What About Schmitt? Translating Carl Schmitt's Theory of Sovereignty as Literary Concept

A loosely allegorical, albeit perhaps somewhat self-indulgent, reading of the hot tub scene in the 2002 movie About Schmidt might serve as a point of entry to the subject of this review. What about Schmitt? In other words, how did we ever find ourselves watching, with a mix of humor and perhaps a little unease, as a retired, conservative, obedient, flabby and grumpy old man (played by Jack Nicholson) suddenly finds himself propositioned in a hot tub by a topless, corpulent, new age liberal (played by Kathy Bates) who is the mother of the hapless dolt whom Schmidt's daughter is about to marry?

In other words, how did the recent fascination with Carl Schmitt come about? The explosion of scholarship and the courtship of Carl Schmitt over the last 15 years by the left and the right alike has been staggering. A bibliographical search on Schmitt carried out over ten years ago by Tracy B. Strong, the author of the forewords to the 1996 edition of Schmitt's The Concept of the Political and the December 2005 edition of Political Theology, comes up with "sixty-three journal articles in the last five years as well as thirty-six books published since 1980, most of them since 1990. By comparison, the search reveals 164 articles on Heidegger and twenty-six on Hitler" (The Concept of the Political xiii). The very selective bibliography contained in the foreword to Political Theology puts a conservative estimate of the rate of scholarly books published on Schmitt at over 1.5 per year since 1996 (xxxiv–xxxv).¹

Moreover, the interest in Schmitt's work is not confined to the current theoretical fashions of any one country. While German legal and critical circles continued to discuss Carl Schmitt's work long after World War II, the reception of Schmitt's work in English-language contexts starting with the rise of Hitler through to the 1970s was so hostile, for example, that George Schwab's dissertation on the critic of the Weimar Republic was rejected by Columbia University (The Challenge of the Exception v). Nearly four decades later, Columbia University and the Cardozo Law School sponsored a conference dedicated to Schmitt's work, "Carl Schmitt: Legacy and Prospects," whose proceedings would be published in the May 2000 issue of the Cardozo Law Review with contributions from scholars from Italy, Israel, the United States, England, Mexico, Germany, and Argentina. In Spain, where Jürgen Habermas's concept of "constitutional patriotism" has been taken up by many intellectuals on the left, and now the right due to the demands of the proposed Catalan Statute, the important philosophical journal Daimon followed up its inaugural issue devoted to Habermas with a 1996 issue dedicated to Schmitt entitled "Carl Schmitt: Entre teología y mitología política" ("Carl Schmitt: Between Theology and Political Mythology").²

It would be too hasty to conclude that Schmitt's current critical standing indicates any kind of resolution of the polemics between left and right regarding the legacy of his legal thought and his political association with the Nazi party. It almost goes without saying that the extreme right has taken pains to revive the friend-enemy distinction, developed in Schmitt's The Concept of the Political and, in many cases, has reduced it further to a friend-foe distinction in order to justify strategies of total war and cultural, religious, and ethnic cleansing.³

On the other side of the spectrum, Giorgio Agamben, in his Homo Sacer series argues that the possibly tyrannical consequences of Schmitt's thinking on the friend-enemy distinction and the sovereign decision are not isolated to the followers of the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich," but rather are only too alive and well within the practices of present day liberal democratic states.⁴ Let me give one quick example of Agamben's line of thought in the form of biopolitics and the sovereign decision. In Homo Sacer...