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THE CONCEPT OF THE MYTHICAL

(SCHMITT WITH SOREL)

Stathis Gourgouris∗

The purpose of this essay is neither to decide on the

significance of Carl Schmitt’s work in our time, nor to determine,
by some sort of distributive logic, which of Carl Schmitt’s concepts
and ideas are useful and which are not. Although an assessment of
Schmitt as a writer and a thinker is inevitable, it is symptomatic of
the encounter, and hence secondary to the more crucial task of
raising certain questions and uncovering certain trails in the wake
of Carl Schmitt’s passage through history. This passage was hardly
negligible and hardly innocent. On the contrary, Schmitt’s good
fortune to live a long life in a troubled century replete with
innumerable untimely deaths, in addition to his alertness to the
most subtle shifts in historical contingency, has forged a historical
passage of unusual complexity and magnitude, as evidenced by the
greatly deferred disturbance (I mean the term literally, not
pejoratively) that his writings continue to produce today. My own
encounter with Schmitt necessarily partakes of this disturbance,
but only to the extent that it incorporates it as a historical
motivation for the inquiry that follows.
The essay belongs to a larger project, straddling the terrain
between two projects whose mutual point of departure is a re-
evaluation of myth (and, in particular, of what I call “mythic
thought”) from the standpoint of a contemporary historical reality
that claims to have become “post-political” and shows definite
signs of turning to theological modes of understanding and acting,
no doubt propelled from the desperation that follows a historical-
epistemological void. The hard reality of such a void becomes
inevitable when a historical universe, for reasons that in this case
remain indecipherable, subjects the political to nearly exhaustive
self-occultation. My hunch is that myth, which I take for granted
as a performative concept that occupies the terrain where the
theatrical and the political coincide, has much to offer in the

∗ Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University. He is also the

author of DREAM NATION, as well as numerous articles on modernist literature, political
theory, psychoanalysis, and music.

1487
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process of disintegrating the self-occultation of the political.

Because Schmitt has made some influential remarks regarding the
political, because he was himself an exemplary political creature
(with all conceivable ramifications of this notion), and also
because he understood the importance of the mythical (though,
from my standpoint, in terms marred by his political decisions and
his theologically motivated limits), he does emerge as an intriguing
interlocutor in this process. Hence, in this essay, articulating the
“concept of the mythical” becomes possible expressly on account
of Schmitt, and it is conducted more or less as a fragment of a
Begriffsgeschichte delineated specifically by Schmitt’s encounter
with Georges Sorel.
To contextualize the encounter further, I should say at the
outset that this essay continues an argumentative tack regarding
Schmitt’s Politische Theologie1 (Political Theology) that I
developed previously in Dream Nation,2 on the question of
national sovereignty. This argument recognizes that the circuitous,
and often contradictory, tendencies in Schmitt’s thinking, and its
specific terms can be summed up in three sentences. Although
Schmitt consistently, and in most trenchant terms, exposes the
secret metaphysics of constitutional liberalism, his own statist
metaphysics can provide only a blueprint for a heteronomous
social and political order. More specifically, though the most
important contribution of Schmitt’s Political Theology is precisely
to unmask the heteronomous real nature of a political order
(constitutional liberalism) that claims to safeguard society’s
autonomy, his underlying logic demonstrates—how conscious of
its implications I am not prepared to say—that national
sovereignty is the enemy of social autonomy. Consequently, from
the standpoint of the political person, of the active citizen in the
polis, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty must conclude in a politics of
subjugation—indeed, in the kind of subjugation that demands the
sacrifice of critical interrogation to the inner truth of an
apocalyptic origin of history, as we encounter it in every
monotheistic order.3
Regarding the last point, my position seems to echo Heinrich
Meier’s thesis that at the core of Schmitt’s understanding of the
world reigns an intransigent, uncompromising Christian

1 CARL SCHMITT, POLITISCHE THEOLOGIE: V IER K APITEL ZUR LEHRE VON DER
SOUVERANITÄT (2d ed. 1934).
2 STATHIS GOURGOURIS, DREAM NATION: ENLIGHTENMENT, COLONIZATION,
AND THE INSTITUTION OF MODERN GREECE (1996).
3 See id. at 20-22, 160-63.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1489

imagination.4 There is certainly much evidence pointing to this

conclusion, despite taking into account that Schmitt’s thought is
deliberately open to historical contingency, and thus does not
unfold continuously from an unadulterated source. My sense of
the matter is not the rather narrow pronouncement that Schmitt
was, above all, a Catholic thinker, but that his epistemological
universe emerges from a monotheistic order, which, in the last
instance, undoes his otherwise acute political understanding of
history. In this sense, I do not share Meier’s distinction between
political theology and political philosophy; I find both terms highly
questionable, if not untenable, and I will return to this at the end.
My initial concern, as the groundwork for Schmitt’s encounter
with the mythical, is Schmitt’s encounter with Marxist dialectics.
This may seem odd in terms of elementary procedural logic, and I
cannot counter this semblance without merely proceeding as such.
I am certainly not concerned with ideological differences. In
ideological terms, the abyss separating Schmitt from Marxism is
insurmountable. Indeed, I believe that Schmitt’s greatest political
enemy (at least in the Weimar period) was not liberalism or
parliamentarism, but Marxism, precisely because it did constitute,
in the 1920s, an equally uncompromising and actual force against
liberalism and parliamentarism. How else are we to interpret the
fact that half of Schmitt’s initial treatise on parliamentary
democracy is occupied with extensive polemics against Marxist
philosophical categories? I would argue that, in the language of
Schmitt’s figuration of the political on the basis of the friend-
enemy principle, Marxism does emerge as the enemy that
“enables” self-constitution. It is precisely because of its radical
foundational significance as the enemy—and here the textual
evidence puts Schmitt’s adherence to his own principle into
question—that the real magnitude of enmity is consistently veiled.
Marxism is foremost a philosophical enemy, which is why, after he
dispenses with the romantic ideology of liberalist metaphysics,
Schmitt must conduct a disintegration of dialectics in the same
terms, as a logical immanence that forever defers the moment of
decision in politics. Nonetheless, a question emerges from this
confrontation as an undeconstructible remainder (which is
methodologically crucial to my discussion): Of what use is a
polemical method without dialectical understanding?
To this end, I shall limit my reading of Schmitt to the last two

4 HEINRICH MEIER, CARL SCHMITT AND LEO STRAUSS: THE H IDDEN DIALOGUE
(J. Harvey Lomax trans., University of Chicago Press 1995) (1988); HEINRICH MEIER,
THE LESSON OF CARL SCHMITT: FOUR CHAPTERS ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (Marcus Brainard trans., 1998).
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1490 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

chapters in The Spiritual-Historical Situation of Contemporary

Parliamentarism (known in translation as The Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy)5 which are concerned with, as Schmitt
terms it, the rationalist dialectics of Marxism and the irrationalist
violence of anarcho-syndicalism. My main concern is less about
the argument that Schmitt catapults against Hegel and Marx—he
tends to stage his attack on the most identitary and teleological
view of dialectics—and more about the one he unleashes against
Georges Sorel in the last chapter. Even from a cursory look at the
text, Sorel emerges as a formidable enemy, marked with a definite,
though barely discernible, ambivalence of desire on the part of
Schmitt, a barely realized trace of admiration that further fuels the
polemical impetus of the argument. Schmitt recognizes in Sorel
the same unabashed polemical spirit that dares to expose one’s
writing to full-fledged enmity, matching the vehemence with which
the text pursues its enemies to the dead end of their inner logic.
But while Schmitt’s theologically-inspired force can implant a
corrosive element at the core of any rationalist metaphysics, it runs
aground against Sorel’s mythological understanding of history,
precisely because Sorel’s brilliant anarchic articulation of myth
shows that myth has no core, no singular arch‘.
Incidentally, the really provocative text that historically
mediates this encounter is Walter Benjamin’s essay, Toward a
Critique of Violence,6 which is profoundly situated between
Schmitt and Sorel and succeeds, in Benjamin’s inimitable way, in
raising precisely the issue of myth as a challenge to sovereignty—
though his own explicitly theological conclusions raise a great
many counter questions. I have spoken of this text at length
elsewhere and will not add anything here, except to alert one to
the fact that it shadows this entire argument.7 Suffice it to say that
Benjamin’s constant reconceptualization of his own terms
eventually led him to a more dialectical understanding of myth
after his encounters with surrealism and Brechtian theatrical
theory. In his later work, when he elaborates on his notion of the
dialectical image (principally in the notes that formed
Passagenwerk, but also in various drafts and fragments from the
post-1928 period), Benjamin becomes crucial in elucidating the
question of how a performative dialectics of myth may withstand

5 CARL SCHMITT, THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY (Ellen Kennedy

trans., 1985).
6 WALTER BENJAMIN, Toward a Critique of Violence, in ONE W AY STREET AND
OTHER WRITINGS 132 (Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter trans., Lowe & Brydone
Printers Ltd. 1979).
7 See Stathis Gourgouris, Enlightenment and Paranomia, in VIOLENCE, IDENTITY,
AND SELF-DETERMINATION 119 (Hent de Vries & Samuel Weber eds., 1997).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1491

the enveloping powers of “political theology.” Schmitt either did

not keep up with Benjamin’s trajectory or he never really
understood him; his only gesture toward Benjamin is a reciprocal
elaboration—in the form of a “correction”—on the Trauerspiel
thesis, where Schmitt’s observations unpredictably point to a
theory of tragedy that actually unlocks myth from the binds of
political theology—a gesture that I see as Benjaminian, if not even
Sorelian. I take up this paradoxical moment in Schmitt’s oeuvre at
the conclusion of the essay as an internally deconstructive instance
that demonstrates the untenability of political theology before the
political challenge that Sorel’s thought places in Schmitt’s way:
myth without arch‘ or telos.
***
The great German dramatic poet, Heiner Müller, once
commented: “Carl Schmitt is theater. His texts are theatrical
performances. I am not interested in whether he was right or not.
His best texts are simply great performances.”8 I am fascinated by
this comment, not least of all because the man who made it was
decidedly against any intellectual and political fad, and celebrated,
with a notoriously consistent lack of compromise, his being out-of-
joint with the times. In my mind, no other comment addresses the
question “why such fascination with Carl Schmitt?” more
incisively than Müller’s casual remark. Müller restages the
question by bringing to the foreground the act of thinking as form,
which is at the heart of the matter whenever we seek to evaluate
the significance of human thinking as action, and indeed, from my
standpoint, as action in an inescapably political universe. Müller’s
gesture restores the inherent performativity of philosophical
thinking that is usually subsumed in the name of logical
argumentation, objective reasoning, and, more often than not, a
moralistic righteousness whose unstated aim is to conceal the
inevitable complicity of a discourse with its ideological location.
Müller’s restaging is crucial in terms of Carl Schmitt’s legacy
for at least two reasons. First, it provides an alternative account of
the recent fascination with Carl Schmitt—certainly a reason other
than the alleged misapprehension of his theories, which, for
example, fuels Schmitt’s patronage by various neofederalist
tendencies in political theory, sometimes hailing from the “left,”
but also from more traditional conservative domains. Second, it
realigns Schmitt’s avowed preference for polemical structures, not
only to reveal the impact of this preference on the concrete
materiality of his writing (which is what makes his writing so

8 HEINER MÜLLER, KRIEG OHNE SCHLACHT: LEBEN IN ZWEI D ICKTATUREN 272

(1992).
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1492 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

seductive), but, more importantly, to challenge Schmitt’s polemical

structures from the standpoint of theatricality and from what I will
discuss here in terms of a performative dialectics of myth—
incidentally, the very idiom of Heiner Müller’s theater.
To speak of thought from the standpoint of theatricality is to
acknowledge the agonistic performativity of all thought: the fact
that all thought (even what might be silently conducted at a
hermit’s nest) takes place within an arena of contention, wherein it
is always dialectically engaged with its interlocutor—whether
friendly or adversarial, public or self-referential, real or
imaginary—in order to problematize and articulate a dialogic, and
thus “collective,” concern. In this respect, no thinker is ever
contained within the bounds of his/her singular viewpoint, but
always exceeds them by virtue of the performative act itself. The
art of theater is a hypocritical art, according to the original sense of
the Greek hypokrisis, which, in addition to its explicitly theatrical
signification, also means the act of responding from the standpoint
of another. Conceived in terms of its original matrix, theatricality
is always a political attribute; it is a means by which the polis
stages its self-representation, which, in concretely historical terms,
involves a dramatic performance of its mythical foundations—the
very terms of its social-imaginary, as Cornelius Castoriadis would
say—for the purposes of theoretical critique, keeping in mind,
again, the significance of the Greek terms theasis and krisis. The
dramatic performance of myth is a dialectical affair, whereby the
staged self-representation may or may not lead to self-recognition;
therefore, an Aufhebung (at least in the Hegelian sense) is by no
means guaranteed. In this sense, Athenian tragedy becomes
paradigmatic in today’s political universe precisely because, in its
own time, it was not exhausted in the confines of the stage. As a
historically living form—though essentially unperformable since
the fourth century B.C.—it exemplifies the ways by which the polis
(long dead as a social-historical entity, but still living as a social-
imaginary form) continues to exercise its imagination.
Carl Schmitt’s encounter with Georges Sorel demands
precisely this sort of dialectical confrontation, and his performative
polemics against what Sorel had already established—in a rival
performative gesture titled Réflexions sur la Violence9—is
conducted with superb theatrical inkling before the audience of a
historical moment with the highest political stakes: post-Spartacist
Weimar society. Georges Sorel himself, like Schmitt, is an
idiosyncratic, controversial, and anomalous figure in European

9 GEORGES SOREL, RÉFLEXIONS SUR LA VIOLENCE (Michel Prat ed., 1990).

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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1493

intellectual history. Assessing his irascible and unpredictable

character, Isaiah Berlin rightly compares him with Karl Kraus10
(which resounds correctly in light of Benjamin’s fascination with
both) and proceeds to describe his innate tendencies in terms that
would apply equally to Schmitt: vehemently antiliberal and
antibourgeois; animated by an avowed polemical desire; suspicious
of the Enlightenment legacy and its democratic institutions;
privileging action over discussion; and occasionally driven to anti-
Semitism, insofar as he identifies intellectual cosmopolitanism,
which he detests, with Jewish culture.11 Moreover, as with Schmitt,
the consistent appropriation of Sorel’s work by both the “left” and
the “right” (often in their extreme positions) makes a political
evaluation of his historical significance highly problematic.
Sorel’s influence in his lifetime may have been greater abroad
than in France, where he became increasingly isolated as an
intellectual and was never really part of the syndicalist movement
he passionately advocated. Sorel had a significant (and, like
Schmitt, diverse) impact on Italian intellectual and political circles,
due primarily to his friendship with Benedetto Croce (who
translated Réflexions sur la Violence and proclaimed him the Vico
of his age), but also due to both Mussolini’s and Gramsci’s explicit
interest in Sorel’s positions.12 The English translator of Réflexions
sur la Violence was T.E. Hulme, who, along with Wyndham Lewis,
brought Sorel’s work within the Vorticist literary circle, which
espoused a similar aesthetics of form on the basis of creative
violence.13 The link here was Hulme’s own affinity with Bergson,
whose philosophical categories were reconfigured by Sorel in a
uniquely creative understanding of the role of intuition and élan
vital in revolutionary politics. Bergson himself, for whatever it is
worth, kept his distance from Sorel’s politicization of his

