The Fundamentalisms of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Schmitt

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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:

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 and Kierkegaard aside, Stirner’s “egotistical ego” expresses a solipsistic rejection of being sublated by the notorious World Spirit of Hegel’s speculative system; for Kierkegaard, only a violent leap can eject us from the speculative path of Spirit. Moses Hess famously called the post‐Hegelian Left “the last philosophers.” Regardless of whether they focus on the social, the political, or the religious, their common point of departure is a practical interest in contemporary historical conditions. Karl Löwith in particular has made this point with all the requisite emphasis and differentiation (especially as concerns the category of decision) in his essay “Philosophical Theory and Historical Practice in the Philosophy of the Left Hegelians,” which, for this reason, deserves being quoted at length:

Kierkegaard’s polemical concept of real existence is not just directed at Hegel; it is also a corrective against the demands of the times. Existence individualized [vereinzelt] onto itself is (1) the superior and singular reality over against the system that embraces everything in the same way and levels the difference (between being and nothing, thinking and being, the general and the particular) onto the level of indifferent being. It is (2) the reality of the individual over against a historical generality (of world history and generations, the masses, the public, the times) to which the individual as such is as nothing. It is (3) the inward existence of the individual over against the outwardness of circumstances. It is (4) a Christian existence before God over against the exteriorization of Christianity [Christsein] in Christendom [Christenheit] as it has spread in the history of the world. And, among these determinations, it is above all (5) an existence that decides (itself), either for or against Christianity. As an existence that decides this way or that, it is the opposite of the “rational” times and to Hegel’s conception [Begreifen], which do not know of an Either/Or.12

Now, it is certainly not wrong to ascribe to Kierkegaard, as Adorno has done, an “old Lutheran heritage”; such ultimate sanction is apparent in conceptual determinations such as this:

No politics ever has, no politics ever can, no worldliness ever has, no worldliness ever can, think through or realize to its last consequences the thought of human equality. To realize complete equality in the medium of worldliness, i.e., to realize it in the medium the very nature of which implies differences, and to realize it in a worldly way, i.e., by positing the differences—such a thing is forever impossible, as is apparent from the categories.13

But, and this is more important in our context, Kierkegaard also distinguishes himself by his strong sensitivity to societal change in his (early‐) capitalist environment. To counter the ubiquitous tendencies of Hegel’s philosophy in which, according to Fear and Trembling, the “Äußere (die Entäußerung) is higher than das Innere”14 and is thus inimical to subjectivity, Kierkegaard of course advocates a radicalization of inwardness. In this dramatic radicalization against the ethically general, already mentioned above, the aesthetic and the religious unite in combat, albeit with different emphases: “[R]eligion is the only power which can deliver the aesthetical out of its conflict with the ethical.”15 Although this combination seems to divest the aesthetic of any value of its own, Kierkegaard’s analysis of the aesthetic sphere retains its diagnostic and theoretical force. This is especially true for his stressing of the individual in his or her eccentricity, which is neither negligible nor superior. In a time that is strongly reminiscent of the dissolution of the Greek state,16 Kierkegaard retains the illusion of the autonomous, untouched island that is the person and, in so doing, maintains a modern utopia. How much Kierkegaard’s criticism of melancholic irony refers to a theory of modernity is made clear by a comparison with an author who, on the face of it, is Kierkegaard’s complete opposite but who, thanks to their contemporaneity and a shared Hegelian heritage, is also much closer to Kierkegaard than it may seem at first. Karl Marx develops his determination of the “economic character mask” that is also at work in the private sphere against a historical background of observations that is similar to the background of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the mask‐like incognito of aesthetic modes of existence. Kierkegaard’s descriptions of a widespread “despair that not only does not cause one any inconvenience in life”17 but which also remains invisible in the busyness of the everyday, in this regard, has something of a critical prophecy about it. 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

It has rightly been pointed out that melancholy has social preconditions. Kierkegaard subtly describes the ethical state of his ironic figures or aesthetic existences as a form of creeping loss of self, a loss caused

not by being volatilized in the infinite, but by being completely finitized, by becoming a number instead of a self . . . . Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Just by losing himself this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, indeed, for making a great success of in the world. Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin. He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.18

But Kierkegaard does not leave it at such diagnostic observations of his times; as a contemporary of the revolutions of 1848, he can also be read as a thinker of modernity after the (French) revolution in general. To address the question of a possible political dimension of Kierkegaard’s so‐called leap out of reason, I would like to analyze a few passages from a short preface19 that directly comments on the situation around 1848.20 There, Kierkegaard compares the political movements of his time to the Protestant Reformation and goes on to say:

The reaction (conversely to that of the Reformation) will transfigure what seemed to be, and imagined itself to be, politics into a religious movement. To get eternity again requires blood, but blood of a different sort ... the precious blood of martyrs.21

I am less interested here in the apparently or openly “apolitical” stance against equality that pervades the text. What I want to stress is the following passage that observes or rather localizes with all the necessary historical precision something like an epistemic‐political rupture that obviously demands or compels an equally new paradigm in political theory:

For tyrants (in the form of emperors, kings, popes, Jesuits, generals, diplomats) have hitherto in a decisive moment been able to rule and direct the world; but from the time the fourth estate has come into the picture—when it has had time to settle itself in such a way that it is rightly understood—it will be seen that in the decisive moment only martyrs are able to rule the world. That is, no man will be able to rule the human race in such a moment, only the Deity can do it with 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

the help of absolutely obedient men who at the same time are willing to suffer— but such a man is the martyr. And when in an elder formation the decisive moment was overcome, then the ordinary worldly government took over; but from the moment the fourth estate came into the picture, it will be seen that even when the crisis has been overcome it is not possible to govern in a worldly way. . . . So soon as the fourth estate comes into the picture it is possible to rule only in a godly way, religiously.22

Even though for Kierkegaard religious government means suffering, there are still striking resemblances in his analyses (not his conclusions!) to later theorists of politics and religion like Carl Schmitt (who simply opts for an opposite set of consequences: state‐political or organizational and arguably Catholic, not individualizing and Protestant). Kierkegaard talks about a post‐revolutionary formation in which the Proletariat, the Fourth Estate, has become part of the power structure and in which the “decisive moment” is no longer transitory but instead defines an exceptional normalcy. Worldly government is no longer possible. The consequence Schmitt will draw from this is that the modern post‐religious (and that means aesthetic, romantic, occasionalist) age of ironic democracy (or democratic irony – both authors devoted their early work to critiques of their ironic present) fatally lacks substance, and also political substance, and only dictatorship, the sovereignty founded on the state of exception, can from now on have any claim to validity. Kierkegaard, however writes that “[i]t is eternity that is needed. ... What is needed is religiousness—that is, true religiousness” in opposition to what he calls an ironic or “demonic religiousness.”23 That is why Kierkegaard points to the absolute opposite of a sovereign figure, to the self‐sacrificing martyr as to a political figure (which can hardly be called a concrete option):

What lay at the root of the catastrophe will then become apparent, that it is the opposite of the Reformation, which appeared to be a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything appears to be politics but will turn out to be a religious movement.24

Kierkegaard’s analyses are thus characterized by a fundamentalist distrust of the democratic governance of society. They find their correlate in the thesis of a militant subject that constitutes itself analogously, a subject that dedicates itself to a higher truth – potentially directed against the social status quo – without guarantees and only out of loyalty to a (religious or political) experience. 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

Next, I would like to turn to Carl Schmitt, whose analyses emerge from a constant engagement with the romantic apparatus [dispositif] of (political) modernity discussed thus far.

III Schmitt

The preparatory role the study Political Romanticism plays for Carl Schmitt’s later fundamentalist writings is clearly recognized in the literature. In addition, Karl Heinz Bohrer has examined Schmitt’s text as to its poetological sensitivity towards Romanticism in particular. He shows that “Schmitt negatively uses political concepts that all possess a poetological correspondence from which the claim to modernity can be derived.”25 Many of the key terms of Schmitt’s political theory are thus transvalued categories of aesthetic modernism. As to the understanding of the political dimension of ironic Romanticism, Schmitt’s conceptual contribution culminates in the concept of occasio, the contrary of the classical causa. For according to him, “Romanticism subjectified occasionalism. In other words, in the romantic, the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion and an opportunity for his romantic productivity.”26 Schmitt thus accuses the modern Romantic subject of aesthetization. If this aesthetization, however, is not understood to be retroactive but to be constitutive, it becomes clear just how much Schmitt’s reductive understanding of irony and aesthetics is inscribed in a long tradition of anti‐democratic criticisms of aesthetics. In a way that is only too familiar, Hegel then enters the stage in Schmitt’s discussion as the democrats’ classical antagonist. Hegel’s “philosophical truth,” according to Schmitt, is “that all spirit is present spirit. ... The historical spirit does not reside in baroque representations or even in romantic alibis.”27 Here as elsewhere, Schmitt’s Manichean thought operates with exaggerated dichotomies, which, under the influence of a pessimistic anthropology (the precondition of his hypostatized friend – enemy schema), transform into political tautologies. According to a common pattern of thought, from the fact that the human being is evil and unfree there follows an unconditional justification of political order and an argumentation against the anti‐state discourses of anarchistic as well as libertarian dreamers. Schmitt’s modern concept of the political thus has to dismiss the Baroque idea of incorporation; and if this idea disappears, so does all confidence in natural, or organic, or symbolic bonds. Not only is the path of monarchic incorporation barred – the prince can no longer metonymically metaphorize a whole people in himself – the path of the Enlightenment’s pedagogical rationalism is, too. According to Schmitt, the objection to Romantic politicking‐as‐if also refutes the second condition of the possibility of democracy, the genuinely romantic “eternal conversation” that is opposed to bloody conflict resolution. 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 the clear words of Political Theology: “Dictatorship is the opposite of discussion.”28 This is the exact reverse of the argument of Kelsen’s neo‐Kantian defence On the Essence and Value of Democracy, according to which “all democratic procedures, whose dialectical‐ contradictory technology is made for speech and counter‐speech, argument and counterargument” is oriented towards “achieving a compromise.”29 Compromise follows a logic of conflict resolution to which, on the epistemological level, corresponds a pragmatic attitude in situations of disagreement.30 There is another reason why Schmitt apostrophizes democracy, which in its settling of conflicts is oriented towards the infinite, as romantic: . Whereas, on the one hand, the political vanishes into the economic or technical‐ organizational, on the other hand, the political dissolves into the everlasting discussion of cultural and philosophical‐historical commonplaces, which, by aesthetic characterization, identify and accept an epoch as classical, romantic, or baroque. The core of the political idea, the exacting moral decision, is evaded in both. The true significance of those counterrevolutionary philosophers of the state [like Donoso Cortés or Joseph de Maistre] lies precisely in the consistency with which they decide. They heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that the notion of legitimacy, their stating point, was finally dissolved.31

