Carl Schmitt's Myth of Benito Cereno

Thomas O. Beebee

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Volume 42, Number 2, May 2006,

pp. 114-134 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/smr.2006.0019

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199399

Access provided by University of Sussex (13 Aug 2018 10:47 GMT)

Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno

THOMAS O. BEEBEE The Pennsylvania State University

Ich bin der letzte, bewußte Vertreter des jus publicum

Europaeum [...] und erfahre sein Ende so, wie Benito
Cereno die Fahrt des Piratenschiffs erfuhr.
(Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus 75)

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), specialist, as he tells us in the epigraph, in public

and constitutional law, remains the most controversial figure in the history
of German legal scholarship, and one of the few right-wing intellectuals
to continue attracting interest from a variety of political spectra (Müller
272). He is also the most literary political thinker of the twentieth century,
one who allowed myth and fiction to shape his ideas about law to create a
unique “political theology,” or, to use Ellen Kennedy’s term, a “political ex-
pressionism” (“Politischer Expressionismus” 233–51). Kennedy has also sug-
gested, controversially, that Schmitt’s thought had a far-reaching influence on
the theory of the Frankfurt School (“Carl Schmitt”). Nikolaus Müller-Scholl
suggests that several early plays by Bertolt Brecht were meant to exhibit the
aporia of state order that Schmitt theorized and that led to Nazi totalitarianism
(supported by Schmitt at least through 1936) as its answer. Together with his
friend Ernst Jünger, Schmitt read the American authors Herman Melville and
Edgar Allen Poe as prophets of the global situation of World War II and of the
postwar period, including, as the epigraph points out, the waning of the epoch
of national sovereignty. Schmitt’s student Armin Mohler claims that Schmitt
cited Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” more than any other work
of world literature. Mohler states further that the title character of the novella
“hat C. S. aufs intensivste beschäftigt” (Mohler and Schmitt 153 n. 74). Two
paradoxes accompany these facts: the first is that Schmitt, a German nationalist,
would use an American piece as his personal motto; the second is that, despite
his fascination for the story, Schmitt never published a complete essay on the
novella, as he did on Theodor Däubler’s Nordlicht, Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
and other works. Schmitt’s reading of “Benito Cereno,” or, more accurately,
his use of “Benito Cereno” as a political and legal allegory and as a persona,
does not find incorporation into a single treatise, but rather emerges indirectly
seminar 42:2 (May 2006)
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 115
from a series of reflections and diary entries and as an influence on Schmitt’s
treatment of the law of the sea. This article traces the genesis of Schmitt’s
reading, compares it with other possible readings of “Benito Cereno,” and
explains Schmitt’s use of the Cereno myth to critique the phenomenon of what
we today call globalization within its historical and mythic contexts. (“Myth”
here means simply that a story – in Greek, muthos – is seen as having truth
value apart from its factual or contrafactual basis.)
The reading of an American literary classic by a German homme de lettres so
as to apply its events to world law and world history is susceptible to comparative
treatment, as well as to analyses from within Germanistik or Amerikanistik. In
addition, as we shall see, Schmitt’s broad reading of classical and other authors
further internationalizes the Cereno complex. On the other hand, this article
emphasizes the dialogic reading of the story as carried out between Schmitt
and his friend Ernst Jünger, who also holds an important if controversial place
in German letters. This article will consider multiple “directions” of influence,
that is, of the story on Schmitt as well as of Schmitt’s reading of it on further
reception of the story. As Schmitt tells us in the epigraph, he saw in “Benito
Cereno” situations, characters, and themes that reflected his own thinking, and
thus an account of his reading elucidates Schmitt’s theories of law and politics
and their relation to literary texts.
Current literary interest in Schmitt rests on his mythic approach to texts that
makes them available to political readings. David Pan has summarized Schmitt’s
contribution thus:

Schmitt rejects the establishment of the autonomy of art in the bourgeois pri-
vate sphere, not because of its elitism but because both the autonomy of art
and the bourgeois private sphere provide the haven for ideas to develop inde-
pendent of institutional control. He attempts to reestablish this control through
his description of art “raised to the level of myth.” (156)

In his reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Schmitt notes that his approach goes
against the grain of German literary studies that stress philology and formal
aspects of literature, thus eschewing interdisciplinary approaches that would
reveal the workings of history and ideology in the text:

Die Philosophen der Kunst und die Lehrer der Ästhetik neigen dazu, das Kunst-
werk als eine in sich geschlossene, von der geschichtlichen oder soziologischen
Wirklichkeit losgelöste, autonome Schöpfung zu betrachten und nur aus sich
selbst hearus zu verstehen. [...] Wir stoßen also auf scharfe Unterscheidungen
und grundsätzliche Trennungen, auf Barrieren und Schranken entgegengesetzter
Betrachtungsweisen, auf ausgebaute Wertsysteme, die nur ihre eigenen Pässe und
116 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

Bescheinigungen anerkennen, nur ihre eigenen Visa gelten lassen und einem
andern weder Eintritt noch Durchfahrt gestatten. (Hamlet 34)

Schmitt wrote these words many decades after he had formulated his reading of
“Benito Cereno.” In following the development of the Cereno complex, we can
see Schmitt breaking down the barriers he identifies here between professional
literary criticism and political science.
We can date Schmitt’s discovery of “Benito Cereno” with some precision.
He seems to have first read the story in early 1941. At the time, Schmitt was
living in Plettenburg. Having risen to prominence as a legal scholar during
the Weimar Republic, the careerist Schmitt then supported the Nazis, but was
stripped of his positions in 1936 as a result of SS opposition. On 25 February
1941, he wrote to Ernst Jünger of the impression Melville’s story had made on
him: “Ich bin von dem ganz ungewollten, hintergründigen Symbolismus der
Situation als solcher überwältigt” (Schmitt, letter to Ernst Jünger, 25 February
1941, 1151). “Situation,” we shall see, is one of Schmitt’s favourite words. It
characterizes his “political expressionism,” which posits the differentiation
between friend and foe as fundamental to political organization. Also striking
here is Schmitt’s suggestion that the story’s symbolism is not deliberate, that
is, does not belong to the bourgeois private sphere of the author’s willed
intention, but to a larger, controlling political and historical context.
Melville based his story on a true incident in which the human cargo of a slave
ship revolted and took the captain, Benito Cereno, prisoner, along with those of
the crew whom they did not kill immediately. The survivors were ordered to steer
towards Africa. When an American ship, captained by Amaso Delano, hailed and
boarded the ship, the Africans, led by Babo, staged an elaborate performance,
giving the impression that the whites and Cereno were still in charge. Only at
the last minute did Cereno leap aboard the longboat and reveal the plot, at which
point the ship was recaptured, the slaves returned to service, and Babo tried and
executed. Melville took these basics, the names of the characters, and even much
of the language of his story from Delano’s narrative of the incident. Perhaps this
adaptation aspect forms part of what Schmitt means when he writes of the story’s
“unintentional” symbolism. More precisely, he saw the incident’s symbolism,
before it ever became a story, as a product of a historical situatedness that exceeds
any individual’s ability to shape events and meanings, either as an actor in history
or as an author. Schmitt’s relationship to Melville’s story equals Cereno’s to his
situation as a captive. The story had been forced upon Schmitt, so to speak, its
relevance to the legal and political situation unasked for (and not mentioned
directly in the letters), but compelling.
1 All references to the correspondence between Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt are to Ernst
Jünger – Carl Schmitt. Briefe 1930–1983, ed. Helmuth Kiesel (see Works Cited).
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 117
In his answering letter, Jünger repeatedly expresses his preference for the
work of Edgar Allen Poe, and the extended literary debate over the relative
merits of the two authors parallels the contrast between, in the characterization
of Ulrich Ufeld, two conservative revolutionaries, one (Schmitt) a statist
and the other (Jünger) an anarchist (567). Schmitt found in the horrors of
Melville’s story a confirmation of the consequences of the destruction of
national sovereignty and of the dethroning of elites by the masses. Jünger, on
the other hand, preferred Poe’s depiction of the visions gained through aimless
wandering and passive suffering at the hands of inhuman forces, as in The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) or in “A Descent into the Maelström”
(1841). Jünger’s defense of Poe as the more transcendent writer drew Schmitt
still deeper into his interpretation of Melville: “Ich denke an Benito Cereno,
als Situations-Symbol” (Schmitt to Jünger, 17 April 1941, 129; emphasis in the
original). Schmitt read and discounted Jean Giono’s short story about Melville,
“Saluer a Melville,” because it “privatizes” its subject matter. Giono’s story
recounts Melville’s brief encounter in England with an Irish woman freedom-
fighter. Schmitt chose to focus on how the French author had personalized the
story by linking it to Melville’s private experience, rather than to explore how
Giono had connected a story of violence and oppression on the high seas to an
explosive colonial situation in Europe. Schmitt then repeats his observation of
Melville’s incomparable portrayal of a “situation”:

Das [Giono’s story] ist eine üble Verkitschung Melvilles, dessen unvergleich-
bare Größe die Kraft zur objektiven, elementaren und konkreten Situation ist.
Benito Cereno ist dadurch größer als die Russen und sämtliche andern Erzähler
des 19. Jahrhunderts, sodaß neben ihm auch Poe anekdotisch wirkt, und Moby
Dick ist als Epos des Meeres nur mit der Odysee zu vergleichen. Das Meer als
Element ist nur durch Melville faßbar zu machen. Ein sehr aktuelles Thema.
(Schmitt to Jünger, 4 July 1941, 121; emphasis in the original)

With “aktuell,” Schmitt means the progress of World War II as a struggle be-
tween Germany as a land power and the English and Americans as sea powers.
He never loses this opinion of Melville as the greater writer and of Poe as the
lesser, as can be seen from his diary entry of 5 February 1948:

Die Genialität von Villiers de l’Isle Adam; zu unseren neuen Mythenbildern ge-
hört (neben Benito Cereno, dem Oberförster, wer noch?), vor allem anderen “le
convive des dernières fêtes”; Poe hat mythische Situationen (im Maelstrom, im
Kerker der Inquisition) aber keine mythischen Figuren (der Ansatz bei Pym ist
zu schwach). (Glossarium 92)
118 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

The Oberförster is a tyrant figure in Jünger’s story Auf den Marmorklippen

(1939), an apocalyptic allegory of Hitler’s rise to power and prediction of his
end. The Oberförster’s sinister nature corresponds to that of the title figure of
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s short story, “Le convive des dernières fêtes” (1874). In
that story, a mysterious Baron Saturn joins a carnival party. It seems from the
conversation that he is an executioner, in town to work the guillotine at the public
execution scheduled for the following morning. It is later revealed, however, that
he is merely an amateur who travels from execution to execution, often bribing
the professionals to let him do the job. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent into the
Maelström” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843), on the other hand, the
situation in extremis, rather than the actions of a single evil character, transforms
the narrator. For example, the narrator of the “Maelström” explains how his hair,
“which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now”
(Poe 88). Poe’s only novel, Pym, was an attempt at creating a narrator with more
substance and psychological depth, though most critics agree with Schmitt that
Pym’s characterization is not fully achieved.
“Benito Cereno” shares with these stories themes of horrific violence
(including hints of cannibalism) and tyranny. However, while the reader ex-
periences the horror of the stories of Poe, Jünger, and Villiers de l’Isle through
their effect on the perceptive narrator, the experience in “Benito Cereno” is
the opposite: the reader understands the charade being carried out long before
Delano does. The character who perceives the most, Benito Cereno, says almost
nothing and, despite his rescue, dies of the horror and guilt of his experience and
the extremity of his “situation,” expiring three months after the end of Babo’s
trial in Lima. Amaso Delano, ever the optimistic Yankee, tries to comfort Benito:
“‘You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained;
‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’ ‘The negro’” (Melville
116). Cereno’s last two words remain ambiguous. They could be general, and
thus mean “that Benito has finally discerned what Delano has not, namely, that
the enslavement of either race is wrong” (Richardson 86). But most readers
will take the reference as specific rather than generic: “the negro” is Babo.
As the Oberförster and the convive des dernières fêtes are to the narrators of
those stories, so Babo is to Benito. Schmitt explains further in his next letter to
Jünger, without explicitly mentioning Melville: “Von der See aus hören unsere
Klassen und Klassifikationen auf. Seit langem beschäftigt mich das Problem der
Piraterie. Jetzt bin ich ihm einen Schritt näher gekommen” (Schmitt to Jünger,
24 September 1941, 131). The short interval between this letter and the previous
one indicates that it is the myth of Benito Cereno that has brought Schmitt
further along in his thinking. Schmitt brought his thoughts on piracy and its role
in the development of a “world system” to full expression in the book Land und
Meer, as we shall see.
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 119
Finally, in one of the many dreams exchanged between the men, Schmitt
finds a way to combine his Cereno with Jünger’s Poe. This is also the point
at which the correspondence becomes most intimate, with a minimum of the
formalities that had marked previous letters, as though the overlapping mythic
content of the two American authors had created brotherhood in their two Ger-
man readers. The note, with a time indication of 2:30 AM, indicating that it is
the report of someone awakened by a disturbing dream, is highly condensed:
“Fabel-hafte (Fatum-hafte?) Situation: die S. Dominick im Maelstrom. B C
sagt sich: besser durch sie sterben, als für sie. Solche taciteische Zuspitzungen
lassen Schulworte wie ‘existentiell’ weit hinter sich.” Schmitt signs his note,
“Gruß Ihres Cereno” (Schmitt to Jünger, 11–12 March 1941, 159). The San
Dominick is the ship on and around which the action of “Benito Cereno” takes
place. Invoking the “ship-of-state” allegory, Schmitt predicts the impending de-
struction of Germany as a sovereign nation. However, as we have seen in the
epigraph, there is a personal dimension as well. Poe’s maelstrom story, which
depicts a small ship being pulled down into the depths of the ocean, shows the
power of nature and the capacity of extreme situations to cause enlightenment
in the sufferer. Cereno, as we have seen, achieves a negative enlightenment, but
the inhuman force is political and historical rather than natural. Babo’s forcing
of Benito Cereno to play the captain when he is in reality a hostage opens
Cereno’s eyes to the cruelty of the system of which he had been a functionary.
Jünger responds to Schmitt that the combination of Poe and Melville works well,
because “Poe sieht ja individualistisch, was Melville politisch, gesellschaftlich”
(Jünger to Schmitt, 8 April 1941, 161).
In the transcription of his dream, Schmitt presents a triangular relationship
between three authors. As we see, Poe and Melville stand in a dialectical
relationship. To understand the reference to Tacitus, we can start with Schmitt’s
much later diary entry of 28 August 1947: “Jetzt hat mich der Anfang der
Historien des Tacitus ergriffen. Ist das nur noch Rhetorik, wie Ortega mir sagte?
Ist es nicht die Identität der Situation, also existentielle Teilhabe, participatio an
ein und derselben Ur- und Kernsituation unseres Aeons?” (Schmitt, Glossarium
5). Four years separate the readings, whose shared content makes them appear
as though they were made from one day to the next, with the word “Situation”
as the leitmotif that unites them. Another important clue is Schmitt’s mention of
Edmund Burke’s comparison between Tacitus and the Journal politique national
of Antoine de Rivarol (1753–1801; Schmitt, letter to Armin Mohler, 26 October
1966; Mohler 374). A further clue is provided in an aperçu given in a letter: “Ich
schicke Ihnen hier den Rivarol, eine großartige Sache, ein Beleg meiner These:
der große Historiker ist erstens Zeitgenosse der von ihm ‘geschriebenen’ Zeit,
und zweitens Besiegter, wie Thukydides, Polybius, Tacitus, Otto von Freysing,
Machiavell und Tocqueville” (Schmitt to Mohler, 9 February 1967; Mohler
120 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

380). Rivarol was a monarchist who published against the French Revolution.
Tacitus, on the other hand, looked back with nostalgia on the days of the Roman
Republic, as he recorded the vices and iniquities of the Augustan emperors and
their minions.
As Schmitt notes, Tacitus begins his Historia with a lamentation of the
degradation of Roman society under the Caesars: “Slaves were bribed to turn
against their masters, and freedmen to betray their patrons; and those who
had not an enemy were destroyed by friends” (Tacitus 420). This is a typical
“taciteische Zuspitzung” of the kind to which Schmitt refers in his letter. It
is an apocalyptic vision of the war of all against all (a situation theorized by
Thomas Hobbes, one of Schmitt’s favourite political thinkers), an existential
situation indeed, for which Tacitus provides many concrete examples in his
individualized and dramatized portrayals of the fate of individuals who lived and
died through dictatorial times. Schmitt seizes on Tacitus as a fellow conservative
intellectual who portrayed the sinking ship of state realistically, as Melville did
allegorically.
Schmitt’s persistent identification of himself with Cereno raises the question
as to whether his quotation, “B C sagt sich: besser durch sie sterben, als für
sie,” refers to the Benito Cereno of Melville’s story, or to Schmitt himself. No
quotation of this kind can be found in Melville’s original. We would have to
insert the quotation at the very moment Cereno quits play-acting and makes
his leap into Delano’s longboat, having decided that it is better to be killed by
the rebels than to continue serving them. If Schmitt intends himself as Benito
Cereno, then the contexts of war and of totalitarian regimes make the meaning
more understandable: better to resist and die at the hands of the German regime
than to continue sacrificing oneself for it. A perhaps relevant detail here is that
Schmitt’s mortal enemies within the Nazi-Regime were the SS “Schwarze
Korps,” to which the colour of Babo and his compatriots then alludes. Nicolaus
Sombart, another promulgator of the Cereno myth, interprets the B.C.-Babo
relationship as “das Verhältnis der deutschen Generalität zu Hitler. Ich möchte
wissen, ob man es besser veranschaulichen könnte als durch das Verhältnis
Babo-B.C.” (Sombart). Presumably, Sombart has used chiasmus here, and
interprets the upstart Hitler as Babo, the German military establishment (many
of whom were of aristocratic descent) as Benito.
Schmitt’s adoption of the persona of Benito Cereno began at that moment
when his own voice merged with that of the character. It grew from a private ex-
change between Schmitt and Jünger into a public stance. Shortly after the end of
the war, Schmitt asked that a Waschzettel be printed with any future editions of
his book Leviathan, first published in 1938. It warned against reading the book,
and was signed at the bottom not by “Carl Schmitt,” but by “Benito Cereno.”
Schmitt sent copies of this text both to Ernst Jünger (June 1945) and to his
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 121
student Armin Mohler (4 December 1948; Mohler and Schmitt 38–39 and 192–
93, n. 4). In Melville’s story, Benito Cereno becomes a puppet in the hands of the
revolted slaves. His power of speech is removed. In Schmitt’s view, who are the
puppet masters? Once Schmitt assumes the mask of Benito Cereno, it becomes
impossible to ground or establish the sincerity of any of his statements, since
each can later be claimed to have been a coerced performance. In publishing
the Waschzettel, is Schmitt disclaiming some of what he wrote in Leviathan
– for example, he had identified the Leviathan as “jüdisches Kampfsymbol”
– because he was under the control of the Nazis at the time? Or is he winking
at the reader and giving him mysterious signs, the way the Spanish sailors do to
Amasa Delano, in order to indicate that his warning against reading Leviathan
is not to be taken seriously, because it is made in conformity with the American
occupation and the postwar regime?
Ruth Groh makes this particular role-playing of Cereno by Schmitt,
occurring after the end of the war when Schmitt knew that he would be called
to account for his Nazi activities, central to her reading of his appropriation
of Melville’s story. In Groh’s view, Schmitt’s “signing” of the Waschzettel
with the name of Cereno means as much as Schmitt saying the following:
“Mein Buch [Leviathan] enthält ja schrille antisemitische Töne; deshalb
wird mich ein uneingeweihter Leser, der meine politische Theologie und
Mythologie nicht von Grund auf kennt und der nicht weiß, daß ich dieses
Buch in der Rolle des Benito Cereno geschrieben habe, für einen Rassisten
und mitschuldig am Judenmord halten” (Groh 138). Later, Groh formulates
the essence of Schmitt’s Cereno persona: “Das Schiff Europa, als dessen
Kapitän Schmitt figurierte, sei von der SS und anderen Institutionen der
NS-Herrschaftsapparates gekapert und zugrunde gerichtet worden. Er selbst
habe, um nicht Märtyrer seines Glaubens an den ‘Mythos Europa’ zu werden,
den terroristischen Gewaltherrschern Lippendienste leisten müssen. Sein Ver-
hältnis zu den Machthabern sei also durch inneren Widerstand und Handeln
unter Zwang bestimmt gewesen” (154, n. 26).
Groh’s reading correctly identifies Schmitt’s appropriation of the Cereno
myth to excuse himself in the postwar period, but the correspondence with
Jünger (not mentioned by Groh, and published only after the appearance of
her book) shows that Schmitt’s role-playing had begun much earlier, and had
acquired several levels of complexity. Indeed, Groh’s own placement of Cereno
as one version of the Epimetheus myth that was dear to Schmitt’s heart shows
this. (Epimetheus was responsible, through his carelessness, for the opening
of Pandora’s box. His name means “looking backward,” and he represents the
impossibility of foreseeing all the future consequences of one’s actions in the
present.) More important than Schmitt’s own sincerity or insincerity in his use
of the Cereno myth, however, is that aspects of his interpretation move beyond
122 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

his personal fate, as what today would be called a “public intellectual,” to a

generalized allegory of the end of the jus publicum europeum. If Carl Schmitt
used “Benito Cereno” as a personal myth to claim that he was forced, Cereno-
like, to adopt Nazi (and/or American) ideology, he also fostered another, more
public reading of the myth of globalization as piracy that is worth exploring.
In Schmitt’s reading of Melville’s story, passed on to his students and
friends from several European countries, the St. Dominick represents Europe,
with its elite class (Cereno) presently dominated by its masses (the slaves). Sava
Klickovic further specifies, “[Schmitt] hat Benito Cereno zu einem Symbol
für die Lage der Intelligenz in einem Massensystem erhoben” (268). The slave
rebellion signifies the masses’ taking over of leadership, whether this be through
democratic means or through revolution. The drifting of the ship represents the
rudderless vagaries of the modern state, whether under democracy or under
Nazism. Undoubtedly, Schmitt read in the novella the same message he had found
in Ortega y Gassett’s La rebelión de las masas (1930), a book that had sold more
than 300,000 copies in German translation (Mermall 7). Schmitt recommended it
to Ernst Jünger (Schmitt to Jünger, 10 August 1931, 11 n. 8). In his essay, Ortega
criticizes the democratization of culture and politics resulting from the industrial
revolution. The mass production of everything, including culture, eliminates
local specificities and dissolves national boundaries and sovereignty – the end
of the jus publicum europeum. Rather than elites serving as model citizens
whom the masses might emulate, the former abandon their own values as the
masses and mass-produced objects and norms come to dominate. The second
part of Ortega’s book is preceded by the question, “¿Quién manda en el mundo?”
(roughly, ‘Who’s in charge?’), the same refrain that haunts Melville’s story. The
Spanish word “mundo” can refer either to society or to the globe. In an essay on
“Benito Cereno” published in a Festschrift for Schmitt’s seventieth birthday, the
prominent Spanish legal scholar Enrique Tierno Galván (1919–1986) interprets
Benito as “das Bewußtsein der Elite, die sieht und leidet,” while Babo, the leader
of the revolt, is “dieses unbestechliche Bewußtsein” (354). The similarities
between the essays, the occasion for which they were written, and the fact that
Schmitt mentions once in his diaries “schöne Gespräche” with Tierno Galván (on
a different subject) all reveal that these essays are recollections of and attempts at
preserving Schmitt’s own reading of Melville (Glossarium 316).
In Tierno Galván’s reading, Captain Delano, who sees the distressed ship
and tries to help, partly in order to obtain its salvage value, represents the equally
idealistic and self-interested American position, as it worked itself out through
two world wars. Tierno Galván also makes an interesting analysis of a relatively
minor character, the slave Atufal. Atufal is the most physically powerful of the
rebels. In directing the masquerade staged for Delano, Babo keeps Atufal in
chains, and has him brought before Cereno:
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 123
Captain Delano’s attention was caught by the moving figure of a gigantic
black, emerging from the general crowd below, and slowly advancing to-
wards the elevated poop. An iron collar was about his neck, from which de-
pended a chain, thrice wound round his body. [...]
At the first glimpse of his approach, Don Benito had started, a resentful shadow
swept over his face; and, as with the sudden memory of bootless rage, his white
lips glued together. [...]
“See, he waits your question, master,” said [Babo]. [...]
“Atufal, will you ask my pardon now?”
The black was silent. [...]
“Go,” said Don Benito, with inkept and unknown emotion.
Deliberately as he had come, the black obeyed. (Melville 61–62)

Following Babo’s script, Don Benito adds that this scene has been replayed
every two hours for the last sixty days, whereas we must suppose that in reality
this is the first and only time it has been performed. The chains are feckless;
Atufal could easily throw them off at any moment. This peculiar scene did not
appear in Delano’s original account, and hence provides an important clue as to
Melville’s intentions for the story.
The scene amplifies the story’s leitmotif of “follow your leader” by in fact
invoking the ambiguity of leadership and mastery. Shortly after the passage
cited, Atufal’s royal status is discussed, to which Babo appends that he himself
was only a “black man’s slave” in Africa. These are both true statements.
Delano notes Atufal’s “royal spirit,” and advises Cereno to pardon him out of
“natural respect” for this spirit (62–63). Delano’s remarks hint at the discrepancy
between natural law and the municipal law that permits such men to be slaves,
while the “natural slave” Babo climbs higher on the social ladder by aiding his
fellow African’s enslavement. But like most of Delano’s observations, this one
is put in an ironic light by his complete ignorance of the true situation. In fact,
the staging of Atufal’s enslavement is gratuitous, serving no real purpose either
in fooling Delano or in keeping the whites subdued. It seems to stem merely
from an ironic whim on Babo’s part, from his desire to enact in pantomime
the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. The real offence, obviously, has been the
enslavement and transportation of Atufal, for which Cereno should beg his
pardon. Babo delights in enacting a scene of the captain’s tyrannical whim and
absolute dominance, knowing that it is in fact an entirely hollow gesture.
Tierno Galván picks up on this dialectic. In his reading, Atufal represents the
principle not of natural law, but of terror. “In seiner Reinheit nimmt der Terror
heute den Platz der toten Werte ein. So erklärt es sich vielleicht, daß in dem
Mythos Melvilles ein in Ketten geschlagener riesiger Neger, Atufal, das Symbol
des Terrors ist” (355). Unlike Schmitt, Tierno Galván recognizes that the terror
124 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

experienced by Cereno has its roots in the terror and violence practiced upon
the slaves. Benito Cereno “empfindet die eigene Schuld [...] angesichts eines
Terrors, der nur die Steigerung der eigenen Eigenschaften des Terrorisierten
ist” (356). Tierno Galván published his essay in 1968; he could not have known
how predictive it would be of the evolution of geopolitics and of warfare in
the last quarter of the twentieth century. Terror, of course, is as old as war and
politics. Tierno Galván provides no examples for it outside of the story itself.
His use of the word “terror” can be interpreted as referring to “Nazi-Terror,”
“Stalin-Terror,” or perhaps “Franco-Terror.” Tierno Galván, a professor of law
in Salamanca, was an opponent of Franco, and after the latter’s death became
socialist mayor of Madrid. But by the end of the twentieth century, terror would
assume a different form: the conduct of asymmetrical war by the stateless, with
a complete disregard for normal rules of engagement. We shall see that this
evolution of terror fits Schmitt’s ideas of the dynamics of warfare and of world
power and accompanies the fading of the sovereignty of national states. However,
a close reading of the Atufal scene complicates the overall identification of the
slaves with Ortega’s “hombre-masa” (Massenmensch), since it points out the
differences in social hierarchy among the Africans themselves.
Marianne Kesting, whose brother was a student of Schmitt’s, entertained a
long correspondence with Schmitt that included a number of interviews. Kesting,
trained in Germanistik and music, challenged the interpretations detailed above,
which made Melville a critic of European rather than of American politics and
society. She reports that Schmitt answered her critique on 6 December 1968,
acknowledging its accuracy, but asking whether there was not something in the
allegorical and symbolic level of the work that would at least partly support his
own interpretations. In a later interview, when Kesting reiterated her concerns
that allegorical interpretations ignored the story’s textual integrity, she reports
that Schmitt answered, “mokant lächelnd: ‘Ja, ja, die Philologen ...’” (Kesting
98). The reference to philologists was undoubtedly meant in the same spirit as
the more reflective critique of literary critics’ “protection” of the text against
politico-allegorical readings that Schmitt formulated in his Hamlet essay, cited
above. Schmitt also informed Kesting that these interpretations had found
an enthusiastic reception among his numerous and far-flung adherents and
colleagues. One might also add that Klickovic’s Schmittian interpretation of the
story, held as a lecture for the U. S. Melville Society in 1957, resulted in his
being named an honorary member (Schmitt, Letter to Mohler, 19 March 1957;
Mohler 235). (Klickovic, who like Schmitt’s wife came from northern Serbia,
was involved in international trade under the Tito regime and travelled widely in
North and South America.)
Kesting became determined to defend the philological level of interpretation,
and she eventually published, in 1972 (2nd edition 1983), a critical edition of
Melville’s story (in German translation), with a selection of critical approaches
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 125
(including Klickovic’s), and her own reading. Interestingly, Kesting’s own
interpretation also finds that the story treats the America-Europe problem, but
from the point of view of slavery and its effect on American class systems. In the
United States, Kesting maintains, the European conflict between aristocracy and
bourgeoisie has been transformed into questions of slavery and of race. (More
recently, Nicola Nixon has seconded the notion that Melville was critiquing
class; however, rather than have Cereno represent either Old World aristocracy
or Southern slavocracy, she reads him as representative of Northern dandyism.)
Cereno, the creole aristocrat, stands for the Southern states, Delano for the North.
Kesting’s interpretation thus agrees with Schmitt’s that the slave rebellion on the
ship represents, in some sense, class warfare in Europe, though in a more indirect
way. There are as many problems with Kesting’s reading as with Schmitt’s, but
the most obvious one is that the story itself encourages its reader neither to think
about slavery as its central issue, nor to have sympathy with the Africans, who
from our present standpoint acted in legitimate self-defense. Like Schmitt, we
are encouraged to identify with the only dynamic characters of the story, namely
Benito Cereno and Amaso Delano. The narrator shares the racist attitudes of
these two characters, as for example in the famous characterization of “the
negro”: “There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for
avocations about one’s person. Most negroes are natural valets and hairdressers,”
and in Delano’s lascivious view of the sprawled woman slave, “with youthful
limbs carelessly disposed” (83, 73). While Babo’s head is described as a “hive
of subtlety,” it is not a location of subjectivity. Significantly, Babo maintains
silence throughout the trial, preventing readers from ever hearing his side of the
story.
Thus, in order to “demythologize” the Benito Cereno of Schmitt et al.,
Richard Faber is forced to remind us of the way the story works counter to our
ideological position in favour of freedom for the oppressed: “Gegen diese ‘Neue’
europäische ‘Ordnung’ [Drittes Reich] enststanden überall zwischen Nordkap
und Sizilien, Atlantik und Ural Widerstandsbewegungen. Allein sie hätten sich
legitimerweise auf ‘Benito Cereno’ berufen können, dessen wirklicher Held der
Partisan Babo ist” (Faber 82). The Benito Cereno story, with just a few details
changed, can be told from the perspective of a heroic Babo, and in fact has been,
in the film Amistad. The Cuban ship Amistad was discovered by a U. S. survey
ship off Long Island in 1839 after being adrift for two months. Enslaved Africans
had broken their chains and taken control of the ship, leaving two whites alive in
order to use their navigational skills to have the ship sail to Africa. The Supreme
Court finally decided that since these blacks were not legally acquired slaves,
they had acted in legitimate self-defense and should be returned to Africa.
The gross similarities serve to highlight the differences between the two
cases. The captain of the Amistad suffered the death that Babo had tried to inflict
126 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

