Briefly, on political theology

Notes on N.S. Lyons' essay on Carl Schmitt

If you’ve been reading me for awhile, especially early chapter drafts of my upcoming book Here Be Monsters or installments of my recurring series on political theology, The Mysteria, then you’ll have noticed I reference Carl Schmitt quite often. The reason for this is that Schmitt, more than any other modern thinker, is best seen as the primary architect of the way nation-states have functioned since World War II.

The conservative writer

N.S. Lyons

has recently published a very long and deeply instructive discussion of Schmitt which, with some really important caveats, is worth the 45 minutes or so that it might take you to read it.

Lyons’ general narrative of Schmitt’s trajectory and powerful influence is absolutely correct, though his framing lopsidedly omits how the man’s ideas have also shaped conservative government policies. For instance, the Patriot Act and the many other authoritarian policies implemented in the US after 9/11 are all based upon Schmitt’s concept of state sovereignty as the ability to “decide” the exception. The draconian domestic surveillance, grand jury installations, and entrapment of environmental activists (“the Green Scare”) which occurred a few years after that likewise would have thrilled Schmitt.

Also, Lyons makes a very common mistake when discussing the Frankfurt School as a monolithic theoretical entity and their “salvaging” of Schmitt. Here, it’s important to note that Walter Benjamin, who corresponded with Schmitt, was only nominally a part of the Frankfurt School, at odds with them because of his continued focus on material struggle. Adorno, Marcuse, and others shifted fully away from the base of Marxist theory, attempting to articulate instead a theory of social power divorced from class. This shift was unfortunate, and we’re still dealing with the aftermath, but the reason for it is also what made Schmitt a figure they needed to understand.

That reason? They were trying to figure out why communism had failed in Germany and Nazism had succeeded. Schmitt had seen in Nazism the final “solution” to communism, the best way to preseve the Christian/Western state against chaos.

This is an important thing that Lyons gets very right. He underlines Schmitt’s animosity towards communism (and also Jews), as well how Schmitt’s fear led him to articulate the theory of sovereignty that now infects every modern nation-state. In other words, the justification for all the relentless States of Emergency we are increasingly seeing, declared to fight terrorism, plague, civil uprisings, or whatever: these all derive from a man’s terrified fear of the chaos that would come from laborers controlling their own labor.

That fear, incidentally, is merely a newer iteration of the older fear of the “demonic,” or what Nietzsche called “the Dionysian,” which I discussed in the most recent installment of The Mysteria. In fact, because of the timing of Lyons’ essay, I’ve decided to remove that essay from its paywall and make it available to all readers:

The Mysteria, part four: “The Mystery of Lawlessness”

If you read both essays, you’re gonna need several pots of tea. That being said, if the matter of the theological underpinnings of the nation-state interests you—especially in light of the political-theological struggle now occurring over control of the neoliberal order—you’ll get a lot from both. And since I’m assigning homework: for extra credit go read Georgio Agamben’s much more robust analysis of Carl Schmitt’s influence and the larger problem of the nation-state, found in both Homo Sacer and State of Exception.