no difference between law and violence, Agamben then

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 52 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

constructs his idea of politics around the notion of a bare life stripped of any
legitimacy or vestiges of cultural markings. Though Benjamin runs into con
tradictions between the unmediated character of divine violence and his wish
that it have a symbolic content as well, he still maintains a conceptual distinc
tion between bare life and the "living" core that lies at the basis of the sacred
through life, death, and the afterlife. Consequently, where Benjamin anoma
lously sees the appearance of bare life as something new, Agamben "cleans up"
the analysis by considering sacred life and bare life as equivalent, beginning in
ancient Rome. If there remains in Benjamin a certain nostalgia for the "insig
nia and seal" of an order that are to remain as the markers of divine violence,
even as it is supposed to replace the old political order with a new, revolution
ary one, Agamben asserts that "from the point of view of sovereignty only bare
life is authentically political11 {Homo Sacer 106) and that consequently any juridi
cal order necessarily participates in a violence that reduces humans to bare life.
Agamben considers bare life and the sovereign decision as two sides of the
same phenomenon. The decision that founds the state and the decision that
declares life itself to be mere life are the same {Homo Sacer 84), and Agamben
postulates an enduring link between the sovereign and the bare life of the homo
sacer within a political space without religious ideals. As Eva Geulen has noted
(91), the homo sacer becomes the primary image of all politics, the sovereign de
cision becoming a biopolitical one for Agamben in which bare biological life
and purely political life collapse into one another, so that "the inclusion of bare
life in the political realm constitutes the original?if concealed? nucleus of
sovereign power" {Homo Sacer 6).
But if the sovereign declares life to be bare life in the same action that estab
lishes sovereignty, then there are by definition no limits on sovereign power
from the side of the subject and its commitments. The sovereign decision is an
unmediated and violent act for Agamben that is sufficient for defining order
prior to any cultural mediation. The lack of any notion of a cultural mediation
of politics in Agamben's analysis means that there is only pure violence, and
biopolitics becomes a matter of cause-and-effect, instrumental calculations
divorced from any sense of ethical principles. Though Agamben is critical of
this situation, his theory implies that there is no escape from it. For he has
purged the Benjaminian escape into divine violence of the particular cultural
vestiges that would prevent bare life and the sovereign decision from becom
ing complementary opposites that determine each other in a logic of pure vio
lence. By extending the absolute decisionist understanding of political power
into an argument that a legal order originates in an unmediated and violent
act, Agamben's biopolitical theory can no longer present any alternative to an
elimination of culture and a treatment of humans as bare life. Even a possible
return to "classical politics," in which the private and the public are clearly
separated, is already foreclosed by the fact that violence will always be a tool

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 53

of oppression focused on the body rather than based on principles (Homo Sacer
188).
As a result, Agamben's only alternatives are Utopian ones that are only
sketchily indicated, as in his description of a humanity that "will play with
law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to
their canonical use but to free them from it for good" (State of Exception 64).
This imagination of a future humanity that is beyond law as we know it is
both so removed from any conceivable reality and so empty of content be
cause Agamben has excluded from his analysis the cultural realm as a dynamic
sphere that would be the justification and constrainer of law on the one hand
and the provider of ideals for imagining the future on the other hand. In con
trast, though Benjamin is inconsistent in rejecting the injunctions of myth
yet still holding onto the symbolic qualities of myth in a new divine sover
eignty, he nevertheless manages to retain the possibility of the sacred in his
notion of a divine violence that inaugurates a new period of justice without
law.

