Ndi 2013 – 6ws – schmitt kritik negative
Download 471.43 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Alt Fails
- Depoliticization good
- Schmitt’s wrong
Enemy elimination turnThe friend/enemy distinction is exclusionary and violent—causes the elimination of the enemyLee 7 (Fred, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Science @ Dennison University, PhD in Political Theory and Race @ UCLA Theory and Event, “The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exclusion,” 2007, Volume 10, Number 1, Project MUSE) In summary I would emphasize two interpretative implications of the theoretical staging of the Japanese internment above. First, the determination of military necessity encodes a racial state of exception, rather than miscodes a factual situation that might justify it. For Nishiura Weglyn and the CWRIC, the state acted inexcusably without reference to the fact of loyalty -- but this normative construction from the start makes less intelligible how the state acted with reference to the fact of sovereignty. Secondly, the sovereign decision that the Japanese were the enemy race was not just politically motivated but essentially political. For Daniels and Rentlen, the state's treatment of Japanese Americans epitomized American racism. Yet explanations based on racism -- as in wartime intensified fears, (un)conscious motivation, or anxiously-repeated stereotypes -- at best locate the psychological or social origins of the internment, but for lack of adequate conceptual distinctions necessarily fall short of the political specificity of the race question. The friend/enemy distinction and the state of exception disclose the distinct logic of sovereignty at work in the internment otherwise easily overlooked: the racial enemy must be 'eliminated' according to decisions that would restore the 'normal' situation. My argument pushes the conception of the interment as racial politics to its limit, where it posits the concept of politicized race. Identifying enemies creates unconscious moral imperatives to do violence against them—the logic of the alt is Japanese internment camps Lee 7 (Fred, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Science @ Dennison University, PhD in Political Theory and Race @ UCLA Theory and Event, “The Japanese Internment and the Racial State of Exclusion,” 2007, Volume 10, Number 1, Project MUSE) Predating America's declaration of war on Japan, the Yellow Peril figured the Japanese as a racial danger within the territory of the state as a matter of danger. What Homer Lea and more broadly the Yellow Peril stood for in the cultural domain, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Commanding General John L. DeWitt of the WDC represented in the political domain. As decision makers, Roosevelt authorized the executive order, whereas the authorized DeWitt distinguished sharply between all Japanese and non-Japanese enemy aliens in executing that order in March-August 1942. Public Proclamations No. 1 and 2 mentioned German and Italian aliens in addition to "any person of Japanese Ancestry" when establishing Military Areas No. 1-6 and various strategic zones where enemies might be prohibited. Public Proclamation No. 3 imposed a curfew -- not generally enforced on the still-mentioned German or Italian aliens -- on all Japanese Americans within Military Area No. 1 and the prohibited zones. Public Proclamation No. 4 set the stage for the evacuation in forbidding "all alien Japanese and persons of Japanese ancestry" from leaving Military Area No. 1 where some 90% of the population resided. Executing Civilian Exclusion Orders, the military then relocated over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into assembly centers while German and Italian aliens and citizens remained en masse. Again and again DeWitt proclaimed these actions to be authorized as matters of "military necessity." When it became apparent that no states outside of the Military Areas would allow the Japanese to resettle freely within their borders, the exclusion program almost inevitably turned into indefinite internment.17 Historians have extensively narrated the processes by which Roosevelt, DeWitt and other government officials arrived at these decisions.18 However the decision-making process is not essential to my account, as my story concerns not the causes but the effects of these made-decisions. Essential instead is Schmitt's question of sovereignty, that is, "who decides on exception." In setting up this question, Schmitt opposes the normal situation of public safety and order to the state of the exception in which the existence of the state is endangered; the former situation is the presupposition of the legal norm's application, whereas the later is characterized by the suspension of the legal norm. Sovereign then is the entity that decides whether the normal or exceptional situation exists, defining "what constitutes public order and safety" and "determining when they are disturbed."19 As that which decides upon the norm/exception distinction, Schmitt must insist that the decision on the exception cannot derive from the legal norm, since "the exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order... cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to preformed law."20 Rather the decision on the exception sets the limit of the law's application and reveals the sovereign as belonging to, but at the same time standing beside, the legal order in having the concrete "authority to suspend valid law."21 The determination of when the exceptional situation exists and how to restore the normal situation is accordingly decisionist, as opposed to normative, in Schmitt's opinion. In response to the internment redress movement of the 1980s, the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) report takes the absence of 'true' military necessity as the relevant fact: the internment occurred "despite the fact that not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast."22 The CWRIC presents the fact of no fifth column activity as decisive in undermining the claim of military necessity; yet the fact of no military necessity by any revisionist or even reasonable standard is only