![]() For this promise of critique-already toned down by Balakrishnan’s prefatory warning that ‘adopting the role of either prosecutor or defence attorney in discussing Schmitt’ presents a false choice-remains unfulfilled. The first aim conveys the nature of the work better than the second. The introduction to The Enemy frames his approach from the angle of a ‘diachronic contextualization’ and ‘intertextual reconstruction’ of Schmitt’s work, resulting in a ‘provisional framework for the comprehensive and critical evaluation of his thought’. Yet, given Balakrishnan’s Marxist credentials and background, the remit and objective of what is, after all, an intellectual portrait, remain curiously restricted. The systematic exploration of this register constitutes the strength of Balakrishnan’s outstanding study. Schmitt, Balakrishnan suggests, identified a politico-jurisprudential problematic-and developed a corresponding categorial register-that Marx, in his own time, had never fully addressed or conceptualized. ![]() Within this context, Balakrishnan not only regards Schmitt as a necessary complement to Marx, but clearly as a superior analytical voice and point of reference in fully understanding the legal-political controversies and geopolitics that marked the crisis-ridden transition from the ius publicum europaeum-the classical European inter-state order, regulated by international law-to an apparently de-politicized legal-moral universalism, codified in the Versailles Peace Treaty and institutionalized in the League of Nations. ![]() Schmitt deployed a remorseless and uncompromising vocabulary to dissect the crisis of the legal form in the inter-war period, analysing the pathologies of liberal international law and the relations between constitutionalism, democracy and emergency powers, in order systematically to deconstruct the practice and ideology of the liberal-capitalist ‘zone of peace’-and with it, the incipient neutralization of inter-state relations. footnote 2 For a critical American scholar, the attraction of exploring and validating Schmitt as a radical and insightful critic of American imperialism and its liberal-cosmopolitan apologists would seem unobjectionable. ![]() footnote 1 Balakrishnan’s intellectual biography of Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in the field, ‘the best English-language study’ on the subject. G opal Balakrishnan is one of the foremost experts in the Anglo-American world on the life and work of Carl Schmitt, and I am grateful for his response in nlr 68, ‘The Geopolitics of Separation’, to my essay on the thinker, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, in nlr 67. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |