Political Theology & The Concept of the Political, Schmitt
significant footnotes still to be transfered.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cYV9mFpW20acVntFRekrMXqwuB6ePolKYR4PcKZ_XRA/edit
2. The Enemy of My Enemy
Reduce or eliminate introductory remarks, and reduce historical context to a minimum; let the theory speak for itself.
As we have seen, the neo-liberal interpretation of self-harm depends on a highly depoliticized, biomedical, and atomistic account of the self-harming subject. Various Marxist critiques have attempted to resuscitate a previously widespread acknowledgement of the socio-political context and causes self-harm, yet within their social model their accounts have generally continued to reproduce a certain self-oriented ontology. In this section, we will argue that in addition to (and in part because of) this shared individualistic model, neither the neoliberal nor Marxist frameworks have been able to work through the full political nature of DSH. To make this politicization, we compare DSH to the work of one of the twentieth century’s most (in)famous non-Liberal, non-Marxist political thinkers: jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, specifically his work on the state of exception and the friend-enemy distinction.
[UNNECESSARY]
I have chosen to use Schmitt as a lens for four reasons. First, his critique of liberalism was and remains influential across the political spectrum. given that the object of my critique is the failure of Marxists to think outside of the liberal-individualistic framing, it makes sense to draw upon a theorist who demonstrates the shortcomings of that framework. Second, Schmitt’s notion of the state of exception helpfully co-illuminate Foucault’s concept of the medical personage*, a critical figure in the politicization of self-harm. Third, Schmitt’s deeply social-behavioral politics precisely in the ways it fails to fully make sense of DSH, but does so in ways quite opposed and inverse to the liberal-individual schema. That is to say, goal here is not to simply apply Shmitt’s framework to self-harm—not only does such an application remedies all the problems of the liberal understanding, it would require ignoring Schmitt’s own disavowal of psychopolitics. Rather, I hope to contrast the liberal-individual with an alternative point of departure in order to open up space for a new model. Finally, I argue that the politics of enmity, encompassing a dialectic of mutual incompatibility and co-determinacy, captures something essential to self-harm usually downplayed in both psychological and historical accounts: a concept I introduce here as intrapersonal violence.
In 1922, Carl Schmitt published Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, an analysis of law and the state in the tradition of Hobbes’ Leviathan. In 1932, he published The Concept of the Political, a concept which he argues is prior to and presupposed by the state (concept 19). In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi party; in November of that year, a second addition of Theology would be published, so named because in it Schmitt sketches a genealogy tracing key concepts from European legal philosophy to essentially religious ones. Sovereignty for Schmitt is defined by the state of exception. He writes,
Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept. Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature, a borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine. It will soon become clear that the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or a state of siege. (Schmitt 5).
Schmitt draws the concept of the constitutive exception out of the work of Søren Kirkegaard on exception-as-method: “[t]he exception explains the general and itself…The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.” (theology 15, quoting Kirkegaard’s Repetition.) Moving from methodology to legislation, Schmitt maintains that to establish a general rule with reference to nothing but itself, ex nihil, would be to legislate from chaos, and “there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.” Thus in both producing and theorizing the law, the exception is prior to and defines the norm (theology 6, 13); meanwhile, “[t]he most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case.” (theology 7)
For Schmitt, the sovereign is a logical property of law itself, a figure standing “outside the normally valid legal system, while nonetheless belong[ing] to it,” (theology 7, see also concept 36), if only in that the potential that someone with the capacity to overturn, suspend, or re-write the law can never be abolished—save, perhaps, through the abolition of the human species itself. However, the “liberal constitution” refuses to recognize this reality: by creating an array of procedural checks and overlaping domains, it cannot make law itself sovereign, ex nihilio, but (at best) merely obfuscates who at any given moment has the authority and capacity to make and unmake the law. This fundamental problem helps to define for Schmitt a fundamental aspect of being human: politics can never be rendered permanently safe, neither from external enemies nor tyrants who would seek to use the law to respond to enemies, real or imagined. () This view is juxtaposed to “political romanticism,” which forwards a worldview in which
there is no last word on anything. Political romanticism is the doctrine of the autonomous, isolated, and solitary individual, whose absolute stance toward himself gives a world in which nothing is connected to anything else. Political romanticism is thus at the root of what Schmitt sees as the liberal tendency to substitute perpetual discussion for the political.
Thus, to decide anything would be to betray the political romanticism’s cult of the debate.