10 ISAIAH BERLIN, Georges Sorel, in AGAINST THE CURRENT: ESSAYS IN THE

HISTORY OF IDEAS 315 (Henry Hardy ed., 1981).
11 There may be a fine but crucial difference here, which I do not have the space to
develop, but which I nevertheless note. In addition to a similar disturbance produced in
Schmitt by Jewish cosmopolitanism as symptomatic of territorial lack, which should be
underlined all the more in light of Schmitt’s obsession with the juridical-theoretical
significance of a people’s concrete geographical entity, Schmitt’s anti-Semitism may also
have been fueled by profound religious enmity. There is extensive evidence of this in
CARL SCHMITT, GLOSSARIUM: AUFZEICHNUNGEN DER JAHRE 1947-1951, at 57, 209, 290
(1991), which demonstrates that Schmitt’s anti-Semitism springs from religious enmity,
whether expressed directly or tangentially, as in the many virulent attacks on Spinoza.
12 The Italian literature on this matter is vast. For the English language literature, see
BERLIN, supra note 10, at 325-27; Darrow Schechter, Two Views of the Revolution:
Gramsci and Sorel, 1916-1920, 12 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 637 (1990).
13 T.E. HULME, Reflections on Violence, in SPECULATIONS: ESSAYS ON HUMANISM
AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART 249 (Herbert Read ed., 1924); WYNDHAM LEWIS, THE
ART OF BEING RULED (Haskell 1972) (1926).
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philosophy, but fully acknowledged Sorel’s seriousness and skill in

understanding and elaborating on his philosophical positions:
It seems to me that Sorel’s spirit is too original and independent
to be enlisted under the banner of his claims; he is not a
disciple. But he accepts certain of my views, and when he cites
me he shows a man who has read me with great attention and
who has understood me perfectly.14
Walter Benjamin’s gesture of incorporating both Schmitt and
Sorel in a long-standing historical-philosophical meditation that
articulates the theological together with the mythological suggests
that Sorel’s presence in Weimar political consciousness was hardly
negligible.15 Two aspects of the Reflections on Violence exercise a
grave fascination for both Benjamin and Schmitt: (1) the
passionate advocacy of the general strike as the absolute
revolutionary gesture; and (2) the theorization of myth as society’s
primary mode for self-alteration. Both aspects expose and
challenge, in dramatic fashion, the questionable nature of
secularization and legal egalitarianism allegedly achieved by
standard bourgeois democracy. Both aspects are intertwined in
their simultaneously creative and destructive force. Thus, the
general strike becomes the great proletarian myth in action.
Schmitt recognizes the merits of this challenge, and his first
gesture is to degrade its connection to Marxism. In philosophical
terms, this means that any connection of Sorel’s thought to
Hegelian-Marxist dialectics must be disproved or discounted,
which in Schmitt’s polemical universe would have to be seen as a
compliment, an act of raising this challenge to the status of an
enemy worthy of serious pursuit. Schmitt further argued that, to
the degree that it claims to organize theoretically a method of
revolutionary action, dialectics conjures up an insurmountable
contradiction. Insofar as it prescribes a developmental historical
scheme according to an immanent logic, dialectics makes
impossible the interruption that would signify the moment of
revolutionary alteration, because, as Schmitt argues, echoing his
famous position in Political Theology: “The essential point is that

14 HENRI BERGSON, MÉLANGES 971 (André Robinet ed., 1972); see also SHLOMO
SAND, QUELQUES REMARQUES SUR SOREL: CRITIQUE DE L’EVOLUTION CRÉATRICE
CAHIERS GEORGES SOREL 101-23 (1983); Ellen Kennedy, Bergson’s Philosophy and
French Political Doctrines: Sorel, Maurras, Péguy, and de Gaulle, 15 GOV’T AND
OPPOSITION 75 (1980).
15 Both Benjamin and Schmitt read Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence in the original,
because it was not translated until 1928 by Benjamin’s friend, Gottfried Salomon, with the
“Benjaminian” title Über die Gewalt. Ernst Bloch, Hugo Ball, Georg Lukács, and Bertolt
Brecht were all familiar with Sorel’s positions. See Chryssoula Kambas, Walter Benjamin
liest Georges Sorel: “Réflexions sur la violence”, in ABER EIN STURM WEHT VOM
PARADIESE HER 250 (Michael Opitz & Erdmut Wiziska eds., Reclam-Verlag 1992).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1495

an exception [Ausnahme] never comes from outside into the

immanence of development [Entwicklung].”16 Because of its built-
in methodological absorption of all negation and contradiction,
Hegelian dialectics, according to Schmitt, provides no real means
of ethical decision, presenting itself as the very actualization of the
real-rational: “If [Hegelian] world history is also the world court,
then it is a process without a last instance and without a definitive,
disjunctive judgment.”17
This particular argument underlies Schmitt’s attempt to show
that the Marxist desire for dictatorship (of the proletariat), as a
practical means of abolishing liberal bourgeois order, and to the
degree that it follows a dialectical method inspired by Hegelian
categories, has resulted in a duplicitous position. On one hand, it
has participated in the practical impossibility of dictatorship,
insofar as it has contributed, along with the rest of bourgeois
liberalism, to the dissolution of the absolute character of moral
disjunction.18 On the other hand, the very process of dialectical
absorption of contradiction and disjunction has produced a
practical permanence of dictatorship by the systematic rationalist
principle over the singular and accidental nature of history. The
practical outcome of this second manifestation would be the
notion of a philosophical vanguard that would represent the world
spirit in its development (in the Hegelian strain), or the vanguard
revolutionary party that would control the significations of
revolutionary action (in the Leninist-Bolshevik strain). Thus,
Schmitt sees at the heart of Marxism an absolute logic that forces
all elements to their most extreme, so that they can be overturned,
historically, by dialectical necessity.
In this schema, thought itself becomes proof that history has
in fact taken place, insofar as the present moment of intellectual
judgment merely bears the outcome of some dialectical
contradiction unfolded in the now-deceased past. According to
Schmitt’s reading of dialectical Marxism, once it becomes possible
for consciousness to grasp the present moment, the contradiction
has already been historically completed and resolved. Schmitt
writes:
The thinker, however, only knows coming things concretely in
the negative, as the dialectical contradiction of what is already

16 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 68 (translating CARL SCHMITT, DIE

GEISTESGESCHICHTLICHE LAGE DES HEUTIGEN PARLIAMENTARISMUS (Duncker &
Humblot eds., 1996)). Incidentally, it is worth noting the central currency of Entwicklung
in Eduard Bernstein’s critical reconstruction of Marxism, and the self-fashioning of social
democracy, a term that Sorel explicitly and vehemently discards.
17 Id. (footnote omitted).
18 See id. at 57.
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1496 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

historically finished. He discovers the past as development into

the present, which he sees in its continuous evolution
[Entwicklung]; and if he has correctly understood it and
correctly constructed it, then there is the certainty that this, as a
thing known perfectly, belongs to the consciousness of a stage
that has already been overcome and whose last hour has
arrived.19
Marxism’s alleged science consists, according to Schmitt, of
“an evolutionary metaphysics [Entwicklungsmetaphysik] that
makes consciousness into the criterion of progress [Fortshritt].”20
However we evaluate the accuracy of this statement, it does
nominally “explain” why, in post-World War I Marxist circles,
such emphasis was placed on correctness of understanding, and
why class consciousness specifically became the most underscored
and negotiated theoretical domain in early twentieth-century
Marxism (Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács, Gramsci).
I shall forego the obvious critique that comes to mind—that
Schmitt judges Marxism with the statutes of the most progressivist
and teleological view of Hegelian dialectics.21 Instead, I shall take
as my point of departure Schmitt’s fascinating conclusion that
dialectical Marxism is intrinsically incapable of revolutionary
action, precisely because it claims to have the logic of history
under control. Regardless of its philosophical (or even historical)
accuracy, this position is crucial because it enforces a singular track
in Schmitt’s argument: namely, that all revolutionary Marxism
(and in his time, Lenin and Trotsky are the eponymous culprits)
proceeds with a theory of direct action that undoes the Hegelian-
inspired desire toward what he calls “an educational
dictatorship”—the despotic rule of enlightened reason by the
representatives of the Spirit—and turns instead to a wholly
irrationalist praxis.
This irrationalist force does not even obey the dictates of the
drive toward “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose logic
points, after all, to an emulation of Jacobian rationalism—a
position Schmitt had already developed in Die Diktatur.22 In his
own words:
This is not a rationalism that transforms itself through a radical
exaggeration into its own opposite and fantasizes utopias, but
finally a new evaluation of rational thought, a new belief in

19 Id. at 61.
20 Id. at 63.
21 If nothing else, the dialectics of Benjamin and Adorno would cast, in distinct ways,
their spectral disproof over this assumption.
22 CARL SCHMITT, DIE DIKTATUR: VON DEN ANFÄNGEN DES MODERNEN
SOUVERÄNTÄTSKEDANKENS BIS ZUM PROLETARISCHEN KLASSENKAMPF (4th ed. 1978).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1497

instinct and intuition that lays to rest every belief in discussion

and would also reject the possibility that mankind could be
made ready for discussion through an educational dictatorship
[Erziehungsdiktatur].23
In this sense, Schmitt places Bolshevik action in the anarcho-
syndicalist tradition which, in his mind, tends to look away from
science, and toward art as a methodological grid for understanding
social existence and social action, whose legacy extends from
Proudhon and Bakunin (through Bergson) to Sorel.24
There are two things to be said here. First, Schmitt follows a
course of analysis that must reduce the basis of revolutionary
action to an irrational principle; this is a dead-end point, in the
sense that it is the only possible outcome—an evolutionary
endpoint—drawn from his analysis of dialectical thought. Second,
by mere logical consequence, Schmitt must begin his discussion of
Sorel’s mythological theory by confining myth to irrationalism. To
do this, he reduces the rich conceptualization of Sorel’s notion of
myth entirely to the Bergsonian category of intuition—which is
itself problematic, insofar as Bergson’s intuition is never simply
irrational—while ignoring the long, albeit peculiar, trajectory of
the notion of intuition in Western rationalist philosophy, including,
not least, its importance in Kant.
Perhaps the most interesting and most revealing aspect of
Schmitt’s argument regarding the legacy of Sorel occurs during the
course of his juxtaposition of Proudhon with Donoso Cortés, when
he proclaims Donoso to be Sorel’s precursor from the other side of
the political divide. It is particularly revealing insofar as Schmitt
considers the passion of Donoso Cortés against socialism to reside
in the belief that socialism is the greatest enemy, “something
enormous, greater than liberal moderation, because it went back
to ultimate problems and gave a decisive answer to radical
questions—because it had a theology.”25 No doubt, Schmitt
absorbed both the logic and the passion of this position into the
core of his political thinking, which is why, as I pointed out at the
outset, Marxism is his real enemy and the polemics against
Marxism is a theological life-and-death matter. This is why Sorel is
such a formidable enemy, and also why he is simultaneously

23 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 66.

24 For Schmitt, this shift to the methodology of art constitutes “a politics of
unmediatedly concrete life” and gives rise to a political theory of myth, as he puts it in an
article on Sorel written concurrently with The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in
which several paragraphs are reproduced verbatim. CARL SCHMITT, Die Politische
Theorie des Mythus, in POSITIONEN UND BEGRIFFE 9-18 (Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt
1940).
25 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 70 (emphasis added).
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1498 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

treated with such ambivalence: because at the origin of Sorel’s

activist passion resides faith, not intellectual clarity. However, it
would be an error to ascribe to Sorel a religious, not to mention
theological, discourse.26
Following Donoso Cortés’s perception that syndicalist action
is based not on “the dialectically construed tensions of Hegelian
Marxism,” but on the immediate “intuitive contradiction of mythic
images,”27 Schmitt proclaims that Sorel’s martial élan, as he calls it,
has nothing to do with a militarism of the Spirit. Schmitt correctly
reads Sorel’s hatred of all intellectualism, centralization, and
uniformity and understands fully that Sorel’s sense of
creative/destructive force, always plural and anonymous, strikes
against the rationalism and monism that lead to the educational
dictatorship of a dogmatic Hegelian Marxism. Schmitt argues that
the most creative gesture of proletarian force is to usher violence
into the place of power, instituting an entirely new means of
struggle, and refusing the means of the parliamentary game, which
is bound to paralyze all proletarian action.
Finally, facing the formidable opposition of Sorel, Schmitt
takes up two points of critique. The first is of a practical nature,
suggesting that the irrationalist insurrectionary tactics of anarcho-
syndicalism can never constitute an affirmative politics (as we
would say in today’s terms), because inevitably anarcho-
syndicalism’s political terms of struggle, at some point, would have
to confront the economic sphere. This would lead, by definition,
to a certain bourgeois domestication of principles—to a domestic
order of rule in the literal sense of oikonomia.28 Schmitt fortifies
this standpoint by pointing to the bourgeoisie as a social-historical
category restricted to the West, which explains for him why
Bolshevik action in Russia was successful. While there is a
notorious problem in Marxist circles regarding the anomaly of the
Russian revolution in terms of political economy, Schmitt explains
the event as evidence that Bolshevik action has nothing to do with
the Marxist cultural tradition. It signifies an explicitly anti-
Western act of the proletarianization of a society without a
capitalist bourgeoisie—in effect, a nationalization of society (and
the term here must resound both literally and in its usual economic
terms). Building on Sorel’s own assessment,29 Schmitt argues that,
in making Russia Muscovite again, the Bolsheviks proved that

26 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI, Georges Sorel: A Jansenist Marxism, in 2 MAIN CURRENTS

OF MARXISM: ITS ORIGINS, GROWTH AND DISSOLUTION 149 (P.S. Falla trans., 1978).
27 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 70.
28 See id. at 73.
29 GEORGES SOREL, Pour Lénine, reprinted in SOREL, supra note 9, at app.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1499

nationalism was stronger than the myth of the class struggle.30 This
historically correct observation, however, becomes the basis for
another, rather typical, Schmittian formalism. It leads to the
questionable conclusion that the strongest myth in the modern
world is nationalism, and to the embarrassing position of
attributing a Machiavellian political realism to Mussolini, whom
Schmitt then regards as a visionary brave enough to proclaim
socialism an inferior mythology.
This trajectory precludes Schmitt’s real engagement with
Sorel’s two essential elements, which, in my opinion, form the crux
of his contribution to political theory: the significance of the
general strike as historical form (as pure praxis) and the nature of
myth as a social-imaginary element. The two are intertwined.
Sorel conceives the general strike as the exemplary instance of
violence that undoes the violent logic of the state, precisely
because it is propelled by the catalytic power of mythic
imagination. He sees the general strike as a figure whose
importance lies more in its potentiality and less in its eventuality,
since even in the strictest historical terms the general strike rarely
occupies the status of event. The general strike, Sorel argues,
exists in the domain of myth, and it is precisely this insight which
makes Sorel’s contribution invaluable. He claims, from the very
beginning, that “proletarian violence changes the aspect of all the
conflicts in which it intervenes.”31 Proletarian violence is not of the
same epistemic order as bourgeois political violence, because it
exposes the so-called primordial rights of man as a historical
construct, demonstrating that the rights of man possess class
content.32 The general strike promises nothing short of paralyzing
society. It disregards bourgeois society’s foundational right: the
free right to produce and develop economically without obstacle.
Thus, the catastrophic promise of the general strike operates at the
level of social-imaginary signification, with a sense of certainty

30 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 75.

31 GEORGES SOREL, REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE 19 (T.E. Hulme trans., 1941)
(translating SOREL, supra note 9).
32 In his recent analysis of Schmitt (and without invoking Sorel at all), Slavoj ðiñek
reaches the same conclusion. Although the position of proletarian revolutionary action is
obviously linked to the predicament of the working class and the historical conditions of
the workers’ movement, it cannot be reduced to a determinist causal relation where class
determines political action. Proletarian violence unveils the truth of the class struggle, not
because it expresses a class interest, pure and simple, but because it recognizes and
exposes the class interest of all social antagonism. Precisely because the proletarian
position, as a subjective commitment to revolutionary action, establishes the class struggle
as the law of social antagonism, one can engage in political praxis beyond his/her class
position. Slavoj ðiñek, Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics, in THE CHALLENGE OF
CARL SCHMITT 18 (Chantal Mouffe ed., Verso 1999).
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1500 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

irreducible to its parts and impervious to analytic technique, such

as the intuitive knowledge of myth.
Anticipating the usual objections, Sorel quickly clarifies that
myths are neither illusions nor facts.33 Myths are incommensurable
to facts because they may exceed facts, much like revolutionary
desire (or utopian vision) can never be exhausted in the fact/event
of revolution. On the other hand, myths are not illusions, because
myths are demonstrable historical forces—imagined alterities of
society that make historical action possible.34 The main
characteristic of myth, according to Sorel, is infinity, which is also
said to include a sense of indefiniteness. Socialism, as theory only,
is ultimately reducible to its words, indeed to its word (of promise,
of definition, etc.). But praxis, exemplified for the anarcho-
syndicalist Sorel, in the act of the general strike, “puts forward no
definite project of future social organization,”35 and is therefore
irreducible, indefinite, and infinite, both because it is irreducible to
its parts (that is, singular), and also because it is interminably
reproducible each time anew.36
What enables Sorel to make this argument is Bergson’s
philosophy of singularity within duration, whereby a past moment
in one’s life, unrepeatable though it is, may be reinserted in the
historical flow as the basis for a present moment of decision. Sorel
believes that society is capable of such catalytic moments where, in
a fashion reminiscent of Vico’s ricorso (or, in another register,
Hölderlin’s Umkehr), an imagined alterity is achieved by invoking
the experience of the past—not in order to repeat it, but in order
to peel off the accumulated inertia of culture on the way to a
rejuvenated history. Such recursive moments have nothing
instrumental about them. The general strike exemplifies a

