Download Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt

I. Who is Carl Schmitt?
The name Carl Schmitt evokes controversy, anger, and both silent and expressed
admiration from diverse and contrasting political and critical thinkers. A large bulk of
his writings have not been translated into English, and throughout the last eighty
years, he has been censored, vilified, viewed as a relic of a particular period, in some
circles glorified as the modern political thinker par excellence, and in other countries
virtually unknown. He remains an interesting political thinker; he gives provocative
and detailed political analyses; his critique of liberalism still needs to be answered
where democracy negates liberalism and liberalism negates democracy; he reiterates
the political idea of “totality”, and most famously he both declares that the sovereign
is he who decides on the exception and presents the friend-enemy distinction as the
foundation of all politics. In the last twenty years interest in Carl Schmitt has
increased with each year. Celebrated philosophers and critical theorists such as
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Slavov Žižek (b. 1949) Georgio Agamben (b. 1942),
Jacob Taubes (1923-87), Chantal Mouffee (b. 1943) and Antonio Negri (b. 1933)
have all being referring to him at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning
of the twenty-first century.1 This could be due to two primary factors: the changing
political climate around the world not least the rise (and fall) of the neo-conservative
movement in the United States of America, which can be traced back to Carl Schmitt
and his rigorous thought,2 and the disappearance of the reluctance of the political and
See, for example, The Neighbour, Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. by Slavov Žižek,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006; Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 2005; Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press 2004; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2000; Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, London and
New York: Verso 1997; Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in
his Acts of Religion, London: Routledge 2001, pp. 228-99; Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl
Schmitt, London and New York: Verso 1999; and Nicolaus Sombart, Die deutschen Männer und ihre
Feinde: Carl Schmitt, ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos,
Munich: Hanser 1991.
2
Leo Strauss was a student of Schmitt’s (Schmitt was instrumental in Strauss receiving a Rockefeller
Fellowship) in Berlin. Strauss wrote on political theology and Spinoza at this time: Religionskritik
Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft: Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologischpolitischen Traktat, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1930. Strauss came to the University of Chicago, where
he taught, along with a few other notably conservative philosophers (for example Allan Bloom). In the
George W. Bush neo-conservative government, Paul Wolfowitz wrote his Ph.D. in political science in
the University of Chicago and was taught by Strauss. Wolfowitz (with Karl Rove) very explicitly used
the ideological tools gleaned from these influences to help the Republicans get Bush elected, and in
spinning all news/decisions. An obvious example is after 9/11, when the clear message is: it’s us or
them, either you’re with us or against us (friend/enemy distinction), and the Iraq campaign’s “Coalition
of the Willing.”
1
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academic environment to approach and appropriate Schmitt who was both an antiSemite and Nazi for a time.
Little has actually been written on Carl Schmitt and Kierkegaard together despite the
reverence that Schmitt gives to the Danish thinker and given where Kierkegaard turns
up in Schmitt’s writing. The fact remains that Schmitt uses Kierkegaard’s “exception”
(Undtagelse from Fear and Trembling and Repetition) as the central thesis to his
project, and views Kierkegaard as the most articulate thinker on the exception and
subsequently using this word “exception” to define the sovereign. Reading Schmitt
reading Kierkegaard is a fruitful exercise in teasing out various unsolved issues in the
latter’s writings, and also adds another surprising member onto the list of radical
European thinkers in the Weimar inter-war years who came under the spell of
Kierkegaard and appropriated his thought in exciting and polarizing ways alongside
Georg Lukács (1885-1971), Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940),
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) to name but a few.
In his early writings on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
and Walter Rathenau (1867-1922), one can see that Schmitt’s interests lay not only in
law but also in modern literature and philosophy, placing him on the fringes of the
radical avant-garde movements in Germany and part of the overall Zeitgeist. In the
aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War I, revolution in Germany itself, and in
the midst of the Versailles Treaty, Schmitt wrote and published his first major work,
Political Romanticism.3 In this seminal text it is hard to tell what political side he will
move towards, causing Georg Lukács to write a positive review of the book,4 and it is
also in this work where we first witness what he views as problems of his “lukewarm”
generation of “eternal conversation” and not being able to make a decision. During
3
Schmitt, Carl; Political Romanticism (1919), trans. by Guy Oakes, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press 1986.) For more of this crucial point in German history and in the context of Carl Schmitt, see
Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, pp. 17-21.
4
Georg Lukács, “Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und
der Arbeiterbewegung, ed. by Carl Grünberg, vol. 13, 1928, pp. 307-8 (reprint edition, vols. 1-15,
Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt 1964-66, vol. 8, pp. 307-8). See also Jan-Werner
Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, New Haven, Connecticut
and London: Yale University Press 2003. After World War II, Schmitt would be treated as one of the
intellectuals responsible for the “destruction of reason” and Lukács explains that the pre-war Schmitt
was when he was “pre-fascist.” Original title: Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag
1954. See Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. by Robert Palmer, Atlantic Highlands, New
Jersey: Humanities Press 1981, p. 652-61.
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these unsettling years of the 1920s, Schmitt penned his most famous works such as
The Dictator (1921),5 Political Theology (1922),6 Roman Catholicism and Political
Form (1923),7 The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923),8 and The Concept of
the Political (1927).9 Schmitt was Professor at Bonn (1922-28) and then at Berlin
(1933-45). During his time at Bonn, he was an active supporter of the Catholic Center
Party. During his Berlin years, Schmitt would host such German luminaries as writer
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) and expressionist Emil Nolde (1867-1956).
Schmitt did not take to the Nazi party immediately and in his essay Legality and
Legitimacy (1932),10 he actually criticizes the attempts to destroy the constitution and
follows with a short essay called “The Abuse of Legality.”11 However, over the
course of the next twelve years of the “thousand-year Third Reich” and beyond in
post-war Germany, Schmitt would prove himself to be a most wily survivor. He was
able to make the transition from legal theorist of the Weimar Republic to National
Socialist by joining the Party in May 1933, the same year as Heidegger. 12 He also
managed to keep his professorship in Berlin until the end of the war, even though he
was a friend of Johannes Popitz (1884-45) who was a Prussian aristocrat and civil
servant who was State Secretary in the German Ministry of Finance from 1925 to
1928, who was instigated in the July plot with von Stauffenberg against Hitler in 1933
and was subsequently hung. Schmitt drafted legislation to legalize Nazi
reorganization and state government less than a year after the publication of “The
Abuse of Legality.” This moved revealed both his theory of the exception and also a
5
Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum
proletarischen Klassenkampf, Munich: Duncker und Humblot 1921.
6
Schmitt, Carl; Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. by
George Schwab, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005.
7
Schmitt, Carl; Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. and ed. by G.L. Ulmen,
Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press Westport 1996.
8
Schmitt, Carl; The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), trans. by Elle Kennedy, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press 1985.
9
Schmitt, Carl; The Concept of the Political (1932), trans. by George Schwab, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 1996.
10
Carl Schmitt, Legalität und Legitimität, Munich: Duncker und Humblot 1932. (English translation:
Legality and Legitimacy, trans. by Jeffrey Seitzer, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press
2004.)
11
Carl Schmitt, “Der Missbrauch der Legalität,” Tägliche Rundschau, July 19, 1932.
12
Schmitt actually received a letter from Heidegger encouraging him to join the Party, and on the 1st
May both signed up together. As Balakrishnan notes, “Despite the massive influx of new members,
which son resulted in a moratorium, Schmitt and those who jumped on board were going beyond the
call of duty: neither Popitz nor Jünger, nor most of Schmitt’s other friends, nor even a majority of those
who taught in the law faculties, ever became members, and he was in no danger of losing his position if
he had chosen not to do so.” Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 181.
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rather sinister, opportunistic streak. After the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1936,
Schmitt published an article defending the legality of Hitler’s actions called “The
Führer Protects the Law”13. In the same year, due mostly to his Weimar past, Catholic
background, and diverse factionalism within the Party, he did lose his government
and party appointments after an inquiry, but kept his job and his life, protected by
none other than Herman Göring 1893-1946). In 1938, he published The Leviathan in
the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol.14
From the late 1930s onwards, Schmitt liked to view himself as a Benito Cereno
character from the story by Herman Melville (1819–1891)15. The analogy is that of
someone being caught in a situation they do not want to be in but have not choice.
However, the fact remains that even though he was being watched by the Nazis
during the war, Schmitt never thought about leaving Germany or criticizing the Nazis.
He continued to see himself as a Benito Cereno being observed by the Allies after the
war. However, he escaped the long court procedures of the Nuremburg Trials even
though he had been an official defender of the legality of the Nazi regime and Hitler
and refusing any de-Nazification down to his dying day. His only punishment was a
year in an internment camp after the war and being banned from teaching. Instead,
Schmitt returned to his hometown Plettenberg where he received intellectuals from all
over the world from both the Left and the Right, and he continued to write
prolifically, publishing such works as The Nomos of the Earth in the International
Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950),16 Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of
the Time Into the Play (1956),17 and Political Theology II (1970).18 In 1962, Schmitt
did give a few lectures in Francoist Spain from which The Theory of Partisan (1963)
emerged.19 Schmitt died on April 7, 1985 and is buried in his hometown.
Carl Schmitt, “Der Führer schützt das Rechts,” Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 1934, pp. 945-50. In June
1934, Schmitt became editor in chief for the self-published newspaper Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung.
14
translation: The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a
Political Symbol (1938), trans. by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, Westport, Connecticut, London:
Greenwood Press 1996.)
15
On his fiftieth birthday in 1938, Schmitt signed himself off as “Benito Cereno” in a letter. See Tracy
B. Strong’s Foreword to Political Theology, p. ix.
16
Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, Cologne: Greven
1950. (English translation: The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum, trans. by G.L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press 2003.)
17
Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, Düsseldorf: Diederichs 1956.
18
Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie,
Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1970.
19
Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen, Berlin:
Duncker und Humblot 1963. (English translation: Theory of the Partisan, trans. by G.L. Ulmen, New
York: Telos Press 2007.)
13
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II. The Connection between Schmitt and Kierkegaard
However seldom, Kierkegaard does turn up in key points of Schmitt’s writings. And
the use that Schmitt makes of some of the thinking and writings of Kierkegaard are
fundamental to understanding the roots and backbone of Schmitt’s political thinking.
This has been overlooked by most Schmittian scholars to the point even, strangely
enough, of being ignored. Kierkegaard is especially prominent in the seminal works
of the Weimar years both explicitly and implicitly in Political Romanticism, Roman
Catholicism and Political Form, Political Theology and The Concept for the Political.
It was especially in these years, from 1909 up until the National Socialists took power
in 1933 that many German intellectuals were reading and being literally bewitched by
Kierkegaard’s profound and stylish writings.
From Schmitt’s Nachlass and evidence in his own writings both in his published
works and his diaries, we know for certain that Schmitt had read or at least was
familiar with German translations of Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, the
essay “The Present Age,”20 Stages on Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, The Point
of View of my Work as an Author, Attack on Christendom, The Single Individual and
the Church, a twelve-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works,21 and a
German edition called Begriff des Auserwählten22 which he received as a gift from the
German translator in 1918. In Begriff des Auserwählten alone, there are markings all
over the book.23 In Political Romanticism, the name Kierkegaard is mentioned once
and only in a footnote. But this one time in this case is enough to perceive the shadow
of Kierkegaard that haunts the whole text. Schmitt writes
See Sören Kierkegaard, “Kritik der Gegenwart,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, May 1516, 1915, pp. 691-712 and pp. 797-817. See also, Sören Kierkegaard, Der Pfahl im Fleisch, trans. and
ed. by Theodor Haecker, Innsbruck: Brenner 1914, p. 75, note. 84. See also Carl Schmitt, Die
Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919, ed. by Ernst Hüsmert and Gerd Geisler, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2005, p.
66, note 71.
21
Sören Kierkegaard, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1-12, trans. and ed. by Hermann Gottsched and
Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1909-22. Cf. Schmitt, Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar
1915, ed. by Ernst Hüsmert, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2003, p. 416, notes; and Schmitt, Die Militärzeit
1915 bis 1919, p. 577.
22
Søren Kierkegaard, Der Begriff des Auserwählten, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Hellerau: Hegner
1917. See Schmitt, Tagebücher: Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, p. 416.
23
Cf. Ellen Kenney, Constitutional Failure. Carl Schmitt in Weimar, Durham and London: Duke
University Press 2004, p. 205.
20
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There was another resolution of the romantic situation, which only the great
figure among the romantics (for I do not consider Kleist a romantic) met
with: Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard, all the elements of the romantic were in
force: irony, the aesthetic conception of the world; the antitheses of the
possible and the real, the infinite and the finite; the feeling for the concrete
moment. His Protestant Christianity made him into the only individual who
exists in the God of Christianity. In the immediacy of the relationship to
God, every intrinsically worthy community was abolished. For political
romanticism, this resolution does not come into consideration.24
This footnote is triggered by the closing sentence of a section (given the title “The
romantic subject and the new realities” in the English translation) where Kierkegaard
is already present: “With the definite renunciation and perception of an either-or, the
romantic situation was brought to an end.”25 For Schmitt, not only is Kierkegaard the
greatest of the romantics but also, crucially, the only one who overcomes the “eternal
conversation” and makes a decision, or turns possibility into concrete reality. In
section three, we will delve deeper into Schmitt and Kierkegaard’s decisionism. This
decisionism will be developed further and more decisively by Schmitt in The Concept
of the Political in his definition of the political and discussion of the friend/enemy
distinction in the politics.
