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306 19 Political Hermeneutics, or Why Schmitt Is Not the Enemy of Gadamer Michael Marder In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer explicitly mentions and engages with Carl Schmitt’s work only once, on a singular occasion—which is, itself, a meditation on the notion of “occasionality”—that of a contentious reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The object of Gadamer’s criticism in appendix 2 of his masterpiece is Schmitt’s 1956 text Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time into Play, and especially its central claim that “it is possible to recognize that fissure in the work through which contemporary reality shines and which reveals the contemporary function of the work.”1 Guided by his preoccupation with the truth of art, Gadamer reproaches Schmitt, among other things, for constructing a series of oversimplified , lopsided, and irreconcilable antitheses of time and art, the “real” and the “imaginary,” the events surrounding King James’s accession to the throne and the literary creation of Hamlet.2 In a familiar, antiHegelian gesture of negating the possibility of the standoff’s conciliatory resolution into a higher third term, such as the fascist aestheticization of politics or the communist politicization of art (with the latter alternative embraced by Benjamin), Schmitt brings the dialectic of art and politics to a standstill. But the German political philosopher shares a certain erroneous presupposition with the dialectical way of thinking, according to which the two antithetical elements to be reconciled are initially situated at a considerable conceptual distance to one another. What his method misses is nothing less than “a new event of being” predicated on the absolute proximity of the work of art to its presumed real referent: “A work of art belongs so closely to what it is related to that it enriches the being of that as if through a new event of being.”3 The event is not to be understood in terms of a sudden rupturing of the symbolic order by an element foreign to it but, rather, as the seamless supplementation of what is already in being with the work of art and with the subsequent his- 307 P O L I T I C A L H E R M E N E U T I C S tory of its interpretation.4 The dialectic of aesthetics and politics at least aimed to reestablish the unity of reality and art, while Schmitt maintains the two strictly separate, save for those rare moments when the nonidentical real “irrupts” into a work of art, breaks through aesthetic sublimations , and asserts its unconditional primacy. Gadamer’s main, albeit unstated, concern is that the focus on the “irruption” (der Einbruch) of the real into the play would allow the reader of Shakespeare to bypass interpretation, to give up all too easily on the patient work of hermeneutics thanks to a sleight of hand that points out the existence of something exempt from the exigencies of interpretation —as though such a thing were possible—namely, a historical fact. The claim that a particular historical event irrupts in a work of art betrays a naive philosophy of history prevented, by its blindness, from recognizing that every historical fact already forms a part of interpretation and an equally misguided ontology of art. The seduction of the irruption is consistent with decisionism, which is, in turn, associated with Schmitt’s legal and political theory in general and the figure of the sovereign who decides on the exception that cannot be subsumed under the existing legislation in particular.5 On this view, the irruption of the real into the play is functionally parallel to the deus ex machina of the decisive intervention of the sovereign into the political milieu, dispensing with the interpretative extension of existing laws to a previously unforeseen situation. Pure acts of sovereignty, like the real fissure in the symbolic order of art, render all interpretative efforts futile. Although Gadamer does not refer to Schmitt by name in his discussion of legal hermeneutics, it is not difficult to infer who might receive the appellation of the proponent of absolutism posing an unsurpassable obstacle in the path of legal interpretation: “Thus it is an essential condition of the possibility of legal hermeneutics that law is binding on all members of the community in the same way. Where this is not the case—for example in an absolutist state, where the will of the absolute ruler is above the law—hermeneutics cannot exist.”6 The dissipation of sovereignty in the...

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