Culture and Politics in Schmitt

But there is an alternative way of understanding the situation of justice

without law, not as a rejection of law as a form of violence but as an acknowl
edgement of the plurality of perspectives that might ground law. Whereas
Benjamin does not question the objective validity of divine violence, Schmitt
links the situation of justice without law to an explicitly political situation
that is marked by competing conceptions of justice. This "state of exception"
is not a space of divine violence but of conflict in which law recedes but re
mains within the "Rahmen des Juristischen" (Politische Theologie 19). Schmitt
considers law to be necessary as a mediator between cultural ideals and exter
nal violence because he assumes a fundamentally "multicultural" political
theology in which the source of political conflict is not competing factions,
each defending their own particular interests, but rather the result of compet
ing conceptions of the general good (Politische Theologie 16; Pan, "Carl Schmitt
on Culture and Violence" 66).
Whereas for Benjamin existing examples of law are only based on violence,
and the divine violence linked to j ustice is only a possibility in a future after the
revolutionary end of these existing legal structures, in Schmitt's thinking
every establishment of order through a sovereign depends on some set of
metaphysical ideals. He by no means neglects an analysis of power, however,
but rather constructs a unified theory of law that understands power and jus
tice as always linked concepts?in marked contrast to the Benjaminian model
that separates these two aspects from each other in the distinction between
mythic and divine violence.

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 54 The German Quarterly Winter 2009

Schmitt links power and justice by offering a non-progressivist under

standing of the difference between what Benjamin calls mythic violence and
divine violence. Benjamin's insistence on a categorical difference between the
two, in which mythic violence is based on the rule of power while divine vio
lence introduces the rule of justice, can only make sense if, as Benjamin as
sumes, there is a fundamental, world-historical break between a traditional
world based on myth and fate and a new, post-revolutionary world of justice
(2:194). In this way, Benjamin sets up J?rgen Habermas's approach to the
difference between traditional and "post-traditional" society as the key to the
possibility of a new type of j ustice, which in Habermas, for example, would be
based on a communicative model of rationality (117-18,167). Schmitt rejects
such a progressive philosophy of history and assumes that social orders will
always have to contend with external necessities. At the same time, each
society must define its approach to these necessities in its own way, the deter
mination of this approach then constituting the basic metaphysical commit
ments of that culture. Because each culture's establishment of what consti
tutes the general good cannot be objectively justified, Schmitt argues that
exception and rule are intimately related to each other, and that every existing
system of law?past, present, or future? is ultimately justified by an initial
decision. Consequently, the decision does not remain totally removed from
justice. Indeed, he emphasizes that "beide Elemente, die Norm wie die Ent
scheidung, im Rahmen des Juristischen verbleiben" {Politische Theologie 19).
There is for Schmitt no world-historical distinction between a mythic vio
lence based on power and a divine violence based on justice. Instead, Benja
min's notion of mythic violence would correspond in Schmitt to the forms of
state coercion (laws and police) that are used to enforce norms within a stable
political order. At the same time, Benj amin's idea of divine violence would cor
respond in Schmitt to the violence connected to the decision that is used in the
state of exception to establish the system of norms in the first place. Though
Schmitt does not see this establishment of a system of norms as a form of
progress from a mythic system to a modern system, he does understand the
decision as a singular event that grounds an entire order, and in this way the
decision is like Benjamin's divine violence. As a consequence, the key differ
ence between Schmitt's and Benjamin's categorizations of forms of violence
is that, while Benjamin sees law-preserving violence and law-establishing vio
lence as just two faces of mythic violence (2:186-88, 203), from Schmitt's
point of view, Benjamin's notion of law-preserving violence is the same as
mythic violence, i.e., violence within the normal situation, and law-estab
lishing violence is the same as divine violence, i.e., violence in the state of
exception. Because the exception makes clear on what basis the rule functions,
the decision is the founding event for all law for Schmitt, and the state of
exception will always involve a struggle to establish the form of justice for the
future. By contrast, the violence connected with the norm is not part of a

