WALTER BENJAMIN AND CARL SCHMITT:

A POLITICAL-THEOLOGICAL CONFRONTATION

MARIN TERPSTRA AND THEO DE WIT

The theme of Benjamin’s posthumous theses on the concept of history is the attempt to

improve ‘our position in the struggle against fascism’, as the eighth thesis has it.1 The same

thesis also contains in nuce the entire complex of Benjamin’s relations to his contemporary

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Benjamin uses the term ‘state of emergency’ (Ausnahmezustand),

which he borrowed from Schmitt and which, as it were, constitutes the signifier of their

affinity. The theme of the ‘struggle against fascism’, however, is something which divides

them most decisively. We will argue in this essay that this dividing line is ultimately

determined by a fundamentally political-theological opposition which is expressed in their

respective concepts of history.

Benjamin wrote the thesis in question towards the end of his life, at a time when

National Socialism had already been in power for seven years in Germany and war in Europe

was a fact. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt belonged to different political camps, whose

reciprocal hostility had already made quite a dramatic mark on either author’s personal

history. Whereas the former is on the run from his Nazi persecutors, the latter finds himself,

as he will later call it, ‘in the belly of the Leviathan’, at first as a prominent lawyer in Hitler’s

new Reich, and from 1936 onwards more and more in the margins of this Reich as it unfolds

into a Behemoth, a monstrous Unstaat.

Nevertheless Benjamin refers to one of Schmitt’s fundamental concepts, the

Ausnahmezustand. They both used this concept in their respective analysis of the seventeenth-

century notion of sovereignty. Schmitt mainly emphasises its constitutional and political-

theological aspects, Benjamin stresses its theatrical and aesthetic aspects. Both authors,

however, are aware that these dimensions are intimately intertwined.2 Schmitt and Benjamin

share a mutual interest and even fascination for the seventeenth century. Its legal and

theological categories (sovereignty, state of emergency) are primarily characteristic of the age

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

of absolutism, when modernity is still looking for its own relationship to the religious world

view of the immediate past. Yet this historical limitation withholds neither Benjamin nor

Schmitt from seeing their own time in the light of the world view of this era.

The aforementioned thesis also provides the key with which we can pinpoint the

difference between both authors. Benjamin distinguishes between the ‘state of emergency’

which, as the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ teaches us, is actually the rule, and the ‘actual state

of emergency’ which has to be brought about. The paradoxical formulation of the first part of

this distinction – Ausnahme and Regel: exception and rule – suggests that, from the

perspective of the oppressed, the situation of 1940 constitutes the normal state of affairs of

history. Benjamin thereby certainly distances himself from Schmitt, theoretically as well as

politically, since the latter conceives of the state of emergency as the political moment par

excellence with regard to an existing legal order, and manifestly not as the historical rule.

Benjamin shifts Schmitt’s concept of the ‘state of emergency’, and in doing so turns it on its

head in the second part of his distinction. A real state of emergency must be established

against the normality of the Ausnahmezustand, which is the history of the law of the jungle.

This real state of emergency calls for the end of history and thus of normality, an end which is

at the same time a restitutio in integrum performed by the true sovereign: the Messiah.3

It may well sound surprising or even astonishing that Benjamin’s text uses a central

concept from the work of a (then) national-socialist theoretician against the concept of history

that dominates social democracy and is to blame for its weakness in the ‘struggle against

fascism’. To Gretel Adorno, Benjamin once defended his conscious use of authors or ways of

thinking which were considered bourgeois or reactionary in the neo-marxist circles of the

Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung by referring to the very singular dynamics of his own thought,

which acquires its fecundity from the very fact that it moves in (between) extreme positions

and unites the incompatible. No thinking without risks and without venturing into ‘dangerous

liaisons’.4

The phrase ‘dangerous liaisons’ has become the title of one of the first monographs on

Benjamin and Schmitt.5 The author, Susanne Heil, quite rightly points out that it is not so

much the empirical-causal question, whether Benjamin was ‘influenced’ by Schmitt, which

3 This is the link between ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ and the ‘Theologisch-politisches Fragment’, which was probably written twenty years earlier (II, 203-204). It is Lieven De Cauter’s hypothesis, put forward in his book De Dwerg in de Schaakautomaat (Nijmegen: SUN, 1999), that theological notions make up a ‘secret doctrine’ at the very onset of Benjamin’s work, forming conceptual links which continue to inform his writings without ever being named explicitly.4 II, 1369.5 Susanne Heil, “Gefährliche Beziehungen”: Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1996).

does justice to Benjamin’s method, but rather the question of the ‘constellations’ to which the

similarities and analogies between himself and Schmitt refer. These ‘constellations’ are

possible because Benjamin and Schmitt share a common way of thinking which could be

described as ‘methodical extremism’: the conviction that only an epistemological orientation

towards the ‘extreme case’ will be able to uncover the essence of a legal, political and

ultimately metaphysical order. Both thinkers thus declare their own state of emergency, a

methodological direction which is not just considered to be unusual, but even ‘dangerous’,

namely insofar as certain practical consequences may be linked to this way of thinking.

