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Latour and Schmitt: Political Theology and Science

Stephen Turner, Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

Abstract

In this article the nature of Latour’s relation to Carl Schmitt is discussed, considering
the point by point revisions of Schmitt offered by Latour and his references to Schmitt.
These turn out to be plentiful and illuminating. Latour systematically replaces Schmitt’s
concepts, while retaining the basic structure of Schmitt’s thought and expanding it. Yet
the nature of Latour’s revision and its implications are obscure. Is he merely replacing
Schmitt, or challenging him? Schmitt presents a meta-theology of politics. It will be
shown that Latour presents an alternative political theology, and not a meta-theology
that can be made sense of within, and critiqued by, Schmittian concepts?

Keywords: Bruno Latour. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, the Political, Cosmopolitics,
John Dewey

Political theory, especially French political theory (e.g., Ranciere ([1992] 2007), but also
much of American political theory (e.g., Wolin 1994; Xenos 2001), has been consumed,
for a generation, by the distinction between politics as a limited empirical phenomenon
governed by governmental and electoral procedures, and “the political,” understood as
the category of the potentially political. This concern derives from Carl Schmitt’s The
Concept of the Political ([1932] 1996), and Schmitt’s thought looms over much of
contemporary political theory, particularly on the Left, where the idea of expanding “the
political” to include collective self-transformation has been a central theme.
Latour presents a novel account of the problem of “the political.” It depends, in
some respects, on Latour’s account of networks (cf. Reassembling the Social 2005), and
this is the source of most of its novelty, but for the most part it stands on its own. The
conclusion to his long running line of thinking is his concept of cosmopolitics, taken
from Isabelle Stengers (cf. 2002). But a surprisingly large subset of his vast body of
work, the places where he invokes, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through
reference to specific concepts, the lineage of political thinking that runs from Hobbes
through Schmitt. It is not too much to say that Latour is a Schmittian who has taken up
and revised his notion of representation, and replaced Schmittian concepts of acclamation
with concepts of collectives and the public, used translation and transubstantiation to
replace the concept of decisionism, as well as replace the Schmittian concept of the
political with the concept of the cosmopolitical. Latour’s arguments, comments, and
asides fit very directly into many of the concerns of Schmitt’s political theory and, as it
happens, political theology. But this lineage raises questions about the nature of Latour’s
contribution that are central to understanding Schmitt: because Schmitt places liberalism
in a larger picture of the political that shows it to be ideological even when it purports to
be, it is a classic anti-liberal approach to “the political.” Can Latour also be located in
relation to liberalism in this way? Finally, there is a question that can be answered for
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Schmitt and needs to be answered for Latour: what he is doing? Political theory, political
theology, metaphysics, or all of these, and if so how are they related?

Political Theology is meta-political. It asks the question of how politics is to be

understood and evaluated if a particular theology—or atheism understood as a theology
—is true. Political theory is a reflection on and understanding of actual political life,
though it may also include, as in the writing of the last generation mentioned above,
consideration of the potentially political and its exclusion from political life, with
inclusion and exclusion understood as an actual political process rather than a purely
hypothetical one. Political theologians differ from metaphysicians in that they assume
that theological truth cannot be limited to metaphysical truth, and that metaphysical truth
cannot warrant theological truth. Metaphysics is established by reason alone; theology
requires more, in the form of faith, revelation, or authority. But each can be taken as a
kind of foundation for aspects of the conceptualization that goes into political theory—
thus liberalism assumes the autonomous individual, while Marxism assumes the reality of
social classes with agential powers. It is not always obvious that the metaphysics and
political theology can be disentangled. Schmitt makes the point that all political concepts
are disguised theological concepts ([1922] 1985: 36). And from the point of view of
political theology, the secularization of these concepts is a theological choice, not a
political or metaphysical choice, so that even the secularized metaphysics of liberalism is
itself a theological choices. Critical political theology, or what we can call meta-political
theology, is the analysis of these choices, but does not purport to decide between them.
Schmitt’s writings, as we will see, fall into this category; whether Latour’s do is less
clear, and requires a more elaborated understanding of his relationship to Schmitt and the
parallel structures of their thought.

