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ab st ract
This article analyzes the critical dialogue between Walter Benjamin and
Carl Schmitt, to which a letter and several references in their work testify.
It shows how affinities and differences between their respective positions
can be explained from a shared theologico-political approach. Both authors
believe that, in spite of secularization, political phenomena can only be
adequately understood in light of certain theological concepts, images,
and metaphors. However, they explain these theologico-political analogies
differently. Whereas Schmitt advocates the authoritarian state, which he
compares to Gods omnipotence, Benjamin endorses the proletarian revolution, in which he recognizes traces of a divine law-destroying violence.
Challenging existing interpretations, this article shows how the political
theologies of Benjamin and Schmitt are not static but developed in the
course of their dialogue, in which both authors respond to each others criticism by changing and correcting their own positions in significant ways.
introduction
On 9 December 1930, Walter Benjamin sent a copy of his book The Origin
of German Tragic Drama to Carl Schmitt, accompanied by a letter in which
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 44, No. 4, 2011
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one was prepared to admit after the war. In 1987, Ellen Kennedy concluded
in a well-argued article that the affinities between Schmitt, Benjamin, and
the other Frankfurt School members had indeed been much deeper and
more problematic than had been acknowledged in the literature, because,
in spite of their very different political ideals, they had shared an aversion
to liberalism and parliamentary democracy (1987, 66). Kennedys essay met
with highly critical responses from Martin Jay, Ulrich Preuss, and others,
who admitted that there were indeed similarities between various Frankfurt
School positions and those of Schmitt, yet claimed that these positions
were ultimately irreconcilable ( Jay 1987; Preuss 1987).
The affinities between Schmitt and Benjamin were thus subject to
controversy from the start: Benjamins apparent endorsement of Schmitts
theory of sovereignty and methodology was either believed to indicate a
significant affinity between intellectuals of the far left and right or declared
incidental or superficial. However, with the passing of time, more nuanced
interpretations were proposed, and the relationship between Schmitt and
Benjamin was judged more often on its own merits. These readings sought
to reveal a critical dialogue in their writings, testifying to shared methodological presuppositions and a critical engagement with each others
positions. Thus, authors such as Norbert Bolz, Samuel Weber, and Giorgio
Agamben showed that although Benjamin had borrowed Schmitts concepts, he injected them into new contexts in which their original meanings were challenged and opposed (Bolz 1989, 8594; Weber 1992, 518;
Agamben 2005, 5264). In her turn, Suzanne Heil argued that the writings
of Schmitt and Benjamin could be read next to and as answers to each
other, even though it was not always possible to ascertain whether they
were indeed meant as interventions in a dialogue (Heil 1996, 8).
In these interpretations, the theologico-political convictions of
Schmitt and Benjamin play a key role. Their authors suggest that the shared
theologico-political approaches of Schmitt and Benjamin explain both the
similarities and differences between their respective positions (see also Figal
1992, 252). Thus, Benjamin and Schmitt believe that, in spite of secularization, political phenomena are to be understood primarily in light of certain
theological concepts and images. However, whereas Schmitt starts from
a Catholic perspective on the political, emphasizing the necessity of the
existing legal-political order, Benjamin takes a messianic perspective that
regards the legal-political order as destined to wither away. Their shared
theologico-political approaches can thus explain their different philosophical and political positions: whereas Schmitt advocates the authoritarian
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rights as a realization of the law. Thereby, fascism had shown its true face:
as a regime of lawlessness, veiled with the appearance of legality. Schmitt
had argued that the state of exception was necessary to protect the existing
legal order, but Benjamin observed that it was mobilized instead to legalize
an essentially unrestricted and lawless violence. To counter Schmitts doctrine of the state of exception and the fascist turn it had taken, Benjamin
now advocated the creation of a real state of exception through which the
laws dependence on violence would be brought to an end once and for all.
In their post-1933 writings, Schmitt and Benjamin introduce new
theologico-political motifs to articulate the various tasks and responsibilities of the sovereign and the revolutionary respectively. Schmitt now
compares the sovereign to the theological figure of the restraining force
[katechon] mentioned by Saint Paul (1997, 2832; see also Meuter 1994 and
Grossheutschi 1996). In his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Saint Paul
describes a restraining force that prevents the coming of the antichrist and
thereby postpones the arrival of the end -time. In these verses, the antichrist
is characterized as the lawless one [ho anomos] (2:68). In line with an
age-old tradition (see Metger 2005, 1548), Schmitt proposes a theologicopolitical reading of Pauls verses: thus, with the image of the restraining
force in mind, the sovereign has to protect the existing order and suppress
lawlessness at all costs, even if it requires violating the laws. By so doing,
he acquires a theological legitimacy, justifying state violence as a temporary
measure to prevent the worst, that is, the revelation of the antichrist.