Parallels between the sovereign for Schmitt and the medical personage for Foucault. Writing of the usurption of the classical understanding of madness (charachterized by the Hôpital) with the modern period, Foucualt identifies among the structures “peculiar to the asylum as it was constituted at the end of the eighteenth century” the most important, namely:
the apotheosis of the medical personage. Of them all, it was doubtless the most important, since it would authorize not only new contacts between doctor and patient, but a new relation between insanity and medical thought, and ultimately command the whole experience of madness. Hitherto, we find in the asylums only the same structures of confinement [as in the Hôpital], but displaced and deformed. With the new status of the medical personage, the deepest meaning of confinement is abolished: mental disease, with the meanings we now give it [in 1965], is made possible.
Here cause and effect are reversed relative to the ‘obvious’ understanding of the condition, for instead of arriving to respond to an ailment, the doctor in this case precedes the disease: “...this is the essential point, the doctor’s intervention is not made by virtue of a medical skill or power that he possesses in himself and that would be justified by a body of objective knowledge. It is not as a scientist that homo medicus has authority in the asylum, but as a wise man.” His commission is initially not one of expertise, but trust. He inherits the rites of exclusion and confinement passed down from the Lazar House and Hôpital, but in the modern era the origins and functioning of these rites has been forgotten, if not rendered completely unintelligible judged against the standards of positivism; such anti-knowledge was initially projected onto the evermore opaque figure of the madman—(273-278) later, it opened up the space for the evolutions of psychiatry explored above, in the second half of The Sacred Circle.
At the molecular level, the doctor is equivalent to the Schmittean sovereign. He is charged with recognizing/authorizing that a state of exception exists, not at the level of the state but the mental patient’s mind. Once so authorized, techniques of confinement and coercion which would otherwise appear despotic become obviously necessary. The spectre of an existential threat is likewise held common: it is only to save the normative order (or usher in a new one) that a suspension of normal law can be justified without itself becoming anti-normal. For Schmitt, “a state of exception includes any kind of severe economic or political disturbance that requires the application of extraordinary measures” (Theology 5, footnote 1), but its standard manifestation is as “the action of ‘us’ against ‘them’—friends versus enemies.”
The friend-enemy distinction is as important to our purposes here as that of the sovereign also serves as the most significant point of departure between the sovereign and the doctor.
The friend enem
our enemy xxi concept
see also not psychological terms or symbolic abstractions, doesn’t matter the psychic causes,
[reference to madness and self-association made to talk to itself?]
>liberalism
the sovereign for schmitt is therefore comparable to what foucualt terms the medical persona…
>post-classical
>authority,
>exception to general order, responded to with exception to rules
>mention freud’s raising of the doctor to the level of self-conscious post-positivist obfuscation
>link to friend-enemy...through the existential threat
The first line of the first chapter defines his subject: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
>both what is exceptional and what to do about it xx political theology
>the exception thinks both itself and the general, while the general cannot even think itself
>the best law can hope to do is to designate who should act as sovereign
>at the same time, there is no sovereign (concept xiv)
>Schmitt’s emphasis on the sovereign contrasts with his depiction of liberalism, which is based on
>trying to make politics safe
>proceduralism, neutralization
>
>turning enemies into competitors, debate adversaries, and outlaws from humanity
>{liberalism requires a sovereign to take care of administration so that the status quo can be discussed endlessly?}
>The medical situation is not what Schmitt had in mind when he crafted the notion of sovereignty
>explicitly says its not a metaphor or psychic symbol, its not abstract
>to this we answer that there is nothing abstract about trying to kill oneself
>as we have already seen, madness constitutes a kind of constitutive exception or borderline (PT pg 1) to reason.
>just as order must suspend itself through a sovereign, the apparatuses dedicated to the management of madness configured an agent to carry out the task of determining who was mad and how one should respond
>there is no sovereign
>based not on science, but moral authority (footnote about morality, science, politics, economics all bending towards each other)
>as we saw, the asylum gave way to the general hospital; to the doctor’s ranks were added the formally trained psychiatric and social worker, and the general knowledge of nurses and doctors…
>the multiplication of agents responsible for overseeing, authorizing, disciplining the madman (by this point transformed into the patient) in no way reduced the political conflict of the relationship
>scenes from sociological studies and literature reviews provide examples…
…………………………………………………………
///
>introduce the exception first? including the medical persona, ie make it a conversation between Schmitt and Foucault [possibly this should make up the entirety of the second section; the social debate should be separate?]