Science and Neutralization

If the political is the potentially political, what does this domain itself consist of? This is
in principle obscure: it is a domain defined by possibility, including possibilities we may
not yet be able to imagine. A typical model of this domain is the state of collective fusion
Durkheim attributed to the French revolution, in which the entire social order was
transformed, including the calendar, forms of religion, and so forth: here the political is
disclosed in the moment of fusion rather than preceding it. Schmitt focuses instead on
acclamation: similarly a kind of primal event in the creation of political forms which
itself constitutes the domain of the actual political out of the domain of the potentially
political ([1928] 2008: 270-73). One can see that in both variants, the question of what is
“the political” is connected to the equally obscure question of what a collectivity—a term
repeatedly used by Latour—is. We will return to this problem, which appears in Latour in
a specific context. But we can also address the question of “the political” in a more
mundane way by looking at the notion of the “unpolitical” and the process of making
something unpolitical, which Schmitt calls neutralization.
Both Latour and Schmitt critique the separation of science and politics, which
Schmitt categorizes as a form of neutralization. One of Latour’s major concerns is the
ideology of science and the way in which this ideology separates it from considerations in
the category “social.” This is central to his discussion of science in We Have Never Been
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Modern ([1991] 1993). Schmitt’s argument is more general, but includes science, and
makes the point that the term political is itself a polemical term, and that

the polemical character determines the use of the term political regardless of
whether the adversary is designated as non-political (in the sense of harmless), or
vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to
portray oneself as non-political (in the sense of purely scientific, purely moral,
purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar
purities, and therefore superior. (Schmitt [1932] 1996: 31-2)

The term” purely juristic” represents the “polemic” that Kelsen’s “pure theory” of law
([1960] 1967) addresses to its non-liberal enemies, while pretending to be itself non-
political. The term “purely scientific” works in the same way.
The result of Schmitt’s analysis is the following: there is no pure science or pure
jurisprudence: what is neutral is a matter of political decision; what is science or learning
is therefore also a political decision. The fundamental fact here is not “what do scientists
think science is?” but “what is the political decision defining what science is?” From a
legal point of view, or more broadly from a “political” point of view, in Schmitt’s sense
of the political as the potentially political, it could not be otherwise. This is not to say that
scientists could not themselves promote a concept of pure science or lawyers a concept of
pure law. It is to say that this is itself a political act, whose meaning is shown by the
political decisions it attempts to influence. Latour embraces and elaborates this point in
his own way, with the concept of “epistemological police,” who enforce this distinction
—a characterization that also makes the activity of purification into a political one
(2004a: 13, 18, 59, 253).

Political Theology

Schmitt’s picture of politics is self-consciously concerned not merely what various

ideologists have defined as the political, but with what he calls “the total.” Thus for him
distinctions and dualisms, such as the dualism of law and politics, are ideological
constructions within a larger domain. This total domain includes God, and therefore
requires that we engage with the topic of political theology. But we are also compelled to
engage with political theology because our contemporary “political” concepts are
themselves secularized theological concepts. Schmitt thus understands liberalism in its
dogmatic forms as rooted in theology. “Protestant theology presents a … supposedly
unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as ‘wholly other’, just an in political liberalism
state and society are conceived of as the ‘wholly other’” (Schmitt [1922] 1985: 2). The
same point applies to the liberal exclusion of God from politics through such concepts as
freedom of conscience: this is a political idea with a theological basis.
Schmitt himself, as Latour does later, made the argument that Protestantism had
introduced a new view of nature, and that the Catholic view did not separate man from
nature.

