WALTER BENJAMIN AND CARL SCHMITT: A POLITICAL-THEOLOGICAL CONFRONTATION

MARIN TERPSTRA AND THEO DE WIT The theme of Benjamins posthumous theses on the concept of history is the attempt to improve our position in the struggle against fascism, as the eighth thesis has it. 1 The same thesis also contains in nuce the entire complex of Benjamins relations to his contemporary Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Benjamin uses the term state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand), which he borrowed from Schmitt and which, as it were, constitutes the signifier of their affinity. The theme of the struggle against fascism, however, is something which divides them most decisively. We will argue in this essay that this dividing line is ultimately determined by a fundamentally political-theological opposition which is expressed in their respective concepts of history. Benjamin wrote the thesis in question towards the end of his life, at a time when National Socialism had already been in power for seven years in Germany and war in Europe was a fact. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt belonged to different political camps, whose reciprocal hostility had already made quite a dramatic mark on either authors personal history. Whereas the former is on the run from his Nazi persecutors, the latter finds himself, as he will later call it, in the belly of the Leviathan, at first as a prominent lawyer in Hitlers new Reich, and from 1936 onwards more and more in the margins of this Reich as it unfolds into a Behemoth, a monstrous Unstaat. Nevertheless Benjamin refers to one of Schmitts fundamental concepts, the Ausnahmezustand. They both used this concept in their respective analysis of the seventeenthcentury notion of sovereignty. Schmitt mainly emphasises its constitutional and politicaltheological aspects, Benjamin stresses its theatrical and aesthetic aspects. Both authors, however, are aware that these dimensions are intimately intertwined.2 Schmitt and Benjamin share a mutual interest and even fascination for the seventeenth century. Its legal and theological categories (sovereignty, state of emergency) are primarily characteristic of the age
1

The theses formulate the hypothesis that it was a certain conception of history, prevalent within social democracy, which undermined the power of the workers movement (ber den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1987), p. 697). We will refer to these collected writings in the now conventional way, with roman numerals indicating the volume and arabic numerals indicating the pages. Translators note: all translations in this essay, unless stated otherwise, are my own. 2 See the editors notes in I, 886.

of absolutism, when modernity is still looking for its own relationship to the religious world view of the immediate past. Yet this historical limitation withholds neither Benjamin nor Schmitt from seeing their own time in the light of the world view of this era. The aforementioned thesis also provides the key with which we can pinpoint the difference between both authors. Benjamin distinguishes between the state of emergency which, as the tradition of the oppressed teaches us, is actually the rule, and the actual state of emergency which has to be brought about. The paradoxical formulation of the first part of this distinction Ausnahme and Regel: exception and rule suggests that, from the perspective of the oppressed, the situation of 1940 constitutes the normal state of affairs of history. Benjamin thereby certainly distances himself from Schmitt, theoretically as well as politically, since the latter conceives of the state of emergency as the political moment par excellence with regard to an existing legal order, and manifestly not as the historical rule. Benjamin shifts Schmitts concept of the state of emergency, and in doing so turns it on its head in the second part of his distinction. A real state of emergency must be established against the normality of the Ausnahmezustand, which is the history of the law of the jungle. This real state of emergency calls for the end of history and thus of normality, an end which is at the same time a restitutio in integrum performed by the true sovereign: the Messiah.3 It may well sound surprising or even astonishing that Benjamins text uses a central concept from the work of a (then) national-socialist theoretician against the concept of history that dominates social democracy and is to blame for its weakness in the struggle against fascism. To Gretel Adorno, Benjamin once defended his conscious use of authors or ways of thinking which were considered bourgeois or reactionary in the neo-marxist circles of the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung by referring to the very singular dynamics of his own thought, which acquires its fecundity from the very fact that it moves in (between) extreme positions and unites the incompatible. No thinking without risks and without venturing into dangerous liaisons.4 The phrase dangerous liaisons has become the title of one of the first monographs on Benjamin and Schmitt.5 The author, Susanne Heil, quite rightly points out that it is not so much the empirical-causal question, whether Benjamin was influenced by Schmitt, which does
3

This is the link between ber den Begriff der Geschichte and the Theologisch-politisches Fragment, which was probably written twenty years earlier (II, 203-204). It is Lieven De Cauters hypothesis, put forward in his book De Dwerg in de Schaakautomaat (Nijmegen: SUN, 1999), that theological notions make up a secret doctrine at the very onset of Benjamins work, forming conceptual links which continue to inform his writings without ever being named explicitly. 4 II, 1369. 5 Susanne Heil, Gefhrliche Beziehungen: Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1996).

justice to Benjamins method, but rather the question of the constellations to which the similarities and analogies between himself and Schmitt refer. These constellations are possible because Benjamin and Schmitt share a common way of thinking which could be described as methodical extremism: the conviction that only an epistemological orientation towards the extreme case will be able to uncover the essence of a legal, political and ultimately metaphysical order. Both thinkers thus declare their own state of emergency, a methodological direction which is not just considered to be unusual, but even dangerous, namely insofar as certain practical consequences may be linked to this way of thinking.

FLEETING ENCOUNTERS It is unlikely that Benjamin and Schmitt ever actually met. If we discount two casual references to Schmitt in Benjamins work (II, 1372 and VI, 219), their encounter can be reduced to three moments in time. In his study of the Baroque mourning play, Benjamin refers several times to Schmitts Politische Theologie.6 Benjamin follows this up in 1930 by sending a short letter to Schmitt, together with a copy of the book Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels, in which he writes that the method and the content of his research on the German mourning play are indebted to some of Schmitts books.7 Finally, some twenty-five years later, Schmitt responds to Benjamins letter by devoting a couple of pages to the latters interpretation of Shakespeare in his study of Hamlet.8 These three instances will further determine the structure of this essay. In the next section, the first two will be discussed, in the last section we will turn to Schmitts posthumous answer to Benjamin. First, however, we will explore the meaning of this fleeting encounter between a Jewish marxist and a Catholic lawyer. Benjamins aforementioned letter, more than anything else, has raised a puzzling question for the readers and supporters of the members of the Frankfurt School in the seventies and eighties: how is it possible that there is a certain affinity in method and approach between the wayward, somewhat mystical marxist and the right-wing political scientist who, after the Second World War, was generally considered to have been the Crown-appointed lawyer of the

Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souvernitt [1922], Fourth imprint (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985). See Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels [1925] I, 245246 (notes 14, 16 and 17). 7 I, 887. 8 Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 19932; first edition Dsseldorf/Kln: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1956).
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Nazis?9 Couched in these terms, the question probably reveals more about the need for clear moral-political dividing lines in the post-war (German) intellectual climate than about the complex intellectual universe of the Weimar Republic. This need may also explain why the letter, on Adornos initiative, was not included in the two-volume edition of Benjamins letters in 1966.10 Benjamins remark to Gretel Adorno about his dangerous liaisons is confirmed by the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes (1927-1987), whose contribution to the solution of this mystery is considerable. Taubes not only had a deep affinity with Benjamins thought, but is also the one who shaped the intellectual encounter between Benjamin and Schmitt after the second World War. His negative messianism, which he sometimes also calls negative political theology11 may be more closely related to Benjamins historical-philosophical position, but he also admits to having devoured the texts of the controversial lawyer in his youth and that if he learned anything, he learned from Schmitt.12 Towards the end of his life, Taubes also had established a personal contact with the controversial political scientist. It was no coincidence that the conversation was about Paul, the Jew who became the founder of Christianity after an exceptional experience. Benjamin and Schmitt appear to assume that the possibility of the exception in politics can only be thought by analogy with the divine intervention. This notion can indeed give a lasting relevance to the political-theological problem, the indebtedness of thinking about politics to speaking about God. For the possibility of an exception implies the possibility of an invasion or a breaking of normality, which thus appears as a fragile construct. It is on this point that Taubes succeeded in reconstructing the theoretical encounter between Benjamin and Schmitt. The passages from Politische Theologie quoted by Taubes in his own book on Paul all revolve around the importance Schmitt attaches to the concept of exception (Ausnahme) and the state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand) for his own legal doctrine.13 And Benjamin as well as Schmitt, followed by Taubes, turn this notion into a method at the same time: they think from
See for instance N. Bolz, Charisma und Souvernitt: Carl Schmitt und Walter Benjamin im Schatten Max Webers, in Der Frst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, edited by J. Taubes (Mnchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag/Verlag Ferdinand Schningh, 1983), p. 249. 10 Briefe, 2 vols., edited by G. Scholem and T.W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). See also S. Weber, Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, in (eds.), Enlightenments: Encounters between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, edited by H. Kunneman and H. de Vries (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993), pp. 141-161. 11 See M. Terpstra and T. de Wit, No spiritual investment in the world as it is: On the negative political theology of Jacob Taubes, in Flight of the Gods. Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, edited by I.N. Bulhof and L. ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 12 J. Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus (Mnchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), p. 137. 13 J. Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, pp. 89ff.
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the perspective of extreme positions which break through normality. As Benjamins Jetztzeit interrupts the progress of history conceived by historicism, Schmitts force of real life, as it comes to the fore in the exception to the legal rule, breaks the automatism of the legal order rigidified in repetition. A similar thought is put forward by Schmitt in his study of Hamlet, as we will see later. He considers the exception to be more interesting than the norm. Normality proves nothing, the exception proves everything; it not only confirms the rule, the rule lives only off the exception.14 In his exposition of Schmitt, Taubes reminds us of the same definition of sovereignty that inspired Benjamin: Souvern ist, wer ber den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet.15 From his commentary of this definition, it becomes apparent that Taubes reads it from a historicalphilosophical perspective from the very onset: This is a lawyer writing, not a theologian. But this is no praise of secularization, it is a revelation.16 Despite this fascination, he is forced to conclude, with reference to one of Benjamins famous images: And yet I detected in every word of Carl Schmitt something which was alien to me, a fear and anxiety for the storm which threatened in the secularized messianic arrow of marxism.17 To Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah which is quite real to him, and not an as if as it is to Adorno18 is the extreme perspective from which he thinks history. History is thus not only a time which can be broken off, but also a time which can be interrupted and brought to a halt, time and again: the splinters of messianic time.19 This is one of the images Benjamin uses to think the presence of a divine history into human history. Benjamin thereby subscribes not only to a critique of historicism, whose adherents describe history as an endlessly progressing future-oriented continuous linear development isolated within itself, but also to the construction of a historiography brushing against the grain. The latter portrays progress not as the deeper destination of history, but in a political sense: as a series of victories with cultural heritage as the spoils. Yet this victory also refers to the victims who have sunk into oblivion and do not form part of culture. Compared to this distortion of history, Benjamin generates a radically different concept in which time (past, present and future) has been contracted into a Jetztzeit,
14

Die Ausnahme ist interessanter als der Normalfall. Das Normale beweist nichts, die Ausnahme bezeichnet alles; sie besttigt nicht nur die Regel, die Regel lebt berhaupt nur von der Ausnahme. (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 22, quoted in Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, p. 90). 15 Sovereign is he who decides on the state of emergency. (Schmitt, p. 11; quoted in Taubes, p. 89). 16 Hier schreibt ein Jurist, kein Theologe. Aber das ist kein Lob der Skularisierung, sondern eine Enthllung. (Taubes, p. 89; our emphasis). Taubes claims that Benjamin sided with Schmitt on the point of the struggle against historicism (Ad Carl Schmitt, p. 26). 17 Und doch sprte ich in jedem Wort von Carl Schmitt ein mir Fremdes, jene Furcht und Angst vor dem Storm, der im skularisierten messianischen Pfeil des Marxismus lauerte. (Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt, p. 10 and p. 15). 18 Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, p. 103 ff. 19 I, 704.

which is essentially a retrospection, remembrance and commemoration and in which progress has been called to a halt. This position is also radical in the sense that Benjamin does not find himself bound to the victories which the future may offer, nor even to any kind of immanent-historically founded duty to cooperate with the endless task of realizing the classless society: there are no meaningful political goals.20 In the context of the historical-philosophical theses there is an important reference to the Jewish tradition which makes the future taboo as a source of knowledge: to the Jews, every second is the small gate through which the Messiah may enter.21 Elsewhere, in a critique of the social democrats, Benjamin writes that the struggle of the working class should not be aimed towards the liberation of future generations, but towards the redemption of past generations the oppressed from the past which have been deleted from history.22 The revolution therefore appears to Benjamin in the first place not as a political event, a decisive moment in political history from which a clear victor will emerge, but as an event with a theological signification. The revolution is a political-theological phenomenon whose roots must be sought at the beginning of modernity.

REVOLUTION, SOVEREIGNTY, STATE OF EMERGENCY Both Benjamin and Schmitt were witness to what was probably the worst crisis ever on the European continent: the First World War, the Russian Revolution and (the threat of) civil wars were events which forced not only them, but most important intellectuals to think about violence and catastrophe. Both Benjamin and Schmitt read Sorels study of violence in politics and both internalized it in their work, even though their respective viewpoints are diametrically opposed to one another. In a short epilogue to Benjamins Kritik der Gewalt in 1964, Herbert Marcuse summarized his thought as follows: Only rarely has the truth about critical theory ever been formulated in such an exemplary way: the revolutionary struggle is concerned with the suspension of what happens and what has happened before all positive aims, this negative aspect is the first positive one.23
See also Klaus-M. Kodalle, Walter Benjamins Politischer Dezisionismus im Theologischen Kontext, in Spiegel und Gleichnis, edited by N. Bolz and W. Hbener (Wrzburg: Kninghausen & Neumann, 1983), p. 309 ff. 21 Denn in ihr war jede Sekunde die kleine Pforte, durch die der Messias treten konnte. (I, 704). 22 I, 1236-1237. 23 Herbert Marcuse, Nachwort, in Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und Andere Aufstze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 104.
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The revolution and the battle of appropriation that rages around it can indeed be seen as a central point of Benjamins work, and it can be linked to one of the most important concepts in Schmitts political thinking. The revolution is the moment of the most radical turnover of a socio-political order. Radical: the revolution touches upon the roots of this order, in other words at the very things that constitute this order. An order, however, is not created ex nihilo, but through a struggle with an other, preceding order which can no longer find the strength to defend itself. Revolution is thus in the first place characterized by an ambiguous relationship between destruction and foundation. The revolution is not merely a violent transition period from one order to the other. On the contrary: its ambiguity reveals a discontinuity. Between the two moments, historical time has been stopped, as it were. The immobilisation of time in the first place reveals the fundamental or metaphysical illegitimacy of every socio-political order. For at this crucial moment when the old order has already ceased to function normally but the new order has not yet been established, every legitimation seems to rest on quicksand. From the perspective of the old order, the revolution is by definition illegitimate, whereas the order which legitimates it does not yet exist but in anticipation. Yet in the absence of all legitimacy the presence of a hyperlegitimacy, of an excess of law, shines through. The clash of the old order and the anticipated new order takes place in the name of an other law, an other justice. At the same time, this clash reveals that it is apparently not given to mankind to keep the law or justice in hands. Conservative violence, which strives to maintain the old order, as well as the revolutionary violence which seeks to establish a new order both contradict the ability of mankind to do justice in an absolute sense. The concept of normality, on the other hand, demands that every thought of foundation, revolution or destruction be banished: it takes the act of foundation and thus of possible destruction or revolution as the limit of thought, which may not be crossed. This is why, Benjamin suspects, the monopoly on violence of the European constitutional state is not so much directed against the violence of the individual pursuing illegitimate aims, as it is intended for the protection of the legal order.24 Legitimacy and legality coincide in the socio-political order that has established itself as normality. The rule of normality appears most clearly in the dominance of positivism, which simply takes the existing law as an incontestable point of departure. Yet positivism is unable to provide an answer to more or less radical challenges to normality. Constitutional law faces its limit here, is how Schmitt read his colleague G. Anschtz. As an answer to such and like challenges,

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II, 183.

they take refuge in quasi-transcendent legitimations, for which the doctrine of natural law is exemplary. Yet we can only speak of true transcendence when it can be shown that the autonomous and isolated normality, present in the identity of legality and legitimacy or in the derivation of the positive law from a higher, but accessible, source of law, is a mere appearance. And even though many continued to cling to their faith in edifying social forces, like the rationality of science, economy and technology, the sophistication of the legal system and the development of a pacifying international law, this was not hard to demonstrate at the time when Benjamin and Schmitt wrote their texts. The first steps on the path to an orderly and stable mass democracy were hardly unproblematic. How could any form of normality establish itself here? The experience that the state of emergency is the rule is not alien to the era in question. But the experience and political declaration of the state of emergency by definition spawns very numerous and very diverse offspring.25 Schmitts answer to his own diagnosis of the unstable foundation of normality (in this case the Weimar Republic) could be called katechontic: which order can check further decay? Schmitt found the expression kat-echon in the second letter to the Thessalonians (2:6-8), where it refers to the figure who prevents the victory of Satan, and used it to indicate every force to resist the Antichrist.26 Likewise, Benjamins answer is not subservient to the existing order of Weimar and can be characterized as messianic: only a disillusioned reading of the decay opens the possibility of salvation, the real state of emergency. These answers can be reduced to different interpretations of the above mentioned moment between the destruction of an order and the foundation of another a different historical-philosophical, even historical-theological interpretation of the sovereignty located in that moment. And as we pointed out above, both authors go back to the legal-theological dramatics of seventeenth-century Baroque. Sovereignty and revolution are thus intimately linked. This does not detract from the fact that this link is made invisible in the actual exercise of sovereign power: the memory and prevention of revolution are exorcised and, where possible, so is the very idea of sovereignty itself. Sovereignty marks the spot where the revolution took place, which is also the spot where a revolution can take place again. Thus sovereignty by definition indicates not only the centre of political power, but also the precarious nature of political power and order as such.
R.Konersmann speaks in this context of the profound ambivalence of the extreme (Erstarrte Unruhe: Walter Benjamins Begriff der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), p. 114). 26 See C. Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 63 and Der Nomos der Erde (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1950), p. 29.
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THE SOVEREIGN Schmitts famous answer to the question of the subject of sovereignty intervenes primarily in a strictly legal discussion. According to a recent reconstruction,27 his definition of sovereignty was remarkable in two points at least. Prominent constitutional lawyers of the German Reich saw sovereignty as a property of state power. They might disagree on who exactly could qualify as the bearer, the highest body or the central instance, but in the eyes of these theoreticians such instances were all constitutional bodies with strictly demarcated competences, pouvoirs constitus. This interpretation implied that the practical significance of sovereignty remained limited to independence under international law, the so-called souverainet extrieure. Souverainet intrieure had become a superfluous notion, as the features of sovereignty had been quietly transferred to state power in general, becoming limited competences and thus, as it were, constitutionally immobilized. Schmitt turns against this neutralization of the souverainet intrieure. In the second place, and in close connection to the previous point, he introduces a new interpretation of Bodins doctrine of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, only a close scrutiny of the classical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors endlessly repeated, completely hollow phrases about supreme power will reveal the practical core of the doctrine of sovereignty. In the first book of his Les Six Livres de la Rpublique (1583), Bodin gives many practical examples, constantly returning to the question in how far the monarch is bound to laws and in how far he has obligations towards the estates. His answer is that the monarch is bound to laws except si la ncessit est urgente. By referring back to the emergency case, Bodin arrived at his interpretation of sovereignty as an indivisible unity, introducing the decision into the concept of sovereignty: the authority to abolish the statutory laws is the actual mark of sovereignty.28 From this, Schmitt draws the following conclusion: The exceptional case reveals the essence of state authority most clearly. Here the decision separates itself from the legal norm and (paradoxically) authority proves that, in order to create a law, it need not actually be right.29 Still Schmitt does not consider the entire question to be a mere point of law. The question whether we can rid ourselves of the exceptional case is not a legal one, but depends
H. Quaritsch, Souvernitt im Ausnahmezustand: Zum Souvernittsbegriff im Werk Carl Schmitts, Der Staat, 35 (1996), pp. 1-30. See also T.W.A. de Wit, De Onontkoombaarheid van de Politiek: De Soevereine Vijand in de Politieke Filosofie van Carl Schmitt (Nijmegen: Pomppers, 1992), p. 27 ff. 28 Schmitt, Politische Theologie, pp. 14-15.
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on philosophical, particularly historical-philosophical or metaphysical, convictions.30 Modern developments in the theory of law which tend to eliminate sovereignty in the sense described above indicate a shift in political metaphysics. The postulation of the identity of state and legal order subscribes to a broader development taking place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: the transition from transcendent to immanent conceptions. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the transcendent position of God towards the world and of the sovereign towards the state are metaphysically self-evident. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the personalist and decisionist elements in the concept of sovereignty are lost in favour of organic conceptions of the people and the democratic premise of the identity of rulers and subjects.31 Only after the Second World War did Schmitt give his seventeenth-century position a (historical-)theological dimension. This is most apparent in his Glossarium: I believe in the Katechon; to me this is the only possibility, as a christian, to understand history and find it meaningful.32 With the concept of Kat-echon, Schmitt refers to a mysterious passage in Paul, where the latter admonishes the primitive community of Thessalonica, which seems to have been overcome by an apocalyptic fever33, to remain patient and calm.34 In accordance with Jewish apocalypticism, Paul appears to be convinced that the parousia of the Messiah will be preceded by a catastrophe, the revelation of the lawless one the Antichrist. However, the mysterious reference to a force which (still) holds this enemy of the law at bay is a novelty, and has provoked many interpretations since. Schmitts interpretation concurs with that of the Church Fathers, who claim that Pauls Kat-echon was meant to designate the Roman Empire and the Roman emperor. It is a decisive, if paradoxical, factor (considering the pagan nature of this empire, which was not kindly disposed towards the Christians) that this identification made possible an affirmative stance of Christians towards a secular power. It is in this exactly that Schmitt discovers a sense of history.
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Der Ausnahmefall offenbart das Wesen der staatlichen Autoritt am klarsten. Hier sondert sich die Entscheidung von der Rechtsnorm, und (um es paradox zu formulieren) die Autoritt beweist, da sie, um Recht zu schaffen, nicht Recht zu haben braucht. (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 20.) 30 [...] hngt von philosophischen, insbesondere geschichtsphilosophischen oder metaphysischen berzeugungen ab. (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 13). 31 Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 60. 32 [...] ich glaube an den Katechon; er ist fr mich die einzige Mglichkeit, als Christ Geschichte zu verstehen und sinnvoll zu finden. (Schmitt, Glossarium, p. 63). 33 W.Trilling, quoted in L. Berthold, Zur Selbstglossierung Carl Schmitts, Leviathan, 21(1993), p. 287. 34 The passage in 2 Tess.2, 6-8 reads: And you know what is now restraining him (kai nun to katechon oidate), so that he may be revealed when his time comes, For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it (ho katechon) is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him with the manifestation of his coming.

In Schmitts opinion, the Kat-echon, the notion of a force which holds the end at bay and suppresses evil, is the bridge which connects the eschatological expectation (which seems to deprive history of all sense) with a christian life in history, with an ethical task and the formation of a political power that results from it.35 Schmitt says the sense of history, the very sign even that history is not over yet, lies in the presence of a katechontic force. Who holds the Satan at bay? is thus the metalegal, historical-theological question which supports Schmitts philosophy of law. Although Schmitts explicit reference to the Paulinic figure of a katechontic force, as we said, comes only after the Second World War, the perception of the historical reality which it presupposes is already present in Politische Theologie. It is a perception according to the extreme antithetical pattern catastrophe versus restauration. The sovereign, who decides on the state of emergency, has the task to restore and maintain the order, which is permanently threatened by chaos and anarchy. Benjamin recognizes this antithesis in the German baroque mourning play. The actual subject of this drama is historical life as it was represented in the Baroque, primarily through the figure of the sovereign. The sovereign holds the course of history in his hand like a sceptre.36 But the radical nature of this drama already lies in the fact that the playwrights do not present the spectacle of the rise and fall of monarchs and kings, constantly repeated in endless variations, as a moral tale, but as a natural development which represents the course of history itself. In the play, history coincides with the nature of a fallen creation without hope of grace or salvation. The German Baroque especially is provocatively worldly. The insignificance of world events and the transience of creation are no longer presented as stages on a path to salvation. There is no Baroque eschatology, Benjamin writes, and therefore a mechanism which unites and exalts all things mortal, before they surrender themselves to their end.37 In baroque mourning plays, the sovereign no longer appears as the earthly reflection of Gods transcendence, but rather as the most extreme expression of the immanence of his creation: The creaturely status, the ground on which the mourning play takes place, undeniably determines the sovereign too. No matter how high he sits enthroned above subject and state, his rank is enclosed within the created world; he is lord of creatures, but he remains a creature.38 This status is also the ground for his downfall. A radically immanent
C. Schmitt, Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung, Universitas 5/8 (1950), p. 929. Der Souvern reprsentiert die Geschichte. Er hlt das historische Geschehen in der Hand wie ein Szepter. (I, 245). 37 Es gibt keine barocke Eschatologie; und eben darum einen Mechanismus, der alles Erdgeborne huft und exaltiert, bevor es sich dem Ende berliefert. (I, 246).
35 36

