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Carl Schmitt in Beijing: partisanship, geopolitics and the demolition of the

Eurocentric world
Alberto Toscano

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2008

To cite this Article Toscano, Alberto(2008)'Carl Schmitt in Beijing: partisanship, geopolitics and the demolition of the Eurocentric

world',Postcolonial Studies,11:4,417 433

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Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 417433, 2008

Carl Schmitt in Beijing: partisanship,

geopolitics and the demolition of the
Eurocentric world

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ALBERTO TOSCANO

To each epoch*its own wars.

Lenin, marginal annotation to Clausewitzs On War

The iron cage of geopolitics

From Iraq to South Ossetia, theorists and pundits who have advocated a
return to geopolitical realism seem to have plentiful reasons to feel
vindicated.1 Though geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns have never
disappeared from the agenda, for the decade or so after the demise of the
Warsaw Pact they had discretely receded, leaving the limelight to proclamations of historical closure and liberal-democratic hegemony. Going by the
diagnoses of a new imperialism and the recent proclamations of an
imminent new Cold War, it appears that the twenty-first century has begun
on a rather different and, some might say, anachronistic footing, as
prophecies of the smoothing out of striated, nation-state power-politics
appear at the very least premature. Needless to say, the aim of this article is
not to adjudicate between world-views and forecasts, to judge whether behind
the semblances of repetition there may lie novel tendencies and possibilities.
Rather, I want to investigate what relationship, if any, can be articulated
between the forbidding scale of the geopolitical and the seemingly incommensurable dimensions of political subjectivity. This is motivated by a
conviction that, for the most part, the recent resurgence of interest in radical
theories of political subjectivity and militancy either evades or gives short
shrift to the problems generated by situating transformative, revolutionary or
emancipatory political action within the practico-inert constraints of the
geopolitical and everything that it may entail: economic competition, scarcity
of resources, biopolitics of populations, military calculations, and so on. For
political theory and philosophy too, then, a revisiting of Cold War themes
might prove salutary, reminding us that some of the more perceptive
examinations of the possibilities and impasses of political action*from
Merleau-Pontys Humanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic, to
Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason, but also works such as Isaac
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/08/04041717 # 2008 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790802456010

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ALBERTO TOSCANO

Deutschers Stalin*were forged in the midst of that dark but fecund postwar
period.
Thus, if we wish to reflect on the vicissitudes of political subjectivity in the
Cold War era, or even, following a recent coinage by Alain Badiou,2 to
resurrect some of its militant bodies, we are obliged to confront one of its
most redoubtable legacies: an amalgam of intense commitment and
uncompromising enmity, on the one hand, and of instrumental geopolitical
calculation, on the other. Needless to say, there is nothing surprising or
anomalous about the presence of a battle-hardened realism in the most
radically transformative of political movements. The angelic position*
turning away from the moment of Realpolitik for the sake of an uncertain
purism*has been regarded by most revolutionaries, and many reformers, as
an unacceptable capitulation. On the other hand, it is difficult not to see a
grain of truth in the many critical theories of a molar convergence affecting
the contenders in the Cold War, be it in Bruno Rizzis seminal work on the
bureaucratization of the world,3 the sundry theories of state capitalism, Guy
Debords integrated spectacle,4 and so on*all of which argued for the
presence of a simulacrum of antagonism whose function was to quash any
genuinely anti-systemic drives. The role of communist China, both in the
subjective perception and the objective unfolding of the Cold War, hugely
complicates this question. Through the vicissitudes of the Non-Aligned
Movement, the Sino-Soviet split and later rapprochement with the US, it
disturbed the tidy teleology of a convergence between two camps, but it also
presented, in its political doctrines and historical manifestations, several
remarkable embodiments of this aporia of the Cold War, between order and
commitment, revolution and realism. Much Cold War writing by American
observers*for instance in the pages of Military Affairs*posed this problem,
albeit in stark and often misleading dichotomies: was Maoism primarily
nationalist or anti-imperialist? Nativist or Leninist? Titoist (even) or
internationalist? Did communism trump geopolitical calculation or vice
versa?
Distant or antiquarian as such discussions may now seem, the often tragic
entanglement of the geopolitical strictures of state politics, on the one hand,
and the requirements of egalitarian or emancipatory projects, on the other,
endures as an unresolved legacy of the Cold War, all too easily elided by the
self-congratulations of a liberal-democratic West or a putative international
community that presumes to mediate these two moments in the best way
possible, as well as by a movementism that thinks these problems may be
simply bypassed or neutralized in the domains of social cooperation or civil
society. To explore this aporetic legacy, which neither an administrative
realism nor an angelic politics is capable of resolving, I want to take a detour
through an improbable but instructive attempt to think through the manner
in which the Chinese Revolution, with Mao at its helm, responded to the
problems of militant subjectivity and global politics in the Cold War: Carl
Schmitts comments on Mao in his 1963 The Theory of the Partisan, alongside
his 1969 Conversation on the Partisan with the German Maoist Joachim
Schickel (where Schmitt notes: At the time, I couldnt know the theoretical
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CARL SCHMITT IN BEIJING

and practical meaning that Mao would come to have . . . on a global level, so
to speak, for the whole world).5

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Maos new Nomos?

