The Return of the Schmittian- Radical Democratic Theory at Its Limits, 30p, 09

8/13/2019 The Return of the Schmittian- Radical Democratic Theory at Its Limits, 30p, 09

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and state of exception along with their concrete political implications, which boosted

the contemporary currency of Schmitts philosophy.4

This essay focuses on another avenue of engagement with Schmitts thought,

namely, its specific appropriation by Chantal Mouffe in her formulation of a radically

pluralist model of liberal democracy. At first, one might wonder how it is possible for

Mouffe to draw on Schmitts thought given the discrepancy between their political

positions and theoretical foci. After all, Schmitt is (in)famous for being a conservative

jurist, the theorist of sovereign power and dictatorship, and even the philosophical

godfather of National Socialism. Mouffe, on the other hand, is a staunch advocate of

radical pluralist democracy, the theorist of social indeterminacy and discursivity, and the

co-author of the groundbreaking post-Marxist work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

However, the fact that Mouffe has written three books and collections of essays (1993,

2000, 2005) and edited another one (1999), all of which engage with the works of Carl

Schmitt, proves that although the two figures are radically divergent, they are not

incommensurable. Moreover, this very divergence attest to the multilayered character of

Schmitts writings, which renders them available for utilization in diverse politico-

theoretical projects and opens up new avenues for thinking about the political in our time.

To this purpose, this essay focuses on a specific theme in Schmitts theory,

namely, the ultimate incompatibility of the logic of liberalism and the logic of

democracy, which Mouffe considers as the challenge of Schmitt and tries to resolve

through a particular interpretation. Put briefly, Mouffe strives to overcome the

incompatibility between liberalism and democracy by articulating the two in a

4A recent work in this lane isInternational Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal war and the

Crisis of Global Order, edited by Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito (2007).


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democratic paradox, whereby the defining principles of each logic (individualism,

deliberation, and universal human rights of the former, and homogeneity, identity, and

exclusivity of the latter) play themselves out in an open-ended discursive struggle for the

redefinition of the terms equality and freedom, which animates a politics of agonism in a

radically pluralist liberal democratic system (Mouffe, 2000: 4-5). To this end, Mouffe

draws on particular themes and appropriates particular concepts in Schmitts works, and

modifies these as to fit her overall project. In her criticism of the universalist-rationalist

model of liberal democracy (exemplified in the works of Rawls and Habermas), she

summons to her aid the Schmittian notion of the political and the distinction of

friend/enemy with a point to emphasize the irreducibly antagonistic and exclusive logic

of democratic politics (Mouffe, 1993). As I will argue, however, in her avowed project of

thinking withand againstSchmitt (Mouffe, 1999: 6), Mouffe omits some of his major

concepts and drastically redefines certain others so as not to endanger the liberal and

pluralist character of democracy she envisions.

In what follows, I begin my exploration with an outline of the Schmittian

concepts and themes that are central to the incorporation of a Schmittian moment in

Mouffe. Among these, the concept of the political as friend/enemy distinction, the

notion of the logic of sovereignty as the nexus of sovereignty-decision-exception, and

the counterposition of liberalism and democracy will be accorded special importance.

This outline is followed by an examination of the works of Mouffe which explicitly draw

on Schmitt for a theory of agonistic politics in a pluralist liberal democracy. In the course

of discussion, I try to delineate the strategic theoretical maneuvers Mouffe undertakes,

which are geared towards the domestication of the Schmittian notion of the political by


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transforming enemy into adversary, antagonism into agonism, and homogeneity into

commonality. Mouffe justifies these conceptual mutations on the grounds that Schmitts

understanding of democracy is rendered obsolete and untenable by the democratic

revolution that has replaced the embodied forms of politics with (in Claude Leforts

terms) the empty place of power. Consequently, although Schmitts insights are useful

for reinvigorating democratic politics, they nonetheless have to be adapted to its modern

conditions. I contend that it is only with these theoretical alterations of core Schmittian

concepts that Mouffe can then construct a paradoxical articulation between liberalism and

democracy.

The focus of the essay then shifts to the questions and problems that arise in the

particular course of Mouffes appropriation of Schmittian concepts. These include the

elision of the questions of sovereignty and decision, and the banishment of the exception

from democratic politics. These theoretical gaps emanate from a presupposition of a state

of normalcy as the condition of possibility of the pluralist democracy, and this

presupposition constitutes the limits of Mouffes theory. These limits become manifest in

her silence regarding the instances where the political community comes into contact

with its constitutive outside, and where the displaced, disavowed, and domesticated

political returns with a vengeance. Finally, the essay concludes with a brief exploration

into the dark side of the liberal democracy, whereby it posits the possibility of a more

insidious and destructive configuration between liberalism and democracy, namely, their

indistinction, which lurks beneath their paradoxical articulation.

