☿️🗽17 Pentember 2024

Feast of the Fire Bringer | All Thieves’ Day

self harm is a kind of writing: it's act and accidents function as an embodied text.

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https://music.apple.com/us/album/bleed-out/1622211546

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17 January 2024 Thesis Notes 

Preliminary

yesterday i reviewed The Concept of the Political, struck by how important the antithesis of self laceration is for Schmitt. 

want to think about Bleed Out through Schmitt’s conceptual lens, every good example of a bleeding text.

Freewrite

the body is a prison and the soul is a state. the willingness to destroy oneself and one’s prison can be tested, built up towards, practiced, with violence against body and mind. the supremeacy over that part which seeks its own or its other’s annihilation by pain or fatality over that part which shirks, pulls back from, cowers against being hurt or annihilated and against performing the act of hurting or annihilating oneself. the body has reserves of adrenaline and panic which he can deploy even against the most rationally, committed, calm commitment to their own destruction. 

the willingness to destroy oneself can bring about a new relationship with the self, a new self determined by its new existential dispositions. it forces a break, a rupture, from which the old way of being, way of life, can no longer continue as it was. In the sublime unity and presence and dissociation and ritual embodiment, one can achieve a negative capability out of which all previous normative commitments fade and only practical, existential questions stand waiting their answers. having proven a willingness to kill and die or refrain from dying and killing, one assumes an authority, both political and linguistic: the gesture and its aftermath determine in the strongest terms their meaning to the one performing and experiencing them.  

Schmitt on Self Laceration

Self laceration appears several times in Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political as an antithetical reference to the friend-enemy distinction. 

In footnote 9 on pg 28-29 he writes

“Plato strongly emphasizes the contrast between the public enemy … and the private one [hostis and inimicus respectively], but in connection with the other antithesis of war (...) and insurrection, upheaval, rebellion, civil war (...) Real war for Plato is a war between Hellenes and Barbarians only (those who are “by nature enemies”), whereas conflicts among Hellenes are for him discords (...). The thought expressed here is that a people cannot wage war against itself and a civil war is only a self laceration and it does not signify that perhaps a new state or even a new people is being created. Cited mostly for the hostis concept is Pomponius in the Digest 50, 16, 118. The most clear-cut definition with additional supporting material is in Forcellini’s Lexicon totius latinitatis (1965 ed.) II, 684: “A public enemy (hostis) is one with whom we are at war publicly….In this respect he differs from a private enemy. He is a person with whom we have private quarrels. They may also be distinguished as follows: a private enemy is a person who hates us, whereas a public enemy is a person who fights against us. 

later on pg 32

For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat beetween organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entier life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something idea, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid. 

32-33

the political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, irregardless of the sources from which it derives its last psychic motives. It exists or it does not exist. If it exists, it is the supreme, that is, in the decisive case, the authoritative entity. 

43-44

as long as the stat is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy. 

46

the state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies. 46

…

life, way of life

reasons to die, protecting your friends for the purpose of destroying your enemies, , which, friend or enemy, is primary:

A religious community, a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the religious community in its quality as an eartholy power: otherwise it assumes a political dimension…Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically deteremied society, whose order int he economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations. To justify such a demand on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order and could never be justified by the norms or ideas of an economy autonomously conceived. The individual may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualistic liberal society, a thoroughly private matter—decided upon freely.

To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. 48

War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong to the side of the enemy—all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social idea no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason [trade and industry]. if such pscial destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one’s own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically. 48-49

[c.r. the importance of The decision, the practical determination, in Political Theology]

Hegel has also advanced a definition of the enemy which in general has been evaded by modern philosophers. The enemy is a negated otherness. but this negation is mutual and this mutuality of negatiosn has its own concrete existence, as a relation between enemies; this relation of two nothingness on both sides bears the danger of war. 63