COOL PERSONA-IN THE BELLY OF THE FISH
Nothing so threatens the cool persona's sense of Luciferian grandeur as the “banality of evil.” How can its habitus survive dictatorship, holocaust, and war? Does a point come when attitude must be put at risk for the sake of experience, or does focus on such a point simply reflect a desire for expression? Further, does the cool persona's refusal to mourn after the Second World War compulsively repeat an attitude after the First
No other intellectual of the 19205 acted out objectivity's trademark role-gambling with the devil—more consistently than Carl Schmitt. No one managed to contrive such an alliance with moral evil on the lofty plane of the state. Our question now concerns what remains of this Luciferian figure after the Second World War. Does it ask, like the exhausted Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight, to be carried off “to a dark hangar, so no one sees my weakness”?
The Diary Schmitt's diary, published in 1991, begins after his release from an American internment camp. The entries run from late summer 1947 to August 1951. He writes as the Cold War was beginning to spread its atmosphere of bitter enmity over all debates, and it comes as no surprise that in his diary Schmitt refers sarcastically to the taboo against taking international animosity as the starting point of theoretical reflection. Schmitt draws a straight line from the taboo to artless talk of the “just war,” in which, according to Schmitt, fundamentalism blends with unregulated killing. His thoughts return insistently to the question of whether putting an end to the political definition of enmity might not enhance the possibility of civil war and the ritual atrocities that accompany it. And he ponders, as could hardly be expected otherwise, the problem of depriving the vanquished of enemy status in order to subject them to hearings and judicial judgment as criminals.
The diary's appearance undermined the assumption humanistic Schmitt scholars had cultivated of a turn marked by the publication of Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre von Thomas Hobbes in 1938. With this book Schmitt supposedly broke off his dalliance with state fetishism, which dated from 1919, in order then, in the 1942, text Land und Meer, to carry out a kind of “mourning.”[177] The diary disappointed expectations, maintaining with undiminished vigor all of Schmitt's theoretical motifs, from his 1916 hymn of praise to Theodor Daubler's Nordlicht to the enemy formula of the 19205, from reflections on linguistic magic, taken over from his friend Hugo Ball, to the anti-Semitic outbursts of the 19305. Any break in the continuity of his thought, writes Schmitt, indicates nothing more than a “mental disturbance” (105). A diary necessarily produces “photocopies of the palimpsest character” (130) of thinking, he maintains, offering a definition we could work with, were it not part of a defensive strategy that allows
The manifest outrage many reviewers expressed over the diary's publication reflects their disappointment. They expected a document of the guilt culture and got unrepentant effrontery. While the reviewers' moral indignation was no doubt justified, a thoughtful look at the ideas expressed in the diary would not have hurt them. These ideas revolve monomaniacally around the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena, sine lege, which is the title of a verdict that Schmitt had circulated in hectograph in 1945. The diary's contents include a collection of timely maxims. Infamous maxims, too, can instruct:
A good conscience that is expedited by the judiciary is the worst. (90) Most people think taking off a fake beard is a metamorphosis. (107)
Whoever is right a few years prematurely is wrong. (144)
Scholastic asceticism is an ethical plus, but it falls short of theoretical accomplishment. (113)
Reading the book historically, we can ask what became of the cult of evil after the Second World War, which had held in its spell such disparate minds as Helmuth Plessner and Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn and Walter Benjamin, E. R. Curtius and Bertolt Brecht. Of greatest interest in this connection is the combination of self-enactment, compulsive brooding, and complaining that always turns the Glossarium's lofty figure of the cool persona into a infantile ventriloquist. Schmitt's diary shows as well how the cool persona and the creature are uncanny doubles: “What is man! The circulation of blood, cast in the light of a poor will-o'-the-wisp” (314).
A few basic motifs of the old avant-garde made it through the dead of winter to sprout in the diary: the “joy in the acceleration” (31) of fatal processes, which Schmitt shared with the intellectuals of the left; the return to seventeenth-century anthropology, which welcomes in the state a great machine for keeping the “terror of drives” (2,07) in check; scorn for the faith in law as the “instinctlessness of a living being condemned to decline” (23, 50, 301), in which he marks his agreement with Brecht, Lukacs, and Lenin;[178] and the pleasure involved in having a “sa-tanic” (5) reputation. In these notes we find slogans (e.g., “The primitive thinks in substances, the civilized man in functions” [161]) in which the new objectivity jargon lives on. Also the pathos of invulnerability and mobility that surrounded the new objectivity's mechanical man comes
The classic characteristics of the cool persona remain present in the years from 1947 to 1951; boastful and fascinating in public presentation, subdued in private notes. For the diary bears the remarkable characteristic of that “compulsive brooding” Benjamin saw in Jesuit spiritual exercises:
This torment of intellectual consciousness is predestined for authoritarian rule through its complete lack of substance. It has lost all relation to the essence of individual being and it offers absolution, depending on how one wants to look at it, either mystically or mechanically, like a sacrament. The tension of penitent torment, displaced to that purely intentional zone, at the same time leaves moral life resting in a certain apathy, in which it now reacts not to its own impulses but rather to carefully weighed and considered stimuli of spiritual authority.[179]
The habitus that undertakes spiritual exercises with no grounding in morality coincides, predictably, with the attitude of the mendicant creature. Tossing aside Gracián's precept no. 129, “Never complain,” the Glossarium engages in a plaintive discursive ritual: “Injustice is always ever again my lot” (2,52,).
From the angle of Benjamin's book on German tragedy, Schmitt's self-portrait in the diary is that of an ousted intriguer who mopes, while refusing resolutely to adopt the role of the melancholic. Schmitt slips on all the masks of the poor supplicant creature he finds in his extensive reading, from Kaspar Hauser to Kafka's defendant in Der Prozess, from victims of ritual murder to the prophet Jonah inside the whale:
Three times I was in the belly of the fish. I have tasted the defeat of the civil war, inflation and deflation, revolution and restoration, changes of regimes and burst pipes, currency reform, air bombardments, and interrogations; camps and barbed wire, hunger and cold, ragged clothes and hideous bunkers. (81)
Schmitt's Shame Culture After 1945 Schmitt repeats an attitude that corresponds to the post-World War I Zeitgeist: he does away with elements of the guilt culture—troubled conscience, remorse—and erects once again the artificial realm of a heroic shame culture. The difference that springs painfully to the eye, of course, is that the idea of a post-World War II shame culture is a phantasm, with no corresponding public discursive space in which to unfold. In the context of the Nuremberg trials, the statement of the Protestant church, and denazification, a guilt
The key concepts of the shame culture are honor and disgrace. After World War I the issue was the “disgrace” of imperial collapse, which, according to the rules of male association and bonding, had to be reversed. At issue now for Schmitt is the “honor” of which he was deprived as a vanquished foe. Everything that the Allies undertook with Schmitt, during his incarceration and afterward, he experiences as a shaming ritual, in which he, suddenly abandoned to the resentful gaze of the enemy, isolated from his fellows and discriminated against, must armor himself. He experiences his stay in the cell of an American camp as exposure. “Man is most naked when he is stripped and made to stand in front of another who is clothed,” he writes in April 1947 in his “Weis-heit der Zelle.” “The clothes that were left to me,” Schmitt continues, “only confirmed my objective nakedness.”[180] The effective factor in a shame culture is not the admonition of the individual conscience but the scorn of others, enacted in the form of public disgrace. Following his release from the Nuremberg prison into the American zone, Schmitt, rather than return to Berlin and the forum of a despising public, goes to Plettenberg, where he believes that he is immune to disgrace. From here he fires off condemnations of the Protestant guilt culture, striving to keep his distance from its “spectacle of a brawl between preachers of repentance” (30). He is “disgusted” by the pathos of moral indignation, and he notes bouts of “depression,” because people expect “from me tips for memorial inscriptions in the confessional style.” On “Der Fall Jaspers” (the case of Jaspers), he later records the derisive verse:
| How his penitential speech offends me | |
| How disgusting are his rotten fish | |
| Now he's gotten where he ought to be: | |
| In the news and on the German telewish. (io4)[181] |
“A jurist,” Schmitt reflects during the summer of 1946, still in the American internment camp, “steers clear of psychological self-depiction. The impulse to offer a literary confession has been spoiled for me by such ugly examples as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and poor August Strind-berg.”[182] Schmitt is not among the public “self-torturers.” “If you want to make a confession, go find a priest and do it there” (77).
He unrolls once again the old banner “Tout ce qui arrive est adorable!” (8), carried by the avant-garde and the militant Catholic Leon Bloy too; but the slogan he writes in his diary presumably has little to
But the treatment Schmitt experiences in no way accords to his status; what he has to say has been banished from that space of consensual resonance, so that he screams “with no voice.” Since he is not prepared to repent, he receives no license for publications. His power of definition lacks a place to be exercised in public; worse yet, he has lost that power to the “enemy.” And the latter, by virtue of its monopoly on making distinctions, incriminated his practice since 1933—which is for Schmitt a serious logical error.
The power of definition had been Schmitt's elixir, the axis of his sovereign consciousness. At the center of his Glossarium we find the motto that also belonged to the creed of Weimar's leftist intellectuals:
Understand the power that is trying to get you in its grasp; do not confront it with countermeasures on the same level; rather, test your power to understand against that power. It will also try to grasp your understanding. But let it. It will cut its paws. (145)
Nor can he, in the seclusion of his refuge in Plettenberg, resist circulating “dangerous definitions” in letters. Still in the role of “hunted game” (174), he wants to classify his hunters. Sometimes he manages to get his views—as a kind of smuggled contraband—published in an organ approved by the occupation powers. Then he rejoices that his contraband, in good new objectivity manner, is allowed to ride on a commodity:
In the weekly journal Christ und Welt, a nice little gloss of mine has been printed, via an advertisement for Nivea cream. It is good so. In czarist times the Russian nihilists hid their bombs in flower pots. Why should I not frame my analogous concerns with Nivea cream. Or, conversely, make my own appearance as the frame for Nivea cream, so as not to agitate the persecutors.
Schmitt directs his attention to the unsecured terrain of postwar society and, as in the 19205, it remains now: when orienting parameters collapse, it's time for codes of conduct.
On i May 1948 Carl Schmitt, following the familiar model of Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom, notes seven maxims, to which he will later add a few others. The Spanish Jesuit, we recall, replaced the internal regulator, the conscience, with an external voice—a code of
If you end up in a loudly screaming chorus, you must scream the text yourself as loudly as you can. Anything else would mean your certain ugly death. Your hearing and brain would be shattered from without if you didn't defend yourself from within by screaming along; I can only recommend to you then a purely physical means of defense against annihilation by sound waves. (144)
Go into the shelter when the signal calls for it; raise your hands when you are ordered to; don't forget that the relation between protection and obedience is no longer certain and self-evident; the shelter can be the gas chamber. (144)
Beware of every loudspeaker; beware of every microphone that conducts your voice into the false public sphere [see Figure 12]. Every amplifier is a meaning counterfeiter…. But beware of the false echo that arises in the byways of the catacombs. (172)
Borrowing from Thomas Hobbes's theory of the state, Schmitt assumes from the outset a reciprocal relation between protection and obedience. Just as the protector can demand obedience, those who obey have a right to protection. Where this arrangement is violated, behavior can no longer be steered in a way that ensures protection. The result is that everyone is delivered up defenseless to circumstance. Schmitt thus formulates rules for situations that, from his perspective, are no longer subject to regulation. Bitterly, he elaborates his precepts ad absurdum; for their validity is restricted to honor-based social groups. He lays responsibility for his rules' absurdity at the feet of the dishonorable victorious powers.
Phonomania and Creature Schmitt's behavioral rules recreate the world of mobilization as an acoustic space. He advises in favor of purely physical defensive mechanisms, which are supposed to guarantee survival, while the command's substance or the song's text is of no matter. Schmitt's diary thus documents a remarkable form of phonocentrism. It reflects his resistance to the concept of law and clarifies his childish fixation on the “voice of the father.”
Through three hundred and twenty pages of diary entries, there is scarcely a reproduction of a visual impression to be found. The diary leads us into a world of acoustic phenomena, into a laboratory of echoing voices. Ultimately, the friend-enemy theory receives a phonetic basis. Even close friends appear without facial features; in the case of Jünger, Schmitt registers the “pathetic larynx” (104); for historically more distant
Beware of every microphone! (Carl Schmitt. With the permission of Ullstein Bilder-dienst, Berlin.)
