The Ethos of Insecure Life: Schmitt, Foucault, Kundera and the Point of the Political

This paper seeks to explore the ethical implications of Carl Schmitt’s decisionism in a poststructuralist reading of Schmitt’s conception of the political as a constitutive exception. The Schmittian problematic of the exception as the constitutive principle of the political has recently made a comeback in the critical discourse, though, as we shall suggest below, the full significance of Schmitt’s political philosophy for contemporary critical thought still remains underestimated. The contention of this paper is that rather than serving as an easy target of poststructuralist (deconstructionist or genealogical) criticism, the Schmittian political ontology functions as an irreducible limit of this criticism, serving as the ‘undeconstructible’ excess of political realism, that which remains after the deconstructive labour. More specifically, the paper seeks to explore the affinities between the work of Schmitt and Foucault. Mika Ojakangas has recently argued that the approach of the two thinkers is marked by the same conceptual logic that locates the foundation of order in the founding rupture of the exception, a logic that we have elsewhere termed ‘ontological extremism’. Nonetheless, there are also crucial divergences between Schmitt and Foucault, most notably regarding the relation to the principle of sovereignty. In contrast to Schmitt’s valorisation of sovereignty, Foucault has of course famously dismissed the very problematic of sovereignty in contemporary political theory with his call to ‘cut off the head of the king’ and his argument for the decentred and immanent character of power. However, as we shall argue, it is both possible and fruitful to reintroduce the question of sovereignty, in its Schmittian ‘quasi-transcendental’ sense of the constitutive decision on exception, into the Foucauldian genealogical problematic. Moreover, a Schmittian exceptionalism, in its focus on the exterior limit of the political order, is more in accordance with the critical thrust of Foucault’s philosophy than the more immanent critique practiced e.g. in the studies of