In The Theory of the Partisan*delivered by Schmitt as a kind of political
offering in Francos Spain, as attested by the rich discussion of the antiNapoleon guerrilleros and the reactionary paean to the Civil War as a war of
national liberation against communism*Mao, as represented by his military
thought, is a pivotal figure, simultaneously the practical and theoretical
culmination of a genealogy of the partisan which begins in the early 1800s in
Spain (the end and high-point of a precise development from Clausewitz
through Lenin to Mao6), and the potential harbinger of a new Nomos of the
Earth: a spatial, political and juridical ordering that would terminate the
anarchy that followed upon the disintegration of the Jus Publicum Europaeum*the concrete Eurocentric inter-state spatio-legal order (nomos) which
also doubles as the spatial order of European consciousness.7 For Schmitt,
Mao is a kind of pharmakon, both the dangerous hyper-political figure who
perfects a partisan political warfare which leaves no room for organized
contests between State and just enemies (Justus hostis) and the repository of
a hope that the deterritorialization of a Eurocentric global politics by
revolution and decolonization*in brief, by abstract universalism*will
finally settle into a post-Eurocentric order of great spaces, Grossraume, in
which Europe too will have its ordered place. So what does Schmitt mean
when he declares that we are faced with an essentially new stage of
partisanship, one at whose beginning we find the name of Mao Tse-tung?8
Reflecting on Schmitts estimation of Mao will permit us, through the
specific filter of the partisan, both to address the aforementioned aporia and
perhaps to provide some insight into the tensions and contradictions that
inhere in Schmitts own thinking, which seeks to combine an insight into
politics qua intensity with a distinctly reactionary or counter-revolutionary
concern for the primacy of order. In a recent article on Schmitt, which
touches on the theme of decolonization, Alberto Moreiras has claimed that
the political ontology implied in the notion of the nomos of the earth
deconstructs the political ontology ciphered in the friendenemy division, and
vice versa. They are mutually incompatible. For a determination of the political,
either the friendenemy division is supreme, or the nomos of the earth is supreme.
Both of them cannot simultaneously be supreme. The gap between them is
strictly untheorizable. If the friendenemy division obtains independently of all
the other antitheses as politically primary, then there is no nomos of the earth. If
there is a nomos of the earth, the nomos produces its own political divisions.9

In contrast to Moreiras, we could argue that Mao, for Schmitt, is precisely a

name for that which could come to fill in, through a globally effective political
practice, this untheorizable gap, or at least that he is the focus imaginaris for
the convergence of proper enmity on the one hand, and an international
spatio-legal order, on the other. Maos particular role will be caught up with
419

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ALBERTO TOSCANO

the specific manner in which he gives expression to what Schmitt regards as

the four co-determining criteria that circumscribe the seemingly boundless
problem of the partisan: irregularity, increasing mobility (or even motorization) in the conduct of warfare, intensity of political commitment, and what
Schmitt calls, after the Spanish historian Jover Zamora, the tellurian or
earth-bound character of the partisan.10
The uses of Schmitts typology and diagnosis for a revitalization of radical
politics in a geopolitical moment is of course very much an open question.11
But to begin to answer it, we need to home in on the crucial*albeit
ambiguous*distinction that governs Schmitts treatment of partisanship: the
one between Lenin and Mao. Indeed, even the Sino-Soviet split can be traced
back to this division within the communist figure of partisanship: The
ideological conflict between Moscow and Peking, which has grown ever
stronger since 1962, has its deepest origin in the concretely varying
[konkretverschiedenen] reality of true partisanship. In this respect, too, the
theory of the partisan proves to be the key to recognizing political reality.12
Several authors have pointed to the manner in which the First World War,
accompanied by Lenin with notebooks on Hegels Science of Logic and
Clausewitzs On War, served as a crucible for Lenins development of a unique
understanding of partisanship in warfare and politics.13 It is worth noting,
nevertheless, that already in one of his first writings, a critical review from
1895, Lenin, defining his position against the subjectivist populism of
Narodnik sociology and Peter Struves objectivist misinterpretation of
Marx, made the following declaration: materialism includes
partisanship . . . and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint
of a definite social group in any assessment of events.14 According to
Schmitt, it is precisely in articulating his position against the objectivism of
Struve that Lenin formulates the inexorability of conflict and of a new type of
warfare, beyond the system of states and the international legal order of the
Jus Publicum Europaeum, such that the partisan is both a military and a
philosophical figure. Schmitt even goes so far as to describe Lenins 1915
notebooks on Clausewitz as one of the greatest documents in world history
and the history of ideas.15
Pivotal to Schmitts reductive and fundamentally inimical portrait of Lenin
is that the latters thinking is grounded on the notion of absolute enmity, an
enmity that goes beyond the supposedly hate-less enmity that Schmitt had
originally posited as the basis for political distinction. Crucially, Schmitt sees
Leninist enmity as absolute because it eliminates all the containments and
coordinates provided by the European states-system which spanned from the
sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Revolutionary war and justice know
of no containment and are dominated by only one question: is there an
absolute enemy and who is it in concreto?16 Betraying a curious kind of
admiration, Schmitt notes that Lenin surpassed all other thinkers of
Marxism*which Schmitt had earlier in his career dubiously sundered into
its militant-political and its liberal-economic aspects17*precisely in his
seriousness about absolute enmity, and that
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knowledge of the enemy was the secret of Lenins enormous strike power. His
comprehension of the partisan rested on the fact that the modern partisan had
become the true irregular proper, in his vocation as the proper executor of
enmity, thus, the most powerful negation of the existing capitalist order.18

It was Lenins capacity to ally philosophy with the partisan which, according to
Schmitt, unleashed new, explosive forces and led to the demolition of the
whole Eurocentric world.19 As Schmitt wistfully remarks, Joseph de Maistre
had already warned against the real danger, namely an association of
philosophy with the elemental forces of insurrection.20 It is this alliance or
association that engenders the political move from the containment provided
by regulated enmity between dominant European states to Lenins global civil
war, and from the real enemy to the absolute enemy. Thus, we encounter here
a crucial problem: is the world revolutionary a partisan? In other words, does
the figure of the partisan actually conceal a fundamental scission? After all,
the profound dislocation of legal and political space effected by the
Bolsheviks permanent global revolution appears to deny any principled role
for the fourth criterion of the partisan, that of territoriality. Lenin, by means
of what Schmitt presents as a philosophical abstraction, operates a shift from
the tellurian defensive character of the original partisans (the ones who had
fought against Napoleons troops in Spain or Germany), to a concept of the
partisan which gives birth to a situation of widespread and offensive
irregularity, thereby threatening to engulf any political order whatsoever. It
was the grounded, or tellurian, character of partisanship that for Schmitt
immunized partisan insurrections from the absolutism of an abstract
justice.21 It is because of this partisan abstraction, this move from relative
partiality and contained enmity to absolute partisanship and global civil war,
that Schmitt paints Leninism in much the same tones as Burke painted the
epidemical fanaticism of the French Revolution, as a levelling war machine
that will eliminate the ordered differences (and hierarchies) of production,
appropriation and distribution which alone sustain the conservation of order.
It is in this respect that partisanship is, as Rodolphe Gasche perspicuously
notes, a historical phenomenon that jeopardizes all political distinctions by
precisely making distinction absolute.22 And philosophy itself, to quote
Derrida, thereby represents the properly productive agency of the purely
political and hence of pure hostility.23
In this respect, Marxism, as enacted by Lenin, goes from being the theory
that seeks to provide the objective conditions of partisanship to the
instrument of the destruction of any order within which regular partiality
and partisanship could be intelligible. The Lenin who we had witnessed
seeking to establish the objectivity of partisan subjectivation becomes*in his
thinking of civil war and dual power, in the dissolution of the distinction
between order and state of exception*the harbinger of the collapse of any
order within which criteria would be given for legal and political distinction
or demarcation.
It is on the basis of his portrayal of Lenin and Leninism as purveyors of
a revolutionary abstraction that would unhinge any spatio-legal order,
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heralding an age of absolute disoriented enmity, that Schmitt turns to Mao

