1

Threats of/to Democracy

Andrew Johnson, LSU

I: Friends and/or Enemies

The scholarship surrounding the relationship, whether personal or intellectual, of Carl Schmitt

and Walter Benjamin is murky. Giorgio Agamben explicitly says that Schmitt’s political theology, more

precisely his definition of sovereignty as the power to decide the exemption, is a direct response to

Benjamin’s concept of pure or revolutionary violence espoused in the 1921 essay Critique of Violence.1

Jacques Derrida claims that Schmitt sent Benjamin a letter congratulating him on the publication of this

essay.2 Horst Bredekamp details a different history, claiming the opposite, that it was Benjamin who first

wrote Schmitt (scandalously) in 1930 acknowledging an intellectual debt. 3

Such a history is rich with irony. The lives of Benjamin and Schmitt would depart on separate

paths, both immersed in the same historical spectacle: one dying too young, alone, attempting to escape

Nazi Europe and the other, dying an old man, with a legacy shrouded by his involvement with the rise of

National Socialism. But two decades earlier, in the early 1920’s their fates were aligned in a shared battle

against the Weimar Republic and the ideology of liberal democracy. It will be this equal footing, and two-

headed assault on democracy, that will be the basis of this paper.4

II: The Auctoritas of the Iron Cross

Henry Ford received an Iron Cross from Nazi Germany, but Carl Schmitt never did.

Carl Schmitt was a leading legal scholar in Germany in the 1920’s, who in a short time produced

a wide array of short polemical political treatises that exerted a profound influence on the constitutional

1
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Tr. Kevin Attell. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 2004. pg. 52-
55.
2
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. ed. Gil Anidjar. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 2002. pg. 259.
3
Bredekamp, Horst. “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 2,
“Angelus Novus”: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter, 1999). pg. 254.
4
Jacques Derrida’s essay Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority will also play a central part, but only
insofar as it concerns a specific reading of Schmitt and Benjamin’s dual-critique.
 2

law of the Weimar Republic. He is perhaps most famous for his support of Article 48, which gave

dictatorial authority to the executive in times of emergency. Adolf Hitler used this rule, after the

Reichstag Fire of 1933, to establish independence from parliament. Schmitt openly supported the Nazi

Regime: Hermann Göring proclaimed Schmitt to be a leading legal proponent of National Socialism.

However, his earlier works, before the rise of Nazism, are most notable. Written in an obscure style, these

works are exemplar of a nostalgic prophecy of the eventual rise of Nazi Germany. However, the extent of

scholarship damning Schmitt is only exceeded by the amount of scholarship that recognizes his brilliance

and insight into the most difficult political problems.

Before damning Schmitt, it is important to note that the Weimar Germany was a violent and

volatile place. Politics, as Clausewitz prophesized, was war. In 1919, paramilitary forces murdered Rosa

Luxemburg, a Communist Party leader in Germany; her body anonymously dumped in a Berlin canal. In

1922, Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, was shot in the middle of the street, by hired thugs. In 1923,

Adolf Hitler was arrested for attempting the overthrow of Munich in the historic Beer Hall Putsch. An

extensive overview of the violence of the early Weimar Republic is impossible: changes of governments

lasted days, both locally and nationally; political parties were cartel organizations and could operate

without voter support according to the Weimar Constitution; the Police was formally independent of

government; violence was the norm of the public sphere; and fear, silence, and hopelessness was surely

the result in the private.

Schmitt stood at the forefront of a public assault on the tenets of liberal democracy and the

effectiveness of the Weimar Republic during this time. 5 His attack on parliamentarianism is both practical

and ideological. Therefore, while he believed that Weimar, itself, was ineffective, democracy, as a whole,

was also an idealistic system based upon faulty enlightenment principles. Schmitt’s developed a two-fold

critique of democratic principles, specifically within the context of parliamentarianism: 1) that the

5
Therefore, in attacking Weimar, Schmitt was giving voice to a universal resentment and commonly shared
cynicism.
 3

principle of open discussion is impossible; 2) that parliamentarianism undermines the belief in the

balance of powers.

Schmitt published The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy in 1923 at the height of civil unrest in

Weimar Germany. According to Schmitt, democracy is an unstable and misunderstood concept. The

principles of equality, which serves as its motto, are empty promises to the dispossessed, whether they are

the indigenous subalterns of Britain’s colonies, or African-Americans, women, or even homosexuals in

the United States.6 The heart of Schmitt’s critique of democracy is its presumptions concerning open

communication amongst the public. According to enlightenment principles, democracy is not only moral,

but stable and effective, because of its ability to reach compromise and consensus through open

discussion.7 Schmitt disagrees that democracy is ever able to achieve such an ideal.

Parliament was the legislative branch of government in the Weimar Republic. The common belief

is that members of parliament must represent their constituents. However, to represent everyone is

practically impossible; a divide separates an election and the subsequent governance. Once a person is

selected to parliament, they are complicit in secret conversations, underground arrangements, political

bargaining, and they must make their own decisions completely removed from the interest and/or

knowledge of the voting public. The practice of representative democracy undermines its enlightenment

ideals.

Schmitt provides a detailed account of democracy and representation, of the democratic ideals of

openness and discussion, and the enlightenment principle of the balance of powers. Liberal democracy

contends that its ideals and institutional mechanisms are not only the most effective means of politics, but

also morally legitimate. The claim is that the competition of open discussion will produce truth, while
6
Jürgen Habermas, in The Inclusion of the Other, does an excellent job of turning this concept against Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt was a vocal proponent of ethnonationalism being a part of the Weimar Constitution (claiming that
democracy could not survive amongst strangers), going so far as to physically remove ethnically diverse populations
to colonies or excluded locales outside the nation-state.
7
So far I have subsumed the dogmas of liberalism with those of democracy. In many ways this is consistent with
historical reality. Schmitt, correctly, asserts that liberalism is a humanistic ideal associated with equality, human
rights, and the free market, while democracy, is not necessarily liberal, but under certain circumstance can be
socialist or authoritarian. Moreover, in discussing ‘modern mass democracy’ Schmitt evokes the rise of political
parties, mass media propaganda, increases in population (heterogeneous and homogenous), industrial and
technological expansion, and economic corruption, that are unique to the politics of the 20 th Century.
 4

deterring oppressive political domination.8 Schmitt seeks to attack the moral and utilitarian underpinnings

of these claims with a plethora of diverse arguments.

The power of Schmitt’s analysis is not that openness and discussion, as some sort of transcendent

and impossible ideals, are incompatible with democracy, but that they are becoming less so. At the end of

the Introduction to the First Edition, Schmitt gives an appetizer of what really threatens democracy:

Important decisions are taken in secret meetings of faction leaders or even in

extraparliamentary committees so that responsibility is transferred and even abolished,
and in this way the whole parliamentary system finally becomes only a poor façade
concealing the dominance of parties and economic interests… In its place there has long
since developed an investigation of the methods and techniques with which the parties
create electoral propaganda, persuade masses, and dominate public opinion… the
collusion of press, party, and capital and treated politics [is] only a shadow of economic
reality.9

The passage above presents three bold challenges to democracy: capitalism, mass media, and

party politics. All three seek to undermine the sacredness of open discussion and the balance of powers by

illustrating the accumulation and concentration of disproportionate power. Such a critique is straight from

the pages of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx claims that profit margins will always produce

exploitation and not competition, and that capitalism as a natural system, will effortlessly seek to expand

and centralize wealth. How does Schmitt’s critique of liberal capitalism resolve itself with his ardent

diatribes against Marxism? Schmitt, later in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, completely drops his

attack on representative democracy and switches to a position against Marxism. His ultimate claim is that

Marxism is inherently dictatorial. Coupling this with his wish-washy support of authoritarian politics, one

might not think that this prevents Schmitt from adopting a pro-communist position. However, it is

obviously not the case: Schmitt’s attacks on Marxist thought are clearly sincere, as he pits Marxism, the

counterpoint of Fascism, as the ultimate threat to democracy. It is at this intersection that one can see the

complexity of Schmitt’s polemic. Schmitt clearly points out that democracy is not antithetical with

8
Schmitt actually says they claim to produce truth. It is my claim that this is an overstatement. The real role of
discussion and the balance of powers is to prevent oppression, at which it is remarkable effective.
9
Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Tr. Ellen Kennedy. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1985. pg.
20.
 5

socialist or authoritarian policies. Moreover, if he had truly read Walter Benjamin, Schmitt would have to

be aware that Marxism is not necessarily dictatorial, but quite the opposite. 10

It would seem that the absence of form becomes an issue. Ellen Kennedy, in the book’s

introduction, claims that perhaps Schmitt is not attempting to undermine liberal democracy, but rather

pointing outs its internal contradictions so as to protect it from the emerging threats of Fascism and

Bolshevism. Such a cross-road is untenable. The conglomeration of economic power and its increasing

ability to effect politics is the necessary result of liberal principles. 11 However, depending upon your

reading of Schmitt, so are all other routes.12

Party politics are analogous to industrial monopolies. The heart of Schmitt’s critique is that in a

representative democracy, a small minority of specialized elites will emerge and create a corporate

enterprise intended to recycle political power. The rise of an industrial-technical political mechanism is

the empirical reality that grounds Schmitt’s overarching critique of liberal/representative democracy.

Schmitt spells this out fully in his response to Richard Thoma, in the Preface to the Second Edition first

published in 1926:

What numerous parliaments in various European and non-European states have produced
in the way of a political elite of hundreds of successive ministers justifies no great
optimism. But worse and destroying almost every hope, in a few states,
parliamentarianism has already produced a situation in which all public businesses has
become an object of spoils and compromise for the parties and their followers and
politics, far from being the concern of an elite, has become the despised business of a
rather dubious class of persons.13

The situation of parliamentarianism is critical today because the development of modern

mass democracy has made argumentative public discussion an empty formality… The
10
Benjamin is an exception (pun?). Marx, himself, as well as Soviet Bolshevism, was distinctly authoritarian and
linked to state-power (though Marx did envision a utopian end to state-power, post-revolution and post-
redistribution). Luxemburg and the mass majority of German socialists were violent revolutionaries, often detached
from party politics, which did not seek to assimilate into the state, but rather completely overthrow/control it.
Perhaps, Schmitt is simply appealing to the public norm. However, this still does not absolve him from making an
incorrect assumption about the tenets of Marxist thought in the 20th Century.
11
This severally undermines the theological principles Schmitt does adhere to. The conflict between economic and
theological interests is another paper in-and-of-itself.
12
Perhaps this is the reason why Schmitt has captivated political philosophy for the past several decades. His
political approach cannot easily be conflated with Fascism, Marxism, or liberal democracy. Rather his polemic and
critical perspective asks us to rethink each of these ideologies. This should not be read as an apology for Schmitt,
but the integrity to take his work seriously.
13
Ibid, pg. 4.
 6

parties (which according to the text of the written constitution officially do not exist) do
not face each other today discussing opinions, but as social or economic power-groups
calculating their mutual interests and opportunities for power, and they actually agree
compromises and coalitions on this basis.14

Schmitt’s implication is that party politics, along with mass media and industrial economic power,

undermines the ability to achieve open communication and conflict resolution, as well as a sustained

balance of powers. Political parties do not represent the volk’s interest, but rather seek to auto-

mechanically aggregate their own political, social, and economic power. Ellen Kennedy further spells out

how this debate was being shaped in Schmitt’s time, quoting Joseph Schumpeter:

That alone disposes of rational argument because the size of the groups will burst those
bounds within which it is effective; that creates the professional agitator, the party
functionary, the Boss. That makes political success a question of organization and
produces the various leadership circles and lobbies who make the MPs their puppets.
That makes parliament itself a puppet, because agitation and victories outside it will be
more important than a good speech in the house. Because now everyone is legally
entitled to speak, no one will be able to speak except as the master of a machine. That has
destroyed the ordinal sense of parliament, broken its original technique, made its activity
look like a farce.15

Perhaps this is why Henry Ford received an Iron Cross, and why the directors of IG Farben were

held trial at Nuremberg, and not our antagonist Carl Schmitt.

Schmitt’s sociological reflections are especially apt given the history of the Weimar Republic.

After all, it was National Socialism, as a democratically elected political party, that was able to undermine

the ideology of democracy in favor of dictatorship. The examples of Rathenau and Luxemburg exist in

contradistinction to the Nazis. Perhaps their respective reform movements, had they not been violently

silenced, could have proved Weimar salvageable. The historical time period of the Weimar Republic is an

extraordinary case of politics turned into violence. If legal mechanisms exist so as to disown such

violence, as they do in most liberal democracies, and not to encourage it, then perhaps excluded and

14
Ibid, pg. 6. Immediately afterwards and on the same page: “The masses are won over through a propaganda
apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions. Argument in the real
sense that is characteristic for genuine discussion ceases” (ibid). Domination though technological and mass media
is also at heart.
15
Ibid, pg. xxxvii. Analogously in terms of modern mass media, perhaps it is the proliferation of such much
communication that ostracizes truly valuable conversation.
 7

minority parties would prevent hyper-nationalism, conservatism, and monopolies on power. 16 However,

this only mitigates the power of Schmitt’s argument: perhaps Germany from 1920-1940 is an extreme

example, but nevertheless political parties dominate and monopolize nation-states in every single so-

called liberal democracy.

III: The Ghost(s) of Walter Benjamin

Jacques Derrida says that the specter of Walter Benjamin haunts us to this day. More precisely,

that the 1921 essay Critique of Violence, “is haunted in advance… by the theme of radical destruction,

extermination, total annihilation, and first of all annihilation of the law, if not of justice,” 17 also that, “let

us return to the thing itself- that is to say, to the ghost; for this text tells a ghost story, a history of ghosts.

We can no more avoid ghosts and ruin than we can elude the question of the rhetorical status of the

textual event.”18 Derrida claims that one cannot ignore that Benjamin was the victim of the violence he

criticizes in 1940, as he died escaping the Nazis. Just as Schmitt’s early work is a nostalgic prophecy of

the eventual rise of National Socialism, Benjamin’s pivotal analysis against violence is the ultimate

preface to the ‘final solution,’ the planned and organized extermination of millions in death camps during

the Nazi regime.

Jacques Derrida’s essay The Force of Law: On the Mystical Foundations of Authority is a

dialogue between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Derrida says as much; but also says as little. He

purposefully dissects Benjamin’s essay, as the work of comrade, interjecting little asides about Heidegger

and Schmitt as he goes. However, it is Schmitt who is the unspecified enemy. Derrida asserts a strong

relationship between Schmitt and Benjamin, claiming that in the early 1920’s they exchanged

correspondences, Schmitt, supposedly, congratulating Benjamin on the publication of his essay: Critique

16
However, it is exactly this point that Schmitt contests. As he notes, political parties exist outside of the law. This
reaffirms his belief in the extralegality inherency in all legal frameworks. In fact, an interesting note about the
Weimar Republic is that parties did exist outside of the constitution and did not depend upon voter supporter. This
created a rise of too many political parties. This weakens democratic effectiveness and, of course, the argument
could be made that this facilitated the Nazi take-over.
17
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 2002. pg. 258.
18
Ibid, pg. 278.
 8

of Violence. Beyond their personal history, their intellectual histories share common elements. First and

foremost, they are united by an exuberant critique against the Weimar Republic, liberal democracy in

general, and the entire project of the enlightenment. Second, they share an obvious affinity for political

theology. Benjamin’s essay predates Schmitt’s thoughts on the subject, and it would not be a stretch to

believe that Schmitt’s more popular treatise was thoroughly influenced by Benjamin’s lesser known

work. Both thinkers espouse a mythical element to the power and function of law. However, how they

differ in their approaches and/or outlooks is the exact demarcation between heaven and hell, utopia and

dystopia.

Derrida’s essay, while interrupted by many interludes and digressions, consists of two parts: one,

an investigation of the power of law; and two, an exegesis into Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence.

The first part of Derrida’s essay is many things at once. It is a defense of his entire project of

deconstruction. It is an excursus on the role of law: first as intrinsically violent and second as an

illocutionary power that sets the world in motion (that founds and preserves as Benjamin and Derrida

both chant). The problem with law, in his view, is that it is founded and promulgated on the basis of

authority, and therefore depends upon violence. He wishes to claim that there is a concept called justice

that stands "outside and beyond the law."

Leaving aside the call for justice, let’s attempt to communicate with the phantom called Walter

Benjamin. Our protagonist, Benjamin was an early outsider of the Marxist research programme called the

Frankfurt School. His outsider status was in large part due to his renunciation of dialectical materialism

and adoption of a personal and bizarre Jewish mysticism. However, it is his writing style, an esoteric

obfuscation, that truly characterizes Benjamin as a thinker like no other. Derrida implies that Benjamin is

the originator of a deconstructive technique. 19 This connection is brutally apparent in the essay at large:

Critique of Violence. In this essay Benjamin deconstructs the traditional appeals/critiques of violence.

Benjamin reveals the aporias of violence and its inescapability. The central focus is upon the Janus

character of law and violence, a two-headed monster in which law cannot establish itself without an

19
This is sure to anger Derrida scholars who commonly hold Heidegger as the father of deconstruction.
 9

original act of founding-violence and the latent character of law preserving-violence in which force is

imperative for maintaining one’s foundations. Benjamin’s deconstruction is the imperative to think

without claiming authority, to question without answering, to undue dialectics, to neither found nor

preserve, and ultimately to think without violence.

