Pro Aris et Focis : Schmitt's Partisans in Munkler's Theory of War

The originality of Carl Schmitt's partisan theory lies in its display of the principle of absolute enmity based on the opposition of friend and foe explored in his earlier work. "Lenin is, for Schmitt, not just an illustrious representative—and a radical one, too—of such a pure hostility, but in a tradition whose first moment, in The Theory of the Partisan, is extremely difficult to determine" (Derrida 1997, 124). His great friend Ernst Jünger was in no doubt about the proximate source of it. As he wrote Schmitt in a letter of 1933 in praise of his concept of the political in the just-issued book of that title, so categorical a principle of enmity is not of a modern sort (Jünger and Schmitt 1999, 18). It imports the traditional diremption of good and evil, seen in a painting of Hieronymus Bosch described by Jünger, into an amoral modern climate that had abolished the concept of evil. Schmitt's portrait of modern history driven by partisans of hatred is remarkable in retrospect for the hatreds that it does not include: no Armenian massacre, no Soviet purges, and of course no industrial death camps. Schmitt's partisan is not a perpetrator but a victim: of foreigners, imperial armies, laws not his own. His final sublimation as Kosmopartisan transports his local celebrity into a transcendental dimension. Like Bosch's self-absorbed figures, he is his own moral element.

Schmitt's intervention of 1963 on the concept of the political is an allegorical canvas, an exemplum in the spirit of the French moralistes whom he admired (Jünger and Schmitt 1999, 20). Here the forlorn partisan stands larger than life, a man apart, alone with his destiny, properly singular as in the essay's title. He is romantic by descent and by intention. The flavor of the type is captured in Heinrich von Kleist's lyric "To Palafox," which situates Schmitt's case in a heroic past:

Approach me not in markets, or where men take the air—I would turn to stone— for I would see you only in the marmoreal Stygian troop of the spirits of Leonidas, Arminius, William Tell . . .

(Kleist 1923, 36-7)

José de Palafox y Melzi (1780-1847), Duke of Saragossa, drove off the Napoleonic army after a siege of 61 days, went after them in the open field when they withdrew, then retreated to Saragossa for a second siege which destroyed the town. Palafox was exalted to the condition of governor of Aragon by popular consent, and led a ragtag resistance without significant support from the crown. The comparison with Leonidas, defender of classical Sparta, provides classical antecedence for the image of endurance against long odds. His battlefield was Thermopylae. Arminius and William Tell extend this line into ancient Germany and modern Switzerland.

The singular partisan doomed to suffer and ultimately to fail, as Palafox did, is Schmitt's culture hero. But as soon as he is more than one man against the world, the formula that "the partisan fights irregularly" (Schmitt 1963, 11) becomes a problem, depending as it does on degree and on regularity itself, as his author recognizes. In the end, the partisan's relative success will turn out to depend on interested third parties—that is, on enlisting the support of regular political and military forces greater than what he can dispose of. The cardinal distinction between regular and irregular on which the identity of the partisan depends cannot be sustained for this reason among others, according to Herfried Münkler (Münkler 2003, 175). If so, he becomes simply a chameleon, changing colors as he must to make a name for himself: the sort of hero that Kleist created in Arminius, at odds with himself because he serves two masters. Such a figure is bound to be morally ambiguous, and Schmitt acknowledges as much. The appeal of an ambiguous character must have been considerable to him in his isolation, caught between the discredited Third Reich and the limitless rivalry of the Cold War...