I. The Political and the Logic of Sovereignty


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The major essays that Schmitt penned throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, that

is, during the parliamentary experiment of the Weimar Republic, have behind them not a

sheer scholarly interest of the jurist, but a political investment that was a reaction to what

he perceived as a degenerative, decaying, and moribund political order reigning in

Germany. The opening sentence of Political Theology (1922), Sovereign is he who

decides on the exception (Schmitt, 2005: 5) should be read as an attempt to revive an

idea that Schmitt observed had fallen into oblivion in the Weimar Republic. In this work,

Schmitt develops the notion of an executive power that will intervene to secure the

foundations of the constitutional order, a notion he first voiced in his essay On

Dictatorship (1921), and formulates a tirinitarian theory of the state which hinges on the

inextricable nexus between the concepts of sovereignty, decision, and exception. In

essence, this nexus points to a locus that is outside the constitutional order and at the

same time its condition of possibility. The crucial assumption that underlies this extra-

constitutional foundation of the constitutional order is that the legal order rests on a

decision and not on a norm (Schmitt, 2005: 10). For Schmitt, an exclusive rule of law

was inconceivable, which was not a simple advocacy of dictatorship, but an assertion of

the need to recognize an extra-legal, personal element of power which would provide an

exterior support, an exoskeleton for the legal order.5In this imagery, when this external

support is cast aside and real life situations in their radical manifoldness are tried to be

dealt with solely by legal norms, the legal order enters a crisis (a state of emergency)

and begins to dissolve, for the letter of law is ultimately finite and thus unable to subsume

5This is a point that has been acknowledged by the earlier liberal thinkers who reserve a space in their

right-based consensual politics for exceptional decisions. For an excellent essay that surveys this space in

the political thought of John Locke, William Blackstone, and Alexander Hamilton, see Clement Fatovics

The Political Theology of Prerogative: The Jurisprudential Miracle in Liberal Constitutional Thought.

ADD MONK


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life as a whole. It is at this point it becomes an imperative to step outside of law and

temporarily and/or partially suspend its efficacy in order to secure the conditions in

which it can operate.6This, for Schmitt, is the moment of exception, whereby the two

elements of the concept legal order are then dissolved into independent notions (Ibid:

12) and the legality (Legalitt) is sacrificed for the purpose of saving the order

(Ordnung). Whereas the efficacy of law refers to its normative content, the order is the

homogenous medium (Ibid: 13), the state of normalcy in which the norm can be

applicable at all. The exception is positioned on the limit between law and order, and

comprises the nexus that upholds the legal system as a whole. In this sense, exception is a

borderline concept in that although it exists outside law, it is nonetheless belongs to it,

which positions the sovereign who decides on the exception both inside and outside legal

order (Ibid: 7).

The concept of exception broaches the issue of who is authorized to decide

whether an exceptional situation is at hand. The provisions for diagnosing an exceptional

situation (a state of emergency) cannot be ultimately derived from the legal norm itself,

for the exception issui generis the situation that defies subsumption under law. Thus the

declaration of exception is not a matter of normative applicability, but reveals decision

as the irreducible and indispensable component of the legal order. This is what leads

Schmitt to identify the decision on the exception as the decision in the true sense of the

word (Ibid: 6). Implied here is the idea that a decision detached from the exception

(situation outside of law) and sovereignty (the authority unbound by law) is no decision

6The notion that the concept of democracy can only be practiced if its ideal radical openness is subjected to

certain degree of closure was famously elaborated by Jacques Derrida. He expounds this autoimmunity of

democracy inRogues: Two Essays on Reason(2005).


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The total exclusion of the logic of sovereignty-decision-exception12

and the

absolute depersonalization of politics constitute the crux of Schmitts criticism of

liberalism. This, for Schmitt, makes liberalism a metaphysical system (akin to deism),

which, by founding positive law on the model of natural law, banishes miracle in line

with the Enlightenments rejection of all arbitrariness and exception (Ibid: 36, 41).

Thereby arises the politics of immanence, which wreaks an onslaught on the political

by reducing political problems to organizational-technical and economic-sociological

ones, thus evading the exacting moral decision that constitutes the core of the

political (Ibid: 65). This logic manifests itself most clearly and most decisively in

liberalisms inability to draw lines of distinction between friends and enemies. This

distinction is the moment when the political emerges and reveals its inherent

relationship with the logic of sovereignty. For this distinction is not a concrete definition

and has no substantive content but follows from a decision. A friend/enemy grouping is

not discovered but decided on, and this decision is irreducibly sovereign, because the

relationship between the two parties is one of existential combat (Schmitt, 1976: 32)

and emerges at the moment of the exception. In other words, the political is not another

domain of life such as economy, religion or morality, (though it can and does feed on

antagonisms in these domains), but exists as an ever present possibility, a potentiality

embedded in social life in its entirety, which is realized when the sovereign decides that

the political system and/or the social body is lethally endangered, and that it has to be

protected by exceptional measures. Contrary to the logic of liberalism, which strives to

dissolve the political along a continuum between economics and ethics (Ibid: 71),

normatively. When conceived so, the nothingness is the lack of correspondence, or the gap between the

existing norm, and the concrete life situation it faces.12This point onwards this logic will be referred to as the logic of sovereignty.


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political entities (friends and enemies) confront each other not as economic competitors

or debating adversaries, but as existentially different and alien opponents who enter

in a decisive bloody battle that involves physical killing, rather than engaging in

mere symbolic wrestlings (Schmitt, 1976: 26-8, 33; Schmitt, 2005: 59). The extremity

of the political and the existentiality of its stakes cannot be overemphasized in Schmitt,

for it constitutes the nexus between the political and the logic of sovereignty that

animates his whole paradigm.

The contours of Schmitts conception of democracy trace the hidden lines of the

political. This correspondence has at its core the requisite of homogeneity of the social

body defined on the basis of a substantive equality (Schmitt: 1988: 9). Schmitt calls the

latter political equality and opposes it to human equality which he contends is a

liberal, not a democratic, idea (Ibid: 11-2). Liberalism does not recognize any substance

that differentiates amongpeople, and considers all individualsto be equal on the basis of

their abstract humanity, which disqualifies liberalism as a state form and renders it an

individualistic-humanitarian ethic and Weltanschauung (Ibid: 13). The underlying

principle of political equality and homogeneity is that for a polity to be a democracy, the

people should be cohesive enough to be mobilized for existential combat (war) when the

sovereign decides on the exception and draws the lines between friend and enemy. This

becomes clearer in Schmitts later assertion that humanity as such cannot wage war

because it has no enemy (Schmitt: 1976: 54). In this respect, one can argue that the

substance of political equality is valuable not in itself, but insofar as it supplies the

political core around which a peoples willcan cohere and recognize this core as worth

protecting against enemies. Homogeneity is not in the natureof the substance shared


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by the governed, but consists of the identity of the governed with the government, of

people and state, of peoples will and law; it is, in short, politicalhomogeneity (Wiley,

2002: 485).13

Schmitt admits that this identity is not a palpable reality but rests on the

recognition of identity, in other words, on identification (Schmitt, 1988: 26-7). The

logic of identification enables Schmitt to reconcile democracy with constitutional

dictatorship (and thus the presidential dictatorship he himself advocates), in which the

peoples will is identified with, or rather incarnated in the state and unified in the

executive as the exclusive bearer of sovereign power and monopoly of decision (Ibid:

45).

The political distinction between friend and enemy is central to Schmitts efforts

to keep the rule (peace) and the exception (war) distinct, and render the latter temporary

and manageable. For the decision on friend and enemy designates, or rather, creates

definitivepoliticalentities to which antagonism is restricted. In contrast, the idea of a war

waged in the name of humanity results in the dehumanizationof the enemy, and would

be geared toward not self-preservation but toward the utter destruction of the enemy

(Schmitt: 1976: 54). Here we see a glimpse into the grim premonitions on the dangers

lurking behind the refusal to come to grips with the political dimension of life, and the

conflation of the nonpolitical concept of humanity with the political logic of friend and

enemy, or rather, formulating a politics out of humanitarian principles, a politics of

humanity. It is as if the humanitarian logic of liberal individualism, which avoids the

risks implied by political existence (risk of being called upon for taking and sacrificing

13The substance of political equality, on the basis of which political homogeneity is erected, is thus

context-specific, and can be associated with different physical and moral qualities in accordance with the

historically specific political project at hand. This introduces an aspect of uncertainty into the lines that

separate politically desirable groups from undesirable ones, the people from domestic enemies

(Schmitt, 1976: 46).


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life in the existential combat between friends and enemies) and entrusts the right over life

only to the individual, points to a dark, destructive underside, where war is condemned

but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications remain. The adversary is

thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated an

outlaw of humanity, and every war must turn into a crusade and into the last war of

humanity (Ibid: 79).

II. Domestication of the Political and Democratic Pluralism

Mouffes engagement with Schmittian insights constitutes a central avenue of

thought in her works The Return of the Political (1993) and The Democratic Paradox

(2000). In these books, as well in her introduction to the collection of essays entitled The

Challenge of Carl Schmitt(1999), the position that Mouffe accords to Schmitt is that of

an interlocutor who, with his concept of the political, supplies Mouffe with a heavy

hand in her criticism of the rationalist-deliberative (Haberawlsian) theories of

democracy and facilitates her move from this critique to the formulation of a radically

pluralist liberal democracy. Nonetheless, although Schmitt proves a useful indicator for

diagnosing the problems of liberal thought (which Mouffe contends that still persist

today) his staunchly anti-liberal stance ultimately proves irreconcilable with the theory of

liberal democracy that Mouffe tries to reinvigorate, and forces her to part ways with

Schmitt at a certain point. Mouffe accomplishes this move by subjecting Schmittian

concepts to a series of transformations and transmutations to render them compatible with

the specificity of modern liberal democracy after the democratic revolution (pace

Lefort), the inattentiveness to which constitutes Schmitts blind spot (1993: 109, 121).


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However, this strategic move broaches as many questions as it answers, and

problematizes the position of the Schmittian moment in Mouffes thought. I will try to

elaborate on these points below.

Mouffe is particularly wary of the claims of a post-political age that she

associates with neoliberal hegemony, which induce apathy toward and a retreat from

politics. She perceives rational-proceduralist theories of Habermas and Rawls as

complicit with this ideology due to their sublimation of political struggle to a dialogical

network of communication, which is universally inclusive on the premise that the

deliberating parties relegate their conflictual interests and beliefs to the private sphere.