Such discourse Benjamin would like either to found or to preserve, but in all purity he
can do neither. At most, he can sign it as a spectral event. Text and signature are specters,
and Benjamin knows it, so well that the event of the text ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ consists
of this strange ex-position: before your eyes a demonstration ruins the distinctions it
proposes. It exhibits and archives the very moment of its implosion, leaving in place what
one calls a text, the ghost of a text that, itself in ruins, at once foundation and
preservation, accomplishes neither, occurs and reaches neither one nor the other and
remains there, up to a certain point, for a certain amount of time, readable and
unreadable, like the exemplary ruin that singularly warns us of the fate of all texts and all
signatures in their relation to law- that is, necessarily (alas), in their relation to a certain
police force. Such would be, let it be said in passing, the status without statute, the statute
of a text said of deconstruction and of what remains of it. The text does not escape the
law that it enunciates. It ruins itself and contaminates itself; it becomes the specter of
itself.20

Derrida claims that his essay is an “interpretation” of Benjamin’s text, moreover, a “risky

reading.” He repeats this apology time and time again throughout the essay. It is this coloring of the

Benjamin text that I will examine. In doing so, I hope to call attention to what Derrida calls a shared

project (between Schmitt and Benjamin): a critique of the Weimar Republic and of democracy as a whole.

The power of police administration undermines democracy. Walter Benjamin says it better than I

ever could:

In a far more unnatural combination than in the death penalty, in a kind of special
mixture, these two forms of violence are present in another institution of the modern
state, the police… The ignominy of such an authority, which is felt by few simply
because its ordinances suffice only seldom for the crudest acts, but are therefore allowed
to rampage all the more blindly in the most vulnerable areas and against thinkers, from
whom the state is not protects by law- this ignominy lies in the fact that in this authority
the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended. 21

Rather, the ‘law’ of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from
impotence or because of the immanent connections within the legal system, can no longer
guarantee though the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain.
Therefore the police intervene ‘for security reasons’ in countless cases where no clear

20
Ibid, pg. 277.
21
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Tr. Edmund Jephcott. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.: New York, NY. 1978. pg.
286.
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legal situation exists, when they are not merely, without the slightest relation to legal
ends, accompanying the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by
ordinances, or simply supervising him. Unlike law, which acknowledges in the ‘decision’
determined by place and time a metaphysical category that gives it a claim to critical
evaluation, a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its
power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly, presence in the life of
civilized states [my emphasis]. And though the police may, in particulars, everywhere
appear the same, it cannot fully be denied that their spirit is less devastating where they
represent, in absolute monarchy, the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive
supremacy are united, than in democracies where their existence, elevated by no such
relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence. 22

The Police are a special part of the industrial-technical political apparatus: a mechanism specifically in

place to maintain the law, to be the law, to impede into the daily lives of everybody, everywhere. The

Police exist outside of legislation; instead they legislate. The Police are an extension of the state, but

nevertheless exists outside of it (or perhaps too closely inside of it), operating on its own accords,

mandates, and objectives. The Police is not mere state-power, but rather an autonomous and independent

force. Benjamin claims that the modern police mechanism exhibits an odd and unheralded trait, in that it

both founds and preserves the law. No other branch of political power is able to weld, simultaneously,

both powers. They found the law; therefore, while protecting the social order, they must become the law,

or, rather, go “outside the law” to guarantee that the law is obeyed. They exhibit independence in being

able to interpret the law, outside of judicial review. They make laws, clandestinely, laws without rule or

structure, ephemerally present and absent. All of this, while aiming to be a law-preserving agent; violence

specifically mobilized so as to be the physical embodiment of law present on the neighborhood street

corner.

Such a widespread administrative force needs money, and coercive legislation, to maintain its

force. An entire industry is designed: to create laws, so that there will be lawbreakers; to train and employ

domestic soldiers; buildings and institutions to judge, house, reform, and supervise the criminal

delinquents; and vast industries to keep the police equipped with latest technologies used for violence

against, and introspection into, the private lives of citizens.

22
Ibid, pg. 287.
 11

It is Derrida who makes the case that the Police haunt the laws, further, that it haunts democracy.

Derrida takes Benjamin’s “formless,” “nowhere tangible,” “all-pervasive,” “ghostly presence,” of the

police force, to be the metaphysical anomaly that democracy cannot rid itself of. The state without the

Police is not a state at all, but a state without power. More exact, a law without Police is not a law at all.

The law exists, because it speeds around in marked and signaled vehicles and uniforms, proving that,

indeed, it is more than just pieces of paper.

One never knows who one is dealing with, and that is the definition of the police,
singularly of state police the limits of which are, at bottom, unlocatable. This absence of a
border between the two types of violence, this contamination between foundations and
preservation is ignoble; it is, he says, the ignominy of the police… Its lack of limit does
not only come from surveillance and repression technology- such as were already being
developed in 1921, in a troubling manner, to the point of doubling and haunting all public
and private life (what could we say today about the development of this technology!). It
comes from the fact that the police are the state, that they are the specter of the state and
that, in all rigor, one cannot take issue with the police without taking issue with the order
of the res publica. For today the police are no longer content to enforce the law and thus
to preserve it; the police invent the law, publish ordinances, and intervene whenever the
legal situation is unclear to guarantee security- which is to say, these days, nearly all the
time. The police are the force of law, the power of law… Even if they do not make the
law, the police behave like a lawmaker in modern times, if not the lawmaker of modern
times. Where there are police, which is to say everywhere and even here, one can no
longer discern between two types of violence- preserving and founding- and that is the
ignoble, ignominious, revolting ambiguity.23

All the exemplary figures of the violence of law are singular metonymies, namely figures
without limit, unfettered possibilities of transposition and figures without face or figure.
Let us take the example of the police, this index of a ghostly violence because it mixes
foundation with preservation and becomes all the more violent for this. Well, the police
that thus capitalize on violence are not simply the police. They do not simply consist of
policemen in uniform, occasionally helmeted, armed and organized in a civil structure on
a military model to whom the right to strike is refused, and so forth. By definition, the
police are present and represented everywhere there is force of law. They are present,
sometime invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social
order.24

Derrida provides a wonderful and poignant portrait of Benjamin’s thought put into a pragmatic profile of

the modern police institution. What was once just a play with words, a ghost story about a dying

revolutionary, becomes a literal frame in which to envision the entire mechanism of civilized society. The

23
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 2002. pg. 276-277.
24
Ibid, pg. 278.
 12

Police, literally, haunt us all! They’re figures without faces or shape, invisible and ubiquitous, nowhere

while everywhere, a violence that is formless. As such, the Police are like a ghost. In all civilized states

this specter is pervasive. They become hallucinatory and spectral because they haunt everything. Their

absence is present in us all. Like Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ the mere idea of their existence is enough to

make citizens legislate themselves. The motifs revolving around surveillance speaks for itself, a ghostly

presence that watches us without us knowing that we are being watched. Therefore, the Police are present

in their absence. The ability to read emails, listen to phone calls, to record events in their evidence logs,

make it so that they are invisible ghosts watching us in the shower without our knowledge.

Derrida claims that Benjamin is specifically talking about the role of the Police in modern

society. The use of sophisticated technologies and contemporary institutions of control are the focus of

Benjamin’s critique on violence. Benjamin and Derrida target modern democratic state as having a need

for police force. The Police are inherent in all democracy. Nation-states of the monarchial and

authoritarian model have no separation of powers, no police, only an army. Modern democracies

explicitly demand a need for a vast policing institution. However, in doing so, they must create an

administrative force that exists outside of a balance of powers. By doing so, they enable a counter-power

to legislate and execute the mandates of the state, without the need of the state.

While recognizing that the ghostly body of the police, however invasive it may be,
always remains equal to itself, Benjamin admits that its spirit (Geist), the spirit of the
police, police spirit, does less damage in absolute monarchy than in modern democracies
where its violence degenerates. Would this be only, as we may be tempted to think today,
because modern technologies of communication, or surveillance and interception of
communication, ensure the police absolute ubiquity, saturation public and private space,
pushing to its limit the coextensivity of the political and police domain? Would it be
because democracies cannot protect citizens against police violence unless they enter into
this logic of policio-political coextensivity, that is to say by confirming the police essence
of the public thing (police of police, institutions of the type ‘informatique et liberté,’
monopolization by the state of technologies of protection of private life secrecy, as the
federal government and its police forces are currently suggesting to American citizens
while also offering to produce the necessary electronic chips; they would then decide the
moment when the security of the state would require the interception of private
exchanges, or authorize, for example, the installation of invisible microphones, the use of
directional microphones, the intrusion into computerized networks or, more simply, the
practice, so common in France, of good old phone taps)? Is this the contradiction of
which Benjamin thought? The internal degeneration of the democratic principle
inevitably corrupted by the principle of police power, intended, in principle, to protect the
 13

former but uncontrollable in its essence, in the process of its becoming technologically
autonomous?25

