Carl Schmitt in Beijing, Partisanship, Geopolitics and the Demolition of the Eurocentric World_Alberto Toscano

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

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 areturn to geopolitical realism seem to have plentiful reasons to feelvindicated.1 Though geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns have neverdisappeared from the agenda, for the decade or so after the demise of theWarsaw Pact they had discretely receded, leaving the limelight to proclama-tions of historical closure and liberal-democratic hegemony. Going by thediagnoses of a new imperialism and the recent proclamations of animminent new Cold War, it appears that the twenty-first century has begunon a rather different and, some might say, anachronistic footing, asprophecies of the smoothing out of striated, nation-state power-politicsappear at the very least premature. Needless to say, the aim of this article isnot to adjudicate between world-views and forecasts, to judge whether behindthe semblances of repetition there may lie novel tendencies and possibilities.Rather, I want to investigate what relationship, if any, can be articulatedbetween the forbidding scale of the geopolitical and the seemingly incom-mensurable dimensions of political subjectivity. This is motivated by aconviction that, for the most part, the recent resurgence of interest in radicaltheories of political subjectivity and militancy either evades or gives shortshrift to the problems generated by situating transformative, revolutionary oremancipatory political action within the practico-inert constraints of thegeopolitical and everything that it may entail: economic competition, scarcityof resources, biopolitics of populations, military calculations, and so on. Forpolitical theory and philosophy too, then, a revisiting of Cold War themesmight prove salutary, reminding us that some of the more perceptiveexaminations of the possibilities and impasses of political action*fromMerleau-Pontys Humanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic, toSartres 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

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

Deutschers Stalin*were forged in the midst of that dark but fecund postwarperiod.

Thus, if we wish to reflect on the vicissitudes of political subjectivity in theCold War era, or even, following a recent coinage by Alain Badiou,2 toresurrect some of its militant bodies, we are obliged to confront one of itsmost redoubtable legacies: an amalgam of intense commitment anduncompromising enmity, on the one hand, and of instrumental geopoliticalcalculation, on the other. Needless to say, there is nothing surprising oranomalous about the presence of a battle-hardened realism in the mostradically transformative of political movements. The angelic position*turning away from the moment of Realpolitik for the sake of an uncertainpurism*has been regarded by most revolutionaries, and many reformers, asan unacceptable capitulation. On the other hand, it is difficult not to see agrain of truth in the many critical theories of a molar convergence affectingthe contenders in the Cold War, be it in Bruno Rizzis seminal work on thebureaucratization of the world,3 the sundry theories of state capitalism, GuyDebords integrated spectacle,4 and so on*all of which argued for thepresence of a simulacrum of antagonism whose function was to quash anygenuinely anti-systemic drives. The role of communist China, both in thesubjective perception and the objective unfolding of the Cold War, hugelycomplicates this question. Through the vicissitudes of the Non-AlignedMovement, the Sino-Soviet split and later rapprochement with the US, itdisturbed the tidy teleology of a convergence between two camps, but it alsopresented, in its political doctrines and historical manifestations, severalremarkable embodiments of this aporia of the Cold War, between order andcommitment, revolution and realism. Much Cold War writing by Americanobservers*for instance in the pages of Military Affairs*posed this problem,albeit in stark and often misleading dichotomies: was Maoism primarilynationalist or anti-imperialist? Nativist or Leninist? Titoist (even) orinternationalist? Did communism trump geopolitical calculation or viceversa?

Distant or antiquarian as such discussions may now seem, the often tragicentanglement 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 theself-congratulations of a liberal-democratic West or a putative internationalcommunity that presumes to mediate these two moments in the best waypossible, as well as by a movementism that thinks these problems may besimply bypassed or neutralized in the domains of social cooperation or civilsociety. To explore this aporetic legacy, which neither an administrativerealism nor an angelic politics is capable of resolving, I want to take a detourthrough an improbable but instructive attempt to think through the mannerin which the Chinese Revolution, with Mao at its helm, responded to theproblems of militant subjectivity and global politics in the Cold War: CarlSchmitts comments on Mao in his 1963 The Theory of the Partisan, alongsidehis 1969 Conversation on the Partisan with the German Maoist JoachimSchickel (where Schmitt notes: At the time, I couldnt know the theoretical

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

Maos new Nomos?

In The Theory of the Partisan*delivered by Schmitt as a kind of politicaloffering in Francos Spain, as attested by the rich discussion of the anti-Napoleon guerrilleros and the reactionary paean to the Civil War as a war ofnational liberation against communism*Mao, as represented by his militarythought, is a pivotal figure, simultaneously the practical and theoreticalculmination of a genealogy of the partisan which begins in the early 1800s inSpain (the end and high-point of a precise development from Clausewitzthrough Lenin to Mao6), and the potential harbinger of a new Nomos of theEarth: a spatial, political and juridical ordering that would terminate theanarchy that followed upon the disintegration of the Jus Publicum Euro-paeum*the concrete Eurocentric inter-state spatio-legal order (nomos) whichalso doubles as the spatial order of European consciousness.7 For Schmitt,Mao is a kind of pharmakon, both the dangerous hyper-political figure whoperfects a partisan political warfare which leaves no room for organizedcontests between State and just enemies (Justus hostis) and the repository ofa hope that the deterritorialization of a Eurocentric global politics byrevolution and decolonization*in brief, by abstract universalism*willfinally settle into a post-Eurocentric order of great spaces, Grossraume, inwhich Europe too will have its ordered place. So what does Schmitt meanwhen he declares that we are faced with an essentially new stage ofpartisanship, one at whose beginning we find the name of Mao Tse-tung?8

Reflecting on Schmitts estimation of Mao will permit us, through thespecific filter of the partisan, both to address the aforementioned aporia andperhaps to provide some insight into the tensions and contradictions thatinhere in Schmitts own thinking, which seeks to combine an insight intopolitics qua intensity with a distinctly reactionary or counter-revolutionaryconcern for the primacy of order. In a recent article on Schmitt, whichtouches on the theme of decolonization, Alberto Moreiras has claimed that

the political ontology implied in the notion of the nomos of the earthdeconstructs the political ontology ciphered in the friendenemy division, andvice 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 isstrictly untheorizable. If the friendenemy division obtains independently of allthe other antitheses as politically primary, then there is no nomos of the earth. Ifthere 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 aname for that which could come to fill in, through a globally effective politicalpractice, this untheorizable gap, or at least that he is the focus imaginaris forthe convergence of proper enmity on the one hand, and an internationalspatio-legal order, on the other. Maos particular role will be caught up with

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the specific manner in which he gives expression to what Schmitt regards asthe four co-determining criteria that circumscribe the seemingly boundlessproblem of the partisan: irregularity, increasing mobility (or even motoriza-tion) in the conduct of warfare, intensity of political commitment, and whatSchmitt calls, after the Spanish historian Jover Zamora, the tellurian orearth-bound character of the partisan.10

The uses of Schmitts typology and diagnosis for a revitalization of radicalpolitics 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*albeitambiguous*distinction that governs Schmitts treatment of partisanship: theone between Lenin and Mao. Indeed, even the Sino-Soviet split can be tracedback to this division within the communist figure of partisanship: Theideological conflict between Moscow and Peking, which has grown everstronger since 1962, has its deepest origin in the concretely varying[konkretverschiedenen] reality of true partisanship. In this respect, too, thetheory 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 andClausewitzs On War, served as a crucible for Lenins development of a uniqueunderstanding of partisanship in warfare and politics.13 It is worth noting,nevertheless, that already in one of his first writings, a critical review from1895, Lenin, defining his position against the subjectivist populism ofNarodnik sociology and Peter Struves objectivist misinterpretation ofMarx, made the following declaration: materialism includespartisanship . . . and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpointof a definite social group in any assessment of events.14 According toSchmitt, it is precisely in articulating his position against the objectivism ofStruve that Lenin formulates the inexorability of conflict and of a new type ofwarfare, beyond the system of states and the international legal order of theJus Publicum Europaeum, such that the partisan is both a military and aphilosophical figure. Schmitt even goes so far as to describe Lenins 1915notebooks on Clausewitz as one of the greatest documents in world historyand the history of ideas.15