FLEETING ENCOUNTERS

It is unlikely that Benjamin and Schmitt ever actually met. If we discount two casual

references to Schmitt in Benjamin’s work (II, 1372 and VI, 219), their ‘encounter’ can be

reduced to three moments in time. In his study of the Baroque mourning play, Benjamin refers

several times to Schmitt’s Politische Theologie.6 Benjamin follows this up in 1930 by sending

a short letter to Schmitt, together with a copy of the book Ursprung des Deutschen

Trauerspiels, in which he writes that the method and the content of his research on the

German mourning play are indebted to some of Schmitt’s books.7 Finally, some twenty-five

years later, Schmitt responds to Benjamin’s letter by devoting a couple of pages to the latter’s

interpretation of Shakespeare in his study of Hamlet.8 These three instances will further

determine the structure of this essay. In the next section, the first two will be discussed, in the

last section we will turn to Schmitt’s posthumous answer to Benjamin. First, however, we will

explore the meaning of this fleeting encounter between a Jewish marxist and a Catholic

lawyer.

Benjamin’s aforementioned letter, more than anything else, has raised a puzzling

question for the readers and supporters of the members of the Frankfurt School in the

seventies and eighties: how is it possible that there is a certain affinity in method and

approach between the wayward, somewhat mystical marxist and the right-wing political

scientist who, after the Second World War, was generally considered to have been the

6 Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität [1922], Fourth imprint (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985). See Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels [1925] I, 245-246 (notes 14, 16 and 17).7 I, 887.8 Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 19932; first edition Düsseldorf/Köln: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1956).

‘Crown-appointed lawyer of the Nazis’?9 Couched in these terms, the question probably

reveals more about the need for clear moral-political dividing lines in the post-war (German)

intellectual climate than about the complex intellectual universe of the Weimar Republic. This

need may also explain why the letter, on Adorno’s initiative, was not included in the two-

volume edition of Benjamin’s letters in 1966.10

Benjamin’s remark to Gretel Adorno about his ‘dangerous liaisons’ is confirmed by the

Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes (1927-1987), whose contribution to the solution of this

‘mystery’ is considerable. Taubes not only had a deep affinity with Benjamin’s thought, but is

also the one who shaped the intellectual encounter between Benjamin and Schmitt after the

second World War. His ‘negative messianism’, which he sometimes also calls ‘negative

political theology’11 may be more closely related to Benjamin’s historical-philosophical

position, but he also admits to having devoured the texts of the controversial lawyer in his

youth and that ‘if he learned anything, he learned from Schmitt.’12 Towards the end of his life,

Taubes also had established a personal contact with the controversial political scientist. It was

no coincidence that the conversation was about Paul, the Jew who became the founder of

Christianity after an ‘exceptional’ experience.

Benjamin and Schmitt appear to assume that the possibility of the exception in politics

can only be thought by analogy with the divine intervention. This notion can indeed give a

lasting relevance to the political-theological problem, the indebtedness of thinking about

politics to speaking about God. For the possibility of an exception implies the possibility of an

invasion or a breaking of normality, which thus appears as a fragile construct. It is on this

point that Taubes succeeded in reconstructing the theoretical encounter between Benjamin

and Schmitt. The passages from Politische Theologie quoted by Taubes in his own book on

Paul all revolve around the importance Schmitt attaches to the concept of ‘exception’

(Ausnahme) and the ‘state of emergency’ (Ausnahmezustand) for his own legal doctrine.13

9 See for instance N. Bolz, ‘Charisma und Souveränität: Carl Schmitt und Walter Benjamin im Schatten Max Webers, in Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, edited by J. Taubes (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag/Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1983), p. 249.10 Briefe, 2 vols., edited by G. Scholem and T.W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). See also S. Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’, in (eds.), Enlightenments: Encounters between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, edited by H. Kunneman and H. de Vries (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993), pp. 141-161.11 See M. Terpstra and T. de Wit, ‘No spiritual investment in the world as it is: On the negative political theology of Jacob Taubes’, in Flight of the Gods. Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, edited by I.N. Bulhof and L. ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).12 J. Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), p. 137.13 J. Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, pp. 89ff.

And Benjamin as well as Schmitt, followed by Taubes, turn this notion into a method at the

same time: they think from the perspective of extreme positions which break through

normality. As Benjamin’s Jetztzeit interrupts the ‘progress’ of history conceived by

historicism, Schmitt’s ‘force of real life’, as it comes to the fore in the exception to the legal

rule, breaks the ‘automatism’ of the legal order ‘rigidified in repetition’. A similar thought is

put forward by Schmitt in his study of Hamlet, as we will see later. He considers the

exception to be ‘more interesting than the norm. Normality proves nothing, the exception

proves everything; it not only confirms the rule, the rule lives only off the exception.’14

In his exposition of Schmitt, Taubes reminds us of the same definition of sovereignty

that inspired Benjamin: ‘Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet.’15 From

his commentary of this definition, it becomes apparent that Taubes reads it from a historical-

philosophical perspective from the very onset: ‘This is a lawyer writing, not a theologian. But

this is no praise of secularization, it is a revelation.’16 Despite this fascination, he is forced to

conclude, with reference to one of Benjamin’s famous images: ‘And yet I detected in every

word of Carl Schmitt something which was alien to me, a fear and anxiety for the storm

which threatened in the secularized messianic arrow of marxism.’17

To Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah – which is quite real to him, and not an ‘as if’

as it is to Adorno18 – is the extreme perspective from which he thinks history. History is thus

not only a time which can be broken off, but also a time which can be interrupted and brought

to a halt, time and again: the ‘splinters’ of messianic time.19 This is one of the images