Kierkegaard most famously appears at the end of the first chapter of Schmitt’s
Political Theology, though his name is not mentioned, but as the “Protestant
theologian”:
A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in
theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: “The exception
explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general
correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals
everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general
becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the
general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed
because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable
superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with
intense passion.”26
24
Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 166, note 10.
Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 65.
26
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 15.
25
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This quotation is taken from the end of Kierkegaard’s Repetition,27 though it is very
slightly altered. Schmitt has modified and edited the quotation. His translation is not
to be found in any German editions. Schmitt uses the word “actual” (wirklich) rather
than the word that Kierkegaard uses which is “legitimate” (berettiget). Preceding this
passage, Schmitt is already speaking in the language and ideas of Kierkegaard’s
pseudonym of Repetition, Constantin Constantius:
The exception can be more important to it [a philosophy of concrete life]
than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but because
the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalisations
inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting
than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything.28
The exception (die Ausnahme in German and undtagelsen in Danish) is the central
term in Schmitt’s Political Theology. The opening sentence is probably Schmitt’s
most famous line: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” 29 I will take a
closer look at the exception in the case of both Kierkegaard and Schmitt in section
three. Throughout the same text, there is mention of the “either/or,” no doubt again
due to the heavy and direct influence of Kierkegaard as “theologian” on Schmitt as
“political and legal theorist” writing a book called Political Theology.30(Maroš K.)
In 1923, a year after Political Theology, Schmitt publishes a kind of sequel, Roman
Catholicism and Political Form,31 where again Kierkegaard is mentioned and this
time by name. Kierkegaard is only mentioned once, but again with reverence. And
whereas in Political Theology, Kierkegaard as “protestant theologian” is mentioned at
the end of the first chapter, in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he is
mentioned at the end in the Appendix to the essay. For one commentator, this is an
essay “concerned with the political consequences of Protestant inwardness and
worldly asceticism, for which Schmitt finds an antidote in the ‘political idea’ of
27
SKS 4, 93 / R, 227.
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 15.
29
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5: “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet.”
30
For the insertion of “either/or” in Political Theology, see for example, Schmitt, Political Theology, p.
18; p. 53; p. 55.
31
As G.L. Ulmen points out in the English translation’s introduction to Roman Catholicism and
Political Form: “The first edition of Political Theology (1922) contains a note indicated that Schmitt’s
four chapters on the theory of sovereignty were written together with an essay titled “The Political Idea
of Catholicism,” which appeared separately in 1923 under the title Roman Catholicism and Political
Form,” see Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, p. xxxi.
28
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Catholicism.”32 Schmitt juxtaposes the Catholic visibility of the Church with the
Protestant invisibility of the church. Again, Kierkegaard comes out unscathed here
and in the text is called, I quote, “the most inward of all Christians”.33 So for Schmitt,
in Political Romanticism, Kierkegaard is “the only great figure among the romantics”;
in Political Theology, the one “who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in
theological reflection in the nineteenth century”; and in Roman Catholicism and
Political Form, “the most inward of all Christians”—high praise indeed.
Even though Kierkegaard is not actually mentioned in The Concept of the Political,
one can see Schmitt’s appropriation of Kierkegaard’s philosophical-theological
mission into the concrete existence into his own creation of the existential political
condition. One might think of Kierkegaard in this text in Schmitt’s prioritization of
conflict and struggle (“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict”), 34 his
disgust at the bourgeoisie (“The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave
the apolitical riskless private sphere”),35 and the lack of decision-making and fauxindividualism (“An individualism in which anyone other then the free individual
himself were to decide upon the substance and dimension of his freedom would be
only an empty phrase”).36
Both Hamlet and Don Quixote, two towering literary figures of modernity, hold a
significant place in Kierkegaard and Schmitt’s writings. Quixote epitomizes the close
connection between lunacy and truth that Kierkegaard explores in both the
Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Fear and Trembling. Schmitt’s essay which
has a very Kierkegaardian title - “Don Quixote and the Public - is also about reason
and madness, and this piece is already giving signs of the more mature Schmitt of
Political Theology in the articulation of the exception. For both Schmitt and
Kierkegaard, Don Quixote is an exception. Similar to Kierkegaard, Schmitt writes: “A
man who has motives other than those usual in bourgeois life will be a
laughingstock…the public sees quite rightly what it laughs at; the question is only
32
Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, pp. xiii-xiv.
ibid. p. 52.
34
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 39.