Pivotal to Schmitts reductive and fundamentally inimical portrait of Leninis that the latters thinking is grounded on the notion of absolute enmity, anenmity that goes beyond the supposedly hate-less enmity that Schmitt hadoriginally posited as the basis for political distinction. Crucially, Schmitt seesLeninist enmity as absolute because it eliminates all the containments andcoordinates provided by the European states-system which spanned from thesixteenth to the early twentieth century. Revolutionary war and justice knowof no containment and are dominated by only one question: is there anabsolute enemy and who is it in concreto?16 Betraying a curious kind ofadmiration, Schmitt notes that Lenin surpassed all other thinkers ofMarxism*which Schmitt had earlier in his career dubiously sundered intoits militant-political and its liberal-economic aspects17*precisely in hisseriousness about absolute enmity, and that

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knowledge of the enemy was the secret of Lenins enormous strike power. Hiscomprehension of the partisan rested on the fact that the modern partisan hadbecome the true irregular proper, in his vocation as the proper executor ofenmity, thus, the most powerful negation of the existing capitalist order.18

It was Lenins capacity to ally philosophy with the partisan which, according toSchmitt, unleashed new, explosive forces and led to the demolition of thewhole Eurocentric world.19 As Schmitt wistfully remarks, Joseph de Maistrehad already warned against the real danger, namely an association ofphilosophy with the elemental forces of insurrection.20 It is this alliance orassociation that engenders the political move from the containment providedby regulated enmity between dominant European states to Lenins global civilwar, and from the real enemy to the absolute enemy. Thus, we encounter herea crucial problem: is the world revolutionary a partisan? In other words, doesthe figure of the partisan actually conceal a fundamental scission? After all,the profound dislocation of legal and political space effected by theBolsheviks permanent global revolution appears to deny any principled rolefor the fourth criterion of the partisan, that of territoriality. Lenin, by meansof what Schmitt presents as a philosophical abstraction, operates a shift fromthe tellurian defensive character of the original partisans (the ones who hadfought against Napoleons troops in Spain or Germany), to a concept of thepartisan which gives birth to a situation of widespread and offensiveirregularity, thereby threatening to engulf any political order whatsoever. Itwas the grounded, or tellurian, character of partisanship that for Schmittimmunized partisan insurrections from the absolutism of an abstractjustice.21 It is because of this partisan abstraction, this move from relativepartiality and contained enmity to absolute partisanship and global civil war,that Schmitt paints Leninism in much the same tones as Burke painted theepidemical fanaticism of the French Revolution, as a levelling war machinethat 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 perspicuouslynotes, a historical phenomenon that jeopardizes all political distinctions byprecisely making distinction absolute.22 And philosophy itself, to quoteDerrida, thereby represents the properly productive agency of the purelypolitical and hence of pure hostility.23

In this respect, Marxism, as enacted by Lenin, goes from being the theorythat seeks to provide the objective conditions of partisanship to theinstrument of the destruction of any order within which regular partialityand partisanship could be intelligible. The Lenin who we had witnessedseeking to establish the objectivity of partisan subjectivation becomes*in histhinking of civil war and dual power, in the dissolution of the distinctionbetween order and state of exception*the harbinger of the collapse of anyorder within which criteria would be given for legal and political distinctionor demarcation.

It is on the basis of his portrayal of Lenin and Leninism as purveyors ofa revolutionary abstraction that would unhinge any spatio-legal order,

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heralding an age of absolute disoriented enmity, that Schmitt turns to Maoand the Chinese brand of communist partisanship as the only katechon, orbulwark, against dis-order and absolute enmity.24 That is because Maosrevolution is fundamentally more telluric than Lenins, not being led, asSchmitt sinisterly notes, by emigrants.25 Not only that, but, as Schmittremarks commenting on Maos poem Kunlun, he presages a new Nomos of theEarth based on large regional blocs, and forms of ordered, true enmity thatresist reduction to a global, absolute enmity.

If heaven were my garrison, I would draw my swordAnd 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 distinctionbetween Grossraume, could not but attract the postwar Schmitt, resigned tothe collapse of Eurocentrism but persevering with his twofold struggle againstthe abstract universalisms of liberalism and communism. In effect, Mao,juxtaposed to Lenin*who is in an important sense Schmitts absolutetheoretical enemy*is the cipher for the third possible avenue for arecomposition of the link between Ordnung and Ortung, order and location,which Schmitt had anticipated in The Nomos of the Earth. After consideringeither the imposition of a single (US or USSR) global sovereignty or theemergence of a primus inter pares (American) hegemon, Schmitt rehearseswhat appears to be his most cherished option: A combination of severalindependent Grossraume or blocs could constitute a balance, and therebycould 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 comingnomos*one so curiously at odds with his image as a Marxist Lord ofMisrule27*is there something that his appearance in the Theory of thePartisan, as an improbable hinge between the nomic and the political, cancontribute to an understanding of Chinas politics in the Maoist period? Cana new nomos at all be considered one of the legacies of Maoism? In order tosketch an answer to these questions I would like to reconsider the legacy ofMao in terms of Schmitts four criteria of partisanship.