33 See SOREL, supra note 31, at 23.

34 Here, the question of whether the result of a given historical action may or may not
correspond to its imagined content is irrelevant. From the standpoint of revolutionary
desire/vision, it is certainly irrelevant that the imaginary of the October Revolution drove
itself to suicide in Kronstad a few years later. As we know from history, this did not mean
the death of the fact of workers’ councils (their historical existence, potential and actual),
nor did it mean the abolition of their intrinsic revolutionary content.
35 SOREL, supra note 31, at 27.
36 This is why critiques, such as Ernst Fraenkel’s, which attempt to articulate the
relation between Sorel and Schmitt as parallel tendencies are misguided. Fraenkel has no
conceptual framework within which to place the non-instrumentalist politics of Sorel—
politics founded on a meditation of the epistemology of praxis as an anarchist act (i.e., an
act without arch‘ or telos)—because he perceives politics not from the standpoint of
process, but from the standpoint of achieving power—or, in other words, from an
apotheosis of state sovereignty. How Fraenkel then concludes that Schmitt—the theorist
of sovereign power—becomes a Sorelian, is not simply a matter of misreading, but of mis-
thinking. ERNST FRAENKEL, THE DUAL STATE: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE THEORY OF
DICTATORSHIP (E.A. Shils et al. trans., Octagon Books 1969) (1941).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1501

moment of imagined alterity, whether it will actually succeed or

not. In the same way that its instrumental failure (the fact that it
will not lead to a takeover of power) does not preclude its re-
occurrence with an equally radical transformative potential each
time, its actuality is always singular and exhausted in its own
historical moment.37
There is, in this respect, “a heterogeneity between the ends in
view and the ends actually realized,”38 which is Sorel’s way of
describing the relation between theory and praxis. It is praxis,
more than theory, that “takes place” in the domain of myth, and it
is the very nonspeculative way that praxis prevails over theory—an
irrevocable present whose potential future as analytical plan is
irrelevant—that registers the mythic nature of proletarian
violence. The general strike is:
[T]he myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised, an
organization of images capable of evoking instinctively all the
sentiments which correspond to the diverse manifestations of
war against modern society. . . . We thus obtain that intuition of
Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clarity—
and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously.39
This instantaneous understanding becomes possible because
the general strike is an act whose violence exceeds this act as such.
As the act is exhausted in a theater of power, in which order of one
kind or another always wins, proletarian violence generates the
sort of knowledge about the contention of social identities that no
power can liquefy. In Sorel’s hands, this dynamic becomes a rare
theorization of ideological force, in which the “distortion” of
reality is hardly the conduit of self-alienation, but is instead the
very means that keeps reality open to self-alteration.40
But Sorel is right to point out that the mythic dimension of
proletarian violence has nothing to do with utopian yearning. In
the sense that myth is an irreducible expression of “collective”
conviction (not attained by rational analysis but intuited as integral
experience), it is a radical language of the moment that does not
bear dissection and classification at the level of historical

37 It is worthwhile to remember—particularly in the context of a discussion of

Schmitt—Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s point that Sorel attempts to think the
specificity of logic of contingency. ERNESTO LACLAU & CHANTAL MOUFFE,
HEGEMONY AND SOCIALIST STRATEGY: TOWARD A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
36-42 (Winston Moore & Paul Cammack trans., 1985).
38 SOREL, supra note 31, at 135.
39 Id. at 137.
40 This is my understanding of the recent argument that Ernesto Laclau has made with
admirable dexterity on the impossibility of the end of ideology, in which Sorel’s thought
figures prominently. Ernesto Laclau, The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of
Ideology, 1 J. POL. IDEOLOGIES 201 (1996).
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1502 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

description. The social imaginary of the general strike is by

definition catalytic of social order; its very conceptualization
enacts an abolition of that order. In contrast, utopia is a projected
model that invites discussion like any other social institution.
Utopias, according to Sorel, are concrete projections, which are
therefore definite and linked to the present by analogy. Myths are
not projections. They are always present and yet, because they do
not belong to the order of fact, they are indefinite and
indeterminate. Thus, myths are beyond analogy. The radical
present of the general strike enacts a “framing of a future in some
indeterminate time,”41 but it is not utopian, because it lacks
teleology, whether conceptual or actual. Sorel’s terms suggest that
violence performs myth, not the reverse. Proletarian violence is a
sort of antinomic condition to the paranomia of bourgeois law.
Schmitt either does not see, or does not want to confront, this
argument on its terms. This is quite unlike him, for he consciously
cultivates the dismantling of his enemy by appropriating the logic
of enemy terms. Not confident that I can subject Schmitt to a
phenomenological psychoanalysis on this issue, I would
nonetheless underline, as a point of departure for an
interpretation, his warning at the conclusion of his argument on
Sorel: “Of course, the abstract danger this kind of irrationalism
poses is great. The last remnants of solidarity and a feeling of
belonging together will be destroyed in the pluralism of an
unforeseeable number of myths. For political theology this is
polytheism, just as every myth is polytheistic.”42
This astute recognition of the essentially polytheistic
imaginary of myth is tantamount to a confession: political theology
cannot tolerate the plural indeterminacy of myth, because political
theology is possible only within the boundaries of a monotheistic
imagination. The immediate and obvious implication is that the
terrain of the mythical is outside the boundaries of political
theology, and the two domains are essentially incompatible. The
instance of Carl Schmitt’s late critique of Hans Blumenberg (as an
afterword to Politische Theologie II)43 does suggest, if nothing else,
that Schmitt was perfectly conscious of this incompatibility and
that he was also committed to the theological arch‘ of his political
thinking throughout his life. Schmitt’s reply to Blumenberg’s
arguments on legitimation and secularization is formed according
to his early thesis on the crypto-metaphysics of secularization,

41 SOREL, supra note 31, at 133.

42 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 76 (emphasis added).
43 CARL SCHMITT, POLITISCHE THEOLOGIE II: DIE LEGENDE VON DER
ERLEDIGUNG JEDER POLITISCHEN THEOLOGIE (1970).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1503

which delineated once and for all the terrain of “political

theology” as a project. Thus, Schmitt will impute Blumenberg
with forced de-theologizing that continues to occlude the reality of
secular metaphysics, while Blumenberg will counter that secular
thought merely re-appropriates from the language of theology its
suppressed and silenced mythical elements.44 The two positions
negate each other; their incompatibility parallels the
incompatibility between myth and political theology—which is
hardly surprising, given that Blumenberg’s entire project is a
meditation on mythical thinking.
Schmitt’s notorious and unwavering vigilance throughout his
life against all developments in actual and theoretical politics that
posed a challenge to his own positions made it inevitable that
Blumenberg would command his attention this late in life. This is
not merely a matter of encountering an adversary in the same
terrain (secularization, legitimacy, etc.), but, more importantly,
counteracting a foe because he conceptualizes this terrain in
mythical terms. In this respect, Blumenberg’s position almost
becomes the late version of Sorel’s, with the significant exception
that it lacks the political expediency that characterized Sorel’s
forceful challenge to Hegelian Marxism, and therefore turned him
from foe to adversary with a distinctive (even if repressed) mark of
ambivalence. Much as Schmitt was deeply troubled by Sorel’s
insurrectionary epistemology in the Weimar years, he was
disturbed by Blumenberg’s challenge to his own secularization
thesis in the 1970s. The contested ground is formed by myth
upturning the basic political-theological terms. Judging from the
conclusion of the argument on Sorel, Schmitt was aware of myth’s
epistemological disruption of his project’s foundations since the
early 1920s. Attempting to diffuse the threat by raising the
oversimplified charges of irrationalism, Schmitt never takes up the
crux of the challenge, which he recognizes explicitly as the threat
of “polytheism.”
However, Blumenberg renews and actually raises the stakes
of this challenge, because he, too, has founded a project on
dismantling the inherited assumptions of the Enlightenment’s
purge of “other-worldly” categories in history. But whereas
Schmitt’s denuding of Enlightenment authority desires, in turn, a