Mouffe resorts to two critical Schmittian insights to reveal the problems inherent in this

approach. First, in their attempt to counter the economic- aggregative model of

democracy with the rational-deliberative model and to infuse a democratic modus vivendi

with a moral content of impartiality and universality, Habermas and Rawls remain within

the political fallacy of liberalism, which totally overlooks the specificity of the political

by moving between ethics (intellectuality) and economics (trade) (Schmitt, quoted in

Mouffe, 1993: 140).14

Second, in their assumption of universality and openness of

deliberation and in their exclusion of the irresolvable (morally comprehensive) conflicts,

they fail to see the limits and exclusions inherent in the rationalist-deliberative discursive

space.15

The consequent illusion of consensus and unanimity culminates in the

repression of antagonisms in society and creates a political void which is increasingly

14In his later writings, especially in Political Liberalism, Rawls tries to compensate for his evasion of

politics in his earlier works. I cannot do justice to a satisfactory discussion of this issue in this essay, though

I would like to note briefly that the intersubjective Kantian constructivism that remains the backbone of

Political Liberalismsituates the Rawlsian understanding of politics in a position that would appear

profoundly apolitical from the Schmittian perspective.15


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occupied by populist and extremist right-wing movements of ethnic, nationalist or

religious nature (Mouffe, 1993: 5-6).16 Here lies the main anxiety that animates

Mouffes thought in these works: the return of the repressed political in forms that cannot

be contained by the liberal democratic framework, and an explosion of antagonism that

can tear up the very basis of civility (Mouffe, 2000: 104, emphasis added). Her whole

endeavor is an attempt to devise a liberal democratic framework which, by

simultaneously reinstituting andcontaining the political, facilitates cathartic discharge of

social antagonisms and thus forecloses the possibility of vengeful return of the repressed.

With this aim in mind, Mouffe introduces the Schmittian concept of the

political as the ontological dimension of social life (Mouffe, 1993: 3). She contends

that antagonism and power relations are constitutive of the very social reality that we live

in and that this antagonism hinges on an irreducible distinction between friend and

enemy, between us and them. In contrast to the rationalist-deliberative model, she

holds that the identities of the parties engaged in politics are not pregiven but constituted

in and through the antagonisms, and always involve an originary exclusion (Mouffe,

2000: 11).17

The process of identity formation necessitates,pace Schmitt, some form of

homogeneity that would make it possible to draw a frontier between us and them

(Ibid: 43; Mouffe, 2000: 55). Mouffe identifies this necessity for exclusion as the

16Such vocabulary as populism and demagogues, which Mouffe uses when referring to political

movements that she sees as threats to liberal democracy, resonates all too well with Schmitts model of

plebiscite and acclamation , and is an initial symptom of the divergent ways they conceive of democracy.17A point of distinction between liberal, deliberative democratic theory and radical democratic theory is the

conceptualization of the legitimate boundaries of the democratic community. Whereas Jurgen Habermas

builds his theory on constitutionalism, human rights and popular sovereignty on the premise that the

legitimate borders of the polity are not only given but also beyond political debate, radical democratselevate the tension between universal impetus of human rights and the bounded scope of national, civil

rights to paramount importance. On this issue compare Jurgen Habermas Constitutional Democracy: A

Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles? (2001) and Jacques RanciereDisagreement: Politics and

Philosophy (1995). For an excellent commentary on Habermass essay see Lasse Thomassen, A Bizarre,

Even Opaque Practice: Habermas on Constitutionalism and Democracy (2006)


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democratic logic of equality that makes possible political agency, and counterposes it

against the liberal logic of liberty which rests on a fundamentally apolitical primacy of

the individual over all forms of social and political association. Although Mouffe

borrows this contrast from Schmitt, she does not agree with him on the ultimate

incompatibility of these two logics, but instead argues that the logics of liberalism and

democracy can be articulated in a democratic paradox in a politically productive way

(Mouffe, 1993: 8). However, before Mouffe can use Schmitt against Schmitt in this

way, it becomes imperative to perform certain transformations and exclusions on

Schmittian body of thought.

The first alteration that Mouffe introduces is the domestication of the political

by transmuting the figure of the enemy into that of adversary who is thus no longer

perceived as an opponent to be destroyed but as somebody whose ideas we combat but

whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question (Ibid: 102). This is a

drastic break with the Schmittian concept of the political, in which the engagement

between friend and enemy is one of existential combat and not mere symbolic

wrestling (Schmitt, 1976: 32). This tension is present in Mouffes initial definition of

enemy as someone who is perceived as negating our identity, as putting in question our

very existence (Mouffe, 1993: 3). It is not clear whether what is at stake is identity or

existence, but ambiguity dissipates when Mouffe states that existence of the adversary

is legitimate and must be tolerated (Ibid: 4), which implies that her definition of

political antagonism mainly consists of a contestation over identities. However, Mouffe

does not completely do away with the concept of the enemy but displaces it by

declaring it to be pertinent with respect to those who do not accept the democratic rules


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of the game and who thereby exclude themselves from thepoliticalcommunity (Ibid).

This statement calls forth a crucial question regarding the nature of the relationship to

those outside the political community, which Mouffe leaves unanswered: are these people

enemies or domestic enemies in the Schmittian sense? Or do they represent a

nonpublic, a politically disinterested existence which place[s] [itself] outside the

political community (Schmitt, 1976: 51)? More importantly, how does the political

community deal with this nonpublic (Schmitt recites a series of methods including

privileges for aliens, internment, exterritoriality, and laws for metics)? Or can democracy

simply ignore and exclude one part of those governed [in this case, those who do not

accept the democratic rules of the game] without ceasing to be a democracy (Schmitt,

1988: 9)? Mouffes position on these questions is not wholly clear.