To the extent that the partisan signals an increasing indiscernibilitybetween the militarization of politics and the politicization of military affairs,the first criterion*irregularity*extends beyond the domain of battlestrategies to affect the political field itself. Though, as some military writershave pointed out, the role of irregularity is never total*to the extent guerrillawar is combined with ordered strategic offensive in the figure of the mobilewar*irregularity points us to a crucial problem arising when the model of the

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partisan is incorporated into the normal field of politics*to wit that, in thelegal context that preoccupies Schmitt, normative regulation [is] judiciallyimpossible.28 Translated into a political vocabulary, this intimates thatpartisanship undoes any containment of political intensity (the katechon onceagain . . . ), opening up the possibility of absolute enmity but also that of awar that is always, at least potentially, global and civil. Or, in Schmitts ownwords: The irregularity of class struggle calls not just the military line but thewhole edifice of political and social order into question.29 Fighters in theclass struggle are thus in a sense caught up in a battle against the nomos, theyare antinomic militants. But the question then arises, as some might argue itdid in the Cultural Revolution, of whether there can be a politics of and inirregularity, a politics without a pre-given measure that still succeeds infollowing principles and constructing a line.30 This is also the issue of the usesof internal strife and the question of violence that inevitably attaches to it, asin the following talk by Mao from July 1967:

We must not be afraid of rows. The bigger they are the better. With seven or eightrows things are bound to be sorted out properly and to some effect. No matterwhat sort of rows there are we must not be afraid of them, because the moreafraid we are the more trouble there will be. But we must not shoot. It is bad toshoot at any time.31

When we move into the confines of a formed state, after a civil war, isirregularity possible? Can it be framed? Measured? And what are the pitfallsof the reliance on a politicized army for a particular amalgam of regularityand irregularity? The partisan is endowed with a logic of contagion: once apartisan enters the field, as Napoleon already noted, and Schmitt repeatedlystressed, all must behave as partisans*but what are the effects of thisderegulation on the political field?

The second criterion, that of mobility, also involves what we could call theintrojection of military and strategic concerns into political organization, justas it is driven, as Schmitt recognizes throughout, by an exquisitely politicalwill. Of course, much could be said about mobility in terms of how it givesrise to a different space than that of traditional territorial politics, one inwhich the partisan, endowed with unprecedented flexibility (a key concept inMaos military writings),32 operates, following Schmitt, in a kind of invisibledepth.33 Above all, mobility can be regarded as a kind of temporalization ofspace, as in Maos dictum of trading space for time.34 Mobility is not simplya technical capacity to master space, but the strategic advantage that comeswith rapid changes and relative invisibility, the non-uniformed bearing thatderives from its irregular status. But what happens when the panoply ofmilitant precepts that govern the movements of the partisan army permeatethe field of peacetime political activity? The primacy of psychologicalstrategies and political manoeuvres in the conduct of the protracted war isalready evident. In a 1958 article on Maos military thought in MilitaryAffairs, which focuses on the role of psychological disintegration and whatthe author calls parasitic cannibalism (i.e. using the enemy as provider oftroops 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 bythe author as follows: The Communists had devised a new way to makesomething out of nothing.35 For Schmitt, this generative function ofmobility*of making bricks without straw36*and its way of making oneselfinvisible to the enemy, extends fully into the political field. As he remarks, inthe interview with Schickel:

I am not a Mao-expert such as yourself, but I was always struck by what I read inhis writings years ago: that when one notices that enemy groups are developing inones midst one should let the weeds grow. One must let the weeds grow: then it iseasier to distinguish, then it is easier to tear it out, and then there is more andbetter fertiliser. This is very interesting in what concerns the concept of thepolitical. I imagine that someone would note this sentence down, to remember itas a grandiose but also dangerous users guide, and that, were he to be stoppedat an enemy checkpoint he would say: I am an amateur gardener, and this is aninstruction for my vegetable garden. You see, that also belongs to thissubmersion. Now I realise how far our language is from Chinese, since, whenwe think about mobility, we cant think about something of this sort.37