35
ibid, p. 62.
36
ibid, p. 71.
33
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whether it is right.”37 Both Kierkegaard and Schmitt view Quixote as good, noble and
honest, all elements of human greatness unlike the all-knowing Publikum or “crowdman” (Mængde) of reason and “normal understanding.”38 Unlike Kierkegaard and
Schmitt’s exception, the Publikum only see the general with a “comfortable
superficiality” rather than with “intense passion” as their Don Quixote does. One can
add that it is in these literary experiments where everything is possible, is also where
Schmitt does find his voice and will appropriate these interests into his most vital
elements of his political and legal thinking. Schmitt, in classical Kierkegaardian
fashion, at one point in the piece asks, “But what does a rationalist know about real
life?”39
III. Zones of Exception and Political Appropriation
A. From Literature to Praxis: The Existential Moment
The literary quality of Kierkegaard’s writing alongside the disenchantment of living
in the modern world and suspicion of optimistic Hegelian philosophy rang powerfully
in the ears of the gifted intellectuals growing up in the early twentieth century and
living through World War I, and then witnessing the fragility of the Weimar Republic
and the rise of extremists from both the Left and the Right culminating in Hitler’s
seizure of power in 1933. Adorno’s monograph on Kierkegaard was published on the
same day that Hitler took power.40 In Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927),
Kierkegaard plays a central role in the development of the book. Most especially,
Heidegger takes Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition, the analysis of anxiety especially
in the face of death, and the “moment.” And Georg Lukács had already written the
seminal essay on Kierkegaard entitled “The Foundering of Form against Life: Sören
Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen,”41 revealing the personal quality of Kierkegaard’s
writing which acts as a mirror and ultimately judgment on the reader’s own life.
Carl Schmitt, “Don Quijote und das Publikum,” Die Rheinlande, vol. 22, 1912, pp. 348-50.
“The public” (Publikum), “the crowd” (Mængde) and “the numerical” (det Numeriske) are words that
Kierkegaard uses especially from 1846 on. Look especially at his social critique and use of these words
in Two Ages (1846) and The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written ca. 1848, published
posthumously in 1859).
39
See Carl Schmitt, “Der Spiegel,” Die Rheinlande, vol. 22, 1912, p. 62.
40
See Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Mohr 1933.(Juraj
M., end here)
41
György Lukács, “Sören Kierkegaard és Regine Olsen,” Nyugat, vol. 1, no. 6, 1910, pp. 378-87.
(English translation: “The Foundering of Form against Life. Sören Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen,” in
37
38
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Not only is Schmitt looking at previous political thinkers in forming his political and
legal thought, he is also delving into characters from literature such as Hamlet, Don
Quixote and Benito Cereno to name a few. We may add Constantin Constantius,
Johannes de silentio, Vigilius Haufniensis, Anti-Climacus, Johannes the Seducer,
Victor Eremita and Judge William to this list of literary-philosophical creations. By
travelling with these various particular characters and pseudonyms, Schmitt is
answering the existential challenge: to turn theory into praxis. Fundamental is also the
fact that Schmitt views these characters and pseudonyms, like the young Lukács and
Heidegger did, as exceptional individuals suspicious of their socio-political
environment, and their wish to transform it through concrete action. Unlike Marx,
who is the enemy for Schmitt, these figures are singular, sovereign individuals who
do not rely on the collective, and rather than obeying the laws of history, wish to
confront and confound it. For Schmitt, this Bruder in Geist is following in the great
tradition of intensely psychological and religious poets of despair, decision and faith
such as Dante and Dostoevsky. When Schmitt is formulating his political sovereign in
1923, he writes, “…making a decision is more important than how a decision is
made.”42
B. Political Romanticism and the Bourgeoisie
Kierkegaard is also a critic of romanticism. Unlike the German romanticists,
Kierkegaard is attempting to make space for such loaded terms as “responsibility,”
“duty” and “decision.” Kierkegaard’s aesthetic pseudonyms perceive the either/or but
avoid it.43 One ultimately must come to the point of duty, decision and responsibility,
Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1974, pp. 28-41;
German translation: “Das Zerschellen der Form against Leben: Søren Kierkegaard und Regine Olsen,”
in Die Seele und die Formen: Essays, Berlin: Fleischel 1911, pp. 61-91.)
42
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 56. Kierkegaard’s first major work, Either/Or, marks the break with
theory and the call for action and practice to the point where half way through Judge William’s
response to the aesthete, he tells the reader that if he understands him by now and finds him standing at
the crossroad (Skillevejen), then he should throw away the book now and begin living, that is, by
choosing (See SKS 3, 164 / EO2, 168: “As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in
such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing. Therefore,
if it should so happen that before you finish reading this somewhat lengthy exploration, which again is
being sent to you in the form of a letter, you feel that the moment of choice has arrived, then throw
away the remainder—do not bother with it; you have lost nothing!”) Schmitt, as is evident from his
diaries and Political Romanticism, embraces the message of Either/Or and Literary Review of Two
Ages and attempts to bring this into law and politics.
43
One commentator articulates Kierkegaard’s relation with the romantics: “Like the German romantics,
Kierkegaard considers the poetic an intrinsic feature of the existential condition. Unlike the romantics,
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and yet both Kierkegaard and Schmitt are still interested in the use of the poetic. Both
allude to Shakespeare’s characters as providing a narrative to human existence. Are
Kierkegaard and Schmitt then immersed in any way in political romanticism? In
Political Romanticism, Schmitt warns that this might indeed happen and tells the
reader: “Indeed, I hope this book remains aloof from every subromantic interest.”44
Yet it is not possible for Schmitt to be exempt from every subromantic interest. In
Schmitt’s thought, is the world instead an occasion for constructing a political world
of friend and enemy? 45 Is not Schmitt himself already aware of this when he asks the
reader not to associate his writings with any “subromantic interest”? The conservative
romantic is apparent when the sovereign/exception has the power to do anything,
which is the same power that German romanticism wished to have and which
Kierkegaard criticized: the power that seeks the “infinite possibilities.” This time,
romanticism is found in the realm of those who hold power, which makes their power
all the more dangerous, as it allows for war, conquest and subjugation. Might Schmitt
be actually aestheticizing the exception and carving out a politically aesthetic world
with the dynamic of the friend/enemy distinction which he bases on a presumed
existential reality?
How can one rescue Kierkegaard from the same fate of so many modern intellectuals
that reject the democratic age? And why should we? Do Kierkegaard’s scathing
remarks on democracy46 and liberalism47 clash with his unwavering argument for the
single individual in the world? Georgio Agamben, in his analysis of “state of
exception” asks the question: “What then happens when exception and rule become
however, he does not believe one should endeavour to construct the self ‘through experimentation and
play with an infinity of possibilities.See Mark Dooley, Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, New
York: Fordham University Press 2001, p. 149.
44
Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 21.
45
In the preface to Political Romanticism, Schmitt introduces this term to help us understand what he
means by “romanticism”: “The romantic attitude is most clearly characterized by means of a singular
concept, that of the occasio” (Political Romanticism, p. 16). This concept can be rendered in terms of
ideas such as occasion, opportunity, and perhaps also chance. Schmitt calls romanticism “subjectified
occasionalism.” Explaining this definition, he writes: “[…] in the romantic, the romantic subject treats
the world as an occasion and an opportunity for his romantic productivity.” (ibid. p. 17).
46
Pap. VIII-1 A 667 / JP 4, 4144: “Of all tyrannies a people’s government is the most excruciating, the
most mindless, unconditionally the downfall of everything greatness and elevation….A people’s
government is the true picture of hell [En Folk-Regjering er det sande Billede paa Helvede].”
47
SKS 18, 205, FF:204 / KJN 2, 105: “But, as in the fairytale, the liberals have a tongue and an empty
head like the tongue in a church bell.”
11
undecidable?”48 Schmitt bases his fear on Man; Kierkegaard bases his fear on God,
and fearlessness in the face of one’s fellow man—something that dictatorship will not
tolerate and democracy will. Kierkegaard and Schmitt wrote in the times of decision.
For much of Europe there was an appeal to either fascism or socialism. Schmitt
decides for Nazism for a time and authoritarian state, while Kierkegaard’s authorship
remains an undecidable, restoring the single individual as critical spirit over and
above political romanticists and authoritarian theorists: “…the condition of man,
regarded as spirit…is always critical.”49 The decision, which is presented so starkly
and with such rhetorical force in Two Ages, distinguishes between God and world. By
choosing God, one is not, to repeat, refuting the world, but paradoxically choosing the
world too, not in the Hegelian sense of absorbing all, but in Kierkegaard’s sense of
acting honestly and decisively.
