Invisible Person: Schmitt and the Master Trope of Power

Weineck, Silke Maria

doi:10.3200/gerr.84.3.199-221

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…Similarly, the concreteness of the political association means that the other’s actions are necessary to ensure an actual enemy rather than simply one imagined (Schmitt, 1996a: 27–28). For this reason, Silke-Maria Weineck’s (2009) criticism that any identification of an enemy ‘is most likely an overdetermined psychic construction rather than the essential threat Schmitt theorizes’ (p. 213) fails to understand the way Schmitt’s thinking on the political is based in and from the concrete actions of the other. Schmitt (1996a) makes this clear when he claims thatthe friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies.…”

Section: War and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The real enmity of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political

Rae

2016

Journal of International Political Theory

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Carl Schmitt’s use of the friend–enemy distinction to define the political is intimately connected to the question of how to define who is a friend and who is an enemy. This article shows that Schmitt bases it on the perceived threat posed by another. Because the political is social, this means that the political decision is intimately connected to war, which leads Schmitt to offer a tripartite analysis of war grounded in different forms of enmity called classical, real or absolute. While a number of commentators have suggested that Schmitt’s insistence that the political is the most intense antagonism should lead him to connect the political with absolute enmity, I show that the Schmittian political is and must be located against a real enemy. This not only clarifies an issue in Schmittian scholarship but also provides insights into how warring states should treat their enemy.

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Section: War and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 99%