To Carl Schmitt

Letters and Reflections

Jacob Taubes, Keith Tribe

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231520348
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor—and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists.

In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists.

INTRODUCTION

“A VERY RARE THING”
MIKE GRIMSHAW

How can, how does one engage with To Carl Schmitt? For this slim collection of writings, comprising letters and lectures on Carl Schmitt by Jacob Taubes, is a fascinating volume that not only increases our knowledge of Taubes, it also demands a rethinking of the role of Schmitt in twentieth-century thought, in particular theology and philosophy. Most centrally, it forces—or I should say, in a Taubean-style polemic, should force—a reconsideration of what is meant, is undertaken, and eventuates when we use the term political theology to describe a particular intellectual and scholarly endeavor. For political theology of the twentieth century is so deeply intertwined with Schmitt that to undertake it is always, even if unknowingly or silently, to engage in, variously, a conversation, dialogue, debate, or argument with Schmitt. Jacob Taubes found himself in such an engagement from 1948 when he set out his questions and views in a letter that came to the attention of Schmitt. The letters and lectures in this volume chart, rechart, discuss, and attempt to explain at least part of this engagement.

A central recurring theme and self-questioning takes the form of an intellectual confession from Taubes, providing the background for how a Jewish scholar became a “friend” (Taubes’s term) of a jurist of the Nazi state. Just how this came to be is discussed throughout the collection and compels a rethinking of the influence of German thought on twentieth-century thought in the sense that to think philosophically in the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first) in the realms of politics, theology—and where they meet in political theology—is to think in the wake of Schmitt. As Taubes notes, even Walter Benjamin stated his debt to Schmitt.

The issues that arise out of this are complex and over the last three decades involve the turn to Paul as political theorist by not only Taubes but also those who have later done so, such as Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek, and the growing body of “political Paul” scholarship that follows. For Paul, as the one who claims the overcoming of law by grace, in effect could be argued to undertake the central sovereign act of exception in Western culture. Not that Paul is sovereign, but that Paul—or at least Paul’s Christ—proclaims the new sovereignty of grace over what becomes characterized (and, it can be stated, all too often caricatured) as the old sovereign God of law. Schmitt’s political theology in turn can be seen as what occurs when the Church’s pragmatic combination of grace and new law becomes secularized law, that is, when the secularized State replaces the Church as authority and now decides the exception without explicit reference to God. Yet God is always there, even when absent, dead, or discounted, for God is the silent reference of political theology, the supplanted sovereign of human politics.

Schmitt’s response to Taubes’s first letter and Taubes’s wrestling with how and when finally to respond provide a central focus and in turn raise issues for how we read Schmitt today. For this is a very “rich” resource and thus, as well as contextualizing both Taubes and Schmitt and their relationship, there are the wider issues of political theology, twentieth-century political and theological history, and the letter as a resource and text. As such this is also a glimpse into a lost world of conversation and thought that because of the Internet is gone. How many of us save our e-mails for the future? Indeed the e-mail itself seems to encourage a different style of communication, and this has an impact upon what could be called the contemporary history of thought. Letters addressed to an individual come to be collected and read by a wider audience and so change their reception and form. We read them for an insight into what can be called an unguarded moment whereby, in the privacy of words on the page, the writer directly “speaks” to a recipient, yet often with an eye and ear for a wider audience and reception. As such, letters allow the pretense of a privacy that is more often the conduit of public utterance, debate, comment, gossip, and description that sits closer to a conversation than a controlled and ordered paper or exposition. In letters the public-private divide is dissolved, for a letter is always potentially a public document, a public record, yet one controlled and disclosed by the intentions of its author.

Taubes was noted as “a master of smaller scholarly genres such as essays, interventions, reviews, letters and talks.”¹ These letters and talks are confessional and digressive, whereby intellectual history, polemic, and questions combine into a distinctly Taubean genre that could also be termed gnostic, for, as other commentators have discerned, Taubes is at heart a thinker who transgresses borders between domains, playing them against each other or blending them.² The relationship with Schmitt, of Jew and German Nazi jurist, is therefore, from Taubes’s perspective, given a gnostic transgression; the central issue of friend-enemy is here remade from the view and position of the one designated enemy. Yet, as will be come clear, what drew them together was antiliberalism, an antiliberalism searching for expression in the face of failed apocalypse, an antiliberalism that gains new urgency in a world where new forms of antihuman (that is antihistorical) apocalypse seem to be resurgent.

It is also important to remember that in this collection Taubes has a central claim that Schmitt is responsible for the recovery of ideology and that ideology in the twentieth century exists in reference—and debt (good and bad)—to Schmitt. In fact, Schmitt himself, in Taubes’s reading becomes what I would term an intellectual sovereign in that he determines the exception that enables this relationship to occur. The Nazi jurist who, as Taubes declares, is by culture and Catholicism an anti-Semite decides in 1948 to make the exception for the Jew who as enemy is the only one who truly understands him. Ideology in the wake of Schmitt must therefore by nature also be complex and open to new relationships—even if firstly as an act toward self-understanding. In short, ideology demands the possibility of the sovereign exception, for, in a secular world, ideology is what premodern faith has become.

It is also important to start reading and engaging with this collection from a position that understands how Jacob Taubes described his relationship with Carl Schmitt: “We knew that we were opponents to the death, but we got along splendidly. We knew one thing: that we were speaking on the same plane. And that was a very rare thing.”³

The writings contained in To Carl Schmitt were originally published in Germany in 1987. While translated versions of three of the writings (“Carl Schmitt: Thirty Years of Refusal,” the letters to Armin Mohler [February 14, 1952] and to Carl Schmitt [September 19, 1979]) have previously appeared as appendixes to Taubes’s The Political Theology of Paul, this new translation by Keith Tribe restores these writings into the larger collection that provides a fascinating, challenging, and important engagement with that “very rare thing,” the relationship between a Jewish intellectual and philosopher of history and a onetime, and unrenounced, Nazi jurist who is the major political theorist of the twentieth century.

Taubes’s statement sets the terms for engaging with this remarkable encounter, for, via Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction they were indeed “opponents to the death” and yet they also were speaking on the same plane, a plane of apocalypticism and counterrevolution.

A NOTE ON WHAT FOLLOWS: THE ANNOTATIVE HERMENEUTIC READER

The following introduction will take two intertwined forms. Firstly there is a discussion of the documents and the issues that arise from a close reading. Secondly the Taubes-Schmitt relationship is placed in the wider debate regarding Schmitt that has occurred over the past twenty-five years, especially since the turn to Schmitt by the left as signaled by the journal Telos in and after 1987. These two intertwined readings become expressed in what can be argued is an annotative reading arising from my heavily annotated copy of To Carl Schmitt. In a bastardized form of secular gentile midrash, my marginalia also exist as an annotative type of midrashic continuation, that is, the hermeneutics of the tradition of political theology into and out of the present context in which To Carl Schmitt is read. This introduction is also therefore a counternarrative taking its starting point from the challenge laid down in the postfoundational thought of Gianni Vattimo. For Vattimo, the death of God signals the birth of hermeneutics, for a postfoundationalist world enacts what he terms the age of interpretation. Arising in response to Nietzsche’s aphorism “there are no facts, only interpretations, and of course this too is only an interpretation,”⁴ the age of interpretation is qualified as an age of “not neutral but engaged knowledge because it is not placed at an ideal place that would claim to be external to the process.”⁵ That is, hermeneutics is the expression of knowledge that is necessarily provisional and contested, because the hermeneutic event is not an objective event that we respond to by thought, but rather a transformative event that changes our existence.⁶ Reading this collection is a transformative hermeneutic event, for it is the response to what was such a transformative exchange between Taubes and Schmitt.