on Cereno. In the Amistad case, the Africans were considered to have acted in
legitimate self-defense, and they achieved their return, while in the other they
were reenslaved and, in the case of Babo, executed. However, had court decisions
gone the other way and the Spanish government had its way, the mutiny leader
Cinqüé would no doubt have suffered the same fate as Babo. While in both cases
the legal claims of salvage played a central role, only Cinqüé’s group enjoyed a
trial that considered them to be persons. One case went down in history because
it became the focus of a Supreme Court decision (though not among the most
important ones), while the other would have been forgotten to history had it not
been for the talents of Melville.
The differing geopolitical concerns, as well as the documentation surrounding
the two cases, result in a different presentation of subjectivity in the two narratives
(in Melville’s story and in Steven Spielberg’s film). As Maurice Lee points out,
Melville eliminates not only the slaves’, but also the sailors’ voices from his
presentation of the story (499). We are left with a story about the consequences
of leadership within a social hierarchy, a focus that Schmitt naturally found to his
interests. Cinqüé, a natural leader, becomes the focus of the 1997 film Amistad,
which makes a far greater effort to explore the subjectivity of the Africans,
despite the fact that this played no role in the judicial decision. Amistad carries
out a salvage operation on the darker story of “Benito Cereno.”
Catherine Kodat has argued that Amistad shares with another Spielberg film,
Saving Private Ryan, the project of constructing “renewed credibility for [...]
continued American global dominance” (79). A combination of the American
navy and the American judicial system tells Spain and, by implication, the Old
World, what kinds of persons it may consider private property, while leaving its
own institutions of slavery untouched. For Schmitt, the difference between sea
and land power, natural and municipal law, allows for such double standards.
The case would seem ideal for Schmitt’s theory, because it could not have
occurred on land or within the territorial waters of Cuba, where the Africans
would have been captured and tried according to local practices. Instead, the
capture of the ship on the high seas by Americans made the case an international
dispute that advanced the cause of abolitionists, who introduced the argument
“that natural rights superseded municipal law and guaranteed blacks the liberty
inherent to mankind” (Jones 64). The concrete situation, as Schmitt would put
it, linked natural universal rights to the high seas and diminished the role of
Landrecht.
But that is precisely not Melville’s story. However much we wish, out of
ideological principles, to make Babo the hero, the story’s narration does not
allow this, and Faber’s attempt merely shows that one person’s mythology is
another’s ideology. Taken as a whole, recent American criticism tends to embrace
both sides of the divide that Kesting saw between various symbolizations of the
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 127
figure of Benito Cereno. For example, one of the story’s most frequently cited
interpreters, Eric Sundquist, sees nothing wrong in identifying Cereno both
as a “symbol of American paranoia about Spanish, Catholic, slave-holding
despotism” and also as a “southern planter, [a] dissipated cavalier spiritually
wasted by his own terrifying enslavement” (148). In a globalized world,
American and European, philological and allegorical readings have come
increasingly to coincide.
In the epigraph to this article, Schmitt claims to be suffering the end of the
jus publicum europeum, a concept that arose out of the religious conflicts of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, legal
theorists who wrote under the shadow of those religious wars, are fundamental
to Schmitt’s concept of state sovereignty. Schmitt experiences the end of this
period of municipal law as the voyage of a hostage aboard a pirate ship. With
this metaphor, Schmitt alludes to the role of sea power in the dissolution of
a historical legal order. To drive his point home, Schmitt designates the San
Dominick as a pirate ship. This designation is technically accurate, since in
taking over the ship the legally enslaved blacks have made themselves pirates,
and they are ready to commit an act of piracy in commandeering Delano’s ship
as well. At the same time, however, it is misleading, since the term “(gekapertes)
Sklavenschiff” would give a fuller picture of what has happened. As he
confessed to Jünger, Schmitt found “Benito Cereno” conducive to his thinking
about the role of pirates in the development of international law. This interest in
pirates may account for Schmitt’s eagerness to give the impression that the San
Dominick is a freebooter on the Spanish Main.
Melville took his plot virtually intact from the memoirs of the American
captain, Amaso Delano, who, like all the characters (but not the ship), appears
in “Benito Cereno” under his own name. Delano is not shy about revealing
the motivation for his retaking the Tryal (rechristened the San Dominick by
Melville, as Delano’s Perseverance is rechristened the Bachelor’s Delight).
His encouragement to his sailors runs thus in his own account: “By way of en-
couragement, I told them that Don Benito considered the ship and what was in
her as lost; that the value was more than one hundred thousand dollars; that if
we would take her, it should be all our own; and that if we should afterwards be
disposed to give him up one half, it would be considered as a present” (Delano
327). The courtroom aftermath to this incident, played out in Concepción, Chile,
was twofold: the rebel slaves were condemned to death or to prison, and Benito
Cereno attempted to thwart Delano’s salvage claims. Delano appends to his
narrative transcripts of the various depositions describing the incident, translated
from the Spanish. Cereno’s legal manoeuvring included taking depositions from
Botany Bay convicts, whom Delano was transporting on his ship: “They swore
every thing against me they could to effect my ruin. Amongst other atrocities,
128 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