Every sphere of the contemporary epoch is governed by a radical dualism…. Its

common ground is a concept of nature that has found its realization in a world
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transformed by technology and industry. Nature appears today as the polar

antithesis of mechanistic world….Such a dichotomy between a rationalistic-
mechanistic world of human labor and a romantic virginal state of nature is
wholly foreign to the Roman Catholic concept of nature. (Schmitt [1932] 1996: 9-
10)

This, with slight modifications, is also the historical thesis and core argument of We have
Never Been Modern ([1991] 1993): that the “modern,” view of nature imposes a false
distinction between man and nature, or for Latour between the objects that are social and
the objects that are subject to science.
Latour does not explicitly identify this thesis as Catholic, though he does so
indirectly by ascribing the views he rejects to the Reformation. Instead, he alludes to a
metaphysical view that both fits with and can be said to underpin his argument:
Whitehead’s. Latour cites Isabelle Stengers, who has written on Whitehead (Stengers
2002). The details of the relation of Whitehead to these issues, which are fascinating and
have implications for the history of science studies that go far beyond anything Latour
says, need not be discussed here. But a few points are relevant. Whitehead was a
constructivist avant la lettre: he had a notion of scientific facts, and facts generally, as the
product of “assemblage” (Whitehead 1938: 2). Behind this was a general metaphysics,
which has come down as “process metaphysics,” but which was more revealingly
identified by him as “organic.” Process metaphysics has a theological counterpart in
“Process Theology,” which is “theological” because it includes, or does not exclude,
God. The specifically theological idea behind process metaphysics is that God is wholly
temporal, and that “God is essentially in a give-and-take relationship with the world”
(Viney [2004] 2014: n.p.).
The relation of scientist or observer to nature, for Whitehead, was not one of
separation: God and the world are part of a larger ongoing organic relation. Without
going into theological niceties, this is both contrary to traditional Catholic doctrine,
particularly the idea in Aquinas that God alone creates, but it is at the same time an
expression of a kind of Catholic response to the general Pascalian and Calvinist account
of salvation, in which God is separate, omniscient, omnipotent, and “owes us nothing,”
especially about salvation, and whose will we cannot affect in any way, rather than
existing in a give and take relation (see Kolakowski 1995). This Pascalian-Calvinist
doctrine was closely related to the issue of whether God stood outside of time, because
predestination and omniscience with respect to it was attributed to the non-temporal
character of God.
The relations of these doctrines to Schmitt are intricate: the Calvinist sacralization
of the conscience as the voice of God was a target in his account of what he took to be
Hobbes’ fundamental error: “What is of significance is the seed planted by Hobbes
regarding his reservation about private belief and his distinction between inner belief and
outer confession. As it unfolded, it became an irresistible and all-governing conviction”
(Schmitt [1938] 2008: 59). He explains his critique of Hobbes in this way:

…when public power wants to be only public, when state and confession drive
inner belief into the private domain, then the soul of the people betakes itself on
the “secret road” that leads inward. Then grows the counterforce of silence and
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stillness. At precisely the moment when the distinction between inner and outer is
recognized, the superiority of the inner over the outer is resolved. Public power
and force may ever be so completely and emphatically recognized and ever so
loyally respected, but only as a public and only an external power, it is hollow and
already dead from within. Such an earthly god has only the appearance and the
simulacra of divinity on his side. (Schmitt [1938] 2008: 61; emphasis in original)

Schmitt wanted the conscience to be regulated by the (temporal) state, and thought that
freedom of conscience doomed the state. Latour, similarly, commenting on the effect of
the reformation, points to the Calvinist account of conscience when he comments that
“Spirituality was reinvented: the all-powerful God could descend into men’s heart of
hearts without intervening in any way in their external affairs” (Latour [1991] 1993: 33).
And like Schmitt, he connects this to Hobbes, but in a novel way. He argues that the
theology of the non-interventionist God of the reformation got “mixed up” with the
Hobbes-Boyle project of the sundering of the natural world from the social world, which
led to the removal of God as an active agent from both worlds ([1991] 1993: 33).
The organic view of the relation of humanity, God, and nature is implicitly a
thesis about agency: the claim that the relation is organic or processual is that the
elements exist in a dynamic relation in which each can affect the others in fundamental
ways. Latour’s version of this is the doctrine of actants: “What is an ‘actor’? Any element
which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent upon itself and
translates their will into a language of its own. An actor makes changes in the set of
elements and concepts habitually used to describe the social and the natural worlds.”
Actors themselves define temporality rather than being defined by it: “By stating what
belongs to the past, and of what the future consists, by defining what comes before and
what comes after, by building up balance sheets, by drawing up chronologies, it imposes
its own space and time” (Callon and Latour 1981: 286-7). What was formerly understood
as permanent can now be understood as the product of a kind of imposition of a network
structure. “an actor can make these asymmetries last, can lay down a temporality and a
space that is imposed on the others” (Callon and Latour 1981: 286-7). The idea is that
nothing is inert or eternal, that every element, including the observer, is part of the larger
dynamic process.