Schmitt reacts idiosyncratically, as if irritated and impatient, to any argument based in any way on appearance. It pains him, leaves him
If the goal is to arrive at principles of law, the eye must be eliminated as an organ of moral judgment. While visible facts have no argumentative status (with the exception, incidentally, of the “visibility” of the judiciary itself, which he sees as establishing its “substance” [2,35]), every conceivable acoustic signal prompts thought. No excuse is too paltry. On 19 February 1948 he writes:
I hear (mornings at 6:00, in the dark, still half asleep) a factory siren, accompanied by a vision of the wide-open jaws of a huge fish. I would like to pursue the immediate simultaneity of an acoustic impression with a visual image. That would likely be more productive than researching the problem of radar. It would offer a glimpse of our inner sensorium. People who hear, instead of church bells, only factory sirens are supposed to believe in the God who is worshiped in church. They are more likely to believe in an iron-hard Moloch, (no)[183]
The foreground point raised in Schmitt's depiction of his acoustic space is the sovereign's voice, which is supposed to reach the ears of the subjects undistorted by the medium. At issue is the problematic written medium of the laws, which distort, absorb, or extinguish the voice, allowing it to reach the ears it is intended for only in diffuse, ambiguous form—the ears of “nonlistening jurists,” who occupy themselves producing technically neutral analyses of reigning opinion. In his construction of the state's acoustic space, his thoughts return to ways of regaining the sovereign voice and eliminating legal positivism. Actually, however, as Sombart suspects, the real point is for the voice of the tone-setting constitutional law expert to reach without impediment the ear of the ruler.[184]
Setting down his thoughts on the omnipotence and wretched impotence of the sovereign, on 23 May 1948 Schmitt paints the melancholy picture of a ruler who seems to have migrated directly from baroque tragedy into the Cold War: “Ultimately, the sovereign, blocked off by the anteroom and his chief of staff, sits in the icy solitude of his omnipotence” (152). What Schmitt is tracing here is the mirror image of the lonely prompter, who has been unjustly dismissed from service. For the
Schmitt's image of the sovereign recalls an anecdote from Pushkin, told by both Ernst Bloch (in Spuren) and Walter Benjamin (in his Kafka commentary), which explains the conditions of sovereign rule. In Benjamin's version, Potemkin (according to Meyers Enzyklopadie of 1906, a skillful courtier who “combined deceitfulness with old-fashioned Russian brutality but was altogether unfamiliar with noble moral ideas”), governor-general and ranking military officer for Her Grace, Catherine II, suffered from severe depressions, during which access to his chamber was strictly forbidden. One day, with stacks of unprocessed files reaching alarming heights outside, an insignificant chancellery bureaucrat chanced into the palace anteroom, where the councilors of state stood wringing their hands. Scarcely waiting for an answer to his question, “What's up, Excellencies?” he took the files in hand, heading off with the bundle under his arm through galleries and corridors to Potem-kin's bedroom, where he turned the doorknob.
Having found Potemkin, dressed in a tattered nightgown, chewing his nails, hunched over in bed, he—“wasting not a word”—dipped Po-temkin's quill in ink and slipped the files one after the other onto his knee, whereupon, as if still in sleep, the latter applied the required signatures. Triumphantly, swinging the files in his hand, the bureaucrat made his way back to the councilors, who, having ripped the eagerly awaited papers from his hand, stared back in horror. Only now did the little man have a look at the signatures, discovering there that, instead of Potemkin's, his own name had been written.[185]
That could not have happened to Schmitt, because he knew that it was necessary to gain the ruler's ear. The bureaucrat would have been for him a typical example of the “nonlistening jurist,” who is fixated on handwriting. And with this, we come to the central motif in Schmitt's assessment of the ear and the voice: his visceral reaction to “the law.”
