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A Critique of the Rejection of Right in Contemporary Political Thought
Summary: In the wake of "war on terror" and the recent financial crisis the current political atmosphere is one of frustration. This frustration articulates itself in the distrust of law and rights as vehicles of political transformation. To overcome this frustration recourse is made to an ontological conception of "the political" that is said to eschew the juridification of political conflict. Tracing the origins of this thought to the Weimar theorist, Carl Schmitt, this project offers a critique of his legacy within contemporary legal and political thinking.
Key Facts
Principal Investigator: David M. Seymour (Law)
Dept/Research Groups: Centre for Law and Society, Law
Keywords: Critical theory, Critical legal studies, Political ontology, Law and politics, Human rights, Jurisprudence, Continental philosophy
Project Description
The current political climate in Europe and elsewhere can be characterised as one of "frustration". Present already in attitudes to the post-9/11 "war on terror", this sense has been increased in the face of the financial crisis and the measures taken in response to it. In the face of these events, many now feel that national and international institutions are unresponsive to their needs and anxieties. There is a pervading pessimism, verging on despair, about the ability of these institutions to fulfil their role as sites of mediation between citizens and the state as well as between states. It manifests itself in the belief that unrepresentative powerful interests perceived as inimical to the "common good" have instrumentalised domestic and international institutions. Although diffuse, a central focus for this "distrust of mediations", and one that connects the domestic to the international is disenchantment with the juridification of political conflict.
It is this context that partly accounts for the recent resurgence of interest in the political and legal thought of the Weimar theorist, Carl Schmitt and his legatees. That Schmitt's thinking both in its original inception and in its adoption by contemporary critical thinkers should come to the fore in this context is far from coincidental. Rather, it emerges from the fact that the hallmark of Schmittian thought lies precisely in its theorising of an atmosphere in which the meditative praxis of rights is called into question.
This organising concept of the distrust of rights and legal forms of political mediation points to a difficulty that emerges first in Schmitt's work and remains unresolved in the contemporary works that draw upon him. The core of my project thus turns on a critique of Schmitt's representation of the nature of domestic and human rights at the national and international levels respectively. For both Schmitt and his legatees, the seemingly inexorable need for the transformation of existing domestic and international arrangements both emerges from and is negated by the juridical articulation of that need. Domestic and international law, domestic rights and human rights, as potential moments of political mediation are all found wanting. From this Schmittian perspective, law and rights become objects, deserving not of critique, but of absolute rejection.
It is in the face of this absolute rejection of law and rights that they seek a new foundation for a transformative potential. For them, this new ground is located in an ontological conception of politics that overcomes and eschews its juridification. Although theorised as present within domestic and international political realms, their "concept of the Political" as the foundation for an authentic or "radical" democracy remains obscured and neutralised by the legal mediations that claim to speak in its name.
Four significant interrelated challenges confront this "turn" to the Political given its rejection of rights. The first challenge is the question of access. How are we to access this new political ground given if it is buried and diffused by the legalism of domestic and international political institutions? Secondly, even if accessible, does this new ground and the democracy it is said to engender overcome the need for new modes of mediation within and between states? Thirdly, if it does not overcome this need, what are the new (non-legal) modes of mediation appropriate to it? Finally, are there any a priori assurances that any new mediations can overcome, rather than reproduce, the limits of rights rejected in the name of the new political?
The objective of this research project is a response to Schmittian thought by considering these four questions. Focussing on law and rights, it aims to critique the Schmittian framing of and responses to the crisis of the present time.
Methodology
Carl Schmitt's body of work is selected for this project because of his germinal formulation of the "concept of the political" (e.g. Concept of the Political (1932) (Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923). Also selected for critique, both because of Schmitt's influence and as the most sophisticated expressions of its contemporary adaptation, is the legal-political thought of Slavoj Zizek,Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben,, Wendy Brown,and Costas Douzinas
My approach is underpinned by the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, particularly by their reflections on the ways in which calls for "the new" risk replicating rather than overcoming the limits of the existing. Kant's Metaphysics of Morality, Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hal Draper's Marx's Theory of the State (Volumes I and II) provides the critical resource for opening the specific question of the distrust of the juridification of political mediations.
Research Significance
Academic
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD
United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510851
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857
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