Three

ZONES OF EXCEPTION (CARL SCHMITT)

Such indirect influences, which elude any documentation, are the strongest and
by far the most authentic.
Carl Schmitt, Letter to Ernst Jünger

However, we must always seek the enemy here in ourselves ... The objections
that are to be feared lie in ourselves. We must search them out like old but
unexpired claims, in order to ground perpetual peace on their annihilation.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

I’ll teach you differences.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

The name Carl Schmitt evokes controversy, anger, and both silent and
expressed admiration from diverse and contrasting political thinkers. Over the
last eighty years he has been censored, vilified, viewed as a relic of a
particular period, in some circles glorified as the modern political thinker par
excellence, and in some intellectual circles still remains virtually unknown.
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism points to an intersection where democracy
negates liberalism and liberalism negates democracy. In Political Theology,
he famously defines the sovereign as he who decides on the exception, and his
definition ofthe political declares the friend-enemy distinction to be the
foundation of all politics. In the last twenty years interest in Carl Schmitt
outside of Germany has grown. Celebrated philosophers and critical theorists
such as Jacques Derrida, Georgio Agamben, Jacob Taubes, Slavoj Žižek,
Chantal Mouffee and Antonio Negri have all referred to him in important
works spanning the past twenty years.1 This could be due to two primary
factors: 1) the changing political climate around the world triggered by US
foreign policy—specifically, at the very least, the neo-conservative movement
in the United States of America, which can be traced back to Carl Schmitt’s
intellectual influence (obvious examples are found in the wake of the terrorist
attacks on New York in September 2001, when the clear message from the US
government, channeling Schmittian friend/enemy political logic, was “either
you’re with us or against us,” and the Bush administration’s Iraq war
campaign slogans of the “Coalition of the Willing” and “Axis of Evil”);2 and
2) the disappearance of the reluctance of the political and academic
environment to approach and appropriate Schmitt, whose biographical links to
anti-Semitism and Nazism greatly complicate the matter.
Little has been written on Carl Schmitt and Kierkegaard despite the
reverence that Schmitt gives to the Danish thinker and given where
90 KIERKEGAARD’S INDIRECT POLITICS

Kierkegaard turns up in Schmitt’s writing. Schmitt uses Kierkegaard’s

‘exception’ (Undtagelse, as found in Fear and Trembling and Repetition) as
the central thesis for some of his writing, and views Kierkegaard as the most
articulate thinker on the exception and subsequently using this word
‘exception’ to define the sovereign in Political Theology. Reading Schmitt
reading Kierkegaard is a fruitful exercise in teasing out various unsolved
issues in the latter’s writings, and also adds another surprising member to the
list of radical European thinkers in the Weimar inter-war years who came
under the spell of Kierkegaard and appropriated his thought in exciting and
polarising ways. In this chapter, we will go deeper into indirect politics as it
makes its way to the forefront of global politics in the twentieth century. What
is often overlooked when reading Schmitt is, like Kierkegaard, the injection of
theatre into his work, and how the motifs, masks, and figures from the stage
inform and infuse his work. Here we have the cautionary tale of an attempt to
fill the negative space and Mellemspil that is indirect politics.
However seldom, Kierkegaard does turn up in key points of Schmitt’s
writings. And the use that Schmitt makes of some of the thinking and writings
of Kierkegaard is fundamental to understanding the roots and backbone of
Schmitt’s political thinking. This has been overlooked by most Schmitt and
Kierkegaard scholars to the point even of being ignored. Kierkegaard is
prominent in the seminal works of the Weimar years both explicitly and
implicitly in Political Romanticism, Roman Catholicism and Political Form,
Political Theology and even in the either/or politics of The Concept for the
Political. It was especially in these years, from 1909 up until the National
Socialists took power in 1933 that many German intellectuals were
enthusiastically reading Kierkegaard’s existential and multifaceted writings.
Translations of Kierkegaard into German were coming out mostly via figures
such as Carl Dallago, Theodor Haecker and Ludwig von Ficker of the
influential journal Der Brenner from Innsbruck, Austria, and Haecker also
published Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit in 1913.3
From Schmitt’s Nachlass and evidence in his own writings both in his
published works and his diaries, we know for certain that Schmitt had read or
at least was familiar with German translations of Either/Or, Repetition, Fear
and Trembling, the essay “The Present Age” and discourse “The Thorn in the
Flesh”4, Stages on Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, The Point of View of
my Work as an Author, Attack on Christendom, The Single Individual and the
Church, a twelve-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works,5 and a
German edition called Begriff des Auserwählten6 which he received as a gift
from the German translator in 1918, and in which there are markings all over
the book by Schmitt.7 His passionate enthusiasm for Kierkegaard is also
evident in his diaries from 1914 to 1918 (For example, here is one entry from
1914: “I ate this evening, drank tea […] read Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s
Way. It is ingenious in the highest sense; everything is brought out in