However, what is clear is that this displacement implies a redefinition of the

political and the political community, which hinges on the divestiture of the political of

its existential (i.e. Schmittian) content and its domestication within the political

community. This is reflected in the second moment of Mouffes operations of

containment, which is the transformation of antagonism as struggle between

enemies into agonism as struggle between adversaries (Mouffe, 2000: 102-3).

Whereas antagonism puts at stake the self-preservation of the enemies that confront each

other, agonism consists of an open ended and indeterminate discursive contestation over

differential definitions and articulations of the ethico-political principles of liberty and

equality that characterize liberal democracy. At this point, it becomes increasingly harder

to see what remains of the political essence of Schmittian thought, for agonism appears to

conform to what Schmitt contemptuously called an endless symbolic wrestling that he


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associated with liberalism. This point is not an overstatement, for the third conceptual

modification by performed Mouffe is the transformation of homogeneity into

commonality (Mouffe, 2000: 55), which is precisely the acknowledgement of a

common symbolic space that makes it possible to recognize ones opponents not as

existentially different and alien enemies (Schmitt, 1976: 26) but as friendly enemies

(which would amount to an oxymoron for Schmitt) (Mouffe, 2000: 13, emphasis

added).18 Moreover, the relationship between friendly enemies is described as the

struggle to organize this symbolic space in a different way (Ibid), which reconstitutes

the political community on the basis of the process of discursive articulation and

rearticulation of collective identities and of ethico-political principles. Finally, the

strategic theoretical moves that are presented above reach their consummation in

Mouffes juxtaposition of the political (antagonism inherent in human relations) and

politics (ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a

certain order and organize human coexistence), whereby politics is identified with the

attempt to domesticatethe political (Mouffe, 1993: 141, emphasis added), and the aim

of democratic politics is established as the reconstruction of enemy as adversary (Mouffe,

2000: 102).

One may be tempted to ask the question, How can Mouffe still claim to draw on

Schmitt after she has hollowed out the radical political content of his concepts by turning

enemy into adversary, antagonism into agonism, homogeneity into commonality, thus

reducing the political to a mere semblance of what it originally was? Secondly, on what

theoretical grounds are these conceptual enervations justified? Mouffes justification is

18It is also remarkable that the term adversary that Mouffe chooses to designate the agonistic parties is

used by Schmitt for referring to the parties involved in liberal-parliamentary discussion the the debating

adversary (Schmitt, 1976: 28).


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based on her diagnosis of what she considers to be Schmitts blind spot, that is, his

inability or refusal (Mouffe is unclear on this) to come to terms with the novelty of

modern liberal democracy that has emerged in the wake of the democratic revolution

(Mouffe, 1993: 109, 121). At the core of this argument is Leforts thesis that after the

collapse of the embodied politics of the Ancien Regime the locus of power becomes

an empty place that no individual or group can ultimately occupy and be consubstantial

with (Lefort, 1988: 17).19Modern democracy rises on a fundamental indeterminacy as to

the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations betweenselfand

other, which follows from the dissolution of the markers of certainty (Ibid: 19). It is

on the basis of this radical indeterminacy that Mouffe refutes Schmitts notions of

homogeneity and enemy: under conditions of modern democracy, one cannot maintain

the notion of the political as a friend/enemy distinction based on the substantive equality

and homogeneity of political identities, for these identities are now constructed in and

through dynamic processes of discursive articulation and rearticulation, and comprise not

so much the starting point as the outcome of political struggles (Mouffe, 2000: 55-6).

Mouffe augments this argument by invoking the Derridean concept of the constitutive

outside, which enables her to uphold the notion of some form of homogeneity that is

indispensable for an agonistic friend/adversary distinction (Mouffe, 2000: 55), while at

the same time revealing the radical undecidability of the constitution of us in relation to

19According to Lefort, the disembodiment of power at the moment of the kings decapitation gives rise o

the body politic of the people upon which political power falls. Here Lefort echoes Tocqueville, who

writes that democracy comes into being in the wake of the collapse of social and political

hierarchies that give way to the idea of equal freedom (Tocqueville, 1990: 8-10). Being thrown back onnothing but the norm of equality, the occupation of the empty place of power becomes a heavily contested

issue, because [i]t remains quite uncertain what it actually means for the people to rule. Democracy is

defined instead by the corrosive logic of social and political equality (Keenan 2003: 5, emphasis added).

Within daily politics, the regularity of elections, i.e. the reoccurring vacationof the place of power is taken

to denote the emptiness of democratic sovereignty.


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challenged by the liberal discourse of universal human rights. This paradox makes both

perfect equality and perfect liberty impossible, but viewed from another perspective, it

impedes both total closure that can result in totalitarianism and total dissemination that

breeds political apathy and hands politics over to neoliberal governance (Ibid).