This suggestion regarding the manner in which Maos mobilizes the conceptof the political*that is, the concept of enmity and hostility*in a novelmanner, introduces us to the third criterion, that of political commitment. Therole of this element in the formation of a partisan army*which, as Schmittnotes, depends on a notion of the party long before it enters into theconstitution of a state*cannot be overestimated, and the politicization of themilitary is of course integral to Maos handling of war. But if we linkcommitment to mobility, we are forced to ask whether the kind of mobilitywhich Schmitt recognizes in Mao is compatible with a form of commitmentthat could maintain its fidelity to certain collectively shareable, transmissibleprinciples rather than being overdetermined at every step by a mobile, andoften unpredictable, enmity, and by more or less invisible or submergedmanoeuvres against the weeds. Once again, the issue is whether theformidably effective dynamic of the partisan can in any sense be moulded,harnessed and put to use, or whether its boundlessness, its uncircumscribableand contagious character, leads it to undermine the construction of acollective political line.

For Schmitt, it is of course the fourth criterion, the telluric or earth-boundfigure of the partisan, which is offered as a kind of containment of itsdisruptive mutability. In his hopeful estimation of Mao, then, Schmitt seemsto throw us back onto the idea of a nativist, nationalist, or even TitoistMao*the kind rather benevolently appearing in American military analysesin the 1970s, which juxtapose Soviet Leninist expansionism to Maos stresson the self-reliance at the heart of a peoples war*analyses which note the defacto disinterest of the Chinese in directly fomenting world revolution, andthe fact that interference is ruled out even in Lin Biaos text on the peopleswar (eventually Deng would promote this view of a non-interfering Chinesecommunism systematically, with his declarations that China had no tendencyto 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 theidea of a new nomos, does not limit himself to a rather banal view of Mao as anationalist. Rather, he depicts the telluric stance within an ongoing globalcontext of conflict as the point of conversion of absolute revolutionarypartisanship 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 alonemust decide this on its own account. For Mao, thinking from the instance of thepartisan, 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 thingsstand, with other than openly violent means. Only weaklings and illusionistscould deceive themselves about it.39

Schmitt, it should be noted, oscillates throughout his work, without everachieving any kind of synthesis or solution, between the existential valoriza-tion of politics as real enmity (as evident in his repugnance for a depoliticizedliberal end of history) and the search for a spatial order that would enable acommon bracketing of war40 (hence his take on Wilsonian liberal humanismas the turn towards a discriminating concept of war, which is to say a warwaged 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 histhinking between the merely conservative and the militantly reactionary, orbetween the counter-revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary. Though thecritique of liberal democracy and the hostility towards socialism areinvariant, the radical aspect of his thinking tends to be coded in terms ofpolitical theory (Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, The Crisis ofParliamentary Democracy, and even Theory of the Partisan), while the anxioussearch for global order is mediated through the critical and metaphysicalhistory of international law (The Nomos of the Earth, prefigured byinnumerable texts on law, legality and legitimacy). But much of thisoscillation, as well as Schmitts peculiar picture of Mao and his attempt toanticipate a new order in the midst of the Cold War, becomes difficult tograsp if we do not confront a question that pervades both Schmitts accountof the demise of Jus Publicum Europaeum and his reflections on the postwarorder and what kind of politics it may permit: this is the question ofcolonialism*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 theEurocentric dispensation, which Schmitt dates to circa 1890, beginning anagony which only ends with the October Revolution and Versailles, that iswith Lenin and Wilson. The ordered enmity that pervaded Europe under theJus Publicum Europaeum (the second planetary nomos after the RespublicaChristiana, 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 bythe radical asymmetry between the European space of regulated conflict andthe extra-European space of conquest. This difference was incarnated in anumber of concrete legal devices, among which Schmitt emphasizes theamity lines which bounded the domain beyond which various forms ofplunder, predation and extra-territorial were permitted, though in such a wayas not to interfere with the intra-European order. Typically, Schmitt providesa disenchanted and realist portrayal of the logic of dispossession whilesimultaneously valorizing a Eurocentrism disturbingly stripped of pastoral,paternalistic or liberal-imperialist justifications. Thus, he writes, in aparticularly 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 issuedby the discovered princes. Discoveries were made without prior permission of thediscovered. Thus, legal title to discoveries lay in a higher legitimacy. They couldbe made only by peoples intellectually and historically advanced enough toapprehend the discovered by superior knowledge and consciousness. Toparaphrase one of Bruno Bauers Hegelian aphorisms: a discoverer is one whoknows his prey better than the prey knows himself, and is able to subjugate himby means of superior education and knowledge.42

