Political Theology:

American exceptionalism redux

posted by Vincent P. Pecora

I come late to the discussion of Paul Kahns Political Theology: Four New
Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, and will add only a few brief
remarks before the conversation closes down. In part, this is because Jean-
Claude Monod has already said, and quite eloquently, much of what I
would have saidif you want my larger view, that is, see Monod. Like
Monod, I find Kahns book as a whole less coherent than some others have.
One issue I want to raise, though, is the specter of American
exceptionalism that haunts the book. Haunts, actually, may be too mild a
word, since Kahn enthusiastically embraces the exceptional nature of
American politics and law, and does so in absolutist terms (perhaps this is
just the unfortunate sign of the legal mind at work, as is also the case in
Schmitt). Of course, much of the book is devoted to pointing out how
extra-legal Americas use of violence for political ends is, as opposed to
that of Europe, while the typical right-wing elaboration of American
exceptionalism tends to avoid this issue in favor of a reliance on the USAs
special, God-given dispensation to address the evils of the world wherever
they occur. Even those who do not directly invoke the divinity or the duty
of foreign adventurism in expressing their high regard for the country
nevertheless often slip into a discourse in which the Sonderweg of the
United States is dearly held. Kahns is a more sobering account of that
Sonderweg, though it still weirdly (as Monod points out) ends up
discovering a notion of freedom in Schmitt that could be appropriately
applied to Americas exceptional (and exceptionally permanent, for Kahn)
state of exception where extra-legal violence is concerned.
But it seems to me that all versions of political exceptionalism, whatever
the ends to which they are put, are fundamentally wrong-headed. That is,
no one would deny that each nation, even each Western liberal democracy,
is somehow uniqueFrances religious and courtly heritage is obviously
quite different from Britains national (if we can call it that) Bildung. But if
we are going to be historically circumspect and careful, then it does us little
good to make such differences absolute. No matter how large the gap when
it comes to legal or constitutional formations and predispositions
(Napoleonic and codified in France, common-law to a large extent in the
UK), we also need to acknowledge how far nation-state structures and geo-
political exigencies create remarkable similarities (for example, France and
Britain, despite chauvinist claims on both sides, ran empires with similar
goals, similar legal chicanery, similar brutality, and similar denouements;
both countries today attack the Islamic veiling of women in ways that
would be unthinkable in the US; both are highly secular, and so on).
And yet Kahn has no difficulty speaking in absolutes about the US. The
juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European
political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign
action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a
resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no
exceptions. By contrast, Americans live comfortably with their long
history of citizen sacrifice in national wars, so that popular history is the
history of violent force against enemies, which is then endlessly
reinforced when Americans take their families to Valley Forge and
Gettysburg, and even Omaha Beach. (For the record, I have been to none
of these places.)
I have read these passages numerous times, and I still do not get the
supposed appropriateness of the contrast on page 16, the on the one hand,
on the other hand structure that Kahn presumes is obvious to his reader.
Yes, I agree, Americans do wave flags more than Europeans, and yes, as
Kahn suggests, they do not see their history through the prism of the
concentration camp or bombed out cities. But how the notion of sacrifice
in warand sacrifice is a crucial term in Kahns argumentcame to be a
uniquely American characteristic, one clearly absent on the Continent,
remains a historical puzzle in Kahns book. It is as if this sense of sacrifice
derived solely from the constitution (and I mean this in both the
conceptual and legal sense) of the US, whereas its absence in Europe is also
fundamentally constitutional. But this makes a hash of twentieth-century
political history.
First, as should be obvious, the idea of sacrifice for the nation (or the
city-state) goes back at least to Pericles. Second, modern European history
is in many ways nothing but what Kahn (referring only to the US) calls the
long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars. The scale on which
French and German citizens (and they were that) sacrificed themselves
during WWI alone dwarfs by orders of magnitude all American sacrifices
in the last hundred years. We will not even begin to talk about Soviet or
German sacrifices in WWII, or the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers in the
Pacific or in kamikaze squads. Only one American war even comes close
the Civil Warand this of course was the one war not fought against
foreign enemies. Given the level of the carnage, it is little wonder that
Europeans have less of a taste for foreign adventurism than Americans do