III. The Crisis of Pluralist Democracy

In the course of examining Mouffes appropriation of Schmitts theory, a

peculiarity quickly stands out: absence of even a marginal engagement with the logic of

sovereignty. One cannot come across the term exception even once in her work, and

the concepts of decision and sovereignty are deployed very sparsely and marginally, and

even then only in the context of the critique of rational-deliberative approach. Especially

in her discussion of the Rawlsian model, one witnesses references to Schmitt in

conjunction with such statements as question of sovereignty is evacuated (Ibid: 49),

the question of sovereignty is evaded (Ibid: 113), a process of deliberation

which eliminates the moment of decision (Mouffe, 2000: 57), and bringing a

deliberation to a close always results from a decision which excludes other possibilities

(Ibid: 105). Strangely enough, Mouffe never elaborates on either of the terms, which

seem all the more curious in the face of the fact that Schmitt is first and foremost the

theorist and the champion of sovereign decision. The only instance when she invokes

popular sovereignty as a positive principle is, ironically, when she contends that in

modern democracy popular sovereignty is exercised within a symbolic framework

informed by the liberal discourse (Ibid: 2).

Pondering over Mouffes constant elision of the issue of the sovereign logic

(except for when it comes out to bash Rawls) might prove insightful for sketching the


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limits of her theory of pluralist democracy. In my outline of Schmitts theory, I tried to

show that the political is intimately linked with the logic of sovereignty because the

distinction between friend and enemy in which it manifests itself always follows from

sovereign decision that declares the self-preservation of the legal system and/or the

political body to be at stake, and an existential battle to be at hand. As demonstrated

above, Mouffe circumvents this entire configuration by replacing it with an agonistic,

adversarial model of politics. However, if one recalls her remarks about the displacement

of the enemy onto those who refuse to play by the rules of the liberal democratic game,

one can catch a glimpse of the specter of Schmitts notion of the political occupying the

subterranean yet central position in Mouffes model. For this displacement signals a

relationship that lacks a common symbolic space, a third grammar which is neither

liberal, nor democratic, and which, by defying articulation, points to the limits of the

pluralist democracy. Mouffe seems to have precisely this problem in mind when she

contends that the institutionalized achievements of the democratic revolution (a

distinction between public and private, separation of Church and State and of civil and

religious law) cannot be called into question in the name of pluralism (Mouffe, 1993:

132).20

It is highly significant (and even more so when seen from the present situation)

that Mouffe points to Islam as a religion that does not recognize these achievements, and

her following remark is even more problematic: The relegation of religion to the private

sphere, which we now have to make Muslims accept (Ibid, emphasis added).21 This

20In view of Mouffes celebration of these achievements, the absence of the sovereign logic in her theory

becomes more intelligible. For these achievements, as Mouffe herself acknowledges, are the contributionsof liberal thought and belong to the Enlightenment tradition, both of which Schmitt holds responsible for

the banishment of miracle from theology and exception (i.e. sovereign decision) from politics (Schmitt,

2005: 36, 41).21Mouffe starts with Islams rejection of the public/private distinction (which is quite problematic to begin

with) and, in one huge sweep, grafts this stigma onto all Muslims without the slightest hesitation. This is


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statement evokes a series of liminalquestions for Mouffes pluralist democracy: Who is

this we? The liberal democrats? The non-Muslims? The demos? And who are we

to make Muslims accept the relegation of religion to the private sphere, that is, where do

we derive our authorityfrom? From popular sovereignty? Are the Muslims living with

us not a part of the populus? Moreover, how are we going to accomplish this? By

agonistic-adversarial struggle (or are the Muslims incapable of understanding the rules

of the game so that we have to stop the game and suspendsome rules in order to teach

them before they can join in)? Or are the Muslims not adversaries but (displaced)

enemies? At this point Mouffes pluralist democracy comes into contact with its

constitutive outside, and because the outside has to be incommensurable with the

inside (Mouffe, 2000: 12), it cannot deal with the latter on discursive terms. And it is at

this very moment that the Schmitts question of Who decides? returns with full

vengeance. Who decides that the achievements of the democratic revolution are in

danger, and that the very existence of the pluralist democratic order is at stake? This is

fundamentally a question on the exception, and within its liberal democratic confines,

Mouffes theory cannot answer this question, for it rests exclusively on the

presupposition of astate of normalcy: exclusion of political violence, adversarial respect,

human rights, secularism, public/private distinction, all of which are institutionalized and

legally protected by a state which rests on the ethico-political principles of equality and

liberty but which is at the same time benevolent enough to refrain from imposing a

an extremely telling symptom of the limits of her theory as one of the contingent, decentred andradically indeterminate identities. Rebounding off these limits, Mouffe falls back to a position which she

criticizes in Rawls and argues for the relegation of controversial, morally comprehensive (in this case,

religious) beliefs to the private sphere. This is all the more problematic for Mouffe than it is for Rawls, for

it is harder to sustain a clear notion of private sphere in Mouffes theory, for the latter asserts the decentred

and discursively constructed nature of the public/private distinction.


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substance on these principles.22

In other words, the political unity that is created and

sustained by hegemonic articulation enters a crisis when the exception appears on the

horizon.

