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By contrast to this depoliticisation characteristic of modernity Schmitt 26 argues that the political requires the making of distinctions — all of which are reducible to his famous properly political distinction of friend and enemy. It is significant that this distinction in itself seems to partake in modernity no doubt as a consequence of the secularisation of political concepts Schmitt elsewhere analyses as it differentiates itself from other distinctions and social spheres.
The specificity of the political lies in the fact that its distinctiveness it its transcendence of other antagonisms religious, moral, aesthetic, economic, etc. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. Although Schmitt 37 is primarily concerned with analysing the political as a matter of sovereignty understood as the sovereignty of nation states , it is also the case that antagonisms within a particular society can be politicised: Every religious, moral, economic, ethical or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy A religious community which wages wars against members of other religious communities or engages in other wars is already more than a religious community3; it is a political entity.
The political, then, is a contentless distinction which acquires substantive content through a decision to create an antagonistic distinction.
It is this dimension of antagonism which creates the relative autonomy of the political: The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavours, from the religious, economic, moral and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national in the ethnic or cultural sense , economic or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.
The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand Schmitt It is important to note that this intensification of distinctions — their becoming-political — takes place through language, through polemos They are focussed on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result Page 8 Papers from the Jubilee Conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know who is to be affected, combated, refuted or negated by such a term.
Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as nonpolitical in the sense of harmless , or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray oneself as nonpolitical in the sense of purely scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities and thereby superior.
Schmitt, known as the theorist of the exception, here appears in the guise of a thinker of differance avant la lettre. The distinctiveness of modern administration and the modern state, according to Schmitt, is the way in which it tends to foreclose the particularly political nature of social antagonisms, in order to render them governable by reason. This, of course, is perfectly understandable given the Enlightenment dream of an end to conflict and dissensus attainable through technologies of rationality.
In this case, what is going on is a political depoliticisation of an empty signifier, an attempt to articulate the language of economics to that of politics — a move of which Schmitt was well aware. This is not to say that the state in its political character or the decision of the exception that creates properly political distinctions elide all social antagonisms. Indeed, it could legitimately be argued that Derrida is not saying this, given his awareness that concepts deconstruct themselves and texts auto-deconstruct.
His addition of Levinasian responsibility to the other enables an analysis of the responsibility or irresponsibility of political decisions and identifications. To a large degree, irresponsibility lies here in the refusal to decide, the depoliticisation of the refusal to politicise distinctions of antagonism: And today, how many examples could be given of this disorientation of the political field, where the principal enemy now appears unindentifiable!
The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are; this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum, to repoliticise, to put an end to depoliticisation. Ever attentive to precise distinctions, Derrida 87 notes that Schmitt makes a separation between private enmity and public hostility — the first not being properly political. Thus, political conflict is not related to love, or to affect, or to feeling — the distinction is one that is properly public.
Political conflict is thus a matter of enunciation, of decision — as soon as it is characterised as eventual that is, announced as a non-excluded event in a sort of contingent future. And it is eventual as soon as it is possible. Schmitt does not wish to dissociate the quasi-transcendental modality of the possible and the historico-factual modaility of the eventual. He names now the eventuality weningstens eventuell , now the possibility Moeglichkeit , without thematising the distinction The concept of the enemy is thereby deduced or constructed a priori, both analytically and synthetically — in synthetic a priori fashion, if you like, as a political concept, or better yet, as the very concept of the political.
In fact, this conceptual prudence and rigour are bound to imply, as is always the case, some sort of phenomenological procedure. Following what resembles at least an eidetic reduction, all facts and all regions that do not announce themselves as political must be put in parentheses Derrida The stakes of this reduction are twofold. This excursus will not be taken up in this paper as what is at stake in its analysis is largely questions of political antagonism not organised around contestation between states as such.
This is, for this paper, firstly a question of method. It defends itself, walls itself up, reconstructs itself unendingly against what is to come; it struggles against the future with a prophetic and pathetic energy This reactive and unscrupulous dread is often presented in the rigour of the concept, a vigilant, meticulous, implacable rigour inherited from the tradition.
This is an insight which Derrida would indubitably be happy to sign. For Deleuze and Guattari 21 : The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem.
Derrida argues that: The purity of the polemos or the enemy, whereby Schmitt would define the political, remains unattainable.
The concept of the political undoubtedly corresponds, as concept, to what the ideal discourse can want to state most rigorously on the ideality of the political. But no politics has ever been adequate to its concept. No political event can be correctly described defined with reference to these concepts. And this inadequation is not accidental, since politics is essentially a praxis, as Schmitt himself always implies in his ever-so-insistent reliance on the concept of real, present possibility or eventuality in his analyses of the formal structures of the political.
On one hand, as argued above, Schmitt suggests that political language is contentless, and that the political is a distinction which can never be stabilised — an outside to other oppositions which in turn takes its substantive content from them.
Yet this does not rule out, this chapter would suggest, any use for a reduction in conceptualisation — of the political, for instance. But all theories, and all texts, are multiple. Derrida raises the question of what remains after the making of the political distinction, of its revenant or remainder, its haunting by spectres of what cannot be distinguished by its logic of exclusion and inclusion.
The paper will now expand on the agonistic analytic of the political as performative praxis. What is certain is that the conditions for the enunciation of discourses of the end of politics include a greater degree of fluidity in the social, and a relative eclipsing of the cleavages and themes around which modernist politics was structured.
Therefore it would seem opportune to explore the utility of a post-structuralist political analysis that comes to grip with a multiplicity of political antagonisms structured and constructed agonistically through rhetoric. Elizabeth Grosz aptly encapsulates the contribution that a deconstructive political analytic can make.
Grosz here is not positing an opposition between theory and practice. It is implicit in her argument that there are no essential and uncontaminated political subject positions — whether based on class, sex, or other bifurcations. In a similar way, the potential in understanding the process of the impure constitution of political subjectivities reflects the contribution post- structuralist theory can make.
To know, to be right. Page 16 Papers from the Jubilee Conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association For Derrida, politics cannot be founded because such a foundation would limit the freedom of the decision. In politics there are no guarantees. In short, what is needed is a resistance to depoliticisations, or indeed a repoliticisation.
In other words, given that identities are increasingly multiple, and political communities more heterogeneous, what is necessary is a dynamics of the constitution of political subjectivities that does not either reduce antagonism to competition or debate nor efface the value consensus which accords dissensus legitimacy while preserving the political association.
An agonistic politics, then, is both liberal and democratic but unlike classical and neo-liberalism, recognises the desirability of dissensus — among friends. Since the constitutive outside is present within the inside as its always real possibility, every identity becomes purely contingent. This implies that we should conceptualise power not as an external relation taking place between two preconstituted identities but rather as constituting the identities themselves.
Identity, then, is something of a power-effect as well as a truth-effect, not fixed in relation to a pre-existent essential centre but contestable and constructed and reconstructed through the agonistic rhetoric of politics. Political concepts, as argued above, are empty signifiers and sites of contestation for the rhetorical mobilisations of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic blocs Laclau It is for this reason that: politicisation never ceases because undecideability continues to inhabit the decision.
Every consensus appears as a stabilisation of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Chaos and instability are irreducible, but as Derrida indicates, this is at once a risk and a chance, since continual stability would mean the end of politics
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