44 HANS BLUMENBERG, THE LEGITIMACY OF THE MODERN AGE 89-102 (Robert

Wallace trans., 1983); SCHMITT, supra note 43, at 109-26. Schmitt’s reading of
Blumenberg as a progressivist is a gross misapprehension of Blumenberg’s “evolutionary”
categories, which have nothing to do with Entwicklung, and are, rather, akin to Adorno’s
notion of sedimentation of content that becomes, in its transhistorical space-time,
immanent to the form.
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1504 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

reconstitution of theological categories for historical thinking,

Blumenberg disputes the notion that the Enlightenment signifies
modernity’s moment of transcending or obliterating myth, and
proceeds to recuperate the presence of myth within Enlightenment
thought itself. In other words, Blumenberg’s seminal Work on
Myth is a continuation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment project—a
dialectical continuation in which Enlightenment is rescued by
means of myth. This is not as farfetched as it seems, considering
that Horkheimer and Adorno’s project essentially consists of a
philosophical outwitting of myth through a specific exercise of
Enlightenment thought that would be conscious and critical of its
own mythological propensities.45
Nevertheless, one need not consider the matter from this
standpoint in order to realize that Schmitt’s and Blumenberg’s
critiques of Enlightenment and secularization are separated by a
chasm. Schmitt’s answer to his correct reading of the metaphysics
of secularization is the famous thesis in Political Theology,
according to which the exception that guarantees sovereignty is, in
the language of jurisprudence, analogous to the miracle in
theology. In the last instance, this analogical gesture is actually
tautological, as it subscribes to an explicit metaphysics; it de-
secularizes a secularism that has been discovered, after all, to be
metaphysical in essence. Conversely, Blumenberg counters the
metaphysics of secularism with a real historical alternative. His
concern with myth goes beyond the standard notion of myth as
narrative of origin (the arch-tales of the world). He investigates
myth as present-time logic, as history’s scientia in the strict sense: a
mode of knowledge that commands a generative domain of social-
symbolic forms, autonomous from the generative logic of science
or reason—which is why Schmitt’s charge of Blumenberg’s
scientism is, at the very least, myopic. For our limited purposes
here, it suffices to note that Blumenberg understands myth as a
mode of knowledge that counters the “absolutism of reality” and
the intrinsic terror this entails by processing and fashioning reality
through imaginative invention. In psychoanalytic terms, this
understanding of mythical thinking would be tantamount to the
work of sublimation: the intervention in and appropriation of
reality by society’s psychic forces, by means of its radical
imagination.46 Mythic thought, in this respect, is irreducibly

45 Note that the proposed sequel to the book, which Horkheimer and Adorno never
completed, was to be titled RETTUNG DER AUFKLÄRUNG.
46 For a discussion of this issue, specifically in regard to the work of Cornelius
Castoriadis, see Stathis Gourgouris, Philosophy and Sublimation, THESIS ELEVEN, May
1997, at 31.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1505

historical; it cannot precede a society’s imaginary.47

When Schmitt speaks from the standpoint of “political
theology,” this understanding of myth is an anathema. As he
consistently argued since Roman Catholicism and Political Form,48
it is tantamount to the work of the Antichrist. Since he configures
“mythical thinking” on the grounds of irrationalist image-
projection that occasionally serves to consolidate the social body,
as in the case of nationalist myth (the exemplar being Mussolini’s
Fascism), Schmitt is bound to see myth as an element that
surpasses the historical, whether as arch‘ or as telos. An
interesting deviation may be a brief foray into literary criticism,
Hamlet oder Hekuba: der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel,49 whereby
a discussion of history’s relation to tragedy yields some revealing
conclusions about myth as a historical force. This small text may
be considered Schmitt’s deferred response to Walter Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel thesis, which was itself partially indebted to the
methodological avenues opened by Political Theology, according
to Benjamin’s explicit tribute to Schmitt in a letter that has
become notorious.50 Though I can only treat this text in passing, I
do believe that it deserves to shake its minor status in Schmitt
studies, not merely for its intriguing views on the nature of
tragedy, but for the way that Schmitt addresses the issue of history
(and myth’s implication with history) by means of a theory of
tragedy which, in my mind, challenges his own “political-
theological” categories.51

47 On the point of myth as a radical historical element, Blumenberg differs

substantially from Ernst Cassirer, who, nonetheless, remains the main source of reference
to mythic thought in the twentieth century, often leading to reading of myth in religious,
monotheistically driven terms. Conversely, my contention is that not only Blumenberg’s,
but also Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s, and Benjamin’s views about myth are profoundly
historical at the core; the frequent—though not exclusive—use of theological language in
their discussion of myth (particularly in the case of Benjamin) must be considered a
gesture undermining the religious tendency to see mythification as mystification.
48 CARL SCHMITT, ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND POLITICAL FORM (G.L. Ulmen trans.,
1996).
49 CARL SCHMITT, HAMLET ODER HEKUBA: DER EINBRUCH DER ZEIT IN DAS SPIEL
(1956).
50 The editors, Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, inexcusably omitted this
letter, sent to Schmitt in December, 1930, from the 1966 publication of Benjamin’s Briefe.
The letter’s content is innocuous; Benjamin merely announces that his publisher is to send
Schmitt a copy of the TRAUERSPIEL book and acknowledges his methodological debt to
Schmitt’s writings of the period. The gesture, however, has great significance because it
was expressed across a political divide (echoed later in its omission from the Briefe), and
Schmitt himself was known to have treasured the letter’s existence.
51 The issue of Schmitt undermining or contradicting himself in the long trajectory of
his thought is rather complicated and deserves a paper of its own. To criticize Schmitt by
merely pointing out his contradictions, inconsistencies, opportunistic deviations, etc., is to
forego the challenge of a substantial critique. Hence, it is not surprising that the
groundwork of the best readings of Schmitt is the recognition of his essential duplicity and
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1506 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

In his usual way, Schmitt conducts his fleeting observations on

tragedy with an underlying critique of the tradition of German
literary criticism, which has operated—with the romantics always
at the helm—by privileging the lyrical subject over the dramatic.
Schmitt reads the prominence of poetry in German literary
thought as both cause and effect of the propensity (since Göethe)
toward aesthetic autonomy and the creative genius. His argument
is based on an exemplary historical-sociological account of the
development of German national culture in an essentially stateless
transition from baroque feudal order to nineteenth-century
capitalism—a point he had already developed comparatively in his
Die Formung des Französischen Geistes Durch die Legisten.52 Very
schematically, the point of comparison is not only the French
model—where the privilege of the dramatic arts is exemplified by
the strong state institution and the mutation of courtly literature to
the seventeenth-century court classicism of Racine, Corneille, or
Molière—but, more importantly, the English model, whose own
strong baroque Trauerspiel tradition is able to mutate, unlike
Germany’s, to the bonafide tragic world of Shakespeare.
Carl Schmitt argues that in Elizabethan England there was yet
no institutionalized theatricality; society was internally, as it were,
in a theatrical condition. Shakespeare’s emergence and eventual
establishment of the Globe Theater chronicled the externalization
of social theatricality into an artistic form, a form that actualized
the social-historical demands in a distinct performative moment of
culture. According to Schmitt, Shakespeare’s success was due not
to his inventive genius, but to his extraordinary alertness to the
génie of a reality that remained excessively performative outside
the structural limitations of a centralized cultural order. Schmitt
writes: “The surplus value [of tragedy] lies within the objective
reality of tragedy itself happening, in the enigmatic involvement
and entanglement of indisputably real people in the unpredictable
course of indisputably real events.”53 Shakespeare may be said to
generate culture, not insofar as he invented a new cultural
practice, but insofar as he realized on the stage society’s own

unequivocal contradictions. The methodology, theoretical impetus, or political aspirations

of such readings may differ widely, but the intellectual engagement with Schmitt is equally
faultless. See generally, e.g., CARLO GALLI, GENEALOGIA DELLA POLITICA: CARL
SCHMITT E LA CRISI DEL PENSIERO POLITICO MODERNO (1996); REINHARD MEHRING,
PATHETISCHES DENKEN (1989); JOHN P. MCCORMICK, CARL SCHMITT’S CRITIQUE OF
LIBERALISM: AGAINST POLITICS AS TECHNOLOGY (1997).
52 CARL SCHMITT, Die Formung des Französischen Geistes Durch die Legisten, in
STAAT, GROSSRAUM, NOMOS: ARBEITEN AUS DEN JAHREN 1916-1919, at 184 (Dunker
& Humblot 1995).
53 SCHMITT, supra note 49, at 46.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1507

