A God Without Sovereignty. Political Jouissance. The Passive Decision

They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The [Judge Advocate General's Corps] officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process. They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary applications of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

(Hersh 2004, 42-43)

The actions of the United States in Guantánamo, the Padilla case, and the incidents concerning the mistreatment of war prisoners that came to light in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal have plunged the validity of the 1949 Geneva Conventions into practical obscurity. We tend to think of it as an ominous contemporary development. And yet Carl Schmitt, in his 1962 lectures on partisan theory, had anticipated it: "The four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 are the work of a humane conscience, and a humanitarian development that deserves our admiration. While they not only permit the enemy a share of humanity but even of legitimacy in the sense of recognition, they remain grounded in classical international law and its tradition, without which such a work of humanity would have been unlikely. Their basis remains the statist foundation of warfare and the achieved containment of war, with their clear distinctions of war and peace, military and civil, enemy and criminal, state war and civil war. While they . . . relax these essential distinctions and even question them, they open the door for a kind of war that would knowingly destroy such clear divisions. At that point many carefully formulated compromise rules will look like the fragile bridges over an abyss concealing portentous metamorphoses in the concepts of war, peace, and the partisan" (Schmitt 2004, 37).¹

Schmitt's portentous metamorphoses may have caught up with us. Have they rendered his partisan theory useless for thinking the present? Is the partisan, today, still a living "figure of the world-spirit" (52), or has it vanished into the dustbin of history? The "spark that in 1808 flew north from Spain" (53) turned the partisan—whether as the "defensive-autochthonous defender of home" or the "aggressive international revolutionary activist" (35)—into the true military hero of the modern imaginary. Partisan militancy, in wars of national liberation, anticolonial wars, and civil wars fought in the name of revolutionary justice, achieved world-historical importance after the Napoleonic invasions. But Jacques Derrida can say in his recent Voyous (2003) that "a new violence is being prepared and in truth has been unleashed for a long time to come, in a manner more visibly suicidal and autoimmunitary than ever. This violence no longer springs from a world war or even from war as such, even less from any war laws. And this is not reassuring: on the contrary. It is not, essentially, a classical and international war, declared according to the old jus europeanus, or even what Schmitt calls a 'partisan war'; for the latter, like terrorism in its classical denomination, made recourse to violence and terror in view of the liberation or the more or less distant foundation of some territorialized national-statal community, hence of some sovereignty" (214). The implication is of course that contemporary partisan or counterpartisan violence, no longer primarily statist, no longer happens in the name of sovereignty. If not sovereignty, then what? Messianisms, whether of the partisan or of the counterpartisan variety?

This essay attempts to read Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan in the context of contemporary developments, as framed by Derrida in Voyous (2003) and by Giorgio Agamben in Stato di eccezione (2003). I make use of Jacques Lacan's notion of the universal state in his differentiation between the ethical commitment of the ordinary man versus that of the hero, and I also analyze the remarks on Kant's notion of the enemy that Schmitt made in The Nomos of the Earth. My question throughout is whether a new antipartisan or even antimilitant understanding of political practice might be developing today in the face of the radical disturbance...