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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
418
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
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,
421
ALBERTO TOSCANO
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
423
ALBERTO TOSCANO
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 post-
liberal 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 so-
called Cold War does not put an end to it. This war is, accordingly, not a quasi-
war 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 valoriza-
tion 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 anti-
human 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.
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 land-
appropriation 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 post-
European 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, anti-
political 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
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 Kojeve 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
427
ALBERTO TOSCANO
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
429
ALBERTO TOSCANO
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.
2
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.
430
CARL SCHMITT IN BEIJING
3
Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratisation of the World (1939), available at: www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/
bureaucratisation/index.htm.
4
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Malcolm Imrie (trans), London: Verso, 1998.
5
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-WarTerror-
JWMueller-March2007.pdf. For the take-up of Schmitts theory of the partisan on the Left, see Jan-
Werner 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.
6
Schmitt in Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, p 13.
7
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.
8
Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, A C Goodson (trans), New Centennial Review 4(3), 2006, p 8.
9
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.
10
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 13.
11
See the principled and firmly negative response to this conundrum in Peter Hallward, Beyond Salvage,
South Atlantic Quarterly 104(2), 2005.
12
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.
13
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.
14
V I Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972, p 401.
15
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 35.
16
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.
431
ALBERTO TOSCANO
17
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Ellen Kennedy (trans), Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1988 [1923], chapter 3, Dictatorship in Marxist Thought.
18
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 36.
19
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
20
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
21
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 13.
22
Rodolphe Gasche, The Partisan and the Philosopher, New Centennial Review 4(3), 2006, p 10.
23
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, George Collins (trans), London: Verso, 2006, p 146.
24
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.
25
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.
26
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.
27
Slavoj Zizek, Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule, introduction to Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice
and Contradiction, London: Verso, 2007.
28
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 25.
29
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
30
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.
31
Mao Tse-Tung, Talk on Strategic Dispositions, New Left Review I/54, 1969, p 36.
32
Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War, in Six Essays on Military Affairs, Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1972.
33
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.
34
See Edward L Katzenbach, Jr and Gene Z Hanrahan, The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung,
Political Science Quarterly 70(3), 1955.
35
Francis F Fuller, Mao Tse-tung: Military Thinker, Military Affairs 22(3), 1958, p 143.
36
John Morgan Dederer, Making Bricks without Straw: Nathanael Greenes Southern Campaigns and
Mao Tse-Tungs Mobile War, Military Affairs 47(3), 1983.
37
Schmitt in Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, p 18.
38
See for instance, especially for the claim of Mao as a Titoist or nationalist communist leader, Donald S
Zagoria, Pacific Affairs 47(2), 1974.
39
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).
40
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
41
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.
432
CARL SCHMITT IN BEIJING
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.
42
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 131132.
43
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 137 and 140.
44
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).
45
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).
46
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.
47
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
48
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
49
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
50
Alexandre Kojeve*Carl Schmitt Correspondence, Erik De Vries (ed and trans), Interpretation 29(1),
2001. This is a fascinating document, as we see Schmitt struggling with Kojeves 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 Kojeve and Schmitt, see Muller, A Dangerous Mind.
51
See for instance Galli, Spazi politici, p 119.
52
Quoted in Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 70. My emphasis.
53
Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 71.
54
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.
55
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 222. In the third of these problems we can perhaps feel the
influence of Kojeve, who, in 1957, at Schmitts request, had delivered a talk in Dusseldorf entitled
Colonialism from a European Perspective, published in Interpretations 29(1), 2001.
56
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 223.
57
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 past-
oriented project, whose anti-European character has displaced any legitimacy or legality (p 237).
58
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 237.
59
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 244.
60
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 52.
61
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
62
On the third front, see Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 235.
63
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.
433