>Schmitt’s entire framework of politics is based on the friend/enemy distinction. Concept 26
>the stranger is alien Concept 26-27 and can only be recognized/established in the concrete context by the actual participants [? prob Concept 26]
>politics cannot be made safe (Concept xv)
>in contrast, liberalism tries to make politics safe “not too serious”
>it avoids the final decision by reducing politics to continuous debate
>the romantic liberal individual is immediate and absolute Xiii-xiv compare to Mill, Milton, etc.
>enemies are reinvisioned as economic competitors and debating adversaries Con28
>however, this is pure ideology. politics can’t actually be made safe. this distinction is irreducible with politics: as long enemies or the potential for enemies exist, conflict cannot be fully smoothed over at the level of administration and politics remains charged.
>(the friend-enemy distinction allows us to more clearly see the political conflicts playing out within self-harm.)
>emergency room restraint, infantilization
>to be clear, this is not how schmitt intended his concept to be used. he explicitly says it does not refer to ‘psychic/mental states’, not symbols, but rather real conflicts
>what schmitt fails to see is that there is not a clear boundary between the two. friend and enemy can be not merely blurred, as in the liberal competition gloss, but outright contradictory.the nurse believes herself to be the enemy of the the patient qua an active cutter and a friend of the cutter qua a passive patient
specifically use Managing Self Harm, youth inpatient study.
>for schmitt, the enemy is a public category, not a private adversarial relationship. I am willing to concede that the enemy may not apply to the cutter alone at least without significant reworking of the concept, but public is always a relative term. in a hospital, one is never quite private. the entire apparatus of observation described by foucault has been maintained, and doctors, nurses, security officers, other patients, one’s friends who brought one there, all are implicated. the doctor has the legally recognized right to commit a person against their will, a decision which will be enforced by agents of state if necessary. even without state intervention, however, the restriction of sovereignty to the state displays a fetishization of one particularly narrow mode of power (put this in a footnote probably.)
>to this framework, let us add a second schmittian concept, the exception. schmitt identifies the exception with sovereign power and law, but is this its necessary and natural limit? (move up?)
>extending Foucault, can we not also say that the one who makes the exception in the context of a hospital, a prison, a workplace, or a psychiatric ward is in a sense sovereign? Foucualt gives a special place to the medical persona, whose power (initially) was not based on medicine and science, but authority: the kind of person who could be trusted to declare a state of exception exists in the life and mind of a patient, thereby subjecting them to a whole array of often inverse rules which emanate from this exception-mindset. (move up)
>for the practitioner of DSH, a state of double exception exists. she is made an exception to society’s standard of normalcy, judged to be a potential threat to herself and/or others, viewed with alarm, restrained or confined. (keep here: following the friend enemy discussion, transition back by saying “a double exception exists: that declared by the medical persona, and that inherent in the situation of friend and enemy, an internal paradox.
[possibly this is where the neoliberal turn should come in? affect regulation, then I respond by saying but why should affect regulation itself not be understood in a social manner?
idl]
>but she is also an exception to schmitt’s own understanding of politics. for schmitt, the self-cutter is a paradoxical cohabitation of friend-and-enemy in a way that liberalism merely ignores. liberalism interprets DSH as a particularly niche mode of attaining self-interest. but cutting and the array of psycho-social conditions it inhabits is not reducible to self interest.
>punishment, the angry itch, the awful skin, intrapersonal violence and the cut as a rite to remove oneself from it. draw on personal experience, Millard, and interviews
>I find it difficult to express the sense of multiplicity-turned-against-itself in those months during which I cut frequently. as I expressed to a friend and advisor at one point, I was in the strange position of deeply hating, with murdures intensity, a particular person--a person who just so happened to be me. at the same time and at different times, I was in the position of hating myself. these two are both distinct and related. insofar as there were aspects or potential aspects I liked about myself, I despised myself for threatening them, hurting them, pulling myself deeper into depression, academic failure, social isolation, substance dependence, in part because I could not force my body and mind to function, but also in part out of a perverse (in an advised sense) feeling of spite.
[contrast here interpersonal violence and DSH]
>>whether in the moment of cutting or those which surround it, the practitioner of DSH is (from the perspective of Schmittian analysis) a paradox incarnate. namely, I found the totality of myself inextricably bound up with my identity as the Enemy of the Enemy which was also myself.