and the Chinese brand of communist partisanship as the only katechon, or
bulwark, against dis-order and absolute enmity.24 That is because Maos
revolution is fundamentally more telluric than Lenins, not being led, as
Schmitt sinisterly notes, by emigrants.25 Not only that, but, as Schmitt
remarks commenting on Maos poem Kunlun, he presages a new Nomos of the
Earth based on large regional blocs, and forms of ordered, true enmity that
resist reduction to a global, absolute enmity.
If heaven were my garrison, I would draw my sword
And strike you into three pieces:
One as a present for Europe,
One for America,
But one left over for China,
And peace would rule the world.

The metaphor of cutting and ordering, of a peace founded on the distinction

between Grossraume, could not but attract the postwar Schmitt, resigned to
the collapse of Eurocentrism but persevering with his twofold struggle against
the abstract universalisms of liberalism and communism. In effect, Mao,
juxtaposed to Lenin*who is in an important sense Schmitts absolute
theoretical enemy*is the cipher for the third possible avenue for a
recomposition of the link between Ordnung and Ortung, order and location,
which Schmitt had anticipated in The Nomos of the Earth. After considering
either the imposition of a single (US or USSR) global sovereignty or the
emergence of a primus inter pares (American) hegemon, Schmitt rehearses
what appears to be his most cherished option: A combination of several
independent Grossraume or blocs could constitute a balance, and thereby
could precipitate a new order of the earth.26
Facets of the partisan
Aside from Maos role as a largely chimerical stand-in for such a coming
nomos*one so curiously at odds with his image as a Marxist Lord of
Misrule27*is there something that his appearance in the Theory of the
Partisan, as an improbable hinge between the nomic and the political, can
contribute to an understanding of Chinas politics in the Maoist period? Can
a new nomos at all be considered one of the legacies of Maoism? In order to
sketch an answer to these questions I would like to reconsider the legacy of
Mao in terms of Schmitts four criteria of partisanship.
To the extent that the partisan signals an increasing indiscernibility
between the militarization of politics and the politicization of military affairs,
the first criterion*irregularity*extends beyond the domain of battle
strategies to affect the political field itself. Though, as some military writers
have pointed out, the role of irregularity is never total*to the extent guerrilla
war is combined with ordered strategic offensive in the figure of the mobile
war*irregularity points us to a crucial problem arising when the model of the
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CARL SCHMITT IN BEIJING

partisan is incorporated into the normal field of politics*to wit that, in the
legal context that preoccupies Schmitt, normative regulation [is] judicially
impossible.28 Translated into a political vocabulary, this intimates that
partisanship undoes any containment of political intensity (the katechon once
again . . . ), opening up the possibility of absolute enmity but also that of a
war that is always, at least potentially, global and civil. Or, in Schmitts own
words: The irregularity of class struggle calls not just the military line but the
whole edifice of political and social order into question.29 Fighters in the
class struggle are thus in a sense caught up in a battle against the nomos, they
are antinomic militants. But the question then arises, as some might argue it
did in the Cultural Revolution, of whether there can be a politics of and in
irregularity, a politics without a pre-given measure that still succeeds in
following principles and constructing a line.30 This is also the issue of the uses
of internal strife and the question of violence that inevitably attaches to it, as
in the following talk by Mao from July 1967:
We must not be afraid of rows. The bigger they are the better. With seven or eight
rows things are bound to be sorted out properly and to some effect. No matter
what sort of rows there are we must not be afraid of them, because the more
afraid we are the more trouble there will be. But we must not shoot. It is bad to
shoot at any time.31

When we move into the confines of a formed state, after a civil war, is
irregularity possible? Can it be framed? Measured? And what are the pitfalls
of the reliance on a politicized army for a particular amalgam of regularity
and irregularity? The partisan is endowed with a logic of contagion: once a
partisan enters the field, as Napoleon already noted, and Schmitt repeatedly
stressed, all must behave as partisans*but what are the effects of this
deregulation on the political field?
The second criterion, that of mobility, also involves what we could call the
introjection of military and strategic concerns into political organization, just
as it is driven, as Schmitt recognizes throughout, by an exquisitely political
will. Of course, much could be said about mobility in terms of how it gives
rise to a different space than that of traditional territorial politics, one in
which the partisan, endowed with unprecedented flexibility (a key concept in
Maos military writings),32 operates, following Schmitt, in a kind of invisible
depth.33 Above all, mobility can be regarded as a kind of temporalization of
space, as in Maos dictum of trading space for time.34 Mobility is not simply
a technical capacity to master space, but the strategic advantage that comes
with rapid changes and relative invisibility, the non-uniformed bearing that
derives from its irregular status. But what happens when the panoply of
militant precepts that govern the movements of the partisan army permeate
the field of peacetime political activity? The primacy of psychological
strategies and political manoeuvres in the conduct of the protracted war is
already evident. In a 1958 article on Maos military thought in Military
Affairs, which focuses on the role of psychological disintegration and what
the author calls parasitic cannibalism (i.e. using the enemy as provider of
troops and materiel), the Sian incident*involving the kidnapping and release
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of Chiang Kai-shek to foment a united anti-Japanese front*is summed up by