In the draft for a letter on 19 January 1948, Schmitt writes as follows:
I would like to say, right away, in surrealistic openness, that the word, and now for the first time properly, the concept of the “law,” unleashes in me all manner—conceptual, theoretical, associative-psychological, and, last not least,
[*] The italicized words are in English in the original.
phonetic—of shudder and outrage. Outrage namely at the orgies of the typesetter and the terror of the “settings of the settings.” (185)As Raphael Gross has demonstrated, a “hatred of the concept of law” runs from the earliest writings all the way through Schmitt's works.[186] Already in his second legal publication, in 1912, we find, “The law is always full of holes. That opens the opportunity for the judiciary and the levying of judgment.”[187] Our misfortune, according to Schmitt, lies in our being ruled, as the legal positivists would have it, by the “sovereignty of the law,” which could never be anything more than an “over-compensation for the absence” of the actual sovereign.
The question of who is responsible for this cursed confinement of the judicial function to the letter of the law leads directly to the problem of Schmitt's anti-Semitism, for this concept of the law, according to Schmitt, is a product of the mental type of the Jewish people.[188] Law in this conception, as Schmitt would have it, becomes a technical means to restrain the all-powerful leviathan, cut it into pieces, and consume it. The fact that Schmitt, both in the Weimar period and in occupied Germany after the Second World War, feels besieged by positivist legal technicians appears to him proof that the Jews' assimilation was successful; for when one Jew was assimilated in one village, then the village had become Jewish. Yet the Jewish victory instanced in legal positivism could, as Schmitt continues, be no more than provisional, for faith in law is part of the “instinctlessness of a life-form condemned to decline” (2,3).
The ear of the ruler and the role of law—here are surely two important aspects of Schmitt's phonocentrism that, remarkably enough, evade his own reflections on his phonetic obsessions. The latter revolve instead around three other critical elements in Schmitt's construction of his acoustic space, namely, the command, conceptual realism, and speech magic.
Potemkin, in the grip of his melancholy, was in no condition to issue commands; the handwriting that the petty bureaucrat managed to get from him strikes back at those who, by virtue of the office they held, were fixated on writing. At the center of Schmitt's acoustical space, we find the command. An oral command is a form of language, establishing a direct connection between sender and receiver. The possibility of splitting speech between the speaking subject and the subject of speech, which characterizes written forms of language, is excluded by the command. With a command, the translation of the verbal appeal into action is regarded as unproblematic, or at least potentially possible. Schmitt's appreciation of the command relies on the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, who had held it to be “the greatest charity of language, for without it there would be no community among people, no peace, and
Schmitt's conceptual realism is another of the constituent elements of his acoustic space. In retrieving the term realism in its medieval sense, Schmitt assumes that the truth contained in the spoken word does not reside in the thing it refers to (116). Unlike writing, which is characterized by the capacity merely to produce the illusion of the presence of the absent subject of speech, the spoken word is inseparable from the instance of speaking. Only in sound does the word take on its corporeal reality; only in sound does it create space. When Schmitt then terms himself a “concept-ballistics man” (Begriffs-Ballistiker) he is attributing to his definition the material quality of a projectile.
Schmitt's view of conceptual realism acquires its uncanny dimension in combination with his reflections on speech magic. Every word, as he puts it in the diary, is a “phonetic hieroglyph,” an “echo of primal worlds” (159), which “impresses itself on memory with hypnotic power.” The point, therefore, is to find key words that articulate a fundamental experience—like Dezision (decision), Raum (space), or Feind (enemy)—and have phonetic qualities that stamp them on the memory. The purely phonetic qualities are ineffaceable. Schmitt believes that his key concepts achieve such a result, so that the cut of the umbilical cord is present in Dezision; that the primeval land is available for perception in Raum, bounded by the sea, defended by the father, and cared for by the mother; and in Feind, on the purely phonetic level, he hears the full intensity of one's separation from the other (16).[190]
His enhanced sensitivity for the tonal aspect of words (76), his atten-tiveness to the phonetic qualities of speech, stem from a time in which he was on friendly terms with Theodor Daubler and the dadaist Hugo Ball. Ball also remarked, referring to his famous performance of sound poems in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the First World War, that his voice, as soon as he surrendered to the mere sound of the words,
The provisional results of our reconstruction of Schmitt's acoustic space suggest that the structure of command stills the furor of his logocen-trism, that rites take up (when possible) the magic of the word. The acoustic space seems to be a very stable construction—which it is not. Schmitt sees threats stemming from two sides: from technology and from the body.
In the diary Schmitt repeatedly proclaims his favorite motto—distin-guo ergo sum (69)—but also knows that the certainty it suggests is illusive. Space—even in the mouth, at the threshold of expression—is always crisscrossed with other sound waves (60, 63). Permanently at play in acoustic performance is “something wildly alien,” a “mass” that bends the word and distorts meaning (52). Between “microphysical sound stimuli” and “macrophysical sound amplification” lies the disaster of the technological world. Thus the advice, in one of his behavior precepts, is to “avoid the microphone.”
A suspicion naturally dawns that this point of cultural criticism serves in the first instance to relieve Schmitt of a certain responsibility. He counts Hitler a “sound amplifier,” the National Socialist dictatorship a technocracy that necessarily distorts every word. And since Schmitt perforce used a microphone to deliver his commencement speech to a group of teachers in the national legal association, the speech necessarily took on the quality of a call for a purge of Jewish lawyers from the association. To this extent, his dialogue with the diary (the problematic of writing as a technical medium occurs to him only in reference to law) provides an ideal terrain for the word.
Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that Schmitt, precisely in this refuge, feels the interference of a force that undermines his notion of autonomy; he recognizes somatic influences on the articulation of language, even on his own power of definition (16 ff.).
In Helmuth Plessner's anthropology, we encountered the cool persona as that highly reflexive dueling subject, its ego sharply distinguished from the unconsciousness of bodily being. It needs, as we noted, to forget its body in order to present itself properly as a physical form. The task of overseeing the boundary to the unconscious, with which the ego
Our experience with the decisionist as a conceptual type during this century suggests that the more precisely it circumscribes the space, the greater is its longing for the amorphous condition of the bodily. Schmitt notes on 2,2, June 1948:
The fundamental precondition of the ability to make good definitions is a rare ability: to bound and exclude what cannot be circumscribed…. That is the first of all distinctions, just as all virtue for the stoic begins by marking off the sphere of our own power from the sphere in which we are powerless. (169)
As if echoing previous certainty, the inevitable comment comes a month later:
I am not in control of what penetrates into my consciousness, and not of that which remains unconscious to me…. Nor, therefore, am I able, as the stoic would have it, to distinguish what is in my power and what is not, and, on the basis of this distinction, master the one and accept the other. (180)
Somatic currents, bodily impulses, and physiological conditions of articulation determine what penetrates into consciousness, and they come into force with the articulation of a word—for example, Dezision or Feind. The secure ego, from this viewpoint, is only a “swamp light,” and when Schmitt repeatedly indulges the satirical verse Cogito ergo sum, summ, summ, summ, Bienchen summ herum
[*] Summen = buzz; thus, “little bee buzzing all around.” The rhyme occurs in German nursery rhymes.
