> As to Schmitt, you really need to point out what is worth knowing or
> reading. It would be nice if you sketched that out because all I've
> read (Jan-Werner Muller) is some very hard core anti-Semitic, nasty
> pro-Catholic stuff that is outright nauseating. And let's remember he
> was more than just another nazis---he consulted in designing and
> writing their legal system which they had to fabricate ex nihlo after
> they abolished the Reichstag.
>
>
I've pointed before to Zizek's account of the " lesson to be learned from Carl Schmitt":
"The lesson to be learned from Carl Schmitt is that the divide friend/ enemy is never just the verification of a factual difference: the enemy is by definition always - up to a point, at least - invisible, it looks like one of us, it cannot be directly recognized, which is why the big problem and task of the political struggle is that of providing/constructing the recognizable IMAGE of the enemy. (This also makes it clear why Jews are the enemy par excellence : it is not only that they conceal their true image or contours - it is that there is ultimately NOTHING beneath their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the 'inner form' that pertains to any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in a formless infinite plasticity). In short, the "enemy recognition" is always a performative procedure which, in contrast to the deceiving appearances, brings to light / constructs the enemy's 'true face.' Schmitt refers here directly to the Kantian category of Einbildungskraft , the transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognize the enemy, the conceptual subsumption under preexisting categories is not enough; one has 'to schematize' the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with concrete sensible features which make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle." <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-homo-sacer-in-afghanistan.html>
It's true that the personality dominated by "hatred" is prone to the paranoid delusional construction of enemies who then provide an object for unmastered sadistic hatred and violence. I would have thought sane "political struggle" would be concerned to defend against and overcome this psychopathology rather than to appeal to it.
Kant's "sensus communis" is the capacity to enlarge our own understanding by placing ourselves imaginatively in the place of others.
"under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgment. This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment."
It hadn't occurred to me that this describes the conspiricist's use of "imagination" to construct paranoid phantasies about "the Enemy."
Schmitt's idea is the antithesis of Marx's idea of how we should understand and treat even our real "enemies."
"If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ ch06_3_d.htm>
Ted