Latour’s Meta-Political Theory: Agency Redefined

Latour’s concept of actants is a novel concept of agency: one which ascribes agency,
albeit of a limited sort, such as the power to resist, to non-human and hybrid objects. To
compare Latour to political theorists, it is useful to break the issues down to some simpler
elements. The distribution of agency is a central issue for these thinkers. Hans Kelsen,
Schmitt’s bête noir, is a useful point of contrast: Kelsen denies that there is any agency
but individual agency, denies the existence of collective entities, and attaches no special
significance to acclamation as a creator of collective will or a mortal God. He identified
the state with law, not with any sort of super-legal “power.” Kelsen noted that every legal
act is carried out by the human individual person. Though Kelsen was a “will” theorist of
the law, he reduced the notion of will to a formal property of the law, and insisted that the
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state was no more than individual people authorized to act under law: they are the only
legally relevant agents. This was a major point of difference with Schmitt, who ascribed
supra-legal power and therefore agency to the state.
Latour’s fundamental “theoretical” innovation is to expand the list of agents to
include objects, hybrids, and so forth: anything that can enter into network relations. The
earliest formulations of Latour’s argument came in such texts as “Unscrewing the Big
Leviathan” (Callon and Latour 1981), which is specifically directed at, and quotes,
Hobbes’ account of the state as a “mortal God,” and “Give Me a Laboratory” (Latour
[1983] 1999). The latter text is a direct and overt discussion and critique of the juridical
point of view in relation to the question of the nature of the power of the state and state-
like “big” entities. It is focused on the issue of big and small, and on what makes an agent
powerful. The answer is not that the agent, such as a state, is big, and therefore powerful.
These big agents are made up of small agents. Power comes from the ability of some
small agents to rely on stable networks of predictable relations, especially those which
are “black-boxed,” that is to say work more or less automatically and are not subjected to
additional scrutiny or debate, or to negotiation.

In order to build the Leviathan it is necessary to enrol [sic] a little more than
relationships, alliances and friendships. An actor grows with the number of
relations he or she can put, as we say, in black boxes. A black box contains that
which no longer needs to be reconsidered, those things whose contents have
become a matter of indifference. The more elements one can place in black boxes
—modes of thoughts, habits, forces and objects, the broader the construction one
can raise. (Callon and Latour 1981: 284-5; emphasis in original)

There is no additional “macro” fact about institutions or the state—they do not have any
agency of their own. All the agency is to be found in the small entities which are arranged
in networks.
The arrangement of the networks is a product of effort, of enrolling elements of
the network, and the exercise of power comes under the heading of “translation,” which
means

By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of

persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be
conferred on itself authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force. . . .
S/he begins to act for several, no longer for one alone. S/he becomes stronger.
S/he grow. The social contract displays in legal terms, at society's very
beginnings, in a once-and-for-all, all-or-nothing ceremony, what processes of
translation display in an empirical and a reversible way, in multiple, detailed,
everyday negotiations. (Callon and Latour 1981: 279)

This makes something very explicit: the goal is to replace the juridical conception of
society with a new description, in terms of translation, which has a specific meaning.
“Translation” is a surrogate term for “authority” The relation of speaking for is
the core of authority (Disch 2008). Latour does not offer a view of legitimate authority: it
is whatever an actor or force takes and is allowed to take. Negotiation is a means of
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taking this authority. This contrasts to the juridical case, where the judge or official
“speaks for” the state or the collectivity and the “speaking for” is governed by laws or in
the original moment of the ceremonial beginning of act of transformative acclamation
that creates the social contract. For Latour these are merely cases of the larger
phenomenon of the construction of networks, which includes many more “speaking for”
relations taken by force or negotiation.
The new conception of networks implies the inclusion of new kinds of agents: “If
you reveal microbes as essential actors in all social relations, then you need to make room
for them, and for the people who show them and can eliminate them” (Latour [1983]
1999: 157). The reference to the people who “show them” is critical here. Pasteur was not
political “[i]f by politics you mean elections and law” (Latour [1983] 1999: 157, but in a
more important sense.