the author as follows: The Communists had devised a new way to make
something out of nothing.35 For Schmitt, this generative function of
mobility*of making bricks without straw36*and its way of making oneself
invisible to the enemy, extends fully into the political field. As he remarks, in
the interview with Schickel:
I am not a Mao-expert such as yourself, but I was always struck by what I read in
his writings years ago: that when one notices that enemy groups are developing in
ones midst one should let the weeds grow. One must let the weeds grow: then it is
easier to distinguish, then it is easier to tear it out, and then there is more and
better fertiliser. This is very interesting in what concerns the concept of the
political. I imagine that someone would note this sentence down, to remember it
as a grandiose but also dangerous users guide, and that, were he to be stopped
at an enemy checkpoint he would say: I am an amateur gardener, and this is an
instruction for my vegetable garden. You see, that also belongs to this
submersion. Now I realise how far our language is from Chinese, since, when
we think about mobility, we cant think about something of this sort.37

This suggestion regarding the manner in which Maos mobilizes the concept
of the political*that is, the concept of enmity and hostility*in a novel
manner, introduces us to the third criterion, that of political commitment. The
role of this element in the formation of a partisan army*which, as Schmitt
notes, depends on a notion of the party long before it enters into the
constitution of a state*cannot be overestimated, and the politicization of the
military is of course integral to Maos handling of war. But if we link
commitment to mobility, we are forced to ask whether the kind of mobility
which Schmitt recognizes in Mao is compatible with a form of commitment
that could maintain its fidelity to certain collectively shareable, transmissible
principles rather than being overdetermined at every step by a mobile, and
often unpredictable, enmity, and by more or less invisible or submerged
manoeuvres against the weeds. Once again, the issue is whether the
formidably effective dynamic of the partisan can in any sense be moulded,
harnessed and put to use, or whether its boundlessness, its uncircumscribable
and contagious character, leads it to undermine the construction of a
collective political line.
For Schmitt, it is of course the fourth criterion, the telluric or earth-bound
figure of the partisan, which is offered as a kind of containment of its
disruptive mutability. In his hopeful estimation of Mao, then, Schmitt seems
to throw us back onto the idea of a nativist, nationalist, or even Titoist
Mao*the kind rather benevolently appearing in American military analyses
in the 1970s, which juxtapose Soviet Leninist expansionism to Maos stress
on the self-reliance at the heart of a peoples war*analyses which note the de
facto disinterest of the Chinese in directly fomenting world revolution, and
the fact that interference is ruled out even in Lin Biaos text on the peoples
war (eventually Deng would promote this view of a non-interfering Chinese
communism systematically, with his declarations that China had no tendency
to hegemonism).38 But Schmitt himself, to the extent that the telluric
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criterion serves as the hinge between the discourse on the partisan and the
idea of a new nomos, does not limit himself to a rather banal view of Mao as a
nationalist. Rather, he depicts the telluric stance within an ongoing global
context of conflict as the point of conversion of absolute revolutionary
partisanship into real, but determinate, enmity*the precondition for a postliberal and post-Leninist nomos:
The question, however, is whether the enmity can be contained and regulated,
that is, whether it represents relative or absolute enmity. The warring party alone
must decide this on its own account. For Mao, thinking from the instance of the
partisan, the present-day peace is only an apparition of real enmity. Even the socalled Cold War does not put an end to it. This war is, accordingly, not a quasiwar and quasi-peace, but an operation of real enmity, depending on how things
stand, with other than openly violent means. Only weaklings and illusionists
could deceive themselves about it.39

Schmitt, it should be noted, oscillates throughout his work, without ever

achieving any kind of synthesis or solution, between the existential valorization of politics as real enmity (as evident in his repugnance for a depoliticized
liberal end of history) and the search for a spatial order that would enable a
common bracketing of war40 (hence his take on Wilsonian liberal humanism
as the turn towards a discriminating concept of war, which is to say a war
waged in the name of humanity against enemies reduced to the rank of antihuman criminals).41 To put it in more classical terms, he struggles in his
thinking between the merely conservative and the militantly reactionary, or
between the counter-revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary. Though the
critique of liberal democracy and the hostility towards socialism are
invariant, the radical aspect of his thinking tends to be coded in terms of
political theory (Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, The Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy, and even Theory of the Partisan), while the anxious
search for global order is mediated through the critical and metaphysical
history of international law (The Nomos of the Earth, prefigured by
innumerable texts on law, legality and legitimacy). But much of this
oscillation, as well as Schmitts peculiar picture of Mao and his attempt to
anticipate a new order in the midst of the Cold War, becomes difficult to
grasp if we do not confront a question that pervades both Schmitts account
of the demise of Jus Publicum Europaeum and his reflections on the postwar
order and what kind of politics it may permit: this is the question of
colonialism*which is to say also of decolonization and anti-colonialism.
Anti-colonialism and the global order
The Nomos of the Earth is unequivocal about the origins of the crisis of the
Eurocentric dispensation, which Schmitt dates to circa 1890, beginning an
agony which only ends with the October Revolution and Versailles, that is
with Lenin and Wilson. The ordered enmity that pervaded Europe under the
Jus Publicum Europaeum (the second planetary nomos after the Respublica
Christiana, whose theological notion of just war is surpassed by the theory
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and practice of the justus hostis, the just enemy) was enabled for Schmitt by
the radical asymmetry between the European space of regulated conflict and
the extra-European space of conquest. This difference was incarnated in a
number of concrete legal devices, among which Schmitt emphasizes the
amity lines which bounded the domain beyond which various forms of
plunder, predation and extra-territorial were permitted, though in such a way
as not to interfere with the intra-European order. Typically, Schmitt provides
a disenchanted and realist portrayal of the logic of dispossession while
simultaneously valorizing a Eurocentrism disturbingly stripped of pastoral,
paternalistic or liberal-imperialist justifications. Thus, he writes, in a
particularly brutal and distinctive passage:
From the standpoint of the discovered, discovery as such was never legal.
Neither Columbus nor any other discoverer appeared with an entry visa issued
by the discovered princes. Discoveries were made without prior permission of the
discovered. Thus, legal title to discoveries lay in a higher legitimacy. They could
be made only by peoples intellectually and historically advanced enough to
apprehend the discovered by superior knowledge and consciousness. To
paraphrase one of Bruno Bauers Hegelian aphorisms: a discoverer is one who
knows his prey better than the prey knows himself, and is able to subjugate him
by means of superior education and knowledge.42