We should not forget that the most iconic modern liberal democracy, the United States, has the

largest criminal justice system in the history of the world. Everyday an invisible and ghostly mechanism

possesses the streets of our cities, the corridors of our mind, the halls of our congress, the weapons of our

protectors, and the isolated cells of our culturally excluded. Is it necessarily so? Might Benjamin and

Schmitt be right? Do we need mafia cartel organizations to fight for our vote, to make our laws, to

manage our budget, maintain transportations systems without speedsters, to give us peace of mind, on the

street, free from terrorists and pirates, so as to know that the only people who will be stealing our money

is the annual tax collector?

Jacques Derrida concludes:

The radical but also fatal corruption of parliamentary and representative democracy by a
modern police force that is inseparable from it, that becomes the true legislative power
and whose ghost commands the totality of the political space. From this point of view,
the ‘final solution’ is both a historico-political decision by the state and a police decision,
a decision of the police, of the civil and military police, without anyone ever being able to
discern the one from the other and to assign the true responsibilities to any decision
whatsoever.26

We must not also forget that it was the German police force, the Nazi SS, who committed the atrocities of

the holocaust. This is Derrida’s fundamental contribution: Benjamin’s critique of violence, specifically

his attack on the Weimar Republic and police administration, is a precursor to the state-violence of the

‘Final Solution.’ We must not forget, less we be haunted, that Walter Benjamin was an early fatality of

the violence that he sought to critique. Real political theology is not the power of the Church, the Iron

Cross, but rather the sacrifice of the criminal and savior Jesus, upon the cross, one of the first victims of

state police violence.

IV: A Community of Friends

25
Ibid, pg. 279-280.
26
Ibid, pg. 295.
 14

Walter Benjamin allows little alternative to the oppressive reality of violence. It appears all

pervasive. Every revolution is the formation of a new law and new violence. However, how can we

combat violence, without reproducing violence ourselves? Or to compare Benjamin with Derrida, how

can we think without authority, without the formation or preservation of a law, and therefore think

without violence?

It is no coincidence that immediately preceding Benjamin’s discussion of police power, he turns

his attention to the failures of parliamentary democracy, specifically that of the Weimar Republic. He

claims that democracy is unable to take into account its own history and need of violence, and therefore is

unable to legitimate itself through its appeal to humanistic and enlightenment principles. Addressing the

institution of parliament he claims, along with Schmitt, that the power of their communication is

implicitly violent. Their laws are the chains that bind us. Their communication performs the spectacle of a

hypocritical compromise, where people’s lives are exchanged for economic agendas, public fanfare, and

bargains within a pre-existing power structure. The communication of representation is particularly

violent. Representative communication silences individual and personal communication. Parliament, the

institution of representative governance, speaks for people, speaks in place of, and speaks so as to silence

a constituency. Representative governance is also a ghostly presence, in that the parliamentary presence

only accounts for the absence of citizens.

Benjamin does allow one brief moment of hope, of an alternative political promise: “Is any

nonviolent resolution of conflict possible? Without doubt. The relationships of private persons are full of

examples of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of

unalloyed means of agreement. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, and whatever else might here

be mentioned, are their subjective preconditions.”27

Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, written in 1926, claims that ‘the political’ is the

result of distinguishing friends from enemies. He claims that this criterion of exclusion/inclusion does not

27
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Tr. Edmund Jephcott. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.: New York, NY. 1978. pg.
289.
 15

exist domestically, because if did, it would stop being ‘political’ and would be a civil war. While he might

be right about civil war, perhaps he underscores its pervasiveness. How he does so, amidst the violence of

the Weimar Republic, perhaps one of the most violent times for a democratic regime, is beyond me. The

oppression of political parties is not the battles amongst themselves, but rather their shared battle against

the public. Surely, the rise of National Socialism is not an exception, but the rule, where the actuality of

‘the political’ is realized through the proliferation of enemy identifications, reaching the point where

everyone is an enemy. This is the ultimate fear. This is not just Nazi Germany, but the United States of

America, and every so-called liberal democracy, where the Police make everyone a public enemy! Leo

Strauss, in his notes to Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, claims that his politics is based upon an

understanding of human nature. More precisely, that Schmitt reproduces a chain of classical political

realists who view the human condition as inherently dangerous. 28 However, if people by nature are

dangerous, everyone, by nature is an enemy.29

Is there such a thing as communication without violence, without, as Schmitt warns us, secrecy,

manipulation, power, and law?30 Is there such a thing as a politics of friendship and not a proliferation of

unanimous enemy identifications? And finally, would such a heterotopia surpass the definition of

democracy, or even the state?