As such, this introduction is not comprehensive, but any introduction that sought to be would become a separate text in itself; rather it exists as the offerings of one reader, introducing possible ways to read this text and raising further questions to consider. Because Taubes repeats earlier narratives in later presentations, I have chosen to respond to them as I read them—as a reader’s annotative hermeneutics—not to attempt to collate references into a series of defined and ordered subject discussions. For that would be to turn the texts into something other than how they were written—and presented—to be read and responded to. This introduction is therefore a short circuit insertion into what has become the public relationship and debate on the relationship of Taubes and Schmitt. Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben expresses the central importance of citation: “Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writing of the past and present a similar kind of meeting transpires; citations function as go-betweens in this encounter.”⁷ Žižek’s notion of the short circuit, its “secret meeting,” occurs in this interchange. A major text and or author is “short-circuited” by reading via “a ‘minor’ author, text or conceptual apparatus. … If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions.”⁸ It is also important, in such a reading strategy, to remember that, for Benjamin, “to quote involves the interruption of its context.”⁹ Annotations are of course not quotations, but, in their interruption, they do offer a type of secret meeting and short circuit. What follows is therefore an annotative reading, a short-circuiting of To Carl Schmitt.

REREADING TO CARL SCHMITT

The collection begins with the transcript of a lecture on Schmitt, given by Taubes in Berlin in 1985 wherein Taubes attests to his respect for Schmitt, even though Taubes as a “conscious Jew” is one who is marked as “enemy” (1) by Schmitt.¹⁰ This friend/enemy distinction sits at the center of their relationship and, as will be argued, also sits at the heart of how we, today, engage with Schmitt. In a further direction for our engagement, Taubes at the outset makes the interesting claim that to truly understand Schmitt one should not turn to his “major, clamorous texts” but rather should read his “broken confessions,” which were published as Ex Captivitate Salus in 1950 and include the poem of the same name.

This poem, still only readily available in English via a translation in the journal Telos,¹¹ is perhaps the closest form we have to an autobiographical confessional statement. In it Schmitt describes himself as the one through whom “all the tribulations of fate” have passed; he is acquainted “with the abundant varieties of terror … and know[s] their grip” as well as “the chanting choirs of power and law.”

Via this poem it is apparent Schmitt’s self-positioning as the man through whom recent history has waged its confrontations with terror and chaos sits at the heart of his political theory. For chaos is Schmitt’s great enemy, and the role of the sovereign is ultimately, in the face of chaos, to make the decisive judgment, the decision of the exception, the decision to keep order. In response to his own question “What now what shall I sing?” Schmitt sings anything but his rejected “the hymn of the placebo,” and that is still his great attraction for thinkers on both the left and right; the question is, however, whether Schmittean medicine is really a cure.

What then is of value in being designated an “enemy” by Schmitt? Taubes argues that Schmitt’s “enemy,” defined from the perspective of a legal theorist, offers something that a theological definition does not. For the theological enemy is, according to Taubes (1), usually defined as one to be destroyed. The alternative possibility offered by the nontheological, legal enemy (that is, political theology) is that such an enemy must still be opposed, but not necessarily destroyed, because such an enemy is central to one’s own self-identity. The caution arising is the reminder that to destroy the one who defines you is, in the end, to destroy oneself or, at the very least, to lose one one’s self-identity. Yet the problem Taubes notes is that Schmitt’s unrepentant move into an engagement with and within National Socialism does, however, put the legal theory definition of enemy in subservience to what I would define as the Reich theology definition of the enemy for National Socialism, wherein the enemy is to be destroyed. This question and its issues will continue to be engaged with by Taubes and Schmitt throughout this collection.

Yet, interestingly, such a question was not present for Taubes in 1942, when, aged nineteen and studying at the University of Zurich (his father was chief rabbi, having moved from Vienna in 1937), he came across reference to Schmitt’s Political Theology in Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche. What struck Taubes was Schmitt’s allusion to the concluding verse of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857) wherein Satan is elevated to the throne (and Taubes quotes [5]):

Race of Cain, ascend to heaven

And cast God down upon the earth!

Taubes took this opposition, via Löwith’s tracing of an intellectual lineage “from Hegel via Marx and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche” (2) as the basis for a new historiography. The rejection of Taubes’s argument by his professor was a turning point, for he found himself aligned with Schmitt’s referencing of Hobbes’s statement in Leviathan that “the law is made by authority, not by truth.” In short, it was his encounter with Schmitt that made Taubes the type of thinker—and opponent to the professorial university and manner—he became for the rest of his life. What Taubes became instead was a philosopher of intellectual history, a philosopher grounded in history who remained opposed to the actions and thinking of most professional historians—especially those who aligned themselves to liberal modernity. This opposition to liberal modernity, and to liberalism more generally, is what holds the friend-enemy relationship of Taubes and Schmitt: a relationship conducted via a shared engagement with political theology, which Taubes reads from a politicotheological perspective, whereas Schmitt writes first and foremost as a jurist. It is this gap, this difference, of readings and perspectives that makes the Taubes-Schmitt debate so fascinating as well as important. For how, in the wake of both Taubes and Schmitt, do we today engage not only with Schmitt’s Political Theology but also, more widely, the return and rise, indeed the expansion, of political theology as a claim, a vision, a hermeneutic, and a critique? Where does law (nomos) sit within political theologies? is the question Taubes was to memorably trace back to what he named as the political theology of Paul, especially the Letter to the Romans. Further, if, as Taubes states, the drive of political theology is that of “an apocalypse of the counterrevolution” (11), how is political theology as a movement to be rethought, for within such a redefinition apocalypse becomes a type of judgment central to any political theology and so makes political theology far more weighted toward theology than the political. It is here we are reminded of what has almost become the Schmittean cliché from Political Theology (1922) that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”¹² What if central to such a secularized move is the desire to keep the apocalypse at bay, to keep apocalyptic thinking at bay? Would—to push this further—the insight that theology, especially Christian theology, is inherently apocalyptic be the insight that liberalism in theology has striven so hard to cover up? Therefore is the exception, identified by Schmitt as analogous to the miracle,¹³ the sign in the secular society of liberal modernity of the apocalyptic power that exists, that is referenced by both exception and miracle, that reminds us that what we believe to be the case, the norm, is in fact only fragile and transitory? Political theology therefore, as both the Schmitt book, but more as developing twentieth-century concept and critique, exists as a reminder of the apocalyptic in what is taken to be a secular world of the triumph of liberal democracy. Is, in fact, apocalyptic counterrevolution the real outside to liberal democracy, and is it this threat, this possibility of such chaos that lead, as Taubes comments, to the possibility that, as immediately post-Shoah as 1949, the Israeli minister of justice Pinchas Rosen was using the only available copy in Jerusalem of Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre (Constitutional Theory, 1928) to attempt to draft a constitution for the state of Israel? (10–11). Was the model for Israel to be Weimar, a new Weimar in which article 48, that of presidential decree to protect public order, was imagined as a possibility to protect the newly emergent Jewish state against such chaos as led to the demise of Weimar? In effect, was the “enemy” Schmitt being used to draft a constitution to ensure the tragic exception would not be repeated? To answer such a question is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it is such questions that reading To Carl Schmitt raises.

It was this possibility, linked with the wider question of, as Taubes puts it “the problem of the Fascist intelligentsia” (11), specifically Schmitt and Heidegger¹⁴ and of their Catholic background, that for Taubes could not be resolved “by appealing to the inner bastard of Nazism” (11). As can be seen in the “Letter to Armand Mohler,” Taubes wrote of these issues to his one-time school friend and now extreme right-wing thinker and secretary to Ernst Jünger, who in turn passed it on to Carl Schmitt. At this same time Taubes was working toward what he terms “the apocalypse of the revolution,” yet “free of the illusions of messianic Marxists” (11), in short, “a new concept of time and a new experience...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction: “A Very Rare Thing”
• Carl Schmitt: Apocalyptic Prophet Of The Counterrevolution
• Letter To Armin Mohler
• Appendix: Four Passages From Letters Of Carl Schmitt To Armin Mohler
• Letter To Carl Schmitt
• Extract From A Dispute About Carl Schmitt
• 1948–1978: Thirty Years Of Refusal
• Editorial Note
• Notes