The real problem lay not in the resistance of the natives but in a strictly
European shortcoming, which had already begun to mine the foundations of
the spatial order as the latter was being projected onto the globe. The key
problem for Schmitt was to be found in the legitimacy of the landappropriation of American territory as a process jure gentium, and in the
formidable task of translating the parameters of intra-European state conflict
on a global scale, into a a new, interstate, Eurocentric, spatial order of the
Earth.43
Thus the demise of the Eurocentric nomos is depicted as a more-or-less
endogenous process*rather than one caused by external resistance. Crucially,
however, it is a process enabled by the rise of the liberal-universalist postEuropean power, the United States. Africa is the site of the signs of the
coming collapse, and the rise of what Schmitt perceives as a disorienting, antipolitical and economistic form of planetary liberalism. Speaking of the
infamous scramble for Africa, he writes:
The United States participated in a thoroughly effective manner. It gained a kind
of foothold in the Republic of Liberia, which had been recognized since 1848.
Moreover, the United States assumed a decisive position when, on April 22,
1884, it recognized the flag of the International Congo Society, which was not a
state. This opened the door to the confusion, whereby an international colony was
treated as an independent state. The core concept of the traditional interstate
European international law thus was thrown into disorder.44

Thus, a process triggered by Europes incapacity to give legal-political form to

its planetary domination is prolonged by an incipient American hegemony,
which no longer treats land-appropriation*the concrete localization of
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juridical order*as the primary concrete legal and political reality. Schmitts
anxiety at this full-blown emergence of a new, capitalist imperialism45 is
manifest. Implicitly recognizing the problematic link between universalism
and decolonization which would structure much of the Cold War,46 Schmitt
nostalgically regards the entrance of the colonized onto the stage of history as
the death knell of what he euphemistically calls the bracketing of war (which
is unsurprising, since the colonized and the conquered lay precisely beyond
the brackets, over the amity lines). He asks, rhetorically, What essentially
did it mean when other, non-European states and nations from all sides now
took their place in the family or house of European nations and states?47 The
pathos this question elicits speaks volumes about Schmitts coordinates: a
headlong leap into the nothingness of a universality lacking any grounding in
space or on land.48 The collapse of the nomos gives rise to nothing less than
the timeless nemesis of the conservative thinker, anarchy:
a disorganized mass of more than 50 heterogeneous states, lacking any spatial or
spiritual consciousness of what they once had had in common, a chaos of
reputedly equal and equally sovereign states and their dispersed possessions, in
which a common bracketing of war was no longer feasible, and for which not
even the concept of civilization could provide any concrete homogeneity.49

Or, as Schmitt wrote in a wistful poem to Alexandre Koje`ve in 1957, die

ganze welt wird melting pot (the whole world becomes a melting pot).50
Numerous commentators have noted that Schmitts vision of Grossraume, or
large spaces, is an ideologically laundered version of his explicitly Nazi
writings of the 1930s,51 but it is the merit of Enzo Traverso, following in the
footsteps of Arendts Imperialism, to have stressed the extent to which the
spatio-political justification of Nazi German expansionism is explicitly
continuous with the theory and practice of European colonialism. The
ideological matrix for the treatment of colonial space in The Nomos of the
Earth, as discussed above, is evident in the following lapidary statement from
the 1941 text Vo lkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung: The non-European space
was without masters [herrenlos], uncivilized or only semi-civilized, a territory
for colonization and the object of conquest by European powers which
thereby became empires, thanks to their colonies overseas. So far, the colonies
have been the spatial element upon which European law is founded.52 Traversos
commentary is worth reproducing:
In substance, said Schmitt, German imperialism upset the European balance and
attacked its laws, but its action was certainly in line with the Western tendency. In
other words, the Germans were simply applying in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic
States, and Russia exactly the same principles and methods as those already
adopted by France and the United Kingdom in Africa and Asia.53

In other words, the underlying postulate of the Jus Publicum Europaeum is

to be found in colonial expansion, and the catastrophe of an unbracketed or
total war in Europe must be understood, as Arendt insisted, as the
consequence of the return to European soil of the barbarity*the genocides
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ALBERTO TOSCANO

and administrative massacres*that was previously shunted beyond the

amity lines.
For reasons which it would be otiose to go into, such a reflexive
understanding of the link between colonialism and Nazism is perhaps the
key blind spot of Schmitts thinking. Yet it is interesting to see that after The
Nomos of the Earth and its treatment of the erosion of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum in the Age of Empire, Schmitt does nevertheless tackle the
question of anti-colonialism. In effect, he does so in a talk given in Spain in
1962, only a few days after the addresses that form the basis of The Theory of
the Partisan. The talk is entitled The World Order after the Second World
War.54 Surveying the Cold War as an uncertain nomic interregnum, for
which neither universalism nor the rule of law can serve as compasses (The
UN doesnt mean anything, he quips, anticipating John Bolton), Schmitt
identifies three new problems, which had yet to make themselves felt at the
cessation of hostilities in 1945: anti-colonialism, the conquest of space and
the industrial development of underdeveloped territories through the aid of
developed countries.55 Now, though one might factor in a certain amount of
pandering to his Francoist audience, undoubtedly jealous of its few remaining
colonial territories (the Western Sahara, Spanish Guinea), it is striking*but
not at all surprising*to see Schmitt, so empathetic with the cause of the
tellurian partisan, the sentinel of the earth against impersonal foreign
powers, treating anti-colonialism as rarely more than anti-European
propaganda.56 Where the long history of anti-colonial struggles might have
given Schmitt plenty of material for his phenomenology of the partisan (from
the Mahdist war to the Wahhabi movement in India), he instead opts for the
ultimately unsustainable choice*especially in light of the planetary situation
he is trying to address*of treating the genealogy of the partisan as internal to
the Eurocentric world, only to abruptly transport it, via Lenin, to Maos
China. The temporal qualification of Schmitts dismissal of anti-colonialism
is also telling. Reacting to Krishna Menons declaration, after Indias 1961
annexation of Goa, that another, non-European international law was
needed, Schmitt despairs at the fact that today, everything European is on
the defensive, precisely because of the patent spatial character of anticolonialism. Ignoring the political content of non-alignment (which he
cannot but regard as a sterile hybrid of Leninism and Wilsonianism),
Schmitts perfunctory verdict is as follows:
Anti-colonialism as a phenomenon accompanies the destruction of [a purely
Eurocentric spatial order]; it is oriented solely backwards, towards the past, and
its aim is to liquidate a condition that was valid until today. Putting aside moral
postulates and the criminalization of European nations, anti-colonialism has
been incapable of producing a single idea for a new order.57

Again, reading this text alongside Schmitts contemporaneous reflections on

the partisan it is difficult to ignore the double standard which allows the
conservative, past-oriented, defensive and rooted drive of the European (antiNapoleonic) partisan to be nostalgically eulogized, while anti-colonial
struggle is reduced to negative propaganda.
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Aside from Schmitts avowed Eurocentrism and his vituperation of the

imperialism of peoples of colour,58 there is perhaps a more important reason
for his unalloyed and in a sense contradictory hostility to anti-colonialism:
the link between decolonization and the pre-eminence of his old universalist
foes, the US and the USSR. Discussing the rising importance of aid and
development policies towards more-or-less non-aligned countries, Schmitt
notes that previously colonized space seems to be the territory predestined
for this new kind of neutrality. Perhaps we can find the explanation for this in
the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union have in common the
ideology of anti-colonialism.59 Though approaching the question from the
angle of development, Schmitt here reconnects with a theme he had already
broached in his lectures on the partisan, namely the link between that figure
of militant resistance and its world political context:
the interconnectedness with world-political fronts and contexts, has likewise long
since been brought to bear on our common awareness. The autochthonous
defenders of the home soil, who died pro aris et focis [for our altars and our
hearths], the national and patriotic heroes who went into the woods, all
elemental, telluric force in reaction to foreign invasion: it has all come under
an international and transnational central control that provides assistance and
support, but only in the interest of its own quite distinct world-aggressive
purposes and that, depending on how things stand, either protects or abandons.
At this point the partisan ceases to be essentially defensive. He becomes a
manipulated cog in the wheel of world-revolutionary aggression. He is simply
sent to slaughter, and betrayed of everything he was fighting for, everything the
telluric character, the source of his legitimacy as an irregular partisan, was rooted
in.60

We have come full circle. The attempt to salvage the moment of the political
in a space of non-state legal-political disorientation, and to do so through the
most minimal and most conservative of figures*the telluric partisan*is once
again plunged into the nothingness of a universality lacking any grounding in
space or on land.61
Conclusion
Why Mao then? Despite the provocative and in many respects illuminating
dimensions of Schmitts strange infatuation with the Great Helmsman, with
the paradoxical figure of a sovereign partisan, we are obliged to conclude that
Mao is ultimately the cipher or stopgap for many of the tensions and
inconsistencies, both immanent and conjunctural, that beset Schmitts
thought as it grapples with its times.
Having already postulated the desire for a new multipolar nomos of large
spaces in The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt turns to Mao as a kind of
vanishing point where partisanship, the political and global order might
meet, as well as the possible fulcrum for a third front that would counter the
mirrored abstract universalisms of the US and USSR.62 Though he both
recognizes and is clearly beguiled by the multifaceted and contradictory
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character of Maos thought and practice*which he schematically reduces to

a tension between the partisan and the revolutionary*the logic of Schmitts
position obliges him to enact two untenable separations: of Mao from Lenin,
and of Mao from anti-colonialism. We might even hazard that it is precisely
Schmitts fierce Eurocentrism which pushes him to Sinify Mao, in an
attempt to purge him from the malady of Europe, abstract universalism, the
very wellspring of the hatred of colonialism which Schmitt repeatedly
condemns.63 Ironically, this is not so far from the fantasy of a depoliticized
multipolarity, of a virtuous balance of powers and civilizations, which today
features in much writing about the rise of China.
But though Schmitts Mao remains chimerical and his orientation
untenable, not to mention profoundly unpalatable, the attempts by this great
reactionary to get to grips with the militant and geopolitical turmoil of the
Cold War do bequeath us a set of questions and conundrums that might in
turn serve as testing grounds for tackling the hiatus between political
subjectivity and global politics with which we are confronted today. First
of all, and with specific reference to Mao and the Chinese Revolution, we are
led to ask how, after the completion of a war of national liberation, one might
articulate the internal issues of partisanship (mobilization, class enmity,
contradictions among the people, social and political organization, etc.) with
all of those international and geopolitical elements that Schmitt synthesizes
under the rubric of the nomos. Is the condition for a perpetuation of
partisanship within the de facto adoption of a multipolar policy of great
spaces without? Or, conversely, is the stabilization of Grossraume, as Schmitt
seems to intimate in his more Hobbesian moments, a ruse that will neutralize
any form of political life within these large internally homogeneous spaces?
If the option of a world revolution is abandoned, or differentially
territorialized, what kind of relationships can exist between different partisan
movements with comparable principles? To think through these questions,
bequeathed by Schmitts brief encounter with Mao, is perhaps to try to
reformulate*revisiting the relation between partisanship, war, the state, and
the geopolitical*a question which dominated Chinese communist discourse
and which has once again come to the fore today, a question that demands to
be profoundly recast and which concerns precisely the gap between militancy
and geopolitics, subjectivity and the global order: what is anti-imperialism?

Notes
1

The literature is vast, but see (for an establishment perspective) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand
Chessboard: American Power and its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1998, and (from
a critical and oppositional stance) Peter Gowan, The New American Century?, The Spokesman 76,
2002. I have dealt with the anti-political effects of geopolitics, with specific reference to the question of
energy resources, in Petropolitics as Retropolitics, Site 20, 2007.
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Alberto Toscano (trans), London: Continuum, 2009. Badious
discussion of Mao and the figure of the state revolutionary in this book is perhaps an index of the
challenge posed to contemporary radical thought by the endurance of statist and geopolitical (as well as
geoeconomic) logics.

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Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratisation of the World (1939), available at: www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/
bureaucratisation/index.htm.
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Malcolm Imrie (trans), London: Verso, 1998.
Carl Schmitt, interviewed in Joachim Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1993,
p 13. There is of course a burgeoning, and sometimes rather monotonous, literature on Schmitts
capacity to anticipate or analyse our present predicament, from Agambens influential variations on
Schmitts account of sovereignty and the state of exception, to suggestions that Schmitt, rather than Leo
Strauss, is the real eminence grise behind the Bush administrations executive assault on international
law. See Sanford Levinson, Torture in Iraq and the Rule of Law in America, Daedalus, Summer 2004,
and Scott Horton, Deconstructing John Yoo, Harpers Magazine, January 2008 (John Yoo, Professor
of Law at Berkeley, is the author of the memoranda to the US president on the legality of torture and the
exemption of illegal combatants from the Geneva Convention). For two even-handed liberal attempts
to tackle Schmitts relevance to our conjuncture, specifically framed in terms of his Theory of the
Partisan, see William E Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib, Constellations 13(1),
2006, and Jan-Werner Muller, An Irregularity that Cannot be Regulated: Carl Schmitts Theory of
the Partisan and the War on Terror, available at: www.princeton.edu/jmueller/Schmitt-WarTerrorJWMueller-March2007.pdf. For the take-up of Schmitts theory of the partisan on the Left, see JanWerner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-European Thought, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003, and Jean-Claude Monod, Penser lennemi, affronter lexception. Reflexions
critiques sur lactualite de Carl Schmitt, Paris: La Decouverte, 2006, esp. pp 6567.
Schmitt in Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, p 13.
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G L
Ulmen (trans), New York: Telos, 2003, p 231.
Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, A C Goodson (trans), New Centennial Review 4(3), 2006, p 8.
Alberto Moreiras, Beyond the Line: On Infinite Decolonization, American Literary History 17(3),
2005, pp 581582. The tension or contradiction between Schmitts concept of the political, as
characterized by the friend/enemy distinction, and his geo-nomic speculations had already been pointed
out by Raymond Aron in a 1963 letter to Schmitt; see Muller, A Dangerous Mind, chapter entitled
Visions of Global Order: Schmitt, Aron and the Civil Servant of the World Spirit. We should
nonetheless consider Gallis suggestion that the reason for this seeming contradiction is that Schmitts
concept of the political is explicitly tailored for the disoriented epoch that comes after the crisis of the
Eurocentric spatial order, for an interregnum between the nomos that finally expired at Versailles,
according to Schmitt, and a new order to come. See Carlo Galli, Spazi politici. Leta` moderna e leta`
globale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. For Galli, Schmitt takes seriously the non-spatiality of the Modern
(p 118). Where the nomos is the coincidence of Ordnung and Ortung, ordering and localization, the
political is marked by Ent-ortung, a kind of disorientation.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 13.
See the principled and firmly negative response to this conundrum in Peter Hallward, Beyond Salvage,
South Atlantic Quarterly 104(2), 2005.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 43. This is how the war of words between Mao and Khrushchev
was reported at the time: As for Khrushchevs withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the maneuver
confirmed Maos worst fears about vacillating Kremlin leadership, leaning first to adventurism, then
to capitulationism. Thundered Peking: It is 100% appeasement. A Munich pure and simple.
Imperialism is only a paper tiger. To which Khrushchev replied: The paper tiger has nuclear teeth.
Only a madman would speak of a new world war. What They Are Fighting About, Time Magazine,
12 July 1963.
See Jacob W Kipp, Lenin and Clausewitz: The Militarization of Marxism, 19141921, Military Affairs
49(4), 1985, and, for a broader perspective, Azar Gat, Clausewitz and the Marxists: Yet Another Look,
Journal of Contemporary History 27(2), 1992.
V I Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972, p 401.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 35.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 36. For the distinction between conventional, real and absolute
enmity in the context of Schmitts essay, see Gabriella Slomp, The Theory of the Partisan: Carl
Schmitts Neglected Legacy, History of Political Thought 26(3), 2005. Contrary to Schmitts contention
that it is abstract, placeless humanist-universalists who wreak the greatest violence, Herfried Munkler
has argued that it is tellurian or reactionary partisans who most destructively murder innocent
civilians and discard any distinction between legal and illegal combatant. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt
and the Road to Abu Ghraib, p 113.

