Terror Right

The enemy is not one. He is at least two. This may constitute a serious, even dangerous problem, Carl Schmitt tells us. Writing in 1950, Schmitt is beginning to elaborate this thought, which will culminate in a sharp formulation in the Theory of the Partisan in 1963. Yet, Schmitt already knows much of what he is talking about. He prompts us, in fact, to consider the two enemies as a lesson from medieval political theory—a lesson that will turn out to be not only a theory of empire, but also one that lays the ground for an understanding of political struggle and of political resistance. The first enemy, then, the first enemy of humanity, hostis humani generis, is the tyrant, who rules over the land. The other enemy, along with the tyrant, partakes of the rest of the earth. They, the two enemies, are divided, and they share the world among themselves. "For the order of the land, the tyrant was the common enemy, just as, for the order of the sea, the pirate was the enemy of the human race" (Schmitt 2003, 65). Saint Augustine had famously illustrated a theory of justice around the respective figures of the emperor and the pirate, but he did not consider them as "universal and core concepts of enmity," as concepts that "not only obtained their meaning from, but affirmed the existence of the concrete order or the international law of an empire." With this affirmation of order rather than with the extent of property and theft, Schmitt singularly recasts medieval political theory as grounding the legal and political order, not this time on the distinction between friend and enemy, but on a distinct duality made up of two enemies. In this description, then, order is not only the division of the earth around antagonistic lines, but it is the earth's sharing by two enemies together, as it were—two enemies who are not, strictly speaking, opposed. The division between them is therefore not the site of a competition, not the site of political struggle nor of political resistance. But where, then, is such a site to be located? Medieval political theory answers indirectly, by way of another question, and it is one which it never fails to ask, namely: What to do with the enemy? The answer to this question is as univocal as it is asymmetric.

Just as, in other times, when a maritime empire emerged, and the pirate appeared to be the enemy of humanity for the order of the sea, so the tyrant, because he exercised power contrary to order in an otherwise autarkic and autonomous system, was both the internal enemy of this system and the enemy of the empire as the comprehensive spatial order.

(Schmitt 2003, 65)

If it remains true that the enemy is not one, and if the two enemies are still enemies of humankind, the solution (to the problems, presumably, of humankind) places them in a different hierarchy of responsibility, marking them with a different label of urgency. The tyrant, at any rate, is the worst enemy because he undermines order in a way that remains independent of the pirate. Moreover, and as we will consider below, the latter may even hold the key to a future order. If it is possible to consider, as I will below, the lines of forces linking the pirate to the partisan (and to the terrorist), it should become obvious that the theory of two enemies serves, in Schmitt's rendering, as a prolegomena to a theory of the partisan. What follows is an attempt to linger in the vicinity of this hypothesis.

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Before the law, man is a subject of the law in appearing before it. This is obvious, but since he is before it because he cannot enter it, he is also outside the law (an outlaw). He is neither under the law nor in the law. He is both a subject of the law...