world excludes the heterogeneity or transcendence of a decision.39 The sovereign, with whom rests the decision on the state of emergency, proves at the very first opportunity that he is hardly capable of a decision at all.40 He now displays his most extreme tendencies, which were already implied in the imbalance between his power and his capacity as a ruler: he becomes a dictator and a tyrant, an emblem of a disturbed order of creation. However, the conviction of the personal incapacity and wickedness of the tyrant was balanced by a belief in the sacrosanct nature of the violence he perpetrates. Thus the tyrant can transform himself into a martyr. A perfect example of this is the dramatic portrayal of king Herod, who as the very pinnacle of creation erupts in a volcanic rage, destroying himself and his entire court. [] He falls back into the status of a mere mortal, a victim of the disproportion of the unlimited hierarchical dignity which God has bestowed upon him.41 The task of the tyrant, as we said above, was a restoration of the order, the utopia of the age, the establishment of an iron constitution of natural laws replacing a disorderly history a new creation. And it is exactly on this point that the most important difference between Schmitt and Benjamin is situated. A POSTHUMOUS ANSWER Schmitts answer to Benjamins letter from 1930 follows posthumously, twenty-five years after the letter, fifteen years after the death of its author, in a study on Shakespeares Hamlet from 1956. Schmitt speaks very highly of the 1928 edition of Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels: The book is full of insights, with regard to the history of art and culture, but also with regard to Shakespeares drama, notably his Hamlet.42 Schmitt obviously did not fail to notice that Benjamin quoted him in the book, and in passing he also mentions the letter.43

38

Die Ebene des Schpfungsstands, der Boden, auf dem das Trauerspiel sich abrollt, bestimmt ganz unverkennbar auch den Souvern. So hoch er ber Untertan und Staat auch thront, sein Rang ist in der Schpfungswelt beschlossen, er ist der Herr der Kreaturen, aber er bleibt Kreatur. (I, 263-264). 39 See Weber, Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, p. 155, 40 Der Frst, bei dem die Entscheidung ber den Ausnahmezustand ruht, erweist in der erstbesten Situation, da ein Entschlu ihm fast unmglich ist. (I, 250). 41 [...] der Gipfel der Kreatur, ausbrechend in der Raserei wie ein Vulkan und mit allem umliegenden Hofstaat sich selber vernichtend. [...] er fllt als Opfer eines Miverhltnisses der unbeschrnkten hierarchischen Wrde, mit welcher Gott ihn investiert, zum Stande seines armen Menschenwesens. (I, 250). 42 Aber das Buch ist reich an bedeutenden Einsichten und Durchblicken, sowohl fr die Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte berhaupt, wie auch fr Shakespeares Drama und namentlich fr seinen Hamlet. (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 62). 43 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 64.

These words of praise are not just to compensate for the very critical notes to Benjamins interpretation of Hamlet in an Exkurs. They express a methodological affinity: the way in which the relationship between theatre and history is treated. Benjamins monadology, according to which a single work of art can embody an entire era, 44 can be found in a similar way in Schmitt. The figure of Hamlet personifies the play Hamlet, and because of the tragedy woven around the protagonist in this mourning play, Hamlet himself has become a myth eminently characteristic of the modern European mind.45 Thus we encounter an entire era in Hamlet. According to Schmitt, of the three great symbolical figures in modern European literature Don Quixot, Hamlet and Faust only the second one could become a myth. Whereas Don Quixot is a Spanish-catholic figure and Faust a German-protestant character, Hamlet embodied the inner conflict of the European mind in the time of the sectarian wars.46 A further affinity, which links in with the idea that the totality can be found in a single work, can be found in the rejection of all specialist approaches to either politics or artistic phenomena. Psychologism and historicism are as alien to Schmitt as they are to Benjamin.47 Yet this affinity and the words of praise Schmitt reserves for Benjamins book should not detract us from the essential differences between them. There are two such differences to which we will direct our attention. The first one concerns the distinction made by both authors between mourning play and tragedy, the second one concerns their respective vision of European history from the beginning of modern times. In the case of the first question, Schmitt responds directly to a distinction introduced by Benjamin himself; in the case of the second question, Schmitt speaks directly to Benjamin in a rather condescending tone about his own field of inquiry: the political history of Europe. It is of course impossible within the scope of this essay to discuss in any great depth the crucial distinction between mourning play and tragedy as it comes to the fore in Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. We will limit ourselves to the one description which is essential to pinpoint the difference with Schmitts interpretation. Benjamin is primarily concerned with determining the exact relationship between historical events and drama: these
44 45

I, 207; I, 703; I, 1251. The transformation of historical events into myth through the plot of a play is an important motif in Schmitts interpretation of Shakespeares Hamlet (Hamlet oder Hekuba, primarily pp. 32 and 46). The question of the source of the tragic event (p. 12) is decisive in this matter. In the case of Hamlet, this is the taboo that rested on the question whether Mary Stuart, mother of James I, was an accomplice to the murder of her husband, and knew that she would herself marry the murderer three months later (pp. 14-22). According to Schmitt, the actual attention to this historical taboo in the play itself is not just an Anspielung or a Spiegelung of history by theatre, but an Einbruch of real life into the play (pp. 26-27). 46 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 28, 54, 30 and 69, note 8. 47 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, notably pp. 9 and 12.

events are not so much the subject matter as the artistic essence in the mourning play.48 But it is exactly this aspect, Benjamin says, which distinguishes the Baroque mourning play from ancient Greek tragedy: This is where it distinguishes itself from tragedy, for the subject of the latter is not history but myth [].49 In his Hamlet oder Hekuba, on the other hand, Schmitt makes only the first point a decisive factor in the distinction between mourning play and tragedy. We can only talk of a [theatre or mourning] play when historical events constitute the subject matter from which the freely creating writer shapes his play; we are dealing with a tragedy, or in any case with the tragical aspect of the mourning play, when tragical historical events have been made present in the centre of the work itself. The central concept here is the invasion of real life into the play: the moment when eine geschichtliche Zeit in die Spielzeit einbricht50 just as real life invades the legal order (see above). Schmitt changes the distinction Benjamin made between mourning play and tragedy into a distinction between different forms of tragedy.51 At this point, Schmitt appears to oppose the consequences of a consistently maintained constructivism, as it can be found in Benjamin. Schmitt claims that there are exceptions to every rule, exceptions such as Hamlet: In times of religious schisms, world and world history lose their fixed forms and a human problem becomes visible from which no purely aesthetic consideration can create the hero of a drama of revenge. Historical reality is stronger than all aesthetics, stronger even than the most brilliant subject. The writer of a tragedy had in mind a king in a very real sense, a king whose fate and character are a product of the division of his time.52 This shift, or perhaps even reversal, of the meaning of mourning play and tragedy is not suggested by Schmitt as a point of criticism, but it is connected to his express criticism of Benjamins interpretation of Hamlet. Benjamins use of Schmitts concept of sovereignty was definitely not in the spirit of its author, who writes: It seems to me, however, that [Benjamin] somewhat underestimates the difference between the situation on the island of England and that on the European continent, and thus also the difference between English drama and the baroque
48 49

[...] da die genannten Vorflle nicht so sehr Stoff als Kern der Kunst im Trauerspiele sind. (I, 242). Es unterscheidet sich darin von der Tragdie. Denn deren Gegenstand ist nicht Geschichte, sondern Mythos, [...] (I, 243). 50 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 46. 51 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 51. 52 In Zeiten der Glaubensspaltung verlieren Welt und Weltgeschichte ihre sicheren Formen und wird eine menschliche Problematik sichtbar, aus der keine rein sthetische Betrachtung den Helden eines Rache-Dramas zu schaffen vermag. Die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit ist strker als jede sthetik, strker auch als das genialste Subjekt. Ein Knig, der in seinem Schicksal und Charakter das Produkt der Zerrissenheit seines Zeitalters selber war, stand dem Verfasser der Tragdie in dessen eigener Existenz vor Augen. (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 31-32).