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Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Ellen Kennedy (trans), Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1988 [1923], chapter 3, Dictatorship in Marxist Thought.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 36.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 13.
Rodolphe Gasche, The Partisan and the Philosopher, New Centennial Review 4(3), 2006, p 10.
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, George Collins (trans), London: Verso, 2006, p 146.
On the katechon or restrainer as a crucial figure of conservative thought, see the brief remarks in Perry
Anderson, The Intransigent Right: Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von
Hayek, in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, London: Verso, 2007, p 26. Much of the
secondary literature on Schmitt touches on this theme.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 40. The insinuations about Lenins rootless abstraction, and
Schmitts enduring and unabated hostility towards delocalized universalism (whether liberal or
Marxist), are a not very distant echo of the Nazi trope of Jewish-Bolshevism. On Schmitts
National-Socialist treatment of Jewish rootlessness, and the distinction between abstract Gesetz and
concrete Recht or nomos, see Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, Janet Lloyd (trans), New
York: Free Press, 2003. Traverso quotes the following lines about Jews and the law from the 1934 U ber
die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftslichen Denkens: There are people who live without land, without
state and without church, solely within the law; normative thought is the only kind that they consider
to be rational (p 139). For a sober treatment of the relation between Schmitts intellectual trajectory and
anti-Semitism, see Monod, Penser lennemi, pp 4661.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 355. Characteristically, Schmitt immediately adds that such a plural
normative spatialization would only be rational if such great spaces were differentiated meaningfully
and are homogeneous internally, maintaining right measures and meaningful proportions.
Slavoj Zizek, Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule, introduction to Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice
and Contradiction, London: Verso, 2007.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 25.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
See Michael Dutton, Passionately Governmental: Maoism and the Structured Intensities of
Revolutionary Governmentality, Postcolonial Studies 11(1), 2008. My essay is in a sense trying to
complement Duttons Schmittian discussion of Chinas revolutionary politics both by exploring
Schmitts own speculations on Mao, and by foregrounding the apparently anti-political thrust of the
geopolitical imaginary which subtends them.
Mao Tse-Tung, Talk on Strategic Dispositions, New Left Review I/54, 1969, p 36.
Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War, in Six Essays on Military Affairs, Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1972.
In partisan battle a complexly structured new space of action emerges, because the partisan does not
fight on an open field of battle nor on the same plane of open frontal war. Rather, he forces his enemy
into another space. To the space of the regular traditional theater of war he, thus, adds another, darker
dimension, a dimension of depth. Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, pp 4849.
See Edward L Katzenbach, Jr and Gene Z Hanrahan, The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung,
Political Science Quarterly 70(3), 1955.
Francis F Fuller, Mao Tse-tung: Military Thinker, Military Affairs 22(3), 1958, p 143.
John Morgan Dederer, Making Bricks without Straw: Nathanael Greenes Southern Campaigns and
Mao Tse-Tungs Mobile War, Military Affairs 47(3), 1983.
Schmitt in Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, p 18.
See for instance, especially for the claim of Mao as a Titoist or nationalist communist leader, Donald S
Zagoria, Pacific Affairs 47(2), 1974.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 42. Schmitt has the probity to foreground Maos ambivalence,
writing that there is an inner contradiction in Maos own situation, who combines a spaceless
[raumlosen], global-universal, absolute world-enemy*the Marxist class enemy*with a territorially
specific, real enemy of the Chinese-Asiatic defense against capitalist colonialism. It is the opposition of
the One World, of a political unity of earth and its humanity, to a set of Grora umen [large spatial areas]
that are rationally balanced both within and among one another (p 41).
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
Carl Schmitt, Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff (1938), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
2003. I refer to the recent Italian edition, Il concetto discriminatorio di guerra, Bari: Laterza, 2008, with
an introduction by the philosopher of law Danilo Zolo on Schmitts prophecy of current global war.

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While Zolos use of Schmitt for a critique of US military humanism is in many regards persuasive, he
fails to interrogate the profoundly reactionary (and counter-revolutionary) character of Schmitts legal
and political anti-universalism. For a critical discussion of Zolos recent writings, see Alberto Toscano,
Sovereign Impunity, New Left Review II/50, 2008.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 131132.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 137 and 140.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 217. My emphasis. Schmitt continues in the same vein: Toward the
end of the 19th century, European powers and jurists of European international law not only had ceased
to be conscious of the spatial presuppositions of their own international law, but had lost any political
instinct, any common power to maintain their own spatial structure and the bracketing of war (p 224);
leading to failed amity lines simultaneously overarched and undermined by a Eurocentrically conceived,
free, global economy ignoring all territorial borders (p 226*the rise of the US); and the collapse of Jus
Publicum Europaeum into a universal world law (p 227).
See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2005. It could be argued that it is precisely
the detachment of economic from extra-economic power that causes such consternation to Schmitt,
wedded as he is to the primacy of territorial appropriation over distribution and production, and
incapable of countenancing the fact that the economic hegemony of capital can extend far beyond the
limits of direct political domination (p 12).
See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, on the relationship between US and Soviet ideology,
decolonization and the political history of the Third World.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
Alexandre Koje`ve*Carl Schmitt Correspondence, Erik De Vries (ed and trans), Interpretation 29(1),
2001. This is a fascinating document, as we see Schmitt struggling with Koje`ves posthistorical
equanimity, his claim that appropriation [Nehmen] died with Napoleon and that Absolute Knowledge
is now incarnate in the guise of post-political administration (of which he is the anti-heroic
embodiment, the great European technocrat shuttling between meetings in Tunis and negotiations in
Bruxelles as he corresponds with Schmitt over the fate of the global order). Schmitt instead bemoans
that the State is dead now that it is no longer capable of war and death sentences; meaning that it no
longer makes history. On Koje`ve and Schmitt, see Muller, A Dangerous Mind.
See for instance Galli, Spazi politici, p 119.
Quoted in Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 70. My emphasis.
Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 71.
Schmitt spoke on the partisan in Pamplona on 15 March 1962, and in Saragossa on 17 March, and on
the world order in Madrid on 21 March 1962, where he was made an honorary member of the Instituto
de estudios politicos madrileno, directed by his host, interpreter and admirer Manuel Fraga, Minister of
Information and Tourism under Francos government from 1962 to 1969 and later ambassador to
London. The German text is Die Weltordnung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in Staat, Groraum, Nomos.
Arbeiten aud den Jahren 19161969, G. Maschke (ed), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995. My references
are to the Italian translation, in Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso. Saggi e interviste, Giorgio
Agamben (ed), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005.
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 222. In the third of these problems we can perhaps feel the
influence of Koje`ve, who, in 1957, at Schmitts request, had delivered a talk in Dusseldorf entitled
Colonialism from a European Perspective, published in Interpretations 29(1), 2001.
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 223.
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 225. Rather bizarrely, Schmitt treats the pure future of cosmic
conquest as the anti-phenomenon of anti-colonialism, viewed as a negative, destructive and pastoriented project, whose anti-European character has displaced any legitimacy or legality (p 237).
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 237.
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 244.
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 52.
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
On the third front, see Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 235.
In his sketch for a 1957 conference on the nomos of the Earth, Schmitt writes: The hatred of colonialism
is the hatred of taking [Nehmen]; it originates in a profound transformation of social and economic
concepts. Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 245.

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