The unconditionality of Baroque representation, according to Schmitt, also indicates the modern impossibility of monarchy. Given Schmitt’s Manichaeism, which cannot accept a romanticism that on his reading is always anti‐Catholic32 and democratic, this leads to the necessity of dictatorship. Schmitt’s complex argument about the relations between law and power, facticity and validity, legality and legitimacy, cannot be discussed here in detail.33 Let me simply note the, at first, striking and forceful expulsion of all purposes from the sphere of the law. Yet looked at more closely, Schmitt’s superficial preference for the political turns out to be saturated with moral, economic, and aesthetic phenomena that resist decision. The fact that these three spheres are located beyond political sovereignty in turn affects Schmitt’s central concepts. The category of decision is thus not determined purely autonomously within its sphere but, first of all, always has moral and epistemological dimensions. We are indebted to Ingeborg Maus, who has pointed out another theoretical impurity, namely the hidden bourgeois (property) interest in Schmitt’s demand for a “substantial order, purged of social moments.”34 Thanks to a merely content‐based understanding of the “material state of law,” the separation of legitimacy and legality – or between higher and lower legality – thus ends up in a dubious and unstable dominance of a 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 particular constitution. Excluding underprivileged social strata, content‐based “values” that accommodate the ruling classes and simultaneously claim timeless validity are preferred to formal procedures. Taken in the face of the danger of a revolution from the Left, the fascist decision thus reveals itself to be economically motivated. Schmitt’s Political Theology, to be sure, dismisses the social or materialistic explanations of the political informed by the nineteenth century’s economic conception of history for the reason that they only see “projection, reflex, reflection”35 everywhere. Yet although Schmitt serves today’s theoreticians (including on the Left) as argumentative spearhead against a purely technical‐ economical, administrative concept of politics, his concept of decision, as Helmut Lethen has pointed out, always rests “on the pillars of a ‘healthy economy inside the strong state.’”36 Despite his criticism of both “American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks,”37 Schmitt, like Max Weber or Helmuth Plessner, in the end remains attached to the economic dogmas of the liberal age. 38 In analogy with his reductive understanding of (popular) sovereignty (to which we will return), Schmitt’s doctrine of the constituent power (the pouvoir constituant) argues entirely in the interest of a petty bourgeoisie that goes about its business in an allegedly apolitical way. In Schmitt,

the apparently grassroots democratic appeal to the people’s originary constituent power ... becomes relevant only as a barrier against the parliament. As mere pouvoir constitué, parliament is disallowed the competence to radically change the constitution.39

This amounts to an exclusion of the political, namely an exclusion of all decisions of a materially progressive character that are not guided by economic interests. Maus’s detailed analysis of Schmitt’s elaborations of constitutional theory demonstrates their radicality, limited though they are by a careful, economic dosage. Although always valid, originary law is posited against the

world of appearances, i.e., against the positivity of the Law occupied with reform. What is always valid, however, ... are the bourgeois essentials of any constitution imaginable, even if it were reduced to guaranteeing the freedom to own property and regulating the authority of the executive in the state of exception. The apparently dynamic principle of permanent revolution only serves to stabilize bourgeois constitutional contents that are not expected to survive within liberal forms of political interaction.40

In addition to moral and economic factors, Schmitt’s political rigorism also seems to me to be determined, against his own methodological precepts, by aesthetic factors. Processes of aesthetization reveal themselves to be constitutive. Only by means of a judgement that is, in the end, an aesthetic judgement can the distinction of friend and enemy be made, a distinction claimed to be constitutive of the political sphere. To found his categories, Schmitt does not offer much more than his classicist predilection pro clarity and contra ambivalence. To illustrate: In Schmitt’s phantasms of sovereignty – no less than in Kierkegaard’s melancholic theory of repetition – the elements of the romantic are “irony, an aesthetic conception of the world, oppositions of the possible and the real, the infinite and the finite, the feeling of the concrete second.”41 Yet the romantic

could not make up his mind without relinquishing his superior irony; in other words, without giving up his romantic situation. The romantic wants to do nothing expect experience and paraphrase his experience in an emotionally impressive fashion.42

With Bohrer, we can read Schmitt’s weakness for the sovereign decision, like the preference for the state of exception over normalcy, as an indication of his sensitivity to aesthetic modernity. Yet beyond this, we have to stress that Schmitt emphatically does not justify his concepts. If, however, he were to attempt such a justification despite the decisionism immanent to his theory, he could do so only aesthetically. What is more: The point of non‐ justification, the moment of sovereign decision, is itself overtaken by the aesthetic. Exaggerating only slightly, we could say that the place of sovereignty is nothing but the place of the aesthetic. The fact that only the occasio of war makes the sovereign decision possible brings out the aesthetic traits of Schmitt’s model, which builds on this hypostatization. Schmitt’s classicist aestheticism expresses his sidelining of this always‐already‐being‐ impure of the political and his unwillingness to admit the subversion of the political by ethical, economic, and aesthetic moments, and it leads him to overlook both important aesthetic dimensions and the decisive political dimension of irony. A (Schmittean) understanding of post‐facto aestheticization therefore has to be countered by pointing to the originary rhetoricity and linguisticality of the political. The question, in Schmitt as in Kierkegaard, is the question of the fundamental or legal status of irony. As Werner Hamacher writes:

This law of irony ... is not the law of an ironic language as opposed to another language, but the law of the irony of language itself that allows for no decision as 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

to whether it is language or sign, imparting or “chatter,” talk (Unterredung) or law.43

The medium of this ironic politics of de‐position (Ent‐setzung) in Benjamin’s sense is language in its indomitable rhetoricity. An objection informed by the theory of irony is relevant in another context as well. For irony can be understood as a technique of affirmation that undermines the “ground of decision” and, in its logic of reflection, both takes a stand and refuses to distinguish between friend and enemy.44 Schmitt’s demand for an absolutely pure decision on the contrary is carried by an obsessive “concern with oppositional purity.”45 Martin Greiffenhagen has given the name “dilemma of conservatism”46 to the fact that in modernity, every conservative conception of politics rests on an ironically refracted foundation or, more precisely, on the fact that every such conception criticizes that which is the very precondition of its own conserving position. We could say that what Panajotis Kondylis has analyzed as the progressive dissolution (of the conditions of possibility) of conservatism in modernity47 is true to a grotesquely exaggerated extent for Schmitt’s self‐ consciously reactionary position. Although the point is contested in Schmitt scholarship, this is apparent in his attitude towards the paradigmatic political construction of modernity, the state, as well. For the end of the era of statehood is also the end of the entire superstructure of concepts that refer to the state. ... But its concepts are retained, even retained as classical concepts. But of course the word classical today sounds equivocal and ambivalent, not to say ironic.48

Schmitt, the ironic theoretician of the state, is always indirectly oriented towards the sphere (of guarantees) of the law: in this sphere, the one who subjectively decides the law is the one who is objectively sovereign. The question of whether “legitimacy” is really, as Schmitt never tires to claim, “an absolutely unromantic category”49 is superfluous. Against its will (and in this sense similar to Kierkegaard’s fundamentalist approach with its proximity to contemporaries on the political Left like Bauer or Marx), Schmitt’s dictatorship is part of the universe of romantic‐modern post‐foundationalism. As “victim” of secularization, dictatorship cannot provide the ultimate justification either. Instead, it relies on “form” – an eminently aesthetic category. And it does so in the register of enthusiastic melancholy. After the end of the state, of the “model of political unity” and “masterpiece of European form,”50 Schmitt like “every theorist of the state involuntarily becomes an ironist of the state.”51 What we are confronted with in (romantic) modernity is a connection of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the political. Schmitt’s ignorance of their epistemic connection explains both his enmity towards the romantics and the desperate hopelessness of his attempts at 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 demarcation. His very argumentation relies on the epistemic basis of the aesthetic regime of thinking (and not just thinking about art). Only within this regime can Schmitt put the romantics’ aesthetic production and political activity in parallel so effortlessly. According to Schmitt, the essence of romanticism is an

echo of an activity that was not their own, and they too sought to acquire their productivity in this way. Lacking all social and intellectual stability, they succumbed to every powerful complex in their vicinity that made a claim to be taken as true reality. Thus lacking all moral scruples and any sense of responsibility other than that of a zealous and servile functionary, they could allow themselves to be used by any political system, a point that can be confirmed by the administrative activity of Adam Müller. ... [T]hey were not capable in shaping something in an artistic fashion.52

Schmitt seems to be thinking here of the “authentic” representations he propagates, and the reason for the incapacity he diagnoses is the Romantics’ occasionalism. The argument seems to go from the domain of aesthetics via a political argument back to an aesthetic judgement. Strictly speaking, for Schmitt, ironic occasionalism is generally grounds for suspicion. In this, Schmitt is, in the end (aesthetically) premodern. He wants to see power –even if it is in the dictatorial Führer. And this also marks a difference to Kierkegaard’s criticism of ironic politics or romantic modernity, a difference that is not just due to the hundred years and the changes in the social and political circumstances that separate the two authors. And yet both Kierkegaard’s earlier Protestant and Schmitt’s later Catholic fundamental opposition to secular (and democratic) politics owe whatever attraction they have to their attempts at religiously or theologically transcending the democratic status quo.