they swore I was a pirate” (Delano 329). The legal wranglings merely underscore
the fact that any encounter like this on the no-man’s water of the high seas is
inherently ambiguous. Who are the pirates?
Melville deliberately intensifies the confusion about piracy found in
Delano’s account. In the novella, Delano continually fights back his own
suspicions that the San Dominick is a “freebooter,” and he is troubled by
a suspicion that the hostage Cereno is really the pirate leader, a motif that
culminates in his alliterative cry, “this plotting pirate means murder!”
(Melville 98) when Don Benito jumps into the longboat. On the other hand,
Melville names Delano’s own ship The Bachelor’s Delight, after an infamous
pirate ship that had been converted from a slaver. Furthermore, Delano’s first
mate had been a “privateer’s-man” (Karcher 89). Delano encourages his crew
in the dangerous task of taking the mutinous vessel with promise of booty, just
as a pirate would. On the other hand, legitimately owned slaves who mutinied
on a vessel came under the category of pirates, and when the mask is finally
dropped the blacks are revealed to be “flourishing hatchets and knives in
ferocious piratical revolt” (Melville 99). In his decision on the Amistad case,
for example, Chief Justice Joseph Story, in ruling that the rebels were Africans
taken illegally and thus free men possessing the right to legitimate self-defense,
wrote that they “cannot be deemed pirates or robbers in the sense of the law
of nations” (United States vs. Amistad 593–94). The logical implication of this
statement is that mutinous slaves could be deemed pirates. Schmitt did not
reveal whether he had discerned these details of the case Melville had chosen
to portray in literature, but his perception of the theme of piracy in the story
cannot be called capricious.
Schmitt saw the piracy related to the discovery and exploitation of the
New World as a crucial phase in world history, in which sea power began to
universalize issues of law and right. Christopher L. Connery calls Schmitt’s
Nomos der Erde “perhaps the last serious attempt to think through the materiality
and spatiality of the earth as a whole in philosophical terms [...] the elementalism
of the German and English romantic project being an expression of a newly
globalized consciousness, where finally materiality – space, the elements – as
a universal whole could be thought and considered in its ideational dimension”
(174). In another book with a similar thematic, Land und Meer, Schmitt pauses
before his introduction of the third epoch of world history, that of ocean power
(the first two are of river and of inland sea), and salutes his “Herolde,” Herman
Melville and Jules Michelet (30). He praises only Moby Dick by name, in terms
resembling those in the letter to Jünger, as the greatest epic of the ocean, but we
shall see that “Benito Cereno” lurks beneath the surface of his argument. For
one thing, Schmitt points out that this third epoch of sea power was achieved
with the help of adventurers, whale hunters, and pirates. Schmitt devotes an
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 129
extraordinary amount of time to the latter group, noting that they were the front-
line troops in the war between Protestant and Catholic powers that defined the
early modern period (44). Schmitt then makes piracy the foundation both of
English sea power and of capitalism: “Sie [the English] waren alle am großen
Beutegeschäft beteiligt. Hunderte und Tausende von Engländern wurden damals
zu ‘Korsaren-Kapitalisten,’ zu corsairs capitalists [sic]. Auch das gehört zur
elementaren Wendung vom Land zum Meer” (46). While Schmitt does not
define the exact contribution of pirate capitalism to the overall development
of an economic system that would eventually dominate the world, its role is
exaggerated by his not mentioning any other factors. The strangest absence of
all is any mention of slavery and of the huge contribution it made to the nascent
capitalist system (see Williams). In a sense, slavers and antislavery policing form
a fourth group that Schmitt should have mentioned in the context of the other
three. This sublimation of slavery into piracy is repeated in Schmitt’s reading of
“Benito Cereno.” In this sense, Land und Meer carries out the same substitution
as the Schmitt-Jünger reading of “Benito Cereno.” As that reading rebaptized the
San Dominick as a pirate ship, so too here the complex business of capitalism,
which included slavery as a constituent part, is reduced to piracy. One may read
here Schmitt’s resentment of England as Germany’s arch-foe and rival, and an
analysis of history in light of the geopolitics of World War II, where Germany
enjoyed land superiority while England dominated the high seas.
In Schmitt’s view, whereas a land power’s ability to take over the whole
world would appear only as tyranny to be resisted, England’s piratical ability
to build a world empire based on sea power appears to the other powers
“als gut und selbstverständlich; das ist für sie dasselbe wie Zivilisation und
Menschlichkeit; es ist der Friede und das Völkerrecht selbst. [...] Eine andere
Wirtschaftswissenschaft und ein anderes Völkerrecht wußten sie sich schließlich
nicht mehr zu denken. Hier kannst du sehen, daß der große Leviathan Macht
auch über die Geister und Gemüter der Menschen hat” (Land und Meer 89).
The Leviathan had been a central symbol in Schmitt’s political theory for years,
finding fullest expression in Der Leviathan, discussed above.
In reality, the Leviathan did not hypnotize the world, and other nations did
not stand by and applaud British sea power and concede the free passage of
the high seas. In a brief history of the law of the sea, Edward D. Brown notes
that the jus publicum europeum has always held two contradictory notions on
the law of the high seas: mare liberum vs. mare clausum; freedom of the high
seas vs. extension of national sovereignty as far as possible, for example to
protect fisheries. Individual nations, such as Britain, do not throw themselves
wholeheartedly behind one principle or the other; rather, they may argue for
either principle at any one time, depending on contexts and goals. Disputes
and treaties have tended to sway back and forth between these principles rather
130 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

