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The Fundamentalisms of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt

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The Fundamentalisms of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt Manuscript; article forthcoming in Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics and the Intervention of the Single Individual, Armen Avanessian and Sophie Wennerscheid (eds.), Museum Tusculanum Press Autumn 2014 Anti‐Ironic Politics? The Fundamentalisms of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt ARMEN AVANESSIAN I Introduction The occasion, if not the main focus, of the following reflections is the current revival of religion in political studies. In this essay, I examine the reasons and motivations of this renewed relevance as well as their historical and systematic origins on the basis of readings of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt. As my cue or starting point, I take the possible, intrinsically revolutionary implications of Christianity most recently mobilized by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Antonio Negri: “Christianity emerges with an uncompromising theopolitical praxis that outflanks the current liberal deadlock.”1 Any political practice that argues in the name of an emphatic understanding of the “event” must aim for the most precise articulation of a material interface of immanence and transcendence. The event is supposed to vehicle what is at stake politically and theoretically, namely to explain the intrusion of the transcendent into the immanent: “[T]he event outwits both the reified logic of capital and the transcendental nature of idealism.”2 Now, Kierkegaard and Schmitt do not simply provide Protestant and Catholic versions of a vocabulary to address the question of a more fundamental correlation of Christian religion and modern politics. What unites them – despite all differences – is a radical and fundamental counter‐position to a certain basic philosophical and political understanding of modernity. This fundamental opposition to central pillars of modern democratic theory must be marked off from fundamentalist positions. Neither Kierkegaard the Protestant nor Schmitt the Catholic are concerned primarily with the implementation of religious precepts and rules of behaviour. Their fundamentalism lies “only” in the mode of immediacy, that is, in their complete disregard for or envisaged circumvention of secular institutions of law that have become the rule in modern constitutional states. In turning against (aesthetic) immanence in the name of a higher sovereignty, Kierkegaard does not differ from Schmitt in his invectives against the democratic Romantics’ occasionalism; he writes: “In the sphere of immanence, authority cannot be thought.” In opposition to the aesthetic genius, the religious apostle can only be understood in his relation to transcendence: “The genius has only immanent teleology; the apostle is put paradoxically in an absolutely paradoxically teleological position.”3 The engagement with the post‐Kantian and Hegelian heritage that characterizes nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century bourgeois‐liberal society is of the same weight as the Manuscript; article forthcoming in Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics and the Intervention of the Single Individual, Armen Avanessian and Sophie Wennerscheid (eds.), Museum Tusculanum Press Autumn 2014 debate about Romantic irony, which constitutes the systematic starting point for Kierkegaard’s as well as Schmitt’s thinking as a whole.4 A look at central categories of post‐ revolutionary philosophy, that is, a look at the Copernican turn that after 1789 becomes the rule in transcendental philosophy and idealism, helps us to understand what both Kierkegaard and Schmitt fundamentally oppose. From their perspective, the subjective and the objective, the individual and the general, are precisely not the contrary positions their contemporaries (mis)understand them to be. The positions of the Romantics and of Hegel, for example, are only two sides of the same coin, and they are, more precisely, two insufficient ways of dealing with a post‐revolutionary – and this also means, post‐religious – democratic and secular cultural and social situation. This also shifts the way in which the discourses relate to one another. Catherine Malabou has made the following important observation with regard to Hegel’s speculative philosophy: It is on the ground of form that philosophy has been reproached and accused by the religious party; just as, conversely, its speculative content has brought the same charges upon it from a self‐styled philosophy—and from a pitiless orthodoxy. It had too little of God in it for the former; too much for the latter. This dual reproach collapses into one, despite the contradictory character of the grievances that motivate it. These come from a misunderstanding of the conceptual form intrinsic to philosophy. The “religious party” sees in this philosophic form the result of an excessive faith in reason which simply and utterly dismisses faith in God: God is made intelligible, and theology expires in philosophy. The “philosophical party,” a branch of Kantian critique, reproaches speculative thought for its excessive faith in reason which, denying any limits to reason, challenges the separation between the sensuous and the supersensuous, and thus spells the ruin of philosophy: God is made intelligible, and philosophy expires as theology. In both examples, the concept is more or less worshipped on its own account; paradoxically, the charges of atheism and pantheism reunite.5 Concretely referring to Kierkegaard, Alain Badiou – in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and elsewhere – has determined this militant theory of truth best personified by Paul, in which “truth” is understood as subjective connection of existence and eternity and “subjectivization” is understood as “truth procedure,” to be the central moment of the Christian paradox: Manuscript; article forthcoming in Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics and the Intervention of the Single Individual, Armen Avanessian and Sophie Wennerscheid (eds.), Museum Tusculanum Press Autumn 2014 Christian paradox … is that eternity must be encountered in time … The dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard is in effect a dispute about Christianity, and it concerns the function of decision in the constitution of Christian subjectivity.6 Against this background, the affinity that today’s revolutionary Left thinks to have with Kierkegaard no longer seems that far‐fetched. What theoreticians like Žižek are fascinated by in Kierkegaard (and in conceptual personae of his such as Abraham and Isaac) is that he holds on to determinations higher than that of the ethical‐general. “There is supposed to be a higher necessity that obliges me to undermine my being, the ethical substance of my very self,” as Dominik Finkelde puts it.7 At the same time, and this is significant with respect to the category of “decision” advocated by Schmitt as well, Badiou’s ultimate ethical maxim is to “decide upon the undecidable.” The (political) event “is unpresented and unpresentable and its belonging to the situation is undecidable from within the situation itself.”8 This also implies an analogue “conception” of the philosopher that in many respects recalls the violence with which Kierkegaard’s confronts Hegel’s system: . The imperative of philosophy is thus to pick out and defend in any discourse that real point that the discourse cannot incorporate. Concretely, this means, by domain: in politics, the celebration of pure, sublime revolt . ; in aesthetics: a sensitivity to sensual particularity.9 Yet not only with this conception of Peter Hallward, schooled by Badiou, but with Kierkegaard, too, philosophy can be conceived of less as an interpretation of experiences and their meaning than as a radical interruption of any interpretation and meaning in the name of (a higher?) truth. II Kierkegaard A more precise estimation of what Kierkegaard’s explicit political stance contains requires contextualization, especially insofar as Kierkegaard’s relation with the contemporary Hegelian Left is concerned. For central concepts of his philosophy are also basic concepts of several of his contemporaries on the Hegelian Left such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx. Particularly relevant in this context are concepts that govern the way we approach political and social phenomena, concepts such as reality or actualization, existence, and practice. Kierkegaard’s particularity lies in his – properly individual – conception of, for example, the tension between existence and practice. Manuscript; article forthcoming in Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics and the Intervention of the Single Individual, Armen Avanessian and Sophie Wennerscheid (eds.), Museum Tusculanum Press Autumn 2014 In his comprehensive study From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth‐ Century Thought, Karl Löwith draws our attention to a common front formed by Marx and Kierkegaard, who present “two aspects of a common destruction of the bourgeois‐Christian world.”10 The difference, of course, is that one, Marx, chooses the new option of the proletariat whereas the other, Kierkegaard, stresses the radicalization of the reflection of inwardness (Innerlichkeit), a radicalized subjectivity. And there certainly are other post‐ Hegelian positions to which Kierkegaard’s can be compared and that are even closer to the Kierkegaardian singular individual than they are to Marx’s conceptions. Bruno Bauer’s critical positing of Selbstsein (being‐oneself) or Stirner’s nihilistic The Ego and Its Own11 are but two examples. All differences between Stirner
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