The real problem lay not in the resistance of the natives but in a strictlyEuropean shortcoming, which had already begun to mine the foundations ofthe spatial order as the latter was being projected onto the globe. The keyproblem for Schmitt was to be found in the legitimacy of the land-appropriation of American territory as a process jure gentium, and in theformidable task of translating the parameters of intra-European state conflicton a global scale, into a a new, interstate, Eurocentric, spatial order of theEarth.43

Thus the demise of the Eurocentric nomos is depicted as a more-or-lessendogenous 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 thecoming collapse, and the rise of what Schmitt perceives as a disorienting, anti-political and economistic form of planetary liberalism. Speaking of theinfamous scramble for Africa, he writes:

The United States participated in a thoroughly effective manner. It gained a kindof 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 astate. This opened the door to the confusion, whereby an international colony wastreated as an independent state. The core concept of the traditional interstateEuropean international law thus was thrown into disorder.44

Thus, a process triggered by Europes incapacity to give legal-political form toits 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. Schmittsanxiety at this full-blown emergence of a new, capitalist imperialism45 ismanifest. Implicitly recognizing the problematic link between universalismand decolonization which would structure much of the Cold War,46 Schmittnostalgically regards the entrance of the colonized onto the stage of history asthe death knell of what he euphemistically calls the bracketing of war (whichis unsurprising, since the colonized and the conquered lay precisely beyondthe brackets, over the amity lines). He asks, rhetorically, What essentiallydid it mean when other, non-European states and nations from all sides nowtook their place in the family or house of European nations and states?47 Thepathos this question elicits speaks volumes about Schmitts coordinates: aheadlong leap into the nothingness of a universality lacking any grounding inspace or on land.48 The collapse of the nomos gives rise to nothing less thanthe timeless nemesis of the conservative thinker, anarchy:

a disorganized mass of more than 50 heterogeneous states, lacking any spatial orspiritual consciousness of what they once had had in common, a chaos ofreputedly equal and equally sovereign states and their dispersed possessions, inwhich a common bracketing of war was no longer feasible, and for which noteven the concept of civilization could provide any concrete homogeneity.49

Or, as Schmitt wrote in a wistful poem to Alexandre Koje`ve in 1957, dieganze welt wird melting pot (the whole world becomes a melting pot).50

Numerous commentators have noted that Schmitts vision of Grossraume, orlarge spaces, is an ideologically laundered version of his explicitly Naziwritings of the 1930s,51 but it is the merit of Enzo Traverso, following in thefootsteps of Arendts Imperialism, to have stressed the extent to which thespatio-political justification of Nazi German expansionism is explicitlycontinuous with the theory and practice of European colonialism. Theideological matrix for the treatment of colonial space in The Nomos of theEarth, as discussed above, is evident in the following lapidary statement fromthe 1941 text Vo lkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung: The non-European spacewas without masters [herrenlos], uncivilized or only semi-civilized, a territoryfor colonization and the object of conquest by European powers whichthereby became empires, thanks to their colonies overseas. So far, the colonieshave been the spatial element upon which European law is founded.52 Traversoscommentary is worth reproducing:

In substance, said Schmitt, German imperialism upset the European balance andattacked its laws, but its action was certainly in line with the Western tendency. Inother words, the Germans were simply applying in Poland, Ukraine, the BalticStates, and Russia exactly the same principles and methods as those alreadyadopted by France and the United Kingdom in Africa and Asia.53

In other words, the underlying postulate of the Jus Publicum Europaeum isto be found in colonial expansion, and the catastrophe of an unbracketed ortotal war in Europe must be understood, as Arendt insisted, as theconsequence of the return to European soil of the barbarity*the genocides

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and administrative massacres*that was previously shunted beyond theamity lines.

For reasons which it would be otiose to go into, such a reflexiveunderstanding of the link between colonialism and Nazism is perhaps thekey blind spot of Schmitts thinking. Yet it is interesting to see that after TheNomos of the Earth and its treatment of the erosion of the Jus PublicumEuropaeum in the Age of Empire, Schmitt does nevertheless tackle thequestion of anti-colonialism. In effect, he does so in a talk given in Spain in1962, only a few days after the addresses that form the basis of The Theory ofthe Partisan. The talk is entitled The World Order after the Second WorldWar.54 Surveying the Cold War as an uncertain nomic interregnum, forwhich neither universalism nor the rule of law can serve as compasses (TheUN doesnt mean anything, he quips, anticipating John Bolton), Schmittidentifies three new problems, which had yet to make themselves felt at thecessation of hostilities in 1945: anti-colonialism, the conquest of space andthe industrial development of underdeveloped territories through the aid ofdeveloped countries.55 Now, though one might factor in a certain amount ofpandering to his Francoist audience, undoubtedly jealous of its few remainingcolonial territories (the Western Sahara, Spanish Guinea), it is striking*butnot at all surprising*to see Schmitt, so empathetic with the cause of thetellurian partisan, the sentinel of the earth against impersonal foreignpowers, treating anti-colonialism as rarely more than anti-Europeanpropaganda.56 Where the long history of anti-colonial struggles might havegiven Schmitt plenty of material for his phenomenology of the partisan (fromthe Mahdist war to the Wahhabi movement in India), he instead opts for theultimately unsustainable choice*especially in light of the planetary situationhe is trying to address*of treating the genealogy of the partisan as internal tothe Eurocentric world, only to abruptly transport it, via Lenin, to MaosChina. The temporal qualification of Schmitts dismissal of anti-colonialismis also telling. Reacting to Krishna Menons declaration, after Indias 1961annexation of Goa, that another, non-European international law wasneeded, Schmitt despairs at the fact that today, everything European is onthe defensive, precisely because of the patent spatial character of anti-colonialism. Ignoring the political content of non-alignment (which hecannot 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 purelyEurocentric spatial order]; it is oriented solely backwards, towards the past, andits aim is to liquidate a condition that was valid until today. Putting aside moralpostulates and the criminalization of European nations, anti-colonialism hasbeen incapable of producing a single idea for a new order.57

Again, reading this text alongside Schmitts contemporaneous reflections onthe partisan it is difficult to ignore the double standard which allows theconservative, past-oriented, defensive and rooted drive of the European (anti-Napoleonic) partisan to be nostalgically eulogized, while anti-colonialstruggle is reduced to negative propaganda.

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Aside from Schmitts avowed Eurocentrism and his vituperation of theimperialism of peoples of colour,58 there is perhaps a more important reasonfor his unalloyed and in a sense contradictory hostility to anti-colonialism:the link between decolonization and the pre-eminence of his old universalistfoes, the US and the USSR. Discussing the rising importance of aid anddevelopment policies towards more-or-less non-aligned countries, Schmittnotes that previously colonized space seems to be the territory predestinedfor this new kind of neutrality. Perhaps we can find the explanation for this inthe fact that the United States and the Soviet Union have in common theideology of anti-colonialism.59 Though approaching the question from theangle of development, Schmitt here reconnects with a theme he had alreadybroached in his lectures on the partisan, namely the link between that figureof militant resistance and its world political context:

the interconnectedness with world-political fronts and contexts, has likewise longsince been brought to bear on our common awareness. The autochthonousdefenders of the home soil, who died pro aris et focis [for our altars and ourhearths], the national and patriotic heroes who went into the woods, allelemental, telluric force in reaction to foreign invasion: it has all come underan international and transnational central control that provides assistance andsupport, but only in the interest of its own quite distinct world-aggressivepurposes and that, depending on how things stand, either protects or abandons.At this point the partisan ceases to be essentially defensive. He becomes amanipulated cog in the wheel of world-revolutionary aggression. He is simplysent to slaughter, and betrayed of everything he was fighting for, everything thetelluric character, the source of his legitimacy as an irregular partisan, was rootedin.60

We have come full circle. The attempt to salvage the moment of the politicalin a space of non-state legal-political disorientation, and to do so through themost minimal and most conservative of figures*the telluric partisan*is onceagain plunged into the nothingness of a universality lacking any grounding inspace or on land.61

Conclusion

Why Mao then? Despite the provocative and in many respects illuminatingdimensions of Schmitts strange infatuation with the Great Helmsman, withthe paradoxical figure of a sovereign partisan, we are obliged to conclude thatMao is ultimately the cipher or stopgap for many of the tensions andinconsistencies, both immanent and conjunctural, that beset Schmittsthought as it grapples with its times.