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 55

struggle against alternative forms of law but one that suppresses criminal
activity.
Schmitt is at great pains to distinguish both criminal activity and rebel
lions from true politics because he consistently defends the existing order
against the overturning of established order (Begriff des Politischen 10-11,
Theorie des Partisanen 21). As Benjamin Arditi argues (14-16), Schmitt's theory
implies a constant conflict between the prevailing structure of politics in a
particular order and the potential for the "political" as such to assert itself as
the emergence of a competing notion of order that would undermine the
existing hegemonic structure of politics. As opposed to Benjamin's assump
tion of a single trajectory for a world-historical shift from power to justice,
Schmitt outlines a constantly shifting dialectic between an established poli
tics and a new understanding of the political, in which this possibility of a new
politics can always threaten the established order, bringing about the state of
exception. But while Schmitt has a keen sense for the approach of such a state
of exception, his concrete judgments regarding contemporary politics main
tain a consistently conservative defense of whatever structure of politics is
currently established?whether it be the Weimar constitution in Legalit?t und
Legitimit?t (98), Hitler's Enabling Act in Staat, Bewegung, Volk (6-7), or the jus
publicum Europaeum in Nomos der Erde (200-01)?against the threat of politi
cally revolutionary tendencies. On the other hand, because Benjamin writes
in support of revolution, he is too quick to argue that the fascination with the
great criminal indicates how criminal violence is always a potentially political
divine violence that establishes a new order. He neglects the extent to which
this criminal activity needs to develop both a symbolic structure and a repre
sentational authority to become a real political possibility.
Because Schmitt concentrates on these representational prerequisites for
the transformation of pure violence into politics, he conceives of culture as a
dynamic process that underlies laws and must be taken into account in any
discussion of their foundations. The tie between exception and norm is a con
sequence of the fact that the influence of the ideals that determine the deci
sion is sometimes obscured by the normal operation of laws but can be clearly
perceived in situations, such as the state of exception, where law breaks down
due to the emergence of an alternative conception of the political. Because he
does not distinguish a mythic violence from a divine violence as two historical
epochs, Schmitt establishes a relationship between violence and justice for all
law but makes the distinction between the norm and the state of exception
into the key one. As Andreas Kalyvas has shown (115-36), the norm for
Schmitt is the form of politics within a stable order while the decision in the
state of exception is the impulse that establishes a particular understanding of
the political against alternative ones.

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 56 The German Quarterly Winter 2009

Enemy and Way of Life

Schmitt thereby develops a cultural notion of decisionism that is opposed

to Agamben's biopolitical understanding. If according to Benj amin divine vio
lence declares life to be a sacred entity while mythic violence subordinates
bare life to myth through explicit laws, punishments, and sacrifices, Schmitt
adjusts his decisionism so that its object is not bare life but rather a collective's
way of life, and he understands law and politics as inextricably tied to a cul
tural context of myth and tradition that helps define such a way of life as a
collective vision that predetermines the individual subject as always more
than its bare life.
This cultural interpretation of political change seems at first to run coun
ter to other aspects of Schmitt's thought, for instance, the idea that the funda
mental political distinction between friend and enemy can exist independ
ently of "alle jene moralischen, ?sthetischen, ?konomischen oder andern
Unterscheidungen" {Begriff des Politischen 27). Though Kennedy, for instance,
reads this passage as evidence for how Schmitt "liberates political decisions
from moral criteria" {Constitutional Failure 19), a careful look at Schmitt's
description of the enemy reveals that the political distinction is not as pure
and independent as one might at first assume. For the way in which the enemy
must be defined as "other" presupposes a cultural determination about what
constitutes sameness and otherness. As Schmitt notes, this determination
can never be based on a general norm or the judgment of a neutral party.
Rather, he refers to the state "als einer organisierten politischen Einheit, die als
Ganzes f?r sich die Freund-Feindentscheidung trifft" {Begriff des Politischen
30). On the one hand, within the context of state politics this decision about
the enemy cannot be made by some "objective" agent or authority outside the
state. On the other hand, this decision is not just the decision of the sovereign
but of the state in its entirety?"als Ganzes." As a consequence, however, this
determination of the enemy must be, first, decisionist to the extent that it is
not objective and, second, culturally bounded to the extent that it involves the
specific attitudes and conceptions of the entire political entity. The impor
tance of the decision on the state of exception lies in its ability to sum up the
near-unanimous perspective of the entire group of people for which the
decision should be binding. Yet, it may be that in certain situations no such
homogeneity of perspective exists within the people, meaning that no deci
sion is possible and there can be no clear sovereign. The possibility of the deci
sion therefore depends on the cohesiveness of the polity and its understanding
of itself as a unified group.
Because the possibility of decision depends on the consent of the group,
the definition of the enemy is a judgment, not about existence itself, but
about the particular "way of life" that is defined and established in the deci
sion: "Den extremen Konfliktsfall k?nnen nur die Beteiligten selbst unter sich

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 57

ausmachen; namentlich kann jeder von ihnen nur selbst entscheiden, ob das
Anderssein des Fremden im konkret vorliegenden Konfliktsfalle die Negation
der eigenen Art Existenz bedeutet und deshalb abgewehrt oder bek?mpft
wird, um die eigene, seinsm??ige Art von Leben zu bewahren" (Begriff des Poli
tischen 27). The appeal to the actual participants rather than to an outside
observer as the only ones capable of making a judgment means that the judg
ment depends on a unity of perspective within the polity, beginning with the
concrete experience and situation of the particular judging subject within this
polity, rather than the application of any objective moral or rational principles.
This is because the content of this judgment on the enemy does not just con
cern pure biological survival but, as Andrew Norris has indicated (73-76), in
volves a self-understanding of what constitutes "der eigenen Art Existenz"?
one's own particular form of existence. Rather than simply defending one's
bare existence against the enemy, the decision establishes the existence of a
group of people who see themselves as part of a particular cultural form that
must be defended against what the group judges to be alien and threatening to
this form.
In a process that Sarah Pourciau describes as a "practice of radical self
constitution" (1071), the decision attains a foundational meaning for the
self-construction of a collective based on cultural ideals, but not in the mecha
nism of a pre-existing norm. Schmitt is working within the same framework
of a critique of the normative emptiness of rationality that motivates texts
such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno's Dialektik der Aufkl?rung.
Facing the same process of secularization that has on the one hand delegit
imized and relativized theological truths and on the other hand demonstrated
the inability of reason to ground a set of values objectively, Schmitt pursues a
line of thought in which each set of values can attain validity within a particu
lar political sphere, not through any objective, universal truth, but through a
process of collective will formation. The constitution of collective identity
that is carried out in the sovereign decision that establishes order is not just a
decision for order itself but for a particular order, and Schmitt's innovation is
to see this decision as the foundation of any set of norms that, because they
can never have any universal validity, can only attain validity on a local level as
the metaphysical ideals that have gained broad support within a group and are
then established into a particular legal and political order through the sover
eign decision.
It is significant here that the decision is a decision and not a construction,
which is to say that the sovereign's decision involves a choice amongst a num
ber of previously existing, competing conceptions of collective identity.
Though the decision is indeed a defining moment and in that sense unprece
dented, it cannot in fact arise out of a void, because the friend-enemy distinc
tion that underlies this decision is dependent on a pre-existing cultural con
text. Though the designation of the enemy may seem to be an arbitrary act of

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 58 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