Benjamin uses to think the presence of a divine history into human history. Benjamin thereby

subscribes not only to a critique of historicism, whose adherents describe history as an

endlessly progressing future-oriented continuous linear development isolated within itself, but

also to the construction of a historiography brushing against the grain. The latter portrays

progress not as the deeper destination of history, but in a political sense: as a series of

victories with cultural heritage as the ‘spoils’. Yet this victory also refers to the victims who

have sunk into oblivion and do not form part of culture. Compared to this distortion of 14 ‘Die Ausnahme ist interessanter als der Normalfall. Das Normale beweist nichts, die Ausnahme bezeichnet alles; sie bestätigt nicht nur die Regel, die Regel lebt überhaupt nur von der Ausnahme.’ (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 22, quoted in Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, p. 90).15 ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the state of emergency.’ (Schmitt, p. 11; quoted in Taubes, p. 89).16 ‘Hier schreibt ein Jurist, kein Theologe. Aber das ist kein Lob der Säkularisierung, sondern eine Enthüllung.’ (Taubes, p. 89; our emphasis). Taubes claims that Benjamin sided with Schmitt on the point of ‘the struggle against historicism’ (Ad Carl Schmitt, p. 26).17 ‘Und doch spürte ich in jedem Wort von Carl Schmitt ein mir Fremdes, jene Furcht und Angst vor dem Storm, der im säkularisierten messianischen Pfeil des Marxismus lauerte.’ (Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt, p. 10 and p. 15).18 Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, p. 103 ff.19 I, 704.

history, Benjamin generates a radically different concept in which time (past, present and

future) has been contracted into a Jetztzeit, which is essentially a retrospection, remembrance

and commemoration and in which progress has been called to a halt.

This position is also radical in the sense that Benjamin does not find himself bound to

the victories which the future may offer, nor even to any kind of immanent-historically

founded duty to cooperate with the endless task of realizing the classless society: there are no

‘meaningful political goals’.20 In the context of the historical-philosophical theses there is an

important reference to the Jewish tradition which makes the future taboo as a source of

knowledge: to the Jews, ‘every second is the small gate through which the Messiah may

enter’.21 Elsewhere, in a critique of the social democrats, Benjamin writes that the struggle of

the working class should not be aimed towards the liberation of future generations, but

towards the redemption of past generations – the oppressed from the past which have been

deleted from history.22 The revolution therefore appears to Benjamin in the first place not as a

political event, a decisive moment in political history from which a clear victor will emerge,

but as an event with a theological signification. The revolution is a political-theological

phenomenon whose roots must be sought at the beginning of modernity.

REVOLUTION, SOVEREIGNTY, STATE OF EMERGENCY

Both Benjamin and Schmitt were witness to what was probably the worst crisis ever on

the European continent: the First World War, the Russian Revolution and (the threat of) civil

wars were events which forced not only them, but most important intellectuals to think about

violence and catastrophe. Both Benjamin and Schmitt read Sorel’s study of violence in

politics and both internalized it in their work, even though their respective viewpoints are

diametrically opposed to one another. In a short epilogue to Benjamin’s Kritik der Gewalt in

1964, Herbert Marcuse summarized his thought as follows: ‘Only rarely has the truth about

critical theory ever been formulated in such an exemplary way: the revolutionary struggle is

concerned with the suspension of what happens and what has happened – before all positive

aims, this negative aspect is the first positive one.’23

20 See also Klaus-M. Kodalle, ‘Walter Benjamins Politischer Dezisionismus im Theologischen Kontext’, in Spiegel und Gleichnis, edited by N. Bolz and W. Hübener (Würzburg: Köninghausen & Neumann, 1983), p. 309 ff.21 ‘Denn in ihr war jede Sekunde die kleine Pforte, durch die der Messias treten konnte.’ (I, 704).22 I, 1236-1237.

The revolution and the battle of appropriation that rages around it can indeed be seen as

a central point of Benjamin’s work, and it can be linked to one of the most important concepts

in Schmitt’s political thinking. The revolution is the moment of the most radical turnover of a

socio-political order. Radical: the revolution touches upon the roots of this order, in other

words at the very things that constitute this order. An order, however, is not created ex nihilo,

but through a struggle with an other, preceding order which can no longer find the strength to

defend itself. Revolution is thus in the first place characterized by an ambiguous relationship

between destruction and foundation. The revolution is not merely a violent transition period

from one order to the other. On the contrary: its ambiguity reveals a discontinuity.