than moving inexorably towards ever greater freedom. The most dramatic
development in the law of the sea came in the postcolonial period, when the
number of independent nations with coastlines increased drastically and altered
the balance of international treaty-making on the subject, culminating in the
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 (Brown 5–11).
While Schmitt does not spend much time on the Americans in Land und
Meer, he clearly considers them a continuation of the English in their reliance
on naval and then air power to achieve military and economic goals, which
eventually lead to the deemphasis of national boundaries (based and defended,
by definition, on Landmacht) in favour of international treaties, human rights,
and global trade organizations. In Chapter 19, Schmitt notes the theories of
Admiral Alfred T. Mahan (The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1890) con-
cerning the need for the U. S. and England to cooperate in maintaining the world
order through command of the oceans, but he notes only that his concept holds
to the older idea of Landrecht.
The relative unimportance of America in the postwar book represents a
softening of the position Schmitt had held during World War II. In his 1943 essay,
“Die letzte globale Linie,” Americans appear as the most fearsome perpetrators
of globalization, taking advantage of third and fourth elements, air and fire (the
latter referring to the internal combustion or jet engine of an airplane):

[Die Amerikaner] überziehen die ganze Erde mit einem System von Luft-
stützpunkten und Luftfähren und proklamieren ein “Amerikanisches Jahr-
hundert” unseres Planeten. [...] Nachdem die letzte dieser globalen Linien,
die Linie der westlichen Hemisphäre, in einen grenzenlosen, globalen Inter-
ventionismus umgeschlagen ist, hat sich eine völlig neue Situation ergeben.
Gegen die Ansprüche einer universalen, planetarischen Weltkontrolle und
Weltherrschaft verteidigt sich ein anderer Nomos der Erde, dessen Grund-
idee die Einteilung der Erde in mehrere, durch ihre geschichtliche, wirt-
schaftliche und kulturelle Substanz erfüllte Großräume ist. (“Die letzte glo-
bale Linie” 447)

The idea of Großraum, which Schmitt opposes to globalization, is another

way of expressing the idea of the jus publicum. Indeed, “nomos,” like “jus,” is
frequently translated as “law,” though Schmitt disagrees with this translation.
This passage was written at approximately the same time as Schmitt was read-
ing Melville intensively, and it undoubtedly reflects his reading both of the
intervention of Captain Delano and of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to
rid the world of evil.
In the much longer Nomos der Erde, Schmitt provides more details
concerning the process by which humanity has moved from local, geographically
 Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno 131
determined boundaries to mathematically determined ones such as the
Tordesillas line, the Greenwich line, and other time boundaries, and to the
division of the world into Western and Eastern hemispheres. Here he gives
more credit to other aspects of globalization, such as the trend towards uni-
versal human rights. The French, according to Schmitt, also played a role in
globalization with their attempt, “in einem gleichzeitig individualistischen und
universalistischen juristischen System die liberal-individualistische Verfassung
der Ideen von 1789 auf die Welt zu übertragen und aus le Citoyen Français das
Normalbild des alle Völker umfassenden kosmopolitischen Weltbürgers zu
machen” (“Die Formung” 208).
And what of Benito Cereno’s people, the Spanish? In Schmitt’s reading,
while Spain furthered the process of globalization through the sponsoring of
Columbus and other explorers, it lost its chance of becoming a sea power with
the defeat of its armada in 1588. The long period of decline that followed saw
Spain lose virtually all its colonies that had once spanned the globe. The United
States, as we know, took its share of these, and several interpretations of “Benito
Cereno” see the American taking of the Spanish ship as a political allegory.
Tierno Galván reads Benito Cereno’s helplessness as symbolic of the paralysis
of the Spanish nation in general:

Es ist kein Zufall, daß der Kapitän des Mythos ein Spanier ist. [...] Wäre er
nicht Kastilianer von Rasse, so würde er sofort über Bord springen und die
Belagerung der Situation durchbrechen. Aber von allen Europäern sind die
Spanier den tiefenschichten der europäischen Tradition und Geschichte am
nächsten geblieben. [...] Tatsächlich, das spanische Schiff hatte niemals seinen
Schiffskiel gereinigt. [...] Auf seinem Helm haben sich Jahrhunderte der Ge-
schichte angehäuft, ohne daß eine tiefe Bewegung es von seinen uralten
Bindungen befriet hätten. [...] Was besseres als eine spanische Galen könnte
man dem fröhlichen Optimismus des homo novus, Mr. Delano, entgegensetzen?
(354–55)

Thomas Vesting is no doubt correct when he notes that, while Schmitt’s early
recognition of the death of “classical” state sovereignty deserves a place in the
history of thought, his insistence on retaining older ideas of force and of theology
as measuring rods for the state makes him able to recognize transformations of
state sovereignty only as decline, as in the case of Spain, or as disappearance:
“In einer Welt, die es immer weniger mit Machtfragen und immer mehr mit
Wissensfragen zu tun hat, kann das Werk Carl Schmitts kein wirklicher Ratgeber
mehr sein” (201). Nevertheless, Schmitt’s analyses that link knowledge, law,
power, and aesthetics may serve as a reminder that Macht and Wissen are in fact
related to each other, and that literary muthos has a role to play in that complex.
132 THOMAS O. BEEBEE

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