Put differently, the limits of the pluralist democracy run parallel to the problems

that arise in Mouffes attempt to domesticate the political by externalizing it.23

Mouffe

deploys the philosophy of concrete life in Schmitt (that legal order must be based on

human action) as a wedge with which to open up the disembodied, rational and uniform

political action envisioned in the deliberative theory to the embodied, dynamic and

antagonistic human agency. However, her desire for infusing liberal politics with a

democratic lan vital is quickly overshadowed by her preoccupation with keeping it

under control.24

No sooner the power of the people makes its appearance than it is

subjected to exercise through a liberal symbolic framework (Ibid: 2). Human action or

real life (with the correlate dimension of physical violence) appears in Mouffes theory

only for an instant before it is absorbed and dissolved into a post-materialist discursive

network.25This inability or refusal (Mouffes own blind spot, if you will) to think of

22The position of the state is also undertheorized in Mouffes work, especially when one considers that the

figure she draws on is one of the staunchest champions of executive state power. Although Mouffe concurs

with Schmitt that the state is not just one association among others but has primacy over them (Mouffe,

1993: 99, 131), she never delves into the question of what it is, except for distinguishing it from the

neutral state in liberal theory, by furnishing it with the ethico-political principles of liberty and equality,

and designating it as their guarantor. This reluctance explore the problem of the state is reflected in

Mouffes incorporation of Western political history into her theory, whereby she narrowly focuses, pace

Lefort on the democratic revolution and the radical indeterminacy it has brought about and neglects the

enormous shift of power and legitimacy from legislatures to executives that accompanied the 20th

-century(Wiley, 2002: 485).23

This gesture ironically resembles Rawlss banishment of the comprehensive political doctrines (that is,

differences that can culminate in violent antagonism) from political liberalism.24

There are potential insights to be gained from a comparison of Mouffes strand of radical democratictheory with other such theories as articulated by Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Ranciere. See, among others,

Ranciere,Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1995) and Wolin, Fugitive Democracy (1996).25

From the Schmittian perspective, this dissolution positions Mouffe alongside Habermas and Rawls in

that she ultimately sublimates concrete human action to discursive contestation, if not to rational

deliberation. This, coupled with her non-substantive definition of political equality and the fundamental


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human action except as the animator of the discursive makes her theory stutter in the face

of the real life that emerges in the exceptional situation (for example, regarding the

problem with the Muslims, she diagnoses a problem which will not be easily solved

and suggests that we now have to make them accept [the liberal values], but does not

offer an idea as to how this can be accomplished). For real life is outside discourse (just

as the exception is outside the legal order), nonetheless, in its muteness, it comprises the

constitutive outside and the very condition of possibility of discourse (again, just as the

legal order ultimately hinges on the exception). Expressed in political terms, it is the

presence of the enemy outside the borders of the political community and the possibility

of antagonistic struggle (or rather, the impossibility of discursive engagement) with it

that makes possible to have agonistic (that is, discursive) relationship with adversaries

within the political community.

In light of the discussion above, the position of Schmitts thought in Mouffes

theory can be restated as follows. When one examines the Schmittian moment withinthe

pluralist liberal democracy, one finds its main arguments domesticated and its concepts

hollowed out to such an extent that it is no longer possible to recognize any Schmittian

content in it, but only an empty shell.26

There are no more enemies, but adversaries; no

more substantive homogeneity, but symbolic commonality; no more existential

antagonism, but respectful agonism; no more concrete human struggle, but discursive

contestation. Even the concept of the political, which is at the core of Mouffes

appropriation of Schmitt, is admitted in on the condition of its subjection to politics

indeterminacy of the ethico-political pillars of her concept of pluralist democracy, renders her theory a

highly formal one.26As though someone had painted the radiator of a modern central heating system with red flames in order

to give the appearance of a blazing fire (Schmitt, 1988: 6).


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that domesticates it. When one looks for the Schmittian moment around the pluralist

democracy, that is, in its relationship to its perceived enemies, one witnesses that the

domestication of the Schmittian thought has ironically deprived it of the theoretical tools

with which to define this relationship. With an introverted focus on adversariality and

agonism, it has grown myopic with respect to antagonism and enmity. It is not clear

whether the ethico-political principles of liberty and equality constitute a political core

that people can (pace Schmitt) identify with and thus form a collective will for the

protection of the regime that represents these values. More importantly, the ultimate locus

of political unity for Schmitt, that is, the question Who decides? (whether the pluralist

democracy is lethally threatened, for example) is utterly absent in Mouffes theory.

Exception is banished from political life, though this time not by a universalist-rationalist

exorcism, but by a radically decentred and indeterminate discursivity. The real challenge

of Carl Schmitt to political theory has been the question of the sovereign decision on

the exception, and in the end it appears that Mouffe does not take up this challenge.

Conclusion

If my critical take on Mouffe appears unduly intense, it is not because I think she

does injustice to Schmitts work, and even less because I advocate Schmittian

decisionism against pluralist democracy. Rather, the intensity emanates from a concern

with grimmer political configurations that might arise from the coexistence of liberalism

and democracy, which Mouffes exclusive focus on their articulation might render one

blind to. One such possible relation can be conceived as the indistinction of liberalism


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and democracy, and I would like to conclude this essay with a brief speculation on its

implications.

