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)
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