Between the two moments, historical time has been stopped, as it were. The

immobilisation of time in the first place reveals the fundamental or metaphysical illegitimacy

of every socio-political order. For at this crucial moment when the old order has already

ceased to function ‘normally’ but the new order has not yet been established, every

legitimation seems to rest on quicksand. From the perspective of the old order, the revolution

is by definition illegitimate, whereas the order which legitimates it does not yet exist but in

anticipation. Yet in the absence of all legitimacy the presence of a hyperlegitimacy, of an

‘excess’ of law, shines through. The clash of the old order and the anticipated new order takes

place in the name of an ‘other’ law, an ‘other’ justice. At the same time, this clash reveals that

it is apparently not given to mankind to keep the law or justice in hands. Conservative

violence, which strives to maintain the old order, as well as the revolutionary violence which

seeks to establish a new order both contradict the ability of mankind to do justice in an

absolute sense.

The concept of normality, on the other hand, demands that every thought of foundation,

revolution or destruction be banished: it takes the act of foundation and thus of possible

destruction or revolution as the limit of thought, which may not be crossed. This is why,

Benjamin suspects, the monopoly on violence of the European constitutional state is not so

much directed against the violence of the individual pursuing illegitimate aims, as it is

intended for the protection of the legal order.24 Legitimacy and legality coincide in the socio-

political order that has established itself as normality.

The rule of normality appears most clearly in the dominance of positivism, which

simply takes the existing law as an incontestable point of departure. Yet positivism is unable

to provide an answer to more or less radical challenges to normality. ‘Constitutional law faces 23 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Nachwort’, in Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und Andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 104.24 II, 183.

its limit here’, is how Schmitt read his colleague G. Anschütz. As an answer to such and like

challenges, they take refuge in quasi-transcendent legitimations, for which the doctrine of

natural law is exemplary.

Yet we can only speak of true transcendence when it can be shown that the autonomous

and isolated normality, present in the identity of legality and legitimacy or in the derivation of

the positive law from a higher, but accessible, source of law, is a mere appearance. And even

though many continued to cling to their faith in edifying social forces, like the rationality of

science, economy and technology, the sophistication of the legal system and the development

of a pacifying international law, this was not hard to demonstrate at the time when Benjamin

and Schmitt wrote their texts.

The first steps on the path to an orderly and stable mass democracy were hardly

unproblematic. How could any form of normality establish itself here? The experience that

the ‘state of emergency’ is the rule is not alien to the era in question. But the experience and

political declaration of the state of emergency by definition spawns very numerous and very

diverse offspring.25 Schmitt’s answer to his own diagnosis of the unstable foundation of

normality (in this case the Weimar Republic) could be called katechontic: which order can

check further decay? Schmitt found the expression ‘kat-echon’ in the second letter to the

Thessalonians (2:6-8), where it refers to the figure who prevents the victory of Satan, and

used it to indicate every force to resist the Antichrist.26 Likewise, Benjamin’s answer is not

subservient to the existing order of Weimar and can be characterized as messianic: only a

disillusioned reading of the decay opens the possibility of salvation, the ‘real state of

emergency’. These answers can be reduced to different interpretations of the above mentioned

moment between the destruction of an order and the foundation of another – a different

historical-philosophical, even historical-theological interpretation of the sovereignty located in

that moment. And as we pointed out above, both authors go back to the legal-theological

dramatics of seventeenth-century Baroque.

Sovereignty and revolution are thus intimately linked. This does not detract from the

fact that this link is made invisible in the actual exercise of sovereign power: the memory and

prevention of revolution are exorcised and, where possible, so is the very idea of sovereignty

itself. Sovereignty marks the spot where the revolution took place, which is also the spot

25 R.Konersmann speaks in this context of the ‘profound ambivalence of the extreme’ (Erstarrte Unruhe: Walter Benjamins Begriff der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), p. 114). 26 See C. Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 63 and Der Nomos der Erde (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1950), p. 29.

where a revolution can take place again. Thus sovereignty by definition indicates not only the

centre of political power, but also the precarious nature of political power and order as such.

THE SOVEREIGN

Schmitt’s famous answer to the question of the subject of sovereignty intervenes

primarily in a strictly legal discussion. According to a recent reconstruction,27 his definition of

sovereignty was remarkable in two points at least. Prominent constitutional lawyers of the

German Reich saw ‘sovereignty’ as a property of state power. They might disagree on who

exactly could qualify as the bearer, the highest body or the central instance, but in the eyes of

these theoreticians such instances were all constitutional bodies with strictly demarcated

competences, pouvoirs constitués. This interpretation implied that the practical significance of

sovereignty remained limited to independence under international law, the so-called

souveraineté extérieure. Souveraineté intérieure had become a superfluous notion, as the

features of sovereignty had been quietly transferred to state power in general, becoming

limited competences and thus, as it were, constitutionally immobilized. Schmitt turns against

this neutralization of the souveraineté intérieure.

In the second place, and in close connection to the previous point, he introduces a new

interpretation of Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, only a close scrutiny

of the classical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors’ ‘endlessly repeated, completely

hollow phrases’ about supreme power will reveal the practical core of the doctrine of

sovereignty. In the first book of his Les Six Livres de la République (1583), Bodin gives many

practical examples, constantly returning to the question in how far the monarch is bound to

laws and in how far he has obligations towards the estates. His answer is that the monarch is

bound to laws except si la nécessité est urgente. By referring back to the emergency case,

Bodin arrived at his interpretation of sovereignty as an indivisible unity, ‘introducing the

decision into the concept of sovereignty’: the authority to abolish the statutory laws is the

actual mark of sovereignty.28

From this, Schmitt draws the following conclusion: ‘The exceptional case reveals the

essence of state authority most clearly. Here the decision separates itself from the legal norm 27 H. Quaritsch, ‘Souveränität im Ausnahmezustand: Zum Souveränitätsbegriff im Werk Carl Schmitts’, Der Staat, 35 (1996), pp. 1-30. See also T.W.A. de Wit, De Onontkoombaarheid van de Politiek: De Soevereine Vijand in de Politieke Filosofie van Carl Schmitt (Nijmegen: Pomppers, 1992), p. 27 ff.28 Schmitt, Politische Theologie, pp. 14-15.

and (paradoxically) authority proves that, in order to create a law, it need not actually be

right.’29 Still Schmitt does not consider the entire question to be a mere point of law. The

question whether we can rid ourselves of the exceptional case is not a legal one, but ‘depends

on philosophical, particularly historical-philosophical or metaphysical, convictions.’30 Modern

developments in the theory of law which tend to eliminate sovereignty in the sense described

above indicate a shift in political metaphysics. The postulation of the identity of state and

legal order subscribes to a broader development taking place between the seventeenth and

nineteenth centuries: the transition from transcendent to immanent conceptions. In the

seventeenth and eighteenth century, the transcendent position of God towards the world and

of the sovereign towards the state are metaphysically self-evident. From the beginning of the

eighteenth century, the personalist and decisionist elements in the concept of sovereignty are

lost in favour of organic conceptions of the people and the democratic premise of the identity

of rulers and subjects.31

Only after the Second World War did Schmitt give his seventeenth-century position a

(historical-)theological dimension. This is most apparent in his Glossarium: ‘I believe in the

Katechon; to me this is the only possibility, as a christian, to understand history and find it

meaningful.’32 With the concept of Kat-echon, Schmitt refers to a mysterious passage in Paul,

where the latter admonishes the primitive community of Thessalonica, which seems to have

been overcome by an ‘apocalyptic fever’33, to remain patient and calm.34 In accordance with

Jewish apocalypticism, Paul appears to be convinced that the parousia of the Messiah will be

preceded by a catastrophe, the revelation of the lawless one – the Antichrist. However, the

mysterious reference to a force which (still) holds this enemy of the law at bay is a novelty,

and has provoked many interpretations since. Schmitt’s interpretation concurs with that of the

Church Fathers, who claim that Paul’s Kat-echon was meant to designate the Roman Empire

and the Roman emperor. It is a decisive, if paradoxical, factor (considering the pagan nature

29 ‘Der Ausnahmefall offenbart das Wesen der staatlichen Autorität am klarsten. Hier sondert sich die Entscheidung von der Rechtsnorm, und (um es paradox zu formulieren) die Autorität beweist, daß sie, um Recht zu schaffen, nicht Recht zu haben braucht.’ (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 20.)30 ‘[...] hängt von philosophischen, insbesondere geschichtsphilosophischen oder metaphysischen Überzeugungen ab.’ (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 13).31 Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 60.32 ‘[...] ich glaube an den Katechon; er ist für mich die einzige Möglichkeit, als Christ Geschichte zu verstehen und sinnvoll zu finden.’ (Schmitt, Glossarium, p. 63).33 W.Trilling, quoted in L. Berthold, ‘Zur Selbstglossierung Carl Schmitts’, Leviathan, 21(1993), p. 287.34 The passage in 2 Tess.2, 6-8 reads: “And you know what is now restraining him (kai nun to katechon oidate), so that he may be revealed when his time comes, For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it (ho katechon) is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him with the manifestation of his coming.’

of this empire, which was not kindly disposed towards the Christians) that this identification

made possible an affirmative stance of Christians towards a secular power. It is in this exactly

that Schmitt discovers a ‘sense’ of history.

In Schmitt’s opinion, the Kat-echon, the ‘notion of a force which holds the end at bay

and suppresses evil’, is the bridge which connects the eschatological expectation (which

seems to deprive history of all sense) with a christian life in history, with an ethical task and

the formation of a political power that results from it.35 Schmitt says the sense of history, the

very sign even that history is not over yet, lies in the presence of a katechontic force. ‘Who

holds the Satan at bay?’ is thus the metalegal, historical-theological question which supports

Schmitt’s philosophy of law.

Although Schmitt’s explicit reference to the Paulinic figure of a katechontic force, as we

said, comes only after the Second World War, the perception of the historical reality which it

presupposes is already present in Politische Theologie. It is a perception according to the

extreme antithetical pattern catastrophe versus restauration. The sovereign, who ‘decides on

the state of emergency’, has the task to restore and maintain the order, which is permanently

threatened by chaos and anarchy. Benjamin recognizes this antithesis in the German baroque

mourning play. The actual subject of this drama is historical life as it was represented in the