Like Schmitt, Benjamin, in his final essay, introduces a theological
figure to articulate the revolutionarys responsibility: he evokes the figure of
an angel of history, who, his face turned toward the past, sees one single
catastrophe, which he seeks to end in vain: The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that
the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into
the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm (2003b, 39293).
With the image of the angel in mind, the revolutionary is expected to turn
against the existing order, it being the embodiment of an ongoing catastrophe. The catastrophe is caused by the storm of progress, which condemns
every aspect of the past that does not directly contribute to a legitimization
of the present to oblivion (Wilde 2009, 17794). It is the revolutionarys
task to revive the memory of the oppressed by destroying the order to
which they have been sacrificed.
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conclusion
When Taubes characterized Benjamins 1930 letter to Schmitt as a mine
that can blow to pieces our conception of the intellectual history of the
Weimar period, he was suggesting that the affinities between these thinkers had been both more substantial and more problematic than had been
acknowledged in literature. My analysis of this relationship, however, leads
to a different conclusion: the dialogue between Schmitt and Benjamin
turns out to have been critical from the start. One should, for instance, not
be misled by Benjamins praising words in his 1930 letter, for it was intended
to accompany a copy of his Origin of German Tragic Drama, in which an
implicit criticism of the Schmitts theory of sovereignty could already
be found. Although Schmitt appears to have taken Benjamins criticism
seriously, his remark in Hamlet or Hecuba that he had been particularly
indebted to Benjamin should not mislead us either, for it did not prevent him from formulating sharp objections to Benjamins interpretation of
sovereignty instead.
Beginning in the mid-1930s, both thinkers seem to have distanced
themselves from each other even further. Thus Benjamin, in On the
Concept of History, described the Schmittian state of exception as an
instrument of state oppression, calling for a real state of exception that
would bring the oppression to an end. In this context, he evoked the
allegory of the angel of history, who sought to redeem the past, ending
oppression and repairing what had been smashed. As I have explained,
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notes
1. References to Schmitt can be found in Benjamin 2003a, 239, nn14, 16, and 17.
Samuel Weber coined the term methodological extremism (1992, 7).
2. Taubes probably received a copy from Schmitt himself, whom he visited in the
1970s in his hometown of Plettenberg. On the relationship between Schmitt and Taubes,
see Taubes 1987, 65ff.
3. Schmitt first referred to the letter in Hamlet oder Hekuba; oder, Der Einbruch
der Zeit in das Spiel (1999, 64). He also distributed copies of the letter to friends and
students (Lethen 1999, 56). Schmitts biographer, Joseph Bendersky, who interviewed
Schmitt several times in Plettenberg in the 1970s, told me that Schmitt kept Benjamins
letter in a special file, which also contained letters from Ernst Jnger and Rudolf Smend.
His impression was that Schmitt kept the file with the specific purpose of showing it to
visitors.
4. The letter was first published by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser
in their edition of Benjamins complete works. Agamben observes that the letter has
always appeared scandalous (2005, 52).
5. The characterizations are Suzanne Heils and Hans Blumenbergs respectively
(Heil 1996, 16061; Blumenberg 1974, 113).
6. As Mathias Eichorn argues, it is remarkable that Schmitt often uses the concept
of theology and that he is even considered as the representative of a particular political
theology, even though he never wrote about theology and abstained from every theological
remark or argumentation (1994, 24).
7. In footnotes and bibliographies, Schmitt cites the issues immediately preceding
and following the one containing Benjamins essay. Agamben concludes that as an avid
reader of and contributor to the Archiv, Schmitt could not easily have missed a text
like Critique of Violence, which . . . touched upon issues that were essential for him
(2005, 5253).
8. Derrida writes: Carl Schmitt . . . congratulated him for his essay (1994, 69, translation mine). The source of Derridas remark is probably an essay by Jrgen Habermas, who
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claims that Carl Schmitt was . . . forced to congratulate the young Walter Benjamin with
his essay on G. Sorel (1987, 112).
9. The translations from Hamlet or Hecuba are mine.
10. Although Schmitt claims he had developed his theory of the katechon as early
as 1932, he first mentions it explicitly in a 1942 article (1995, 43536). Benjamin mentions
the image of the angel of history in 1940, in his ninth thesis on the concept of history
(2003b, 392).
works cited
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