political will by a sovereign, the sovereign's decision is always bounded by the

available cultural understandings of both that which might constitute the
group's way of life and that which would threaten this constitution. Because
the political determination of the enemy is always based on previously devel
oped conceptions of just what constitutes the collective's way of life, the deci
sion is bounded by the possibilities available to the cultural context within a
specific tradition. The contents of these possibilities are not defined by the
political decision but precisely by those other oppositions?moral, aesthetic,
economic?that are available for politicization.
Schmitt explains this dependence of the political determination of the en
emy on nonpolitical factors by pointing out that the political has no substance
of its own: "[das Politische] bezeichnet kein eigenes Sachgebiet, sondern nur
den Intensit?tsgrad einer Assoziation oder Dissoziation von Menschen, deren
Motive religi?ser, nationaler (im ethnischen oder kulturellen Sinne), wirt
schaftlicher oder anderer Art sein k?nnen und zu verschiedenen Zeiten ver
schiedene Verbindungen und Trennungen bewirken" {Begriff des Politischen
38-39). Because it does not have its own substance but only describes an
intensity of an association, the political can never exist in a "pure" state. In
stead, it is always a property that attaches itself to a prior association with a
specific cultural content. Such a religious or national or economic association
must always provide the cultural basis and content for a political definition of
the enemy. Once this happens, that cultural basis is itself transformed
through the politicization. The friend-enemy distinction cannot be con
structed without a pre-existing religious, national, economic, or other distinc
tion. Thus, far from imagining the political friend-enemy distinction as that
which grounds an order ex nihilo from an "abyssal act of violence" (Zizek
18-19), Schmitt always conceives of the political as a characteristic that a
pre-existing cultural association can take on. By the same token, the cultural
association, once it is politicized, becomes subject to a political dynamic that
takes decision-making beyond the bounds of the purely religious, national, or
economic criteria that were the initial basis of the association of people and
subjects them to the "oft sehr inkonsequenten und irrationalen Bedingungen
und Folgerungen der nunmehr politischen Situation" {Begriff des Politischen
39). The political and the cultural are intertwined in a relationship in which a
human association with a particular content becomes intense enough to be
the basis of a decision that defines enemies in terms of the need to preserve the
collective's existence as cultural form.
Within this process of defining a cultural identity, the final designation
about the enemy still depends upon the possibility of armed struggle between
two groups {Begriff des Politischen 29). But even if the ultimate political intensi
fication of an opposition can only arise when two groups face each other in
battle, this descent into war is not a situation of pure violence. Politics for
Schmitt can never be about a biopolitics in which violence and the body come

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 59

into direct contact without mediation, because politics can never even consti
tute itself as such without a prior set of ideological oppositions. Because he
defines politics as an intensification of a previously existing opposition, the
political for Schmitt always presupposes some substantive opposition that
will then form the basis for law. Though any particular religious, national, or
economic opposition might not be political, it will gain a political meaning
when it intensifies to the point where an association of people will define an
enemy based on the opposition and thereby link their identity to that opposi
tion to such an extent that they are willing to both risk death and kill in order
to maintain the significance of the distinction.
Though the possibility of war is necessary for the definition of the enemy,
Schmitt's conception is not an incitement to war. Rather, the prospect of war
defines the most intense point along a continuum between a total lack of
politicization and the most extreme politicization of a particular opposition.
Schmitt does not call for the creation of enemies but rather uses the concept of
the enemy as a tool to take the political "temperature" of an existing opposi
tion. A particular opposition, such as that between rich and poor or between
Christian and Muslim, may have a relatively low political intensity in a partic
ular time and place, reflecting the fact that there is little potential in that con
text that, for example, rich people would see poor people (or vice versa) or that
Muslims would see Christians (or vice versa) as their enemy. But over time, this
intensity could increase to the extent that one group begins to see the other as
a threat to its existence as a group. By considering the probability that the
rich/poor opposition or the Christian/Muslim opposition could lead people to
take up arms against each other based on this opposition, one determines the
relative political intensity of the opposition. The enemy in war is not a desid
eratum for Schmitt buta limit concept, and the political is not itself an opposi
tion that could exist independently of other oppositions, but can only develop
through the intensification of an existing opposition.
As a consequence, the descent into civil war (as opposed to criminal vio
lence) must be based on the commitment to some type of value system in
which oppositions can be defined on a cultural level that involves basic princi
ples. This set of oppositions, then, is both the underlying schema for defining
politics in a particular situation and the ideological basis for a set of laws.
Anomic violence may be a possibility for Schmitt, but it is not political. Vio
lence can only be political once it is linked to a symbolic field of oppositions
that can define enemies. This definition is not simply a reaction to an existen
tial threat to physical survival but a determination of what counts as cultural
survival. This "mythic" basis of law is not merely an instrument for maintain
ing power that can be turned on and off at will, as M?ller suggests (466), but
an independent realm of cultural dynamics that follows its own logic and is
not subject to simple instrumentalization. It is to this realm that Schmitt

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 60 Fhe German Quarterly Winter 2009

turns in order to understand the forces that underlie political conflicts and
upheavals.

Conclusion

As opposed to Agamben's biopolitical paradigm that leaves out cultural

differences as a motivating factor in political conflict, Schmitt's sense for the
cultural ideals that underlie such conflict can be particularly useful in those
situations, such as Germany in the Weimar Republic or the period of civil war
in Iraq, in which the fundamental sources of conflict do not lie simply in a
struggle for resources between competing interest groups but in the disparate
religious, ethnic, and economic systems that collide with such intensity that
the resulting political instability leads to a state of exception. Though the
sovereign's decision may be the defining moment in establishing the political
identity of a people, this decision is only one moment in a broader and longer
process that involves the building of the cultural and ethical foundations that
are necessary for such a decision to take place. Consequently, the cultural anal
ysis of both religious and secular literary traditions should be able to throw
light on the deeper trends that motivate the most intractable political con
flicts, and Schmitt's political theory is structured so as to leave a space in
which cultural theory could address the gaps that a purely political analysis
would be unable to fill. Indeed, Benjamin's notion o? Jetztzeit might be success
fully integrated with Schmitt's idea of the decision, as both represent unprece
dented moments that link a cultural tradition with an immediate political
context.
Accordingly, a possible "Schmittian" approach to cultural studies would
involve a new kind of inquiry into the political parameters of cultural produc
tion and reception. If 1918 and 1933 represent key decision points in German
political history, the results of those decisions also had consequences for the
character of culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. At the same
time, though these crises were decided by political events, the options avail
able to political actors were tightly constrained by the cultural history leading
up to those points. Schmitt's reading of the sovereign decision and the state of
exception as moments when culture and politics collide opens up an approach
to cultural objects that sees them as offering competing models for defining
cultural identity in the confrontation with external exigencies.
The strength of Schmitt's political theory lies in its ability to interpret
crisis points of politics as turning points in culture as well. But Schmitt's sev
eral attempts to explain the precise workings of culture in politics turned out
to be either inadequate or downright disastrous. His Staat, Bewegung, Volk, for
instance, argues that the Nazi movement provided the cultural mediation
between the people and the state that is missing in a liberal framework that is

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 PAN: Against Biopolitics 61

based on a dualistic opposition between the two (14-17). While Schmitt is

obviously searching here for a way to integrate the realm of culture into the
political sphere, his solution ends up destroying the independence of the cul
tural realm that he was trying to save by reducing it to unity with the Nazi
movement. If Benjamin's political theory turns out to be just as dangerous in
leading him to imagine, in divine violence, the one true from of j ustice that can
only be established through the violent destruction of all previously existing
systems of law, his cultural theory, in allowing for the freedom of cultural life
to establish new connections between current circumstances and past tradi
tions, provides the antidote to Schmitt's heavy-handed approach to culture.
Agamben's biopolitical paradigm, however, in imagining a possible space of
freedom from cultural inscriptions, pushes toward a notion of an empty sub
ject, freed from law, but by the same token void of culture and defined by bare
life. As much as he criticizes the notion of bare life, his image of freedom from
law implies it by de-legitimating all those "mythic" constructions that are the
only path toward maintaining the sacred as something that is more than just
power or bodily existence. Agamben seeks a life that is freed from ideology,
imagining that its mythic character is the source of domination. But if we con
sider language uals den wirklichen Unterscheidungscharakter unsrer Gattung von
au?en'1 (Herder 43), then language and its accompanying ideological under
pinnings would not be the source of domination but merely the human means
of adapting to the sources of violence that form the fundamental parameters
of human existence.

Note

11 would like to thank Kai Evers, Eva Geulen, James Rolleston, Christophe Fricker,
and two readers for German Quarterly for their helpful comments and suggestions re
lating to the work in this essay. Any errors or omissions are entirely my own.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
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