Translated by Nils F. Schott

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard: Die Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Avanessian, Armen. Phänomenologie ironischen Geistes: Ethik, Poetik und Politik der Moderne. Munich: Fink, 2010. Badiou, Alain. Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil, 2006.| 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

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Translated by Alberto Toscano. New York: Continuum, 2009. Balke, Friedrich. Der Staat nach seinem Ende: Die Versuchung Carl Schmitts. Munich: Fink, 1996. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Die Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Davis, Creston, and Patrick Aaron Riches. “Metanoia: The Theological Praxis of Revolution.” In Theology and the Political. Edited by Chreston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 22–51. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 2005. Düttmann, Alexander García. Philosophie der Übertreibung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Finkelde, Dominik. Politische Eschatologie nach Paulus: Badiou–Agamben–Žižek–Santner, second edition. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007. Greiffenhagen, Martin. Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland. Munich: Piper, 1971. Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003. Hamacher, Werner. “Afformative, Strike.” Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (1991), pp. 1133–1158. Kelsen, Hans. Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, second edition, 1929. Aalen: Scientia, 1981. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler. Translated by Walter Lowrie, Everyman’s Library 178. New York: Knopf, 1994. Kierkegaard, Søren. Journals and Papers, vol. 4. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Edited by Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Kondylis, Panajotis. Konservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang. Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta, 1986. Löwith, Karl. “Einleitung: Philosophische Theorie und geschichtliche Praxis in der Philosophie der Linkshegelianer. ” In Löwith, Die Hegelsche Linke. Stuttgart‐Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962, pp. 7–38. 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

Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth‐Century Thought. Translated by David E. Green, New York: Doubleday, 1967. Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During, London: Routledge, 2005. Maus, Ingeborg. Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus. Munich: Fink, 1986. Schmitt, Carl. Political Romanticism. Translated by Guy Oakes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Schmitt, Carl. Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien. Berlin: Duncker und Hublot, 1996. Schmitt, Carl. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by Gary L. Ulmen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Edited and translated by David Leopold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ulmen, Gary L. Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie über Max Weber und Carl Schmitt. Weinheim: VCH‐Wiley, 1991.

1 Creston Davis and Patrick Aaron Riches, “Metanoia: The Theological Praxis of Revolution,” in Theology and the Political, ed. by Chreston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 22–51, here p. 22. 2 Ibid., p. 23. 3 Søren Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler, in Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler, transl. by Walter Lowrie, Everyman’s Library 178, New York: Knopf, 1994, pp. 206 and 213. 4 On this point, compare my Phänomenologie ironischen Geistes: Ethik, Poetik und Politik der Moderne, Munich: Fink, 2010. 5 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, transl. by Lisabeth During, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 138. 6 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, transl. by Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 428, 426 (“paradoxe chretien est que l'eternité doit etre rencontrée dans le temps. … La querelle entre Hegel et Kierkegaard est en effet un querelle à propos du christianisme, querelle qui porte sur la fonction de la décision dans la constitution de la subjectivité chrétienne,” Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil, 2006, pp. 450 and 448). 7 Dominik Finkelde, Politische Eschatologie nach Paulus: Badiou–Agamben–Žižek–Santner, second edition, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007, pp. 85–86. 8 This succinct summary is taken from Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003, pp. 116–117. 9 Ibid., p. 23. 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

10 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in NineteenthCentury Thought, transl. by David E. Green, New York: Doubleday, 1967, p. 150. 11 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. and transl. by David Leopold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 12 The essay serves as introduction to a volume Löwith edited, Die Hegelsche Linke, Stuttgart‐Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962, pp. 7–38, pp. 25–26. According to Löwith, “[t]he critical inheritors of Hegelian philosophers are ‘leftists’ even when, like Bauer, they despise the ‘masses’ or, like Stirner and Kierkegaard, fight the idea of ‘community’ and ‘humanity’” (ibid., p. 10). 13 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History, transl. by Walter Lowrie, ed. by Benjamin Nelson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, p. 107; also quoted in Löwith, Hegelsche Linke, p. 278. 14 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 59 [The German quoted by Kierkegaard means, roughly, “the outward (exteriorization)” and “the interior.” 15 Ibid., p. 82. 16 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Die Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002, p. 56. 17 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 34. 18 Ibid., pp. 33–34. On this parallel, compare Hinrich Fink‐Eitel, “Kierkegaard und Foucault: Frag‐ würdige Gemeinsamkeiten zweier ungleicher Denker,” in Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993), pp. 7–27. 19 This 1848 preface, published separately in German under the title “Das Eine, was not tut” (“The One Thing That Is Needed”), is reproduced in the appendix to the Everyman’s Library edition of Fear and Trembling; references are to this edition. 20 Relevant entries diagnosing the escalation of events around 1848 are also to be found in Kierkegaard’s diaries: “With this in mind, I must attach great significance to the bread‐ riots around Europe this year; they indicate that the European constitution (as a physician speaks of a man's constitution) has completely altered; in the future we will have internal disturbances, secessio in montem sacrum etc.” Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 4, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 141. 21 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pp. 299–300. 22 Ibid., p. 300. 23 Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 6, pp. 61–62; cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling p. 300. 24 Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 6, p. 60. 25 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001, p. 285. 26 Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, transl. by Guy Oakes, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, p. 17. 27 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, transl. by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 62. 28 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, transl. by George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 63. 29 Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, second edition, Aalen: Scientia, 1981, p. 57. 30 See Friedrich Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende: Die Versuchung Carl, Munich: Fink, 1996, p. 106. 31 Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 65, my emphasis. 32 Schmitt explicitly denies the thesis of a Catholic romanticism. The repudiation of dictatorship in Schlegel’s early text on Republicanism for Schmitt is “too deeply grounded in rationalist thought for him to be able to shed it like a piece of dead tissue. On the contrary, often it is precisely intellectualistic and rationalistic elements that have been perceived as essentially romantic.” Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 27. On Schmitt’s substantial embeddedness in Catholicism, compare, for example, 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

Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, transl. by Don Reneau, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 91. 33 On this point, cf. Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende, pp. 164–165 and 308. 34 The relevant quotations from Schmitt can be found in Ingeborg Maus, Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus, Munich: Fink, 1986, p. 42. 35 Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, transl. by Gary L. Ulmen, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 21. 36 Lethen, Cool Conduct, p. 91. 37 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, p. 13; cf. pp. 15–16. 38 In this context, compare Gary L. Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie über Max Weber und Carl Schmitt. Weinheim: VCH‐Wiley, 1991, esp. p. 210. 39 Maus, Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie, p. 156. 40 Ibid., p. 157. 41 This quote is taken from a footnote to Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1982, p. 97) that has not been included in the English translation cited earlier. 42 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 100. 43 Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (1991), pp. 1133–1158, here p. 1157, n. 46. 44 Alexander García Düttmann, Philosophie der Übertreibung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 73 and 82. 45 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, transl. by George Collins, 1997, London: Verso, 2005, p. 247; cf. pp. 155–158. 46 Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland, Munich: Piper, 1971. 47 Panajotis Kondylis, Konservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang, Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta, 1986. 48 This quotation is taken from a later preface not included in the English translation; see Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, Berlin: Duncker und Hublot, 1996, p. 10. 49 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 124. 50 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, p. 10. 51 Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende, p. 189. 52 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 106. This interpretation is in turn justified in the terms of a theory of art since – as Schmitt writes, apparently unaware of analogous phenomena already to be found in Bach’s cantatas and religious oratorios – the romantic “unbegrenzte Welt von Assoziationen und Andeutungen läßt sich mit jeder Melodie, mit jedem Akkord, ja mit einem einzelnen, angeschlagenen Ton in Beziehung bringen; die Deutbarkeit ist unbeschränkt. Dieselbe Melodie kann heute ein leichtfertiges Liebeslied und in einigen Jahren ein ergreifendes Bußlied sein. ” Schmitt, Politische Romantik, pp. 111–112.