normatively relevant. But posing the authority to decide on military necessity as the relevant fact brackets the question of whether military necessity 'really' existed. The question then shifts from whether or not the state needed to do what it claimed was necessary, to scrutinizing what the state in-deed did in claiming that necessity. It is a mistake to see military necessity only as a justification, although it surely functioned as one 'after the fact' of decision. The declaration of military necessity was not a denotative utterance that referred to existent situation of fact, but a performative utterance of the WDC, an entity invested by the authority of EO 9066 with the power to proclaim that situation into existence.23 Put simply, the state decided that an exceptional situation existed in the face of a determined 'danger.' This statement can neither attack nor defend military necessity as a justification because it treats military necessity as a sovereign decision on the exception.24 What's more, this framing of the facts avoids the problem of responding to the WDC's charge of Japanese American disloyalty -- for although the intentions behind such a response are more often than not admirable, an answer to that charge can only be as perverted as the question itself. The sovereign not only decides on the state of exception, but also decides on the friend/enemy distinction that conceptually defines the politicaLink - as Schmitt defines it, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy."25 If the stakes of the norm/exception distinction are the legal order and its limits, then the ultimate stakes of the friend/enemy distinction are life and death. Though conceptually distinct, Schmitt interrelates war and the political as mutual presuppositions. War presupposes "that the political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is," while the possibility of war is the "leading presupposition" of the political.26 The enemy is not the figure hated or considered morally inferior by the friend, but is rather the figuration of the possibility of violent conflict between armed collectivities. The extremity of enmity then correlates to the intensity of political conflict, although the enemy as a category has no necessary content. As a formal distinction, the political only refers to the highest degree of (dis)association between groups, and these groupings might divide along class, religious, racial or any other lines. However only a grouping of sufficient quantitative intensity can qualify as political, and moreover, only in this qualification is any social antagonism 'politicized' in the more familiar phrase. Once this occurs, the political distinction takes control or is overriding: "The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely nonpolitical criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand."27 The pervasive figuration of race as racism in American popular and academic discourse precisely elides the crucial distinction between political and non-political forms of (dis)association. Indeed, even Alison Dundes Renteln's unconventional psychoanalysis of the internment is entirely conventional in this respect when it argues that "a deeply rooted fear of sexual congress between the races consciously or unconsciously motivated some of the actions which led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans... A combination of the ideas of eugenics and virulent racism... was partly responsible for the occurrence of one of America's worst civil liberties disasters."28 Within the necessity-rights circle, Rentlen collapses the difference between the specter of racial miscegenation and the concrete declaration of racial enmity by turning the former into a (partial) cause of (the several actions that produced) the later. Thus maintaining the distinction between the political and the social from the outset not only re-politicizes the overly psychologized question of race, but shifts our analysis away from the (pre-political) causes of the decision to intern towards the structuring friend/enemy distinctions of the Japanese internment. All this initial staging then stands or falls on this simple premise: the state politicized race in the decision that the Japanese Americans were enemies and this identification of 'danger' coincided with the decision on the state of exception.29 Alt FailsThe alt fails to overcome liberalism—Schmitt just moralizes the politicalStrong 7 (Tracy, Distinguished Professor of Political Science @ Harvard, PhD in Political Science @ Harvard Foreword: Dimensions of the New Debate about Carl Schmitt, from The Concept of the Political, 2007, pg. xvii-xviii) Two questions are at stake here. The first is whether it is possible to escape the hold of an ethical universalism; the second is that if it is possible, where then does one find oneself-what does it mean to go "beyond good and evil"? Schmitt clearly thought that he had given a positive answer to the first question: that people will only be responsible for what they are if the reality of death and conflict remain present. 25 Such considerations transcend the ethical and place one-this is Schmitt's answer to the second question-in the realm of nature. As Strauss notes: "Schmitt returns, contrary to liberalism, to its author, Hobbes, in order to strike at the root of liberalism in Hobbes's express negation of the state of nature.,,26 However, as Strauss brilliantly shows, it is highly contestable that Schmitt actually has achieved what he believes himself to have accomplished. Strauss demonstrates that Schmitt remains concerned with the meaningfulness of life-he is afraid that modernity will make life unmeaningful. He thus, as Strauss concludes, remains within the horizon of liberal moralist. "The affirmation of the political," writes Strauss, "is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral." Schmitt has, albeit unwillingly, moralized even his would-be amorality. Depoliticization goodDepoliticization is good—we should deconstruct the boundaries of friend/enemy differences as a form of political, democratic heterogeneityDerrida 97 (Jacques Derrida, Visiting Professor at NYU, The Politics of Friendship, 1997, p. 