mourning play in seventeenth-century Germany. This difference is also essential for an interpretation of Hamlet, as this play cannot be understood with art- and cultural-historical categories such as Renaissance and Baroque. The difference can be characterized most economically and accurately with a slogan-like antithesis, the significance of which is symptomatic of the cultural history of the concept of the political. I mean the antithesis of barbaric and political.53 A moment before, Schmitt had already made some critical notes to Benjamins remark on the Christian character of Hamlet.54 Here Schmitt is of the opinion that the image Benjamin gives is all too undifferentiated, and that he neglects the fact that the figure of Hamlet unites the tragedy of the English monarchs government torn by religious strife and all sorts of theological subtleties.55 From a factual perspective, both points seek to correct a picture of the baroque mourning play which is deemed to be too generalizing. But Schmitt is not the kind of man merely to introduce nuances in an otherwise correct description. It is not the first time that Schmitt brings the fate of an English myth into the limelight: in 1938, the political symbol of the Leviathan and, in this case, its failure as a myth became the subject of a historical interpretation of early modern Europe.56 The history of England as it grows into a naval power towards the end of the sixteenth century (the time of Mary Stuart, mother of James I), an industrial power in the eighteenth century and finally a political and ideological world power in the subsequent century, has everything to do with the decay of the historical form which was characteristic of the political history of the Continent at the time: the state. In this matter, Schmitt quite pedantically puts Benjamin in his place.57 This England overgrows continental Europe politically, economically as well as ideologically. When in 1938 Schmitt drew attention to the subversion of the historical form of the state as imperium rationis by the liberalist separation between confessio and fides, the line of his argument here is the fact

53

Aber mir scheint, da er die Verschiedenheit der englisch-insularen mit der europisch-kontinentalen Gesamtlage und damit auch die Verschiedenheit des englischen Dramas gegenber dem barocken Trauerspiel des deutschen 17. Jahrhundert zu gering einschtzt. Die Verschiedenheit ist auch fr eine Deutung des Hamlet wesentlich, weil dieser mit kunst-und geistesgeschichtlichen Kategorien wie Renaissance und Barock im Kern nicht zu erfassen ist. Die Verschiedenheit lt sich am schnellsten und treffendsten mit einer schlagwortartigen Antithese kennzeichnen, deren Sinntrchtigkeit fr die Geistesgeschichte des Begriffs des Politischen symptomatisch ist. Es handelt sich um die Antithese von Barbarisch und Politisch. (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 64). 54 I, 334-335. 55 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 62-64. 56 Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Kln-Lvenich: Hohenheim Verlag, 1982). 57 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 65.

that Hamlet grows into a myth and a symbol of indecision,58 which Benjamin too foregrounds in his analysis of the German mourning play.59 An important distinction, a radical difference even, emerges between Benjamin and Schmitt in their respective thoughts on the relationship between history and theatre. Although Schmitt acknowledges the fact that the seventeenth century perceives the world and history itself as a stage, and that the world is therefore not differentiated from the theatre,60 there remains to Schmitt a fundamental externality in the relationship between history and theatre. Schmitt needs this externality, which also constitutes a primacy of the world over theatre, in order to make a distinction between tragedy and mourning play the distinction between theatre which carries the gravity of real life within itself and theatre which sees history merely as material for a romantic-subjective authorship. The source of tragedy is real history, and never a story, a word to which Schmitt refers with contempt.61 It seems to us that Benjamin is not only reluctant to accept this externality of real history to theatre, but, conversely, that he needs the image of history as theatre in order to distance himself from the former as we know from other texts, he does so in the name of an other history which refers to the Messianic redemption. It is hardly remarkable that Benjamin concentrates on the mourning play, which, although situated in the seventeenth century, is already part of the absolutist state cult of the sovereign (the merging of state and theatre), whereas Schmitt turns to an example which, in his eyes, has been a more important factor in the determination of European history than Baroque theatre, and in which real history is present in the theatre in the form of an absence and thus an externality. This is where Schmitt situates the superiority of tragedy: the gravity of what is given, and can thus not be invented, staged and played. This is the crucial sentence in Schmitts text: The indisputable reality then becomes the speechless rock against which the play breaks and the surf of real tragedy surges. This sentence makes the following, decisive conclusion possible: Here we find the last and insurmountable barrier of free poetic invention.62 Benjamins answer to this might have been that this speechless rock will be shattered by the divine violence, and that the work of art already refers to this Messianic possibility.
58

Apart from the taboo that rests on the mothers complicity to the murder of her husband, the metamorphosis of the avenger into a melancholic doubter is the second historical fact which breaks into the play (Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 22ff). 59 I, 249ff. 60 Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 42-43; see also Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel, I, 244-245. 61 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 12 and 48. 62 Die unumstliche Wirklichkeit ist der stumme Felsen, an dem das Spiel sich bricht und die Brandung der echten Tragik aufschumt. Hier ist die letzte und unbersteigbare Grenze freier dichterischer Erfindung. (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 47).

Inasmuch as a theology can be suspected behind these opposing views, we can conclude that Schmitts orientation is towards a Creator-God who provides man with the historical realities on which the latter must base his decisions, whereas Benjamins focus is on a Jewishgnostic Redeemer-God: the idea that real history will be ended by the Messiah. The first orientation will tend to see everything in the light of halting the decay of the given (a katechontic view of history), the second orientation considers everything in the light of the destruction of the given (a messianist view of history). It was probably the awareness, shared by both authors, that European history still revolves around theology, around unbridgeable theological differences and the incompatible views of history which they entail, which brought them in touch with each other but also separated them so cruelly. Because for a few years at least, Schmitt saw a katechontic force in Hitlers regime, a regime which was the death of Walter Benjamin. (translated from Dutch by Bram Mertens)