mythological performativity. The vanguard nature of Hamlet, with

its circuitous, ambivalent, self-reflexive, and even convoluted
structures, is, for Schmitt, an exemplary instance of the
mythification of a precise social-historical moment. It is a case
where “the play on stage could appear without artificiality as
theater within theater, as a living play within the immediately
present play of real life,”54 instituting a doubling effect that is set
up for further externalization within its own domain in a kind of
mise en abîme, exemplified by the famous play-within-a-play
section in Hamlet.
Here, Schmitt constructs an insightful argument:
The play within a play in Act III of Hamlet is not only no
look behind the scenes; to the contrary, it is the play proper
repeated before the curtains. This presupposes a realistic
core of the most intense present-ness and actuality. . . .
Only a strong core of reality [Aktualitätskern] could stand
up to the double exposure of the stage upon the stage.55
In other words, because reality itself has not yet sacrificed its
spontaneous theatricality to a cultural institution presided over by
the (theatrical) order of the state, the boundaries between the
reality and the theater are still open. Thus, reality leans on the
very production of the play, conferring upon it not merely
retrospective interpretive significance, but real-time productive
significance. It is reality, and not dramatic invention, that brings
about the grand innovation Schmitt calls “the Hamletization of the
hero,” a modern mythifying gesture that forces ambivalence and
indecision upon the classic realm of heroic action. This gesture
does not belong to Shakespeare; it belongs to history. More
precisely, it belongs to Shakespeare’s attunement to history’s
performance, which opens a tear in the play’s unity so that
historical space-time may flow through it, so that a drama on stage
and history’s drÇmenon (which at this very moment becomes an
event as theater) can be performatively interwoven. Though this
gesture may seem to disrupt the “classical” integrity of the play as
pure artistic entity, it nonetheless enables the transformation of
the figure of Hamlet from dramatic persona to myth (and
concurrently, Schmitt argues, the play Hamlet from a Trauerspiel
to a tragedy).
This moment of mythification means nothing outside a
performative actualization of a specific social-historical reality.
Herein lies the significance of the tragic form as a political force, a
form generative, not constitutive, of the polis:

54 Id. at 43.
55 Id. at 45.
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1508 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

[Tragedy] is the final and insurmountable limit of literary

invention. A poet can and should invent a great deal, but he
cannot invent the realistic core of tragic action [Handlung]. . . .
The core of tragic action [Geschehens], the origin of tragic
authenticity, is something so irrevocable that no mortal can
imagine it, no genius can construct it. . . . In tragedy, the
common public sphere (which in every performance
encompasses the author, the actors, and the audience) is not
based on the commonly accepted rules of language and play but
on the lived experience of a shared historical reality.56
Regardless of how this statement figures within Schmitt’s
oeuvre as a whole, it does provide a concise presentation of
tragedy that enables us to understand why myth is not merely the
source-text of tragedy (the story upon which a specific drama is
constructed), but the actual reality that enables drama as a form to
exist. Athenian tragedy already showed why myth is not original
but contemporary, as the implicit imaginary that lends a
community the necessary coherence to put into practice (and
perhaps into question) its own institutions. This coherence does
not necessarily imply cohesion or homogeneity. It testifies to the
barest elements of a shared historical existence, within which a
subversive self-altering imaginary may potentially develop, and,
depending on the institutional conditions, perhaps even flourish.
The knowledge of myth as source-text, which the community
possesses, is invested in the performance not as origin, but as
“reality,” as present-tense mythic thought that will then enable the
judgment (krisis) of the given tragedy as a specific performative
instance of myth. In other words, in tragedy, myth does not
preside as origin, but is enacted as drÇmenon, beyond the
boundaries of the stage, for the simple reason that the entire polis
is reminded by the theatrical experience that its political substance
is predicated on its own continuous theatricality. The political
community is constituted not only in but as theatron; it is theater as
such.
Historically speaking, Athenian tragedy is an exemplary
moment of performative myth that fosters interrogation of existing
institutions, and this historical nature cannot be disavowed when
one speaks of tragedy as a form. This is the step that Schmitt does
not make, because his reading of Hamlet as tragedy—otherwise
insightful in pointing to history’s complicity with myth—sees
tragedy as mere confirmation of society’s historical myth(s), never
raising the question of tragedy as a mode of interrogation of
society’s historical myth(s). The crossroads of theatrical reality on

56 Id.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1509

and off stage demand a dialectical apprehension that carries no

instrumental guarantee, since even the most classical
(Aristotelian) resolution on stage is immediately undermined by
the irresolute critical praxis of the spectator polity. This is another
point that Schmitt misses, no doubt because he would find the
dialectical undecidability of ancient democratic politics intolerable
on principle. In the process, he also misses Benjamin’s
understanding of the inevitably political signification of
theatricality at every specific historical frame.
Schmitt concludes his Hamlet oder Hekuba with a brief
appendix, responding directly to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel reading of
Hamlet. He provides an admittedly concise explanation of
England’s peculiar historical maneuver around the institution of
modern political sovereignty—exemplified by classicist France—
by showing how England passes directly from an exemplary feudal
order to a naval imperialist power, from a traditional terrestrial
existence to maritime global expansion—to which he links the
extraordinary occurrence of the industrial revolution. For Schmitt,
England enacted a real revolution far beyond the “revolutionary
progress” from the State of Louis XIV to the State of the Citizen.
The Shakespeare phenomenon occurs in the very last phase of
England’s “barbaric” existence—“barbaric” from the standpoint
of the “civilized” Sovereign of Europe—but also on the cusp of a
duly “barbaric” society poised to enter another phase of
civilization that would leave the “civilized” politics of sovereignty
behind. Therefore, if the play is perceived in terms of the
historical representation of power, which is essentially the point of
Schmitt’s analysis, then the “Hamletization of the hero”
documents the hopelessness and intellectual malaise of a
bewildered class about to be swept into an incomprehensible
historical reality.
Schmitt insightfully attributes the status of tragic myth to the
“Hamletization of the hero”—as the new imaginary element that
distorts and reassembles the classical hero’s relation with fatum
(though Schmitt doesn’t phrase it in quite these terms)—which
carries a veritable historical force. But Schmitt’s perception of
history, or, conversely, his metaphysical perception, is cemented in
a determinate order that translates everything into a specific set of
terms. Thus, Schmitt reads Benjamin’s explanation of Hamlet’s
malaise as the outcome of religious crisis, not as a deeply historical
meditation on the hopelessness of a worldly history that has
emerged victorious over religion. Schmitt attributes to Benjamin a
residual theologism, while in fact Benjamin submerges himself in
religious metaphor in order to explode theological assurance from
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1510 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

within. Schmitt’s act is tantamount to self-occultation, as

Castoriadis would put it. Benjamin succeeds in evoking the
historical-philosophical dimensions of a cultural moment by
exploring a form whose Jetztzeit demonstrates precisely that
history may be untotalizable, undecidable, and indecisive, but is
nonetheless a terrain—a “stage”—where anything can happen.57
Contrary to Schmitt, Benjamin reads “Hamletization” not as the
outcome of class bewilderment, but as a radical moment of
realization. Indecision is the sort of praxis that emerges from the
hopeless knowledge of historical multivalence in a world denying
the possibility of transcendence. Thus, Benjamin’s agreement with
Schmitt on the fact that Hamlet is distinct from the German
Trauerspiel (and thus exempted from its historical failure) hinges
on a contrary thesis: Hamlet as a document of this radical moment
of historical realization.
Schmitt’s encounters with Benjamin and Blumenberg in his
later writings are marked by the same occluding ambivalence he
had extended to Sorel in the 1920s. We see repeatedly how points
of agreement were either based on contrary terms or were
articulated simultaneously with contradictory conclusions. Indeed,
beyond the critique of depolitization inherent in the metaphysics
of liberalism—which still remains his most challenging
contribution to political theory and the most coherent aspect of his
work throughout—Schmitt’s methodological duplicity is most
rigorously articulated in his attempts to encounter myth with the
armory of political theology. Any attempt to deny, or even to
resolve, this essential duplicity in Schmitt’s thinking—whereby his
association with Nazism is often dismissed as mere opportunism—
can only lead to “Schmittianism,” to an ideological reproduction in
the most pejorative sense. What makes the thought of Carl
Schmitt worthy of discussion is precisely this duplicity, this
continuous “Hamletization” elevated to the status of method.58
Schmitt himself confirms this insight with a quip, whose off-the-
cuff tone is just as exemplary of his duplicity as is the content of his
words. During his interrogation by the Allies at Nuremberg,
Schmitt responded: “The Dr. Carl Schmitt myth is pure myth.
Carl Schmitt is quite a peculiar individual, not just a professor; he
is also a composite of various individuals,” adding shortly

