[see also bibliography, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 7, part 8]
Carl Schmitt also understood the concept of the political to be rooted in the possibility of violence, which arises whenever social groupings become intense enough to threaten to negate each others' way of life and thus become enemies. "Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy" (Schmitt 37), and thus "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy" (Schmitt 26). Though Arendt - a German Jew, a concentration camp survivor - and Schmitt - a member of the Nazi party - seem to be both philosophically and existentially opposed, their writings seem to share some of the same generally humanistic assumptions about the uniqueness and irreducible agency of individuals as well as a shared polemical target in the depoliticization of the modern state; perhaps here, as elsewhere in strategy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and perhaps Schmitt's concept of the enemy can help to supplement my understanding without dislodging Arendt and Merleau-Ponty's altogether 'friendlier' understanding of the political. After all, must not Clausewitz's strategist in war have an adversary?
The political terrain extends throughout the world of men and women speaking to each other, and while there is a potential political significance to all expression, it is certainly true that some expression intends political objects more directly and consciously than others and thus could be said more properly to be specifically 'political expression'; this is in fact what we have been discussing in this account. As the political object of my expression increases in scope, as my action seeks to alter more and more constellations of the web of human relationships, as I seek to affect intersubjective groupings of an increasingly intense and efficacious character, I will indeed find that my expression is countered by increasingly distinct enemies who more and more explicitly oppose my objects, my values, whatever they are. "From every domain the point of the political is reached and with it a qualitatively new intensity of human groupings. The process of such a transformation executes itself continuously... the hitherto nonpolitical or pure matter of fact now turns political" (Schmitt 62), and I recognize the enemy that opposes me. "All action and all love are haunted by the expectation of an account which will transform them into their truth. In short, they are haunted by the expectation of the moment at which it will finally be known just what the situation was" (Merleau-Ponty 74-5). In the same sense, "the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy" (Schmitt 67), and the recognition of the expression of the enemy as the enemy of my expression is revealed as perhaps the most crucial feature of the political terrain into which I act.
[next: part 7]