Politics and Negation

For an Affirmative Philosophy

Roberto Esposito, Zakiya Hanafi

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509536634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

For some while we have been witnessing a series of destructive phenomena which seem to indicate a full-fledged return to the negative on the world stage – from terrorism and armed conflict to the threat of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, politics seems increasingly impotent in the face of these threats. In this book, the leading Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito reconstructs the genealogy of the reciprocal intertwining of politics and negation. He retraces the intensification of negation in the thought of various thinkers, from Schmitt and Freud to Heidegger, and examines the negative slant of some of our fundamental political categories, such as sovereignty, property and freedom. Against the centrality of negation, Esposito proposes an affirmative philosophy that does not negate or repress negation but radically rethinks it in the positive cipher of difference, determination and opposition. The result is a rigorous and original pathway which, in the tension between affirmation and negation, recognizes the disturbing traumas of our time, as well as the harbingers of what awaits at its limits. This highly original and timely book will be of great value to students and scholars in philosophy, cultural theory and the humanities more generally, and to anyone interested in contemporary European thought.

Part I

1
Enemy and friend

1. Carl Schmitt always denied that he identified negation as the secret heart of politics. In reply to the objection brought against him by Otto Brunner, that he put the category of enemy before that of friend,¹ Schmitt claimed that this was a purely logical choice. Brunner’s comment, he argued,

ignores the fact that every movement of a legal concept emerges with dialectical necessity from negation. In the life, as in the theory, of the law, the incorporation of negation is anything but a “primacy” of what is negated. A trial as legal action only becomes at all conceivable when a law is negated. Punishment and criminal law posit at their beginning not a deed but a criminal misdeed. Does such a positing perhaps reflect a “positive” attitude towards criminal misdeeds and toward a “primacy” of crime?²

In this passage as in others of the same tenor, Schmitt argues that there can be no determination without the negative, according to the classic principle that omnis determinatio est negatio [all determination is negation]. Along these lines, it does not matter which pole you move from to determine how the other one differs. Whether you start from the enemy to characterize the friend or from the friend to identify the enemy, nothing changes. In either case, what comes first is opposition, contrariety, and therefore, in the technical sense of the word, enmity.³ This does not mean, continues Schmitt, that he posits enmity as having a higher value than friendship. It merely signifies that the enemy precedes the friend – it comes logically before and is necessary for distinguishing what comes afterwards. Schmitt’s strategy is to limit the argument to a purely formal domain. Enmity is not the content of the political but rather its form – or, more specifically, its presupposition. Enmity is what makes the political conceivable. This interpretation is confirmed by the reference – which is anything but casual – he makes to the law. Just as punishment is what guarantees order, a law becomes noticeable only if, and when, it is negated. Elsewhere⁴ Schmitt recalls Max Scheler’s idea: “The ultimate sense of any positive proposition, e.g., ‘There ought to be justice in the world,’ ‘Indemnifications ought to be paid,’ necessarily contains, therefore, a reference to a non-value, i.e., a reference to the non-being of a positive value.”⁵ Legal logic always proceeds from a negative register, by deriving every category from its opposite. Thus, in Roman law, at the dawn of all European legal systems, a free human being was not defined positively as such but starting from the fact that he or she was not a slave: sui iuris, “under one’s own legal authority,” was anyone who was not alieni iuris, “under someone else’s legal authority.” Similarly, movable goods for private use or trade are characterized on the basis of their difference from those that are not available for these uses because they are intended for the city or for the gods. In short, the positive opposite always arises from the ground of the “not,” and never the other way around. What is lawful is that which is not unlawful.