he also betrays his suspicion of the emancipated signifier, as could only please a deconstruc-tionist: we seem to have found the vulnerable point in the steely structure of the command as well as the ritual structure of his acoustic space, in which language turns into indecipherable sound and command collapses. Here, we could maintain, Schmitt succeeds in punching holes in his definition discourse by way of Nietzsche's “guiding thread of the body”; here we have a lapse back to the literary avant-garde, or at least a case of geriatric anarchism.And yet the evidence of the tie back to Hugo Ball's word experiments
Vilém Flusser has coined the term “pyramidal discourse” for the kind of auditory communication Schmitt has in mind. It functions in societies that, while hearing, are not supposed to answer:
That is the reason for having relays between sender and receiver. The sender becomes inaccessible to the receiver. This model presupposes pyramidal hierarchies such as the priesthood, within which the messages of a distant God are transmitted through authorities toward receivers. The mediator has a twofold function: to keep the messages free of noise and to block the receiver's access to the author.[193]
The point may be a surprising one: insofar as Schmitt's phonomania plays itself out in the context of a pyramidal discourse, it remains a creature of the technological communications paradigm of the interbellum, the radio. Confirmation for this point comes from another direction: making the human word absolute, we read in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectik der Aufklärung, is a “false commandment,” which is part of the “immanent tendency of the radio.”[194]
Schmitt's Kafka If people face the decision of becoming kings or couriers, “in the way of children,” according to Kafka, “they all [want] to be couriers.” So the world is full of couriers running around, shouting out their reports to one another. But in the resounding absence of a king, their reports have no meaning. This is Kafka's space, founded on the murmur of couriers' voices.[195]
What could be more distant from Schmitt's acoustic space revolving around the command axis than this world of Kafka's? And yet Schmitt feels the magnetic attraction of a world in which the messengers can only get started with their task once the commanders-should they appear at all-have died, in which the couriers get lost in the labyrinths of palace hallways or dimly lit lofts, where those for whom the messages are meant are forever deprived of the true word or have to dream up the
In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course; I've been told it's being used there all the time; that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now, this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you'll hear, everything else is deceptive. There's no fixed connection with the Castle, no central exchange that transmits our calls farther. When anybody calls up the Castle from here, the instruments in all subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments-I know it for a certainty-didn't leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a distraction, especially in the evenings and at night, and may hang the receiver up. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that's merely a practical joke.[196]
Schmitt is fascinated by novels that measure the constitutional nation's lack of foundation, that create the sense of a permanent “state of waiting,” which for him signifies the epitome of Judaization (37). The representation of decisions being made out of nothing unsettles him-while in Kafka the much ballyhooed “decision” amounts to a gesture, to a little finger smoothing an eyebrow.
The contrast between these two anti-worlds might explain Schmitt's fascination. Its basis, however, is more ominous than the model of the attraction of opposites can suggest. On 2,9 August 1950 Schmitt notes in his diary:
But I (in contrast to Heidegger) name names out loud, like a child, and am for that reason predestined to be the sacrificial victim of ritual murder, like Kafka's defendant in Der Prozess. (309)
Schmitt believes he has fallen into the cogs of the legal machine, which lets him go on vegetating there, as he goes on to say, only because it is too worn out to carry out the traditional ritual murder.
Seven entries on Kafka document the way Schmitt follows the mores and customs of the constitutional nation in Kafka's novels. Kafka's writings illustrate for him the condition of a world in which the final judgment of the father is willfully nullified, so that people are left with no alternative but to feign his presence. It is a world in which faith in the law prevents the individual from perceiving the holes in the law, from which-in the father's voice—all that is good could be expected and in which —were the father's voice to be heard—it would demand nothing of the son but self-liquidation. In Das Schloß, Schmitt discovers the drama of
Franz Kafka could write a novel: THE ENEMY. Then it would become evident that the indeterminacy of the enemy evokes the fear (there is no fear but this, and it is the essence of this fear to sense an indeterminate enemy); in contrast, it is a matter of reason (and in this sense of high politics), to define the enemy (which always implies simultaneous self-definition), and with this definition the fear ceases, with only dread, at most, remaining.
But how—sighs Schmitt in this connection—how are we to snatch something from indeterminacy, “if we have no concepts in common?” (148). Shared concepts are lacking, no doubt, because no one else makes use of Schmitt's definition of the enemy, which demarcates the existential other.
For Schmitt, it is the font of all evil that humanity will no longer accept a paternal authority, and that instead in the father's place is the “objectivity” of law. There for him lies the disgrace of the November revolution and the failure of the majority of the Weimar Republic's legal scholars: “legal positivism,” so he declares in the diary, “kills its father and devours its children.” The worst form of “father devouring,” however, he finds in “Americanism” (148), first in the new objectivity decade of the Weimar Republic and later in the postwar Federal Republic.
As children of this Americanism we have been trying for thirty years to stand up to a form of political romanticism that, as Paul Tillich formulated it, appeared “to create the mother from the son and call the father out of nothing.” That is why it is no cause for sadness if acoustic conditions for the call for the father remain pretty bad during our lifetime.
Incidentally, Kafka did write a little piece about the enemy; it is called “Der Bau” (The burrow) and shows us an animal that lives underground and loves silence. The silence, in Siegfried Kracauer's commentary, “that prevails, or ought to prevail, in his lightless structure is also truly the only radical antidote to the true word.”[197]