The Metapolitical Structure of the West

The Essence of Politics

What is the essence of politics? Or, more importantly, does one exist? The European philosophical tradition has never stopped asking this question—if only because it has never produced a convincing answer. When Carl Schmitt, in his famous essay on the “political,” poses the question explicitly for the first time, he specifies from the outset that by essence he means neither an exhaustive definition nor even a particular content. Essence, rather, is the paradigm enabling us to understand what politics is in its originary character. Not coincidentally, his other point of reference is the term origin. After having identified conflict as the constitutive element of politics, he explains that, “As with the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense.”¹ The application of this condition, for Schmitt, is meant to frustrate any bellicist interpretation of his words. Even an anti- war stance can be essentially political, provided it is carried out with the same polemical intensity as the conflict it seeks to avoid: “War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever- present possibility it is its leading presupposition” (cp, 117).

What does the word presupposition mean for Schmitt? Like the term origin, it has no temporal connotation. A presupposition is not simply that which comes first, chronologically preceding something that will follow. It is not an event, something that has already happened; it is a negative, a fracture where time contracts in order to reconstitute itself along lines that lie outside mere chronology. Rather than the initial moment of a series of episodes, a presupposition is what, in shrinking, sets the stage for their self- realization. Far from a full- blown origin, it is an empty point that subtends what it engenders without conferring stability—even, in fact, undermining its stability. In other words, for Schmitt the presupposition of the political is both the constitutive conflictual energy and the destructive force threatening to overthrow the constituted order. In this sense, the conflict simultaneously precedes and follows what it produces. It is the element from which order rises, and yet also in which it can sink. The essence of the political is the temporal hiatus that, by means of tension, links possibility and reality, past and present, origin and contemporaneousness—the contemporary feature of the origin and the originary feature of the contemporary.²

So we return to the initial question: What is the political “made of”? What is its first “matter”? What is the source of that energy, which, having enabled the institution of order, constantly threatens to disrupt it? Schmitt’s well- known answer draws on the opposition between friend and enemy. Political unity, he argues, is made conceivable by hostility, the course of action against which it is defined. This response has been attacked as one- sided, both by those who find it imbalanced in favor of conflict and by those who complain that it is incapable of accounting for a more complex dynamic that involves not merely exclusion but also the principle of inclusion. At its foundation it is a bipolar dialectic that excludes third positions. If political unity is the result of a presupposed hostility, the entire field of the political ends up divided into two symmetrical parts, separated by a single line, according to which one is either inside or outside. The fact that the contrast may project and multiply to infinity does nothing to change its binary character. Each of the many fronts of the conflict produces the same dichotomous scheme. Thus the horizon of the political is flattened onto a single dimension bifurcated into two opposing zones.

Dolf Sternberger raises a similar objection to Schmitt. He too opens his book, Drei Wurzeln der Politik (Three Roots of Politics), with a variant of our initial question: “Politics is our destiny, but do we know what politics is?”³ He refuses the possibility of a generic definition. For Sternberger, the fact that one can identify three roots of politics—the...