Schmitt had already observed the beginnings of a fusion between classical

liberalism and mass democracy in what he termed the total state (Wiley, 2002: 485),

and his appeal to maintain the distinction between friend and enemy, and state and

society was in part a reaction to this development. However, under conditions in which

the liberal principle of universal humanity and the democratic principle of political

inclusion/exclusion begin to shade into each other, it becomes harder do sustain the

distinction between nonpolitical rights of humanity and political rights of citizenship, and

the loss of ones citizenship status reveals the inalienable rights of man as lacking

every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of

rights belonging to the citizens of a state (Agamben, 1998: 126). In other words, ones

human value is not recognized as such unless ones life is politically relevant for a

state or a political community. Mouffe locates the contemporary expression of Schmitts

concept of political equality in citizenship (Mouffe, 2000: 40), and argues that under

modern conditions the individual and the citizen do not coincide because private and

public have been separated (Mouffe, 1993: 113), however, her lack of elaboration on

what kind ofpolitical relationship is or ought to be between the citizen as the subject of

political rights and the individual as the bearer of human rights is worrying. The dearth of

thought as to what the political community, that is, the body of citizens should do with

those who place themselves outside it attests to this gap in her theory. Do these

politically disinterested people, as Schmitt puts it, lose their citizenship rights? Political


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theory urgently needs to think this relationship aloud so that the human rights are not

silently abandoned to the question of the political relevance of ones life.

Moreover, this problem is further aggravated by discourses on theproperpolitical

existence today, which is increasingly located in First World lives (Butler, 2003: 12).

Capitalized tropes of Civilization, Democracy and Freedom constitute a discursive matrix

which differentially distributes political value or relevance of lives over the world, which

translates into a global geography of differential humanity.27 This was most clearly

evidenced in the fact that their citizenship in their respective political communities did

not protect hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives from being destroyed under

the rubric of collateral damage, which is utterly unthinkable with respect to their First

World counterparts. The term and the practice of civilization work to produce the

human differentially and a Western civilization defines itself over and against a

population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human (Ibid: 91). I

think Mouffes assertion that to belong to the political community what is required is

that we accept a specific language of civil intercourse, while not directly evoking a

civilized/uncivilized binary, leaves open the question of how the constitutive outside of

the political community is defined in terms of civility (Mouffe, 1993: 67, emphasis

added).28

This silence, coupled with her designation of Islam and Muslims (and one

should also add ethnic, nationalist, religious, and populist movements) by definition

27

Butler convincingly shows the relationship between depoliticization and dehumanization around theproblem of violence. That the Palestinian Intifada cannot be conceived as but terror, while Israeli state

violence against the Palestinians is understood as self-defense or military operation rests on the

definition of the Other as lacking a political capacity that We have, which renders the violence it bears

irrational, uncivilized, inhuman, and bestial (Butler, 2003: 88). The depoliticization of the Other renders itshumanity precarious, and creates conditions in which the Other can be stripped of its humanity (and thus

human rights) at the moment it is perceived as a threat.28

This civil language constitutes not an identity but an articulating principle (a grammatical rule) that

tends to disallow certain articulations and actions, thus rendering certain voices inaudible (Keenan, 2003:

117, 120, 132).


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anti-secular (and thus illegitimate) leads one to wonder whether Mouffe is leaving too

wide a leeway for differential understanding of proper political existence, and unwittingly

participating in the discourse of Civilization. The problem is further exacerbated by the

radical indeterminacy of political identities, and the contested definitions of citizenship

and human rights (instigated by the democratic revolution), which render the lines that

separate politically relevant from irrelevant lives (thus humanity from less-than-

humanity) fluid and shifting.29 In a crisis situation (a state of emergency), the

citizenship rights of certain groups can radically fall into question, dragging along the

protection of their human rights, as demonstrated by the exposure of the Muslims citizens

and residents in the Western countries to the constant threat of arbitrary detention and

interrogation in the aftermath of the 9/11.

What we witness in this picture of the marriage of liberalism and democracy is far

from a vibrant clash of democratic ideas but a precariousness of human life that verges

on the brink of falling outside of the political community and thus outside of humanity. It

appears that the articulation between the liberal logic of universal human rights and the

democratic logic of political inclusion/exclusion has a dark underbelly wherein the two

logics enter a zone of indistinction (which flashes for a moment in Mouffes expression

of contamination). In this zone of indistinction, sovereignty is exercised in the name of

protecting humanity by deciding on and eradicating the nonhumans that threaten it;

the preservation of peace becomes inseparable from the incessant war against the

disturbers of peace; and one cannot quite tell whether one is living under rule or under

29Keenan observes this in terms of problem of the unqualified equation of radical openness and democracy

in Mouffes work, and warns that there is no guarantee that the open symbolic space will not be

articulated in non- or anti-democratic ways (Keenan, 2003: 112). As he rightly asserts, for democracy to

mean anything certain things have to be decided, however, this point is overlooked by Mouffes

undertheorization of decision (Ibid: 138).


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exception. The political situation of our times chimes too well with the premonition that

Schmitt posited at the end of The Political Theology: war is indeed condemned, but extra-

legal detentions (Guantanamo), tortures (Abu Ghraib) and executions (Afghanistan, Iraq,

and now Afghanistan once again) remain. The adversary is no longer called an enemy but

a terrorist and is thereby designated an outlaw of humanity. And the War on Terror

that has been reigning for the past 8 years has already turned, in its avowed intention to

rage until the last one of the terrorists is killed, into a crusade and into the last war of

humanity. Perhaps it is indeed time to face the challenge of Schmitt.


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