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die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftslichen Denkens: There are people who live without land, without
state and without church, solely within the law; normative thought is the only kind that they consider
to be rational (p 139). For a sober treatment of the relation between Schmitts intellectual trajectory and
anti-Semitism, see Monod, Penser lennemi, pp 4661.
26
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 355. Characteristically, Schmitt immediately adds that such a plural
normative spatialization would only be rational if such great spaces were differentiated meaningfully
and are homogeneous internally, maintaining right measures and meaningful proportions.
27
Slavoj Zizek, Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule, introduction to Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice
and Contradiction, London: Verso, 2007.
28
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 25.
29
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 37.
30
See Michael Dutton, Passionately Governmental: Maoism and the Structured Intensities of
Revolutionary Governmentality, Postcolonial Studies 11(1), 2008. My essay is in a sense trying to
complement Duttons Schmittian discussion of Chinas revolutionary politics both by exploring
Schmitts own speculations on Mao, and by foregrounding the apparently anti-political thrust of the
geopolitical imaginary which subtends them.
31
Mao Tse-Tung, Talk on Strategic Dispositions, New Left Review I/54, 1969, p 36.
32
Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War, in Six Essays on Military Affairs, Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1972.
33
In partisan battle a complexly structured new space of action emerges, because the partisan does not
ght on an open eld of battle nor on the same plane of open frontal war. Rather, he forces his enemy
into another space. To the space of the regular traditional theater of war he, thus, adds another, darker
dimension, a dimension of depth. Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, pp 4849.
34
See Edward L Katzenbach, Jr and Gene Z Hanrahan, The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung,
Political Science Quarterly 70(3), 1955.
35
Francis F Fuller, Mao Tse-tung: Military Thinker, Military Affairs 22(3), 1958, p 143.
36
John Morgan Dederer, Making Bricks without Straw: Nathanael Greenes Southern Campaigns and
Mao Tse-Tungs Mobile War, Military Affairs 47(3), 1983.
37
Schmitt in Schickel, Gespra che mit Carl Schmitt, p 18.
38
See for instance, especially for the claim of Mao as a Titoist or nationalist communist leader, Donald S
Zagoria, Pacic Affairs 47(2), 1974.
39
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 42. Schmitt has the probity to foreground Maos ambivalence,
writing that there is an inner contradiction in Maos own situation, who combines a spaceless
[raumlosen], global-universal, absolute world-enemy*the Marxist class enemy*with a territorially
specic, real enemy of the Chinese-Asiatic defense against capitalist colonialism. It is the opposition of
the One World, of a political unity of earth and its humanity, to a set of Grora umen [large spatial areas]
that are rationally balanced both within and among one another (p 41).
40
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
41
Carl Schmitt, Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff (1938), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
2003. I refer to the recent Italian edition, Il concetto discriminatorio di guerra, Bari: Laterza, 2008, with
an introduction by the philosopher of law Danilo Zolo on Schmitts prophecy of current global war.
432
ALBERTO TOSCANO
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While Zolos use of Schmitt for a critique of US military humanism is in many regards persuasive, he
fails to interrogate the profoundly reactionary (and counter-revolutionary) character of Schmitts legal
and political anti-universalism. For a critical discussion of Zolos recent writings, see Alberto Toscano,
Sovereign Impunity, New Left Review II/50, 2008.
42
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 131132.
43
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp 137 and 140.
44
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 217. My emphasis. Schmitt continues in the same vein: Toward the
end of the 19th century, European powers and jurists of European international law not only had ceased
to be conscious of the spatial presuppositions of their own international law, but had lost any political
instinct, any common power to maintain their own spatial structure and the bracketing of war (p 224);
leading to failed amity lines simultaneously overarched and undermined by a Eurocentrically conceived,
free, global economy ignoring all territorial borders (p 226*the rise of the US); and the collapse of Jus
Publicum Europaeum into a universal world law (p 227).
45
See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2005. It could be argued that it is precisely
the detachment of economic from extra-economic power that causes such consternation to Schmitt,
wedded as he is to the primacy of territorial appropriation over distribution and production, and
incapable of countenancing the fact that the economic hegemony of capital can extend far beyond the
limits of direct political domination (p 12).
46
See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, on the relationship between US and Soviet ideology,
decolonization and the political history of the Third World.
47
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
48
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
49
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 234.
50
Alexandre Koje`ve*Carl Schmitt Correspondence, Erik De Vries (ed and trans), Interpretation 29(1),
2001. This is a fascinating document, as we see Schmitt struggling with Koje`ves posthistorical
equanimity, his claim that appropriation [Nehmen] died with Napoleon and that Absolute Knowledge
is now incarnate in the guise of post-political administration (of which he is the anti-heroic
embodiment, the great European technocrat shuttling between meetings in Tunis and negotiations in
Bruxelles as he corresponds with Schmitt over the fate of the global order). Schmitt instead bemoans
that the State is dead now that it is no longer capable of war and death sentences; meaning that it no
longer makes history. On Koje`ve and Schmitt, see Mu ller, A Dangerous Mind.
51
See for instance Galli, Spazi politici, p 119.
52
Quoted in Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 70. My emphasis.
53
Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, p 71.
54
Schmitt spoke on the partisan in Pamplona on 15 March 1962, and in Saragossa on 17 March, and on
the world order in Madrid on 21 March 1962, where he was made an honorary member of the Instituto
de estudios politicos madrilen o, directed by his host, interpreter and admirer Manuel Fraga, Minister of
Information and Tourism under Francos government from 1962 to 1969 and later ambassador to
London. The German text is Die Weltordnung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in Staat, Groraum, Nomos.
Arbeiten aud den Jahren 19161969, G. Maschke (ed), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995. My references
are to the Italian translation, in Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso. Saggi e interviste, Giorgio
Agamben (ed), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005.
55
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 222. In the third of these problems we can perhaps feel the
inuence of Koje`ve, who, in 1957, at Schmitts request, had delivered a talk in Du sseldorf entitled
Colonialism from a European Perspective, published in Interpretations 29(1), 2001.
56
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 223.
57
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 225. Rather bizarrely, Schmitt treats the pure future of cosmic
conquest as the anti-phenomenon of anti-colonialism, viewed as a negative, destructive and past-
oriented project, whose anti-European character has displaced any legitimacy or legality (p 237).
58
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 237.
59
Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 244.
60
Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p 52.
61
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p 237.
62
On the third front, see Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 235.
63
In his sketch for a 1957 conference on the nomos of the Earth, Schmitt writes: The hatred of colonialism
is the hatred of taking [Nehmen]; it originates in a profound transformation of social and economic
concepts. Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso, p 245.
433
CARL SCHMITT IN BEIJING
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