Baroque, primarily through the figure of the sovereign. The sovereign ‘holds the course of

history in his hand like a sceptre.’36 But the radical nature of this drama already lies in the fact

that the playwrights do not present the spectacle of the rise and fall of monarchs and kings,

constantly repeated in endless variations, as a moral tale, but as a natural development which

represents the course of history itself. In the play, history coincides with the nature of a fallen

creation without hope of grace or salvation. The German Baroque especially is provocatively

worldly. The insignificance of world events and the transience of creation are no longer

presented as stages on a path to salvation. ‘There is no Baroque eschatology’, Benjamin

writes, ‘and therefore a mechanism which unites and exalts all things mortal, before they

surrender themselves to their end.’37 In baroque mourning plays, the sovereign no longer

appears as the earthly reflection of God’s transcendence, but rather as the most extreme

expression of the immanence of his creation: ‘The creaturely status, the ground on which the

mourning play takes place, undeniably determines the sovereign too. No matter how high he 35 C. Schmitt, ‘Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung’, Universitas 5/8 (1950), p. 929.36 ‘Der Souverän repräsentiert die Geschichte. Er hält das historische Geschehen in der Hand wie ein Szepter.’ (I, 245).37 ‘Es gibt keine barocke Eschatologie; und eben darum einen Mechanismus, der alles Erdgeborne häuft und exaltiert, bevor es sich dem Ende überliefert.’ (I, 246).

sits enthroned above subject and state, his rank is enclosed within the created world; he is lord

of creatures, but he remains a creature.’38 This status is also the ground for his downfall. A

radically immanent world excludes the heterogeneity or transcendence of a decision.39 The

sovereign, with whom rests the decision on the state of emergency, ‘proves at the very first

opportunity that he is hardly capable of a decision at all.’40 He now displays his most extreme

tendencies, which were already implied in the imbalance between his power and his capacity

as a ruler: he becomes a dictator and a tyrant, an ‘emblem of a disturbed order of creation’.

However, the conviction of the personal incapacity and wickedness of the tyrant was balanced

by a belief in the sacrosanct nature of the violence he perpetrates. Thus the tyrant can

transform himself into a martyr. A perfect example of this is the dramatic portrayal of king

Herod, who ‘as the very pinnacle of creation erupts in a volcanic rage, destroying himself and

his entire court. […] He falls back into the status of a mere mortal, a victim of the

disproportion of the unlimited hierarchical dignity which God has bestowed upon him.’41

The task of the tyrant, as we said above, was a restoration of the order, the utopia of the

age, the establishment of an ‘iron constitution of natural laws’ replacing a disorderly history –

a new creation. And it is exactly on this point that the most important difference between

Schmitt and Benjamin is situated.

A POSTHUMOUS ANSWER

Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin’s letter from 1930 follows posthumously, twenty-five

years after the letter, fifteen years after the death of its author, in a study on Shakespeare’s

Hamlet from 1956. Schmitt speaks very highly of the 1928 edition of Benjamin’s Ursprung

des deutschen Trauerspiels: ‘The book is full of insights, with regard to the history of art and

culture, but also with regard to Shakespeare’s drama, notably his Hamlet.’42 Schmitt

38 ‘Die Ebene des Schöpfungsstands, der Boden, auf dem das Trauerspiel sich abrollt, bestimmt ganz unverkennbar auch den Souverän. So hoch er über Untertan und Staat auch thront, sein Rang ist in der Schöpfungswelt beschlossen, er ist der Herr der Kreaturen, aber er bleibt Kreatur.’ (I, 263-264).39 See Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’, p. 155,40 ‘Der Fürst, bei dem die Entscheidung über den Ausnahmezustand ruht, erweist in der erstbesten Situation, daß ein Entschluß ihm fast unmöglich ist.’ (I, 250).41 ‘[...] der Gipfel der Kreatur, ausbrechend in der Raserei wie ein Vulkan und mit allem umliegenden Hofstaat sich selber vernichtend. [...] er fällt als Opfer eines Mißverhältnisses der unbeschränkten hierarchischen Würde, mit welcher Gott ihn investiert, zum Stande seines armen Menschenwesens.’ (I, 250).42 ‘Aber das Buch ist reich an bedeutenden Einsichten und Durchblicken, sowohl für die Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte überhaupt, wie auch für Shakespeares Drama und namentlich für seinen Hamlet.’ (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 62).

obviously did not fail to notice that Benjamin quoted him in the book, and in passing he also

mentions the letter.43

These words of praise are not just to compensate for the very critical notes to

Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet in an ‘Exkurs.’ They express a methodological affinity:

the way in which the relationship between theatre and history is treated. Benjamin’s

monadology, according to which a single work of art can embody an entire era,44 can be found

in a similar way in Schmitt. The figure of Hamlet personifies the play Hamlet, and because of

the tragedy woven around the protagonist in this mourning play, Hamlet himself has become a

myth eminently characteristic of the modern European mind.45 Thus we encounter an entire

era in Hamlet. According to Schmitt, of the three great symbolical figures in modern

European literature – Don Quixot, Hamlet and Faust – only the second one could become a

myth. Whereas Don Quixot is a Spanish-catholic figure and Faust a German-protestant

character, Hamlet embodied the inner conflict of the European mind in the time of the

sectarian wars.46 A further affinity, which links in with the idea that the totality can be found

in a single work, can be found in the rejection of all specialist approaches to either politics or

artistic phenomena. Psychologism and historicism are as alien to Schmitt as they are to

Benjamin.47

Yet this affinity and the words of praise Schmitt reserves for Benjamin’s book should

not detract us from the essential differences between them. There are two such differences to

which we will direct our attention. The first one concerns the distinction made by both authors

between mourning play and tragedy, the second one concerns their respective vision of

European history from the beginning of modern times. In the case of the first question,

Schmitt responds directly to a distinction introduced by Benjamin himself; in the case of the

second question, Schmitt speaks directly to Benjamin in a rather condescending tone about his

own field of inquiry: the political history of Europe.

It is of course impossible within the scope of this essay to discuss in any great depth the

crucial distinction between mourning play and tragedy as it comes to the fore in Benjamin’s 43 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 64.44 I, 207; I, 703; I, 1251.45 The transformation of historical events into myth through the plot of a play is an important motif in Schmitt’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Hamlet oder Hekuba, primarily pp. 32 and 46). The question of the source of the tragic event (p. 12) is decisive in this matter. In the case of Hamlet, this is the taboo that rested on the question whether Mary Stuart, mother of James I, was an accomplice to the murder of her husband, and knew that she would herself marry the murderer three months later (pp. 14-22). According to Schmitt, the actual attention to this historical taboo in the play itself is not just an ‘Anspielung’ or a ‘Spiegelung’ of history by theatre, but an ‘Einbruch’ of real life into the play (pp. 26-27). 46 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 28, 54, 30 and 69, note 8.47 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, notably pp. 9 and 12.

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. We will limit ourselves to the one description which is

essential to pinpoint the difference with Schmitt’s interpretation. Benjamin is primarily

concerned with determining the exact relationship between historical events and drama: these

events are ‘not so much the subject matter as the artistic essence in the mourning play’. 48 But

it is exactly this aspect, Benjamin says, which distinguishes the Baroque mourning play from

ancient Greek tragedy: ‘This is where it distinguishes itself from tragedy, for the subject of

the latter is not history but myth […]’.49 In his Hamlet oder Hekuba, on the other hand,

Schmitt makes only the first point a decisive factor in the distinction between mourning play

and tragedy. We can only talk of a [theatre or mourning] play when historical events

constitute the subject matter from which the freely creating writer shapes his play; we are

dealing with a tragedy, or in any case with the tragical aspect of the mourning play, when

tragical historical events have been made present in the centre of the work itself. The central

concept here is the invasion of real life into the play: the moment when ‘eine geschichtliche

Zeit in die Spielzeit einbricht’50 – just as real life invades the legal order (see above). Schmitt

changes the distinction Benjamin made between mourning play and tragedy into a distinction

between different forms of tragedy.51

At this point, Schmitt appears to oppose the consequences of a consistently maintained

constructivism, as it can be found in Benjamin. Schmitt claims that there are exceptions to

every rule, exceptions such as Hamlet: ‘In times of religious schisms, world and world history

lose their fixed forms and a human problem becomes visible from which no purely aesthetic

consideration can create the hero of a drama of revenge. Historical reality is stronger than all

aesthetics, stronger even than the most brilliant subject. The writer of a tragedy had in mind a

king in a very real sense, a king whose fate and character are a product of the division of his

time.’52

This shift, or perhaps even reversal, of the meaning of mourning play and tragedy is not

suggested by Schmitt as a point of criticism, but it is connected to his express criticism of

Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet. Benjamin’s use of Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty was

48 ‘[...] daß die genannten Vorfälle nicht so sehr Stoff als Kern der Kunst im Trauerspiele sind.’ (I, 242).49 ‘Es unterscheidet sich darin von der Tragödie. Denn deren Gegenstand ist nicht Geschichte, sondern Mythos, [...]’ (I, 243).50 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 46.51 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 51.52 ‘In Zeiten der Glaubensspaltung verlieren Welt und Weltgeschichte ihre sicheren Formen und wird eine menschliche Problematik sichtbar, aus der keine rein ästhetische Betrachtung den Helden eines Rache-Dramas zu schaffen vermag. Die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit ist stärker als jede Ästhetik, stärker auch als das genialste Subjekt. Ein König, der in seinem Schicksal und Charakter das Produkt der Zerrissenheit seines Zeitalters selber war, stand dem Verfasser der Tragödie in dessen eigener Existenz vor Augen.’ (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 31-32).

definitely not in the spirit of its author, who writes: ‘It seems to me, however, that [Benjamin]

somewhat underestimates the difference between the situation on the island of England and

that on the European continent, and thus also the difference between English drama and the

baroque mourning play in seventeenth-century Germany. This difference is also essential for

an interpretation of Hamlet, as this play cannot be understood with art- and cultural-historical

categories such as Renaissance and Baroque. The difference can be characterized most

economically and accurately with a slogan-like antithesis, the significance of which is

symptomatic of the cultural history of the concept of the political. I mean the antithesis of

barbaric and political.’53

A moment before, Schmitt had already made some critical notes to Benjamin’s remark

on the Christian character of Hamlet.54 Here Schmitt is of the opinion that the image Benjamin

gives is all too undifferentiated, and that he neglects the fact that the figure of Hamlet unites

the tragedy of the English monarch’s government torn by religious strife and all sorts of

theological subtleties.55 From a factual perspective, both points seek to correct a picture of the

baroque mourning play which is deemed to be too generalizing. But Schmitt is not the kind of

man merely to introduce nuances in an otherwise correct description.

It is not the first time that Schmitt brings the fate of an English myth into the limelight:

in 1938, the political symbol of the Leviathan and, in this case, its failure as a myth became

the subject of a historical interpretation of early modern Europe.56 The history of England as it

grows into a naval power towards the end of the sixteenth century (the time of Mary Stuart,

mother of James I), an industrial power in the eighteenth century and finally a political and

ideological world power in the subsequent century, has everything to do with the decay of the

historical form which was characteristic of the political history of the Continent at the time:

the state. In this matter, Schmitt quite pedantically puts Benjamin in his place.57 This England

overgrows continental Europe politically, economically as well as ideologically. When in

1938 Schmitt drew attention to the subversion of the historical form of the state as imperium

53 ‘Aber mir scheint, daß er die Verschiedenheit der englisch-insularen mit der europäisch-kontinentalen Gesamtlage und damit auch die Verschiedenheit des englischen Dramas gegenüber dem barocken Trauerspiel des deutschen 17. Jahrhundert zu gering einschätzt. Die Verschiedenheit ist auch für eine Deutung des Hamlet wesentlich, weil dieser mit kunst-und geistesgeschichtlichen Kategorien wie Renaissance und Barock im Kern nicht zu erfassen ist. Die Verschiedenheit läßt sich am schnellsten und treffendsten mit einer schlagwortartigen Antithese kennzeichnen, deren Sinnträchtigkeit für die Geistesgeschichte des Begriffs des Politischen symptomatisch ist. Es handelt sich um die Antithese von Barbarisch und Politisch.’ (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 64).54 I, 334-335.55 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 62-64.56 Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Köln-Lövenich: Hohenheim Verlag, 1982).57 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 65.

rationis by the liberalist separation between confessio and fides, the line of his argument here

is the fact that Hamlet grows into a myth and a symbol of indecision,58 which Benjamin too

foregrounds in his analysis of the German mourning play.59

An important distinction, a radical difference even, emerges between Benjamin and

Schmitt in their respective thoughts on the relationship between history and theatre. Although

Schmitt acknowledges the fact that the seventeenth century perceives the world and history

itself as a stage, and that the world is therefore not differentiated from the theatre,60 there

remains to Schmitt a fundamental externality in the relationship between history and theatre.

Schmitt needs this externality, which also constitutes a primacy of the world over theatre, in

order to make a distinction between tragedy and mourning play – the distinction between

theatre which carries the gravity of real life within itself and theatre which sees history merely

as material for a romantic-subjective authorship. The source of tragedy is real history, and

never a story, a word to which Schmitt refers with contempt.61

It seems to us that Benjamin is not only reluctant to accept this externality of real

history to theatre, but, conversely, that he needs the image of history as theatre in order to

distance himself from the former – as we know from other texts, he does so in the name of an

other history which refers to the Messianic redemption. It is hardly remarkable that Benjamin

concentrates on the mourning play, which, although situated in the seventeenth century, is

already part of the absolutist state cult of the sovereign (the merging of state and theatre),

whereas Schmitt turns to an example which, in his eyes, has been a more important factor in

the determination of European history than Baroque theatre, and in which real history is

present in the theatre in the form of an absence and thus an externality.

This is where Schmitt situates the superiority of tragedy: the gravity of what is given,

and can thus not be invented, staged and played. This is the crucial sentence in Schmitt’s text:

‘The indisputable reality then becomes the speechless rock against which the play breaks and

the surf of real tragedy surges.’ This sentence makes the following, decisive conclusion

possible: ‘Here we find the last and insurmountable barrier of free poetic invention.’62

58 Apart from the taboo that rests on the mother’s complicity to the murder of her husband, the metamorphosis of the avenger into a melancholic doubter is the second historical fact which breaks into the play (Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 22ff).59 I, 249ff.60 Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 42-43; see also ‘Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel’, I, 244-245.61 Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, pp. 12 and 48.62 ‘Die unumstößliche Wirklichkeit ist der stumme Felsen, an dem das Spiel sich bricht und die Brandung der echten Tragik aufschäumt. Hier ist die letzte und unübersteigbare Grenze freier dichterischer Erfindung.’ (Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 47).

Benjamin’s answer to this might have been that this ‘speechless rock’ will be shattered by the

divine violence, and that the work of art already refers to this Messianic possibility.

Inasmuch as a theology can be suspected behind these opposing views, we can conclude

that Schmitt’s orientation is towards a Creator-God who provides man with the historical

realities on which the latter must base his decisions, whereas Benjamin’s focus is on a Jewish-

gnostic Redeemer-God: the idea that real history will be ended by the Messiah. The first

orientation will tend to see everything in the light of halting the decay of the given (a

katechontic view of history), the second orientation considers everything in the light of the

destruction of the given (a messianist view of history). It was probably the awareness, shared

by both authors, that European history still revolves around theology, around unbridgeable

theological differences and the incompatible views of history which they entail, which

brought them in touch with each other but also separated them so cruelly. Because for a few

years at least, Schmitt saw a katechontic force in Hitler’s regime, a regime which was the

death of Walter Benjamin.

(translated from Dutch by Bram Mertens)