Neil Levi On Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic
Author(s): Neil Levi

Source: New German Critique, No. 101 (Summer, 2007), pp. 27-43
Published by: Duke University Press
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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 R?hm 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
D?ubler, 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
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.
New German Critique 101, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2007

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2007-002 ? 2007 by New German Critique, Inc.
27
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?J?rgen 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 Ideas
Most 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.
3.1 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.
Neil Levi 29
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 Legalit?t und Legitimit?t (1932) also attacks a proceduralism that does not recog
nize the substantial values on which the Constitution is based.
Neil Levi 31
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 Zizek 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 Schmitt

For 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 Zizek, "Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics," in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt,
ed. Chantal Moufle (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 B?rger, 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 M?ller 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 Kaly vas 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. J?rgen 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 B?rger,
"Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf ?sthetik," in Zerst?rung: Rettung des Mythos
durch Eicht, ed. Christa B?rger (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 ?sthetik des Schreckens (Munich: Hanser,
1978); Jan-Werner M?ller, 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.lnorris.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.
Neil Levi 33
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. Burger's brief, lucid essay "Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf ?sthetik" 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, B?rger, 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 Values
Wolin 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.
Neil Levi 35
Wolin's account of Schmitt's aesthetics draws, as I have noted, on Bohrer's Aes

thetics of Horror. Bohrer groups Schmitt together with S0ren 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 Ranci?re translates it, the partition of the sensible/perceptible.
According to Ranci?re, 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 Ranci?re calls "the
part who have no part," demand to be seen, when the invisible are made vis
ible, the voiceless given voice.19
Ranci?re'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 Ranci?re, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Ranci?re, "The Aesthetic Revolution and Its
Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Wtlzronomy" New Eeft Review, no. 14 (2002): 133-51.
20. Zizek makes a similar point in relation to Ranci?re, 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).
Neil Levi 37
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 Ernstf?lle (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 Political

As 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
Doppelg?nger 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 Sains, 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.
Neil Levi 39
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, Lome 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.
Neil Levi 41
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
Neil Levi 43
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.

Neil Levi On Carl Schmitt

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Neil Levi On Carl Schmitt

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Carl Schmitt and the Question of the Aesthetic

Author(s): Neil Levi

New German Critique 101, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2007

7. My understanding of the place of the Lebensform in Schmitt's thought is indebted to Andrew

observed, Schmitt's persistent emphasis on concrete situations paradoxically

The Status of the Aesthetic in Debates about Schmitt

mean by "the aesthetic," we risk getting caught up in a game of definitions:

Schmitt grounds the foundational concepts of his mature political philosophy

Wolin's account of Schmitt's aesthetics draws, as I have noted, on Bohrer's Aes

None of these suggestions about what might make Schmitt's ideas

The Aesthetic as the Enemy of the Political

tion proper, with fatal consequences. It negates political perception?negates,

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