Having already postulated the desire for a new multipolar nomos of largespaces in The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt turns to Mao as a kind ofvanishing point where partisanship, the political and global order mightmeet, as well as the possible fulcrum for a third front that would counter themirrored abstract universalisms of the US and USSR.62 Though he bothrecognizes and is clearly beguiled by the multifaceted and contradictory

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character of Maos thought and practice*which he schematically reduces toa tension between the partisan and the revolutionary*the logic of Schmittsposition obliges him to enact two untenable separations: of Mao from Lenin,and of Mao from anti-colonialism. We might even hazard that it is preciselySchmitts fierce Eurocentrism which pushes him to Sinify Mao, in anattempt to purge him from the malady of Europe, abstract universalism, thevery wellspring of the hatred of colonialism which Schmitt repeatedlycondemns.63 Ironically, this is not so far from the fantasy of a depoliticizedmultipolarity, of a virtuous balance of powers and civilizations, which todayfeatures in much writing about the rise of China.

But though Schmitts Mao remains chimerical and his orientationuntenable, not to mention profoundly unpalatable, the attempts by this greatreactionary to get to grips with the militant and geopolitical turmoil of theCold War do bequeath us a set of questions and conundrums that might inturn serve as testing grounds for tackling the hiatus between politicalsubjectivity and global politics with which we are confronted today. Firstof all, and with specific reference to Mao and the Chinese Revolution, we areled to ask how, after the completion of a war of national liberation, one mightarticulate the internal issues of partisanship (mobilization, class enmity,contradictions among the people, social and political organization, etc.) withall of those international and geopolitical elements that Schmitt synthesizesunder the rubric of the nomos. Is the condition for a perpetuation ofpartisanship within the de facto adoption of a multipolar policy of greatspaces without? Or, conversely, is the stabilization of Grossraume, as Schmittseems to intimate in his more Hobbesian moments, a ruse that will neutralizeany form of political life within these large internally homogeneous spaces?If the option of a world revolution is abandoned, or differentiallyterritorialized, what kind of relationships can exist between different partisanmovements with comparable principles? To think through these questions,bequeathed by Schmitts brief encounter with Mao, is perhaps to try toreformulate*revisiting the relation between partisanship, war, the state, andthe geopolitical*a question which dominated Chinese communist discourseand which has once again come to the fore today, a question that demands tobe profoundly recast and which concerns precisely the gap between militancyand geopolitics, subjectivity and the global order: what is anti-imperialism?

Notes1 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.

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ALBERTO TOSCANO

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, ascharacterized 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


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 territoriallyspecific, 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.

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ALBERTO TOSCANO

While Zolos use of Schmitt for a critique of US military humanism is in many regards persuasive, hefails to interrogate the profoundly reactionary (and counter-revolutionary) character of Schmitts legaland 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 ceasedto be conscious of the spatial presuppositions of their own international law, but had lost any politicalinstinct, 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 JusPublicum 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 preciselythe 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, andincapable of countenancing the fact that the economic hegemony of capital can extend far beyond thelimits 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 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 posthistoricalequanimity, his claim that appropriation [Nehmen] died with Napoleon and that Absolute Knowledgeis now incarnate in the guise of post-political administration (of which he is the anti-heroicembodiment, the great European technocrat shuttling between meetings in Tunis and negotiations inBruxelles as he corresponds with Schmitt over the fate of the global order). Schmitt instead bemoansthat the State is dead now that it is no longer capable of war and death sentences; meaning that it nolonger makes history. On Koje`ve 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 Institutode estudios politicos madrileno, directed by his host, interpreter and admirer Manuel Fraga, Minister ofInformation and Tourism under Francos government from 1962 to 1969 and later ambassador toLondon. 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 referencesare to the Italian translation, in Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso. Saggi e interviste, GiorgioAgamben (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 theinfluence of Koje`ve, who, in 1957, at Schmitts request, had delivered a talk in Dusseldorf entitledColonialism 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 economicconcepts. Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 245.

433


Documents

Carl Schmitt in Beijing, Partisanship, Geopolitics and the Demolition of the Eurocentric World_Alberto Toscano