57 My reading here follows Samuel Weber’s ground-breaking discussion of the

Schmitt-Benjamin relation on the matter of TRAUERSPIEL and the exception. Samuel
Webber, Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, in
ENLIGHTENMENTS: ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CRITICAL THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY
FRENCH THOUGHT 141 (Henry Kunneman & Hent de Vries eds., 1993).
58 For the most persuasive argument in these terms, see Jan Müller, Carl Schmitt’s
Method: Between Ideology, Demonology and Myth, 4 J. POL. IDEOLOGIES 61 (1999).
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1511

afterward, “I am an intellectual adventurer.”59

The avowal of adventurism should not shield the disavowal of
myth. Indeed, behind the explicit denial of the myth of Carl
Schmitt, the avowed adventurist logic points to an equivalent
hidden desire to gain the status of myth. However, a major
question is immediately posed: which myth? Is it the vital
insurrectionary force of Sorelian praxis, or the tragic mythification
of history in Hamlet, or the all-potent nationalist myth of
Mussolini, or the theological politics of the katechon? Schmitt’s
duplicity makes any definitive answer difficult, because he has
reserved for all at least one occasion of more or less direct avowal.
However, in his relation to Sorel, whatever instance of
identification is claimed would have to be subjected to the rule of
ambivalence. Even if, in fact, Schmitt did subscribe to Sorel’s
mythical thinking, he did so only in terms of its vitalist and
polemical aspects. He did his best to repress Sorel’s own impetus
behind these aspects, not so much his Marxism, but his anarchic
vision. In instances when, operating from the other side of his
ambivalence, Schmitt expresses his fear for Sorel’s irrationalism,
he aims to harness Sorel’s vitalism under the principles of order.
In this sense, we might say that, if Schmitt is at all Sorelian, he is
an authoritarian and hierarchic Sorelian, which is, for all practical
purposes, a contradiction in terms. Philosophically speaking, it
would be tantamount to claiming that myth is a theological
concept—a contradiction that Schmitt obviously understands, if we
remember the extraordinary comment that closes his analysis of
Sorel in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy: “The last
remnants of solidarity and a feeling of belonging together will be
destroyed in the pluralism of an unforeseeable number of myths.
For political theology this is polytheism, just as every myth is
polytheistic.” 60
The clarity of this statement is literally apocalyptic. Political
theology must be the enemy of myth because, quite correctly, the
force of myth is diverse and indeterminate (“unforeseeable”) at
the core. This is the only way that the charge of myth’s polytheism

59 Joseph W. Bendersky, Schmitt at Nuremberg, TELOS, Summer 1978, at 97, 103.

Regardless of Schmitt’s political savvy, his occasional collaboration with the Nazis displays
many characteristics similar to Heidegger’s scandalous naiveté, petty arrogance, and
narcissistic opportunism of die Führer führen—an absurdly genuine belief in directing the
new regime to a more credible and reasonable orientation. While Heidegger is on record
with the embarrassment of performing an elegy to the Führer’s hands, Schmitt registers his
own elegy in his 1934 article Der Führer schütz das Recht. In both cases, we would be
committing the gravest error if we considered such actions mere survivalism, and did not
acknowledge in them the groundwork of a philosophical problem.
60 SCHMITT, supra note 5, at 76 (emphasis added).
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1512 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

could be translated into the terms of this essay, since opting to

consider myth in a theological language leads to severe confusion.
In the strictest terms of Schmitt’s phrase, myth can be said to
become theological only in instances when its multiple, dispersed
forces are consolidated monologically into a singular end, as in the
case of nationalism, which Schmitt duly celebrates.61 “Political
theology” has room for the singularity of monomythical thinking
because it is of the same order. Certainly, this would be the case in
the last instance, but nothing is more significant, with respect to
understanding Schmitt’s duplicitous method, than raising the
question of the last instance before the edifice of political
theology.
From this standpoint, an enormous question emerges with
respect to the actual signification of the notion of “political
theology,” which goes beyond Schmitt’s usage but incorporates
into its (il)logical whirlwind the implications of Schmitt’s claims.
In what sense could any body of thought that considers itself
essentially political, spring from an apocalyptic origin, thus
subjecting itself to a heteronomous arch‘, to an unquestionable
law of an Other?62 Simultaneously, a second question arises,
entirely interwoven with the first: In what sense could political
thinking spring from a monological (or monomythical) point of
view? I do not mean an individual point of view, for all politics, to
the extent that it involves political subjects, must be experienced
under the demand of singular decision—this is the bare necessity
of subjectivity in society, the barest sense of political life.

61 As Odo Marquard has expertly argued, there is such a thing as monomythical

thinking that, in religious terms, is expressed by monotheism—and in political terms, I
would add, by nationalism. This is when, according to Marquard, mythic thought becomes
self-destructive. ODO MARQUARD, In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythic and
Polymythic Thinking), in FAREWELL TO MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE: PHILOSOPHICAL
STUDIES 87 (Robert M. Wallace et al. trans., 1989).
62 Fortified with the added evidence of Schmitt’s Glossarium, Heinrich Meier calls
political theology “a political theory that claims to have its basis in revelation.” Heinrich
Meier, The Philosopher as Enemy: On Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium, 17 GRADUATE FAC.
PHIL. J. 325, 329 (Marcus Brainard trans., 1994). Schmitt’s advocates often accuse his
critics (including Meier) of abusing the privilege of access to Glossarium, a body of private
notes never meant for publication, and then building their case on gross interpretations of
this undoubtedly ambiguous text. Two things need to be said here. First, Meier’s
extraordinary rigor in reading through Schmitt’s entire oeuvre would immediately exempt
him from any such charge. For Meier, Glossarium is just another Schmitt text to be taken
just as seriously as the others. This brings us to the second point: writers are often at the
mercy of their posthumous publications. Although the biographical dimensions of any
text must be taken into account (hence the due “privacy” of such notes cannot be
outmaneuvered), to consider these texts inappropriate, or less authentic, because the
author did not necessarily wish them published is precisely to deny their authorial
authenticity. If anything, precisely because the Glossarium notes were private, the insight
they provide to Schmitt’s authorial “intentions” is all the more significant.
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2000] SCHMITT WITH SOREL 1513

However, the monological point of view inherent in a

monomythical-monotheistic imaginary can never transform itself
into the antagonistic multiplicity embodied in the actual historical
nature of political praxis—which is to say, of life in a never quite
definite arena of contention where the moment of decision is faced
without guarantee.
For this reason, the notion of political theology, despite its
long and illustrious tradition in the history of Christian thought, is
stricto sensu nonsensical. Theology has nothing to do with the
polis, not only historically, but epistemologically. It can only be
linked to politics metaphorically—as Hans Blumenberg has
argued, the very link that propels its self-occultation: “political
theology” is a metaphorical theology whose metaphoric act
consists precisely in concealing its mere nature of “theology as
politics.”63 For the same reason, apart from a strictly
historiographical utility within the terms of the history of religion,
Heinrich Meier’s elaborate attempt at distinguishing between
political theology and political philosophy further occludes the
matter. From the standpoint of my argument in this essay, if the
term “political theology” is nonsensical, the term “political
philosophy” is merely tautological. As an interrogative reflection
on the significance of human life, philosophical praxis is not
possible without the political, as both ground and community.
Hence, the concept of the political can never be exhausted in a
sheer formalism of conflict—of enemy Otherness as self-
constitutive arch‘.
In the simplest sense, once we extract from the political any
instrumentalist or expedient elements (whose meaning is possible
always and only in terms of appropriation of state power), then
theology cannot be political, and philosophy is always political—
hence, the impossibility of attempting to contrast them, and to
judge Schmitt according to one preference. The political is a
historical, not ontological, manifestation of a certain social
imaginary that dares to conceive of society as the outcome of
interminable interrogation. The moment this interrogation is
derailed, the political goes into hibernation at best, and oblivion at
worst. This is our predicament today, in the age of “identity
politics,” “political correctness,” and “conflict resolution.” Only if

grounded on the premise that nothing is sacred, that all judgments

63 BLUMENBERG, supra note 44, at 98-101.

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1514 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 21:1487

are open to question, can the moment of decision signify a

moment of transformation. Otherwise, all decision will remain
subjugated to the worship of Order.