If by politics you mean the spokesman for the forces you mould [sic] society with
and of which you are the only credible and legitimate authority, then Pasteur is a
fully political man.” (Latour [1983] 1999: 157-8).

Nevertheless, “showing” is something “people” alone can do. If you have an impact on
social relations, however, you are political, and an agent, whether you are a microbe or a
citizen. Latour thus redefines agency and therefore redistributes agency: microbes and
whatnot become agents, as in actor network theory. But Latour also adds something new,
namely considerations of power. He contrasts the power of the laboratory and its agents,
which derives from the networks to which they have connected, to the more limited
power of the agricultural practitioners, and also discusses the ways in which Pasteur’s
power was amplified by such things as the statistical machinery of the state. Actor-
network analysis consists in showing the network relations between the various actants—
who may be clams or laboratory instruments or the things that move the instruments, and
thus revealing the mechanisms of power.

Latour’s Concept of the Political

By creating the category of actants, and making humans merely another actant, Latour
levels the field of play and equalizes the players by minimizing the intentional content of
their actions. This is not a democratic leveling: clams are not equal to humans, much less
agents who maximize their political agency in the moment of self-transforming collective
fusion. Both clams and people are of interest as part of a network of actants, rather than
as agents, or as people with the ability to show. And as we will see this is a source of
some muddles. His critique of standard sociology and political science is that they are
limited to the humans at the negotiating table.

The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean

the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in
cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that
must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure of
politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos. (Latour 2004b: 454)
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This is reminiscent, if not derived, from Schmitt: it is a replacement and radicalization of

the Schmittian “total,” which is also a response to the limited “liberal” concept of the
political, defined by artificial “neutralizations.” But there is a puzzle about “negotiating.”
As Latour puts it, the older

way of understanding cosmos and cosmopolitics is limited in that it puts a limit to

the number of entities on the negotiating table. But if cosmos is to mean anything,
it must embrace, literally, everything—including all the vast numbers of
nonhuman entities making humans act (Latour 2004b: 454).

“Making humans act” seems like the criterion of membership. But negotiating, showing,
and many other things (notably those involved in “translation”) seem to be within the
capacity of a small subset of the cosmos.
Latour’s explicit concern is to transform this notion of cosmopolitics into an
account of “the political.” Latour mentions Schmitt, and explains that his ambition is
indeed to provide an alternative account of the political (Latour 2008: 662). But without
the baseline notion of collective action derived from Hobbes—the fearful individuals
huddled together awaiting the flashing of the spark of reason, or the notion of individuals
joined in unrestricted collective fusion—what can the political be (especially if it is
composed of “literally, everything”)?
Latour answers this question indirectly, though his account of the process of
creating a collectivity, which is in turn part of his picture of the political process itself. It
is through this picture that Latour both absorbs and distinguishes himself from Schmitt.
The picture is of a circle, depicting a cyclical process of politics with four elements. The
parts of the “political circle” are related as follows: there are moments in which
autonomous individuals, one part of the circle, first act freely under the law, then, in the
next part of the circle, come together in a collective form, which is then transubstantiated
into the third part of the circle, the creation of law by representatives. The fourth step,
which is the exercise of authority itself, creates the autonomous individual through
obedience. “From the classical point of view I am auto -nomous (as opposed to hetero
-nomous) when the law (nomos) is both what I produce through the expression of my will
and what I conform to through the manifestation of my docility” (Latour 2003: 150). This
completes the circle.
How does this circle compare to Schmitt? Latour’s point against Schmitt is that
his focus, on the collective expression of will and the distinctive supra-legal fact of
sovereignty, which is defined by the binary relation of protection and obedience, is
insufficient to capture the complexity of the process. His comments on Schmitt reject the
focus on sovereignty, with these words:

It is interesting to notice that those who talk of sovereignty so much like Schmitt
[(1932) 1996] are unable to see that political talk requires a curve in every single
of its points, so they concentrate in one single point the oddity of political
transubstantiation. In effect they confuse the curvature of the political circle with
the ‘state of exception’, as if putting in Zeus’s hands the full power of thunder and
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lightning. The effect is more powerful, but the peculiar spin of political
enunciation is hidden just as much. (2003: 163)

It is not quite true that Schmitt ignores the other parts of the “cycle.” Schmitt’s comment
on the state’s formation of individuals is characteristic:

For the rationalism of the Enlightenment, man was by nature ignorant and rough,
but educable. It was thus on pedagogic grounds that the ideal of a “legal
despotism” was justified: Uneducated humanity is educated by a legislator (who,
according to Rousseau’s Social Contract, was able “to change the nature of man”:
or unruly nature could be conquered by Fichte’s “tyrant,” and the state became, as
Fichte said with naïve brutality, an “educational factory.” (Schmitt [1922] 1985:
56)

The liberal state, for Schmitt, did not create autonomous individuals, but a particular kind
of servant. But Latour’s criticism does serve a purpose: distinguishing himself from
Schmitt in this way allows Latour to focus on these parts of the cycle as having common
properties, properties that turn out to have the same element of arbitrariness that Schmitt
associated with decision ([1922] 1985: 31).

Schmitt’s “decisionism” rests on the claim that “In every transformation there is present
an auctoritatis interpositio…a distinctive determination that cannot be derived from the
mere legal quality of a maxim” ([1922] 1985: 31). The key to Latour’s reasoning is the
concept of transubstantiation, a term carefully chosen. It means a change in substance:
there is a transformation at each step, which is also a kind of betrayal. We can take this as
a constructivist point: that there is no such thing as pure representation, and each of the
other transubstantiations also involves a kind of betrayal. Schmitt’s error, according to
Latour, was in concentrating on the moment of obedience, and the specific phenomenon
of sovereign command, and ignoring the other three transubstantiations. As he puts it,

Schmitt’s error lay in his belief that it is only on high, among the powerful and on
rare occasions that the political mode has to look for exceptions. Look at the
[political] circle. It is exceptional at all points…since it never goes straight, and in
addition must always start over especially if it is to spread. (Latour 2013: 347-8;
cf. Harman 2015: 54)

The claim that Schmitt overstates the importance of the state of exception and the notion
of sovereign power it implies is a standard criticism.1Yet one should read this carefully:

1
The idea that “decision” for Schmitt is limited to the declaration of states of exception, the rare
moments of high politics to which Latour alludes, is a misreading. Harman comments that “For
Latour, the state of exception is no longer an ‘event’, but a constant feature of the political, even
at the micro-scale of family dinners and clubhouse electoral politics” (2015: 54). Schmitt’s point
is that discretionary power is also a constant feature, found throughout the legal and bureaucratic
system and that it is ineliminable.
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Latour does not dismiss the importance of the consideration of discretionary power. On
the contrary, his notion of transubstantiation radically expands it. Not only does the
person exercising authority change the substance of the law by acting, which is Schmitt’s
point, there is a change in substance at each transition point in the “political circle,”
including especially the change that occurs in the moment in which the collective is
“represented.”
To understand Latour’s notion of representation one must put aside the
conventional notion of representation, as Schmitt also did. For Schmitt, genuine
representation preceded democracy and was not consistent with it ([1932] 1996: 19-27; in
original 1932: 48). The Church “represented” in a genuine way, and the dynastic
principle was itself a principle of representation. Latour, in contrast, rejects any notion of
genuine representation.

Hobbes's descendants had defined the Republic in which naked citizens, unable to
speak all at once, arranged to have themselves represented by one of their
number, the Sovereign, a simple intermediary and spokesperson. What did this
representative say? Nothing but what the citizens would have said had they all
been able to speak at the same time. But a doubt about the quality of that double
translation crept in straight away. What if the scientists were talking about
themselves instead of about things? And if the Sovereign were pursuing his own
interests instead of reciting the script written for him by his constituents? In the
first case, we would lose Nature and fall back into human disputes; in the second,
we would fall back into the State of Nature and into the war of every man against
every man. By defining a total separation between the scientific and political
representations, the double translation-betrayal became possible. We shall never
know whether scientists translate or betray. We shall never know whether
representatives betray or translate. (Latour [1991] 1993: 143).