This connects specifically with Kierkegaard’s depiction of the bourgeoisie that hide
behind that valor of others and shelter themselves in their protective “cleverness” or
Klogskab. Comments are rife throughout his authorship on this kind of image we get
of the bourgeoisie. In order to survive, the bourgeoisie oscillates between right and
left, between fascism and communism, between the either/ors – from hatred of
monarchy and aristocracy and fear of being dispossessed of private property. Schmitt
concludes in Political Theology: “He (the bourgeois) thus oscillated between his two
enemies and wanted to fool both.”50
One is reminded of the passage from the Revelation of John that closes the New
Testament that Kierkegaard was very fond of: “I know thy works, that thou art neither
cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm—The
effect of lukewarm water is well known. I am about to spue thee out of my mouth.”51
Dostoevsky was also very fond of this passage and which turns up in vital moments of
his great novels.52 And in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lukewarm people are not even
48
See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell, Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press 2005, p. 58.
49
SKS 11, 142 / SUD, 25.
50
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 61. (Nikola H., end here)
51
See The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, King James Bible, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1997, 3:15-16, p. 302.
52
See especially Demons, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London and New York:
Everyman’s Library 2000, when the passage is read out at the end of the novel to the father of the two
principle characters, p. 653. The character Stavrogin might represent the lukewarm figure par
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allowed enter hell such is their wretchedness.53 Schmitt carries this disdain of the
“lukewarm” into political thought and for which the bourgeoisie, the liberal
democrats and the Jews are to blame. Earlier in The Concept of the Political in stating
his friend/enemy distinction in politics, Schmitt confronts this “lukewarm” bourgeois
liberalism and declares: “If a part of the population declares that it no longer
recognises enemies, then depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids
them.”54 However, Schmitt and Kierkegaard differ here ultimately. For Kierkegaard,
it is the watering down of “spirit” and “passion” that is the great problem of the
bourgeoisie towards faith in God and the mortality of one’s life; for Schmitt this is
transferred into the public and political realm. And even though we of course have the
benefit of hindsight and history behind us and Schmitt was writing throughout the
very unsettling Weimar republic years, the danger still remains of eliminating the
“everlasting conversation” and the “discussion class” altogether from the political
realm. Instead, a whole generation of German jurists including Carl Schmitt, trained
to uphold the independence of the courts, legalize murder and gave absolute power to
the sovereign as exception to transcend the law and the “everlasting conversation.”
This brings us to the next point - on the appropriation of the exception.
C. The Exception
i. The Exception in the Political Realm
What is the exception? Literally, the exception is a person or entity that is ‘excepted’
or that does not follow a rule. There is an old proverb that Schmitt might be pleased
with: “the exception proves the rule.” The fact that some cases do not follow the rule
proves that the rule applies in all other cases. This applies to both Constantin’s poet
and Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign. Schmitt draws the sovereign from the exception,
which in turn is drawn from the single individual. The problem emerges when
Schmitt takes Constantin’s exception and puts it to political use.
excellence, who shifts from one idea to the next, one country to another, from seducing one woman to
another, and infects all those around him like a cult and shadowy leader.
53
See Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, lines 34-9, in his The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum,
London and New York: Everyman’s Library 1995: “This miserable way is taken by the sorry souls of
those who lived without disgrace and without praise. They now commingle with the coward angels, the
company of those who were not rebels nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.”
54
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 51.
13
Constantin concludes: “…the poet is ordinarily [Almindelighed] an exception.” It is
Constantin’s poet that fails as the exception, because he has failed in his experiment
of repetition and remains outside society, asocial and nostalgic. He is lost in the
melancholy of erotic love, he confides in a stranger he does not wish to confide in, he
in no way wins back the girl and he in no way overcomes his attachment to her; in
short, he is left in a worse state than when he started out. Indeed, Repetition, perhaps
the most aesthetic of Kierkegaard’s writings, is a book whose characters—the writer
and the poet, fail in their project.55 One can go further then to say that Kierkegaard
too fails (intentionally perhaps) in his project of Repetition, as the writer behind the
writer, and both the poet (as the exception) and the writer fail when the “exception”
turns to praxis. Yet the political realm always implies praxis. This brings out a
neglected point, because the focus of the discussion on the exception in Kierkegaard
is almost invariably Fear and Trembling, where one is tempted to think that the
exception—Abraham—is vindicated. Abraham is vindicated through God as the
Absolute, and, as Johannes de silentio concludes, either the exception “stands in an
absolute relation to the Absolute, or Abraham is lost.”56 Repetition suggests that, in
praxis, most exceptions fail. Schmitt presumes upon the achievability of the exception
in public practice, just what Kierkegaard would deny, or at least question. Nearing the
end of chapter two of Political Theology, Schmitt points out: “What matters for the
reality of legal life is who decides.”57 And yet, a few lines later, he concludes:
“Finally it [the juristic form] is also not the form of aesthetic production, because the
latter knows no decision.”58 But this simply alludes to the failure of Repetition in the
attempt to put ‘the exception’ to practice, and the failure of the exception in public
affairs that differs from the aesthetic worlds of the poet, and the religious worlds of
the knight of faith.