104-106) This last hypothesis may lead to two types of rejoinder to the Schmittian project or, if you prefer, to two distinct sides of the same answer to The Concept of the Political, that is, to the reconstruction of the political. On the one hand, we seem to be confirming — but not by way of deploring the fact, as Schmitt does — an essential and necessary depoliticization. This depoliticization would no longer necessarily be the neuter or negative indifference to all forms of the social bond, of the community, of friendship. On the other hand, through this depoliticization, which would apply only to the fundamental and dominant concept of the political, through this genealogical deconstruction of the political (and through it to the democratic), one would seek to think, interpret and implement another politics, another democracy. One would seek to say it, to thematize it, to formalize it in the course of a deconstruction — the course of the world — under these old names. Saying, thematizing, formalizing are not neuter or apolitical gestures, arriving after the fact from above [en surplomb]. These gestures are positions staked out in a process. Calling this experience (for it is an experience that crosses through and ventures out before being a philosophical, theoretical or methodological statement) genealogical deconstruction' would here no longer be naming, as was often done, an operation proceeding only through genealogical analysis, retrospection and reconstitution. At stake would thus be a deconstruction of the genealogical schema, a paradoxical deconstruction — a deconstruction, at once genealogical and a-genealogical, of the genealogical. It would concern, by way of a privilege granted — thus its attribute — the genealogical. Wherever it commands in the name of birth, of a national naturalness which has never been what it was said to be. It would concern confidence, credit, credence, doxa or eudoxia, opinion or right opinion, the approbation given to filiation, at birth and at the origin, to generation, to the familiarity of the family, to the proximity of the neighbour — to what axioms too quickly inscribe under these words. This is not to wage war on them and to see evil therein, but to think and live a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin. Hence, which begin where the beginning divides (itself) and differs, begin by marking an `originary' heterogeneity that has already come and that alone can come, in the future, to open them up. If only unto themselves. Saying that to keep this Greek name, democracy, is an affair of context, of rhetoric or of strategy, even of polemics, reaffirming that this name will last as long as it has to but not much longer, saying that things are speeding up remarkably in these fast times, is not necessarily giving in to the opportunism or cynicism of the antidemocrat who is not showing his cards. Completely to the contrary: one keeps this indefinite right to the question, to criticism, to deconstruction (guaranteed rights, in principle, in any democracy: no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction). One keeps this right strategically to mark what is no longer a strategic affair: the limit between the conditional (the edges of the context and of the concept enclosing the effective practice of democracy and nourishing it in land [sol] and blood) and the unconditional which, from the outset, will have inscribed a self-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and the duty for democracy itself to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive self-delimitation. Delimitation not only in the name of a regulative idea and an indefinite perfectibility, but every time in the singular urgency of a here and now. Precisely through the abstract and potentially indifferent thought of number and equality. This thought certainly can impose homogenizing calculability while exalting land and blood, and the risk is as terrifying as it is inevitable — it is the risk today, more than ever. But it perhaps also keeps the power of universalizing, beyond the State and the nation, the account taken of anonymous and irreducible singularities, infinitely different and thereby indifferent to particular difference, to the raging quest for identity corrupting the most indestructible desires of the idiom. Schmitt’s wrongSchmitt’s history is selective and misleading—enmity has not reduced the scale or scope of wars.Brown 7 (Chris, Professsor of International Relations and Governor of the International Relations Department @ the London School of Economics Writing in The international political thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order pg. 63-64) Other features of Schmitt’s rather selective account of the history of the European states-system also deserve to be challenged. Central to this history is the notion that the bracketed, humanized wars of sovereign states were less terrible than the religious wars they replaced, or the modern crusades they would bereplaced by. It is certainly the case that there were brief periods in modern European history, especially in the mid-eighteenth century, when the notion of war as a duel between enemies who recognized each other as legitimate bore some relationship to the facts – although even then the general level of brutality towardscivilians was higher than anecdotes such as that told by Laurence Sterne would suggest. In any event, these periods were few and far between. Most of the time, the more civilized features of war during the era of the public law of Europe were experienced only by the princes who declared them, and perhaps a few aristocrats and senior military officers. More, Schmitt makes life easy for himself by defining his period in a way that helps his case – thus the Thirty Years War is described as a religious conflict which predates the idea of war as a duel between sovereign states, and yet religion was only one element in that conflict, and often not the most significant element. Catholic France and the Papacy ended up effectively on what was nominally the ‘Protestant’ side of the conflict which hardly suggests deep religious motivations. Download 471.43 Kb. Share with your friends:
|