today. But even this reluctance did not happen overnight (even the
Europeans, that is, learn slowly). French soldiers continued to sacrifice
themselves in large numbers in Vietnam andwith a fairly enthusiastic use
of extra-legal torture against their enemiesin Algeria in the 1950s. Of
course, outside Europe, Korea and Vietnam made the sacrifice of citizens
against foreign enemies something of a sacred cause. The Vietnamese were
far more enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves for their nation than the
disaffected Americans were between 1965 and 1973the results prove it, I
think. It would be hard to show that the Americans were more willing than
the French to sacrifice themselves in Vietnam, and both were less willing
than the Russians were (for a time, at least) in Afghanistan. The
enthusiasm among British citizens for war in the Falklands was palpable
and was far greater than Americans willingness to sacrifice themselves, in
a comparably ridiculous war, in Granada. Had I the time or space, even a
cursory discussion of Israel, where the willingness of citizens (again, in a
Western European sense) to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation
remains unabated to this dayjust try throwing stones over the border
and far outstrips, say, US citizens willingness to sacrifice themselves in
defending the border with Mexico. (Ok, in Arizona, I agree, there are some
folks who may feel this way, but even big-chested Rick Perry in Texas has
more or less admitted, to the dismay of the Tea Party, that he will not lay
down his life to defend El Paso from Mexicans.)
When Kahn writes about the exceptional and unique nature of Americans
willingness to sacrifice themselves, even in extra-legal circumstances, for
the nation, and then traces this willingness back to the unique nature of the
US political constitution, I cannot avoid thinking of the great Viennese
scholar Otto Brunner, perhaps the most important follower of Schmitt,
vlkisch thinker, and Nazi-identified historian of the Third Reich.
Brunners summa is (in English) called Land and Lordship: Fundamental
Questions on the Territorial Constitutional History of Southeast Germany
in the Middle Ages. Like Kahn, Brunner accepted Schmitts definition of
the political as the opposition of friend and foe; like Kahn, he accepted the
irreducibility of political theology in the liberal state, that is, the state
defined by the opposition of state and society. Like Kahn, he believed that
the unique political constitution (both conceptual and legal) of a particular
people (in this case, the Germans) was completely unsuited to the
dominant liberal nation-state juridical and political order of Europe, an
order based (just as Kahn himself puts it) on the idea that the rule of law
and the states consequent monopoly on violence (only the states violence
is permitted, and it is only permitted when it is lawfulno exceptions) is
the essence of justice. And like Kahn, Brunner argued that one people, and
only one peoplethe Germanswere constitutionally incapable of
following the rule of such a European order of nation-states, and hence
needed to reclaim a sense of freedom in the extra-legal use of violence,
such as could be found in feuds and clan retribution, in the sense of the
sacred that binds them organically to the soil and to one another, and most
of all, in the sacrificial loyalties of the medieval Austrian Reich. When Kahn
writes, late in his book, that political authenticity, as it emerges in a study
of political theology, is that experience of the unity of being and meaning
that marks the presence of the sacred, Brunner would have agreed
wholeheartedly. And Brunner would also have agreed with Kahn that, alas,
such an experience could not be found among the liberal nation-states of
Europe, though he certainly hoped, in 1939, that Germany would soon
show Europe how it might be achieved.
Kahn surely shares little of Brunners rabid, expansionist, and anti-Semitic
nationalism. But his critique of the modern liberal nation-state from the
vantage point of political theology is of a piece with much that has
appeared recently, a fair amount of it deriving from both Schmitt and
Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence, which rejects both the earlier
natural law tradition and the positive law of the nation-state. From the
work of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the inevitable denouement of the
nation-state is totalitarian Nazism, to the Red Tory revanchist theology of
John Milbank, and the delirious Christian Stalinism of Salvoj Zizek, a
certain strain of academic theory has emphasized that the nation-state
after Hobbes rests on an absolutist basisa monopoly on violencethat its
own constitutional presumptions must constantly disavow under the guise
of lawfulness. Ironically, Brunners own deeply conservative, National
Socialist thinking is in complete agreement with such indictments. Yet
what Brunner demonstrates at the same time, albeit unintentionally, is that
the attempt to find a final solution to the aporia of the liberal states
political theologyits seemingly endless and irresolvable process of
secularizationmay be far worse than the aporia itself.
Tags: American exceptionalism, American politics, Carl Schmitt, France,
Germany, Giorgio Agamben, John Milbank, law, Otto Brunner, sacrifice,
Slavoj !i"ek, Sonderweg, Walter Benjamin