Representation, something of a pun in this context, is central to his argument. Scientists

and elected representatives both “represent.” If there is no separation between the
political and the scientific, there is merely translation in the case both of scientists and
legislators. The phrase “we shall never know whether representatives betray or translate”
is simultaneously a rejection of genuineness of representation, and of the possibility of
truth in translation. Translation is neither true nor false, but merely successful in
lengthening networks or not.
In short, Latour solves the problem of genuine representation by denying it is a
meaningful concept, even in the case of science. Suspicion of science arose because of
false standards of truth: if we accept that scientists are “constructing their societies and
natures at the same time” ([1991] 1993: 143) there is no problem. The problem with
politics is comparable: suspicion of the motives and interests of the sovereign derives
from the failure to understand that the sovereign is “churning together both citizens and
the enormous mass of non-humans that allow the Leviathan to hold up” (Latour [1991]
1993: 143). If everything is constructed, there is no ground for complaining that anything
is constructed; if every transubstantiation is a translation, a mixture of “negotiations,
intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force
takes, or causes to be conferred on itself authority to speak or act on behalf of another
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actor or force” (Callon and Latour 1981: 279), there is no ground for complaining that
any particular one is impure.
Latour’s account of the public, which is presented as deriving from Dewey,
nevertheless has a close parallel in Schmitt, in which the roots in the model of
acclamation are visible:

“People” is a concept that appears only in the public sphere. The people appear
only in the public, and they first produce the public generally. People and public
exist together: no people without public, no public without people. By its
presence, specifically, the people initiate the public. Only the present, truly
assembled people are the people and produce the public (Schmitt [1928] 2008:
272)

Latour restates the problem of the public in STS terms, in the familiar category of
controversies. Latour cites Dewey’s idea of generating a public:

Dewey's term was “unexpected and unattended consequences of collective

actions,” summarized by Marres in terms of “issues and their trajectories.” This is
exactly what Dewey, taking his cue from Walter Lippmann, called the “problem
of the public” (Lippmann, 1993 [1927]). Here is a Copernican revolution of
radical proportions: to finally make politics turn around topics that generate a
public around them instead of trying to define politics in the absence of any issue,
as a question of procedure, authority, sovereignty, right and representativity. As
Marres has so forcefully summed up this whole line of thought: “No issue, no
politics!” (Latour 2007: 815).

The public becomes not a fixed category with boundaries, but an emergent one, which
forms itself in response to “issues” and changes shape and content, depending on the
issues that arise. This shifts attention from the possibility of collective transformation
through effervescence to the external circumstances, which are traditionally thought of as
“non-political,” which generate the controversies.
For Latour, what has traditionally been thought of as the actual political, that is to
say the actions of legislators, is instead merely a stage in the activity of the network
produced by the activity of the actants, not unlike the stages of development of stars.

Des cinq synonymes que nous avons listés dans la section précédente, pas un ne
cherchait à séparer un domaine propre, celui du politique. Tous, ils qualifiaient
des étapes distinctes dans la trajectoire des mêmes affaires, un peu comme les
astronomes ont pris l'habitude de nommer par des termes distincts (naine rouge,
super-géante, supernova, pulsar, trou noir, etc.) les états distincts des mêmes
étoiles. Le but de tous ces termes [ ... ] définir comment le collectif parvient plus
ou moins bien à se désembrouiller de ces affaires. (Latour 2008: 673)

The stages, then, are developmental states of the same thing—a controversy—which has
the character of a scrambling which is then unscrambled by the collective. “Scrambling”
is a revealing construction: it implies something like a disruption of the ordinary—not
 12

quite a state of exception, in which the laws are suspended, or of collective effervescence
—but one in which the ordinary administrative processes have failed, and the issue has
been placed into the realm of the political, but not necessarily the ordinary political of
procedure and policy. That sphere has, implicitly, been exhausted or failed to be taken as
legitimate. The public is created, as with Schmitt, by people attending to the issue, which
Schmitt calls the assembled. ([1928] 2008: 272) Once there is a public we are propelled
into the realm of the collective and therefore also the realm of the possible political.
This argument is crucial, and accomplishes a number of things. In the first place it
makes the revised notion of “the total” more plausible: Latour does not need to make a
positive claim that, for example, electrons do or do not participate in the political,
because there is no principle governing who or what can participate in the political. He
also relieves himself of the responsibility of defining the political by making plausible
some variant of the picture of collective acclamation on which Hobbes and his successors
depend. This is accomplished by redefining “collectivity” in terms of the public, which
turns out to be the potential public.

Political Theory or Political Theology?

Political theory may be understood as substantive theory about political reality with
normative implications. So what is the relation between it and political theology, social
theory, the philosophy of law, and the empirical world? And how do they relate for
Schmitt and Latour? Latour’s “political theory” is his account of the four parts of the
political cycle, with constructivist connections of “translation” between the defining
institutional points of the cycle. Schmitt’s political theory is his “decisionism,”
specifically the claim that there are points of arbitrary authority in the hands of actual
agents with legal powers—the auctoritas interpostio—scattered throughout the
institutions of the state, with the ultimate, sovereignty-defining power of suspending the
law itself, declaring a state of exception.

For Schmitt, the power to declare a state of exception is a “specifically juristic” ([1922]
1985: 13). Latour also provides a philosophy of law, or at least his own characterization
of law, or as he says an account not of the construction of facts, but of “the construction
of legal arguments (‘moyens de droit’) ([2002] 2009: ix). And Latour characterizes his
work in these terms:

Although there is no clear description for what I am doing, the closest is that of an
empirical (not an empiricist) philosopher. This book tries, through the device of
ethnography, to capture a philosophical question (and in addition a social theory
puzzle) that would be inaccessible philosophically (provided the adverb had a real
meaning, which I doubt very much): the essence of law. ([2002] 2009: x)

Solving the social theory puzzle is necessary for answering the “philosophical” question.
And the same relation holds between political theory and the account of political reality
that is incorporated into it: political theory reaches beyond the empirical, but depends on
explanations of political life which are in some sense independent of the normative
 13

implications that are drawn using these explanations. This is true for Schmitt as well: his
problem is also the essence or ultimate foundation of law; his data is not ethnography but
the vast history of legal acts together with their real world consequences, displayed for
example in his study of the institution of dictatorship ([1921] 2014).

But Schmitt goes beyond political theory. He is committed to the analysis of political
theories as political theologies, and to showing why what appear to be political theories,
namely those of liberalism, are made plausible in a self-circumscribed domain which is
self-circumscribed in by its own concealed theological premises. Liberalism imagines
that government by discussion is the only kind of legitimate political alternative, based on
the nature of man. But their version of the nature of man is a theologically derived nature
of man with the theology hidden. The Catholic alternative reveals this hidden theology.
But Schmitt is not committed, as a commentator, to any political theology—he uses
Donoso Cortes as a means of showing what is at stake, but notes that his theological
views are not orthodox, and does not endorse them. Indeed, Schmitt’s own account of
Catholicism points to the inherent tensions in its doctrinal commitments, which he calls
its complexio oppositorum. Although he regards Catholicism as the preferred option, he
treats this preference as a matter of faith, not of metaphysical truth, such as the truth that
Natural Law purports to have. This is one matter on which he never contests his bête
noire Kelsen, the ultimate enemy of Natural Law theory. Schmitt can then be called a
meta-political theologian, not a political theologian in the sense of endorsing a political
theology or formulating his own.

Latour repudiates the Protestant political theology that defines the “modern.” His
argument parallels Schmitt’s argument against liberalism. Latour de-naturalizes and
problematizes the assumptions that underlie the “modern” separation of nature and
society, just as Schmitt de-naturalizes the assumptions of liberalism. But Latour goes
beyond this to provide—not merely to cite as an example in order to problematize
assumptions—his own account of the true relation of nature to society. And this account
turns out to be the account Schmitt designates as Catholic. It is therefore a political
theology, and Latour is thus a political theologian, not a meta-political theologian.

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