When Schmitt remarked on Kierkegaard being the one “who demonstrated the vital
intensity possible in theological reflection,” he overlooked the distinction that
Johannes de silentio makes in Abraham’s ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in
relation to God and the individual’s duties to the ethical in relation to the affairs of
SKS 6, 221 / SLW, 402: “…Repetition…a venture that did not, however, succeed, for he remained
within the aesthetic.”
56
SKS 4, 207 / FT, 120.
57
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 34.
58
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 35.
55
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men. Taking note of Jesus’ advice to the Pharisees: “Render therefore unto Caesar the
things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,”59 Kierkegaard,
moving from Fear and Trembling, goes on to write extended discourses in 1848 on
distinguishing what serves God and what serves Mammon.60 In short, the same
exception should not be used in the same way in both religion and politics. Yet, such
an exception is something that Schmitt is at pains to construct/contest because, for
Schmitt, all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts. Schmitt writes: “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to
the miracle in theology.”61 What might be interpreted here, given the title he has been
ascribed by both his supporters and detractors as “the Hobbes of the twentieth
century,” is a return to the pre-modern conception of man and state. But Schmitt is not
pre-modern, but very much modern, when we view his modernity as such that his
thought is not based on theological argument or scientifically deduced argument. He
will always be more modern than Hobbes, because Hobbes uses scientific argument,
as the ground for his thinking, while for Schmitt, there is only an existential ground,
that is, an abyss.
ii. The “Exceptionless Exception”
Can Kierkegaard’s exception become the right of resistance to Schmitt’s state of
exception? In the case of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, the law of the state was
nearly broken, and Johannes Climacus assures the reader in his concluding remarks in
the Postscript that he is in favor of the well-ordered state that keeps out any idea of a
peoples’ rule.62 Kierkegaard’s exception is most needed when stability seems most
assured. Also unlike Schmitt’s exception being the decision of the sovereign, and thus
the exception becoming the ruler governing a country, Kierkegaard’s exception acts
as the critic in the face of the universal or norm—and in extremis—in the face of
political totality, thus giving the exception to the individual being governed rather
than to the powers that govern. Kierkegaard’s exception emerges in normality, or
when society assures itself that it is stable and secure, in the case of the political
realm, in times of peace, in times of stability; the exception ought to provide the
exception to the rule, as the Socratic gadfly (Bremse) that confronts the ruling powers,
59
Matthew 22:21.
Referring specifically to Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses.
61
Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 36.
62
SKS 7, 563 / CUP, 620-1.
60
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the one that speaks out, responsible for themselves as individuals rather than as
members of a faceless public. However, it is contrary also to the modern phenomenon
of the paparazzi which reveals the absence of the exception in those who are governed
in their claim for no responsibility for whatever celebrity or figure they are chasing,
they claim they are only responding to a demand, and the public reader claims no
responsibility either because they claim that they don’t chase the figure in question,
they only read about them. This example helps us understand Kierkegaard’s point on
journalism being the “evil principle of the world.”63
When emergency governments become the norm, politics has failed. It is in times of
normality (security, stability, and supposed tranquility) where exceptions are needed
within those that are ruled, and not within dictatorships by those who rule. This is
where Kierkegaard’s exception might find its space in actual existence. However,
Schmitt’s exception emerges in a world of exceptions and crises and desires to
consolidate its power; it feasts on crisis and catastrophe and waits for the opportune
moment to wield its “lawful” power. Kierkegaard’s exception emerges in a world of
Klogskab and reflection—both for and by the stranger64—thus distinguishing
Kierkegaard from Schmitt. So far, Kierkegaard’s exception fails as an authority
within the powers that be when implemented in or articulated by human affairs—
witness the blunders of Constantin and his poet, or the teleological suspension by
Abraham with his knife. Nor does Kierkegaard welcome chaos and impotency in the
“exceptionless exception,” but there must still remain space for the exception.
Agamben reminds the reader: “It is important not to forget that the modern state of
exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist
one.”65
63
SV1 XIII, 555 / PV, 69.
“Stranger” in the sense of the outsider, as the gadfly (Bremse) such as Socrates, the eccentric, and
“the emigrant from the sphere of the universal [Almenes Sphære]” to quote from Johannes de silentio,
see SKS 4, 202 / FT 115.
65
Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 5.
64
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