Jacques Derrida, a strange synthesis of Schmitt and Benjamin, in challenging democracy, never

renounces it. Instead he claims that real democracy has not been realized; there is not yet a democracy

worth of its name. Therefore, by a blind and nonviolent hope, he claims that democracy is still to come. 31

28
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Tr. George Schwab. Rutgers Press: New Brunswick, NJ. 1976. pg. 93.
29
Derrida’s contribution to scholarship on Carl Schmitt does not end at Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of
Authority. Schmitt becomes a prominent figure in the final decade of Derrida’s life. In The Politics of Friendship
Derrida deconstructs Schmitt’s definition of politics as the identification of enemies. In Rogues and Philosophy in a
Time of Terror Schmitt is commonly evoked as the harbinger of the Bush administration. Derrida contends that the
end of the nation-state and the proliferation of wars against non-State enemies marks the end of Schmitt’s reign on
political philosophy. In The Beast and the Sovereign, a recently published series of lectures, Derrida rallies against
Schmitt’s political anthropology.
30
Jürgen Habermas would certainly think so. If fact, his work on communication and political legitimacy, is the
ultimate counterpart to the political theology of Schmitt, Benjamin, and Derrida. Habermas, a grandchild, via the
Frankfurt School, of the ghost Walter Benjamin, calls for a post-metaphysical politics that endorses secularism not
just as a historical condition, but as the political legacy of questioning authority and relying on communicated
reason. Political legitimacy is only possible through communication.
31
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 2002. pg. 281.
 16

Only by erasing the vocabulary of Western political thought can we hope for a depoliticization, or a ‘new

concept of politics.’ But once that point is achieved, what we discover is that the democracy we want

cannot be described or defended; it can only be treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic dream.

That is the wistful conclusion of Politics of Friendship: “For democracy remains to come; this is its

essence in so far as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient

and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to

come: even when there is democracy, it never exists.”32

Schmitt’s definition of politics through enemy identifications is where he goes horribly wrong.

The concept is poisoned at its core, by an internal logic of auto-immunity. 33 The enemy is automatically

the other; but also, always a public enemy, such that anyone can be the enemy. Instead I propose, along

with Derrida, a deconstruction of the canonical legacy of politics, along with a reconstruction of the

concept based upon a paradigm of friendship and community. This is imperative if we truly desire the

democracy-to-come that Derrida ask we bears witness to. Such a democracy is only possible with the

types of non-violent communication in which Benjamin alludes. What is to-come, avenir, will both differ

and defer, differance, with our current state of party and police politics.

In conclusion, Benjamin, in the Eighth Theses on the Philosophy of History, the last piece of

writing he completed before his demise in the mountains and borders between Spain and France, says:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is
not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping
with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state
of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One
reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a
historical norm. The current amazement that things we are experiencing are ‘still’
possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the
beginning of knowledge- unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives
rise to it is untenable.34

32
Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Tr. George Collins. Verso Press: New York, NY. 2005. pg. 306.
33
This is the topic of a more recent paper on Derrida and Schmitt that I have been working on. I believe that this
contains the central kernel to Derrida’s reading of Schmitt. Schmitt captivates Derrida because he is a strange and
dangerous anomaly of the deconstructive technique. Schmitt’s political logic is stricken with a double-bind at the
heart of his definition of politics. In attempting to immunize himself from critique, Schmitt spells out the seeds to his
denunciation.
34
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Tr. Harry Zohn. Schoken Books: New York, NY. 1968. pg. 257.
 17

This quotation, our adieu from the ghost Walter Benjamin, is the final irony of the Benjamin-Schmitt

relationship. A common attack against the Weimar Republic, the principles of the Enlightenment, and the

tenants of parliamentary democracy, finally diverges in the event of National Socialism, the ultimate

summation of party politics and police power bleeding forth from the history of democracy.