The same goes for war in relation to peace – peace is the time not occupied by war, as Hobbes asserted (De cive, I, 12). Schmitt assures us that his own conception leans no more towards bellicism than it does towards pacifism. What counts is the inseparability of the two terms and the logical primacy of one over the other. As in the relationship between enemy and friend, in this case too the precedence goes to war, for the simple reason that the relationship that binds it to peace is itself antagonistic. Even the most committed pacifist is forced to defend his or her position by making war on war. In this sense – and only in this sense, Schmitt assures us – one of the two concepts, here war, tends to prevail over its opposite. This does not break their formal symmetry but structures it according to a mode that belongs only to one of the two terms. Where hostility is predominant, “everything that is not war can be defined eo ipso as peace, and everything that is not enemy, as friend. Conversely, where peace and friendship are normally and indisputably a given, everything that is not peace can become war and everything that is not friendship, hostility.” Nevertheless, adds Schmitt, revealing the vanishing point towards which his argument is pulled – “in the first case peace and, in the second case, war are negatively defined starting from the given opposite. For the same reason, in the first case the non-friend is friend; in the second, the non-enemy is enemy.”⁶

*

2. What is presented as a logical assumption already takes on a much bolder role in this formulation. Neither of the two terms is stated positively. Both wind up expressed in a negative form that powerfully influences their meanings. If it is natural for the enemy to be defined as non-friend, the definition of friend as non-enemy seems less obvious. While the negative is intuitively a non-positive, the positive appears less obviously as a non-negative. For Schmitt, as we have seen, the significance of this attribution is merely epistemological. Nonetheless, his entire argument is conditioned by it, to the point that his reasoning bows to the primacy of the negative in both content and expression. It should be noted that once the antithesis between friend and enemy is established, Schmitt quickly abandons the first term to devote his attention exclusively to the second. Once the friend has been confined to the edges of the picture, the enemy has an exclusive hold on Schmitt’s gaze. There is no room for generic descriptions: the enemy has to be thought out in all its absolute specificity. To achieve this, its role has to be intensified to the extreme, so that any analogy with only apparently similar figures will break down. Not only is the enemy not equivalent with the economic competitor or with the private opponent – and note that all Schmitt’s affirmations proceed via negatives; the enemy implies the eventuality of a potentially lethal struggle. Even this struggle is qualified, essentially, by what it is not: enmity “does not mean competition, not the ‘purely spiritual’ struggle of discussion, not the symbolic ‘struggle’ in which every person always engages somehow,” but war as “absolute negation of every other being […] It does not need to be something mundane or normal, nor does it need to be seen as something ideal or desirable: it must, however, exist as a real possibility in order for the concept of enemy to be able to retain its meaning.”⁷

Even beyond the polarity between friend and enemy, by now the focus of the text is on the indissoluble tie between politics and negation. Significantly, Schmitt points out that all the great political thinkers start out from a negative anthropology. This is what happens to Hobbes: for the English philosopher, the conviction of possessing the good and being in the right is precisely what provokes the most violent hostility and, ultimately, the war of all against all. But the same thing happens to Hegel too: what he sees in the enemy is “the moral difference [die sittliche Differenz], an alien being that has to be negated in its living totality.”⁸ For both, the positive is nothing but the result of a clash rooted in the negative: “The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”⁹ With the friend out of the picture or reduced to a simple stand-in for the enemy, the latter dominates the entire political sphere. The political is what arises out of the clash between two entities defined by their contrariety.

*

3. Let me return to an expression cited earlier in connection with extreme enmity: that of a “real possibility.” War, writes Schmitt, is not the content or the goal of politics but its prerequisite, which is always present as a real possibility (die als reale Möglichkeit immer vorhandene Voraussetzung). In an insightful study of Schmitt’s text, Jacques Derrida lingers on the word “real,” which Schmitt introduces several times, often in association with “concrete.” What exactly is a “real possibility”? Is it a mere logical hypothesis or an actual eventuality? An eventuality or a fact? The ultimate meaning of the political, understood in its constitutive relationship with war, derives from the answer to this question. Politics, it has been said, presupposes the possibility of war. But is this presupposition external or internal to the political? Is this prerequisite its immemorial past or its actual present? Schmitt’s argument seems to alternate between these two hypotheses, slipping continuously from one to the other:

What appears to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Quote
• Introduction
• Glosses
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index
• End User License Agreement