Notes and Commentary

The Tragic Theory of Carl Schmitt

Andrea Salvatore

The Winter 2010 issue of Telos has clearly highlighted the relevance of Carl
Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba to both the interpretation of Schmitt’s political the-
ory and Shakespearean criticism. The main thesis concerning Schmitt’s intrusion
into the literary field deals with the structural relationships between historical
context and tragic dimension, between politics and aesthetics; the tragic drama
can be properly understood only in relation to the historical context to which it
refers and the concrete situation that it aims to re-present. The historical reality
that can be glimpsed by focusing on the tragic masks against the light of their con-
texts represents the necessary condition for the comprehension of the very tragic
dimension. By reversing and at the same time developing the original subject of
that Telos issue, I will try here to suggest a tragic reading of Schmitt’s thought
within a post-metaphysical perspective. While in Hamlet or Hecuba the main
concepts of Schmitt’s philosophy are applied to the analysis of tragic dimension,
the following will shed some light on the tragic dimension of Schmitt’s own phi-
losophy. In a nutshell, the argument will move away from the intrusion of a given
historical context into tragic space to the intrusion of tragic space into the concrete
conformation of Schmitt’s theory.
The argument is divided into two parts. In the first—the meaning of the
tragic dimension—I will deal with Schmitt as a theorist of the tragic, that is,
with the concept of tragedy that can be induced from Schmitt’s philosophy as a
unitary whole. In the second part—the actuality of the tragic era—I will consider
Schmitt as a pathologist of the tragic, by summarizing the diagnosis of modernity
he explicitly formulates in his major works. Finally, I will show how the tragic
reading of Schmitt’s philosophy allows us properly to account for the post-meta-
physical aspects of his thought and how the post-metaphysical perspective within
which Schmitt advances his interpretation of modernity is in turn to be considered
as a constitutive part and a fundamental aspect of his own tragic theory.
The meaning of the tragic dimension. The essential core and the uniform
ground of Schmitt’s philosophy can be identified in his conceptual inquiry into,
and practical quest for, the factual and concrete conditions of possibility of the
normative dimension. The present interpretation is based on three main theses:

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Telos 161 (Winter 2012): 181–87.
doi:10.3817/1212161181
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182    Andrea Salvatore

(1) the normative dimension presupposes and implies a fundamental set of factual

preconditions (above all, geo-historical and sociocultural); (2) the actual enforce-
ment of these preconditions cannot be achieved by any normative power and is
completely dependent on a contextual and epochal contingency, beyond human
control; (3) without the factual presuppositions we are discussing, the normative
dimension cannot attain either a conceptual definition or practical effectiveness.
The rationale of these theses is to be found not in the commonplace, accord-
ing to which every political reality hides an execrable and bloody origin, but in
the much more binding thesis, according to which any normative sphere (moral,
ethical, political, juridical) has sense, value, and duration inasmuch as its factual
preconditions have sense, value, and duration. In rising up against the pure and
self-sufficient normativism (with the related concepts of independence, auton-
omy, and universality), Schmitt shows that any normative system, political order,
or even individual existence constitutively depends on a set of non-normative
assumptions, to such an extent that the factual dimension determines not only and
not so much what has to be done but also and firstly what can be done.
The reference to a set of factual conditions of possibility for the normative
dimension can be found in every phase and almost in every text of Schmitt’s
academic production, regardless of the undeniable doctrinal and political turns
characterizing his more than fifty-year-long reflection. In Law and Judgment
(1912) he demonstrates the impossibility of deducing, by means of interpretation
and subsumption, the judiciary decision in its wholeness from preexisting legal
norms. Similarly, in Political Theology (1922) he claims that, for legal norms to
be enacted and enforced, they need a previous condition of factual normaliza-
tion. In the same Weimarian years, in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
(1923) he links the effectiveness of the parliamentarian system to the consensual
acknowledgment of the validity of discussion, publicity, and representation as
conceived in the nineteenth century’s rationalism (so as to show that the content
of the factual conditions at stake can be even a normative principle). Then, in
Constitutional Theory (1928) he demonstrates how the formal and legal equality
of citizens conceptually and practically depends on (and thus must be deduced
from) the substantial and concrete homogeneity of their political identity.1 Finally,
in The Nomos of the Earth (1950) Schmitt regards the concrete spatial order as
the actual precondition for the enforcement of the international norms aiming to
restrain the violence of war.

1.  For a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the concepts of homogeneity and
concrete order, see Mariano Croce, “Does Legal Institutionalism Rule Legal Pluralism
out? Schmitt’s Institutional Theory and the Problem of the Concrete Order,” Utrecht Law
Review 7, no. 2 (2011): 42–59; Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore, The Legal Theory of
Carl Schmitt (New York: Routledge, 2012).
 The Tragic Theory of Carl Schmitt   183

An additional—meta-theoretical—element can be seen in the methodologi-

cal thesis underlying Schmitt’s conceptualization of political theology, according
to which the political field can be properly conceived only by comprehensively
referring the fundamental categories of the political modernity to the historical
development of the former, all the way back to the dawn of the Christian era. The
initial thesis regarding the factual preconditions of the normative sphere can be
further developed by carrying it to the extreme, following the argumentative strat-
egy Schmitt adopts above all in his late works. From this perspective, the concrete
reality of the factual preconditions not only is constitutively unavailable to the
normative dimension (in its different aspect, such as individual projects, general
will, universal aspirations) but even reveals itself as a radically and structurally
anti-normative space. In other words, it represents a dimension that shapes reality
under the guidance of practical principles that are the exact opposite of the content
enshrined in the normative prescriptions it still grounds.
Let me clarify my thesis by applying it to The Nomos of the Earth. Here
not only does Schmitt state that the effectiveness of martial law presupposes a
determined and super-individual spatial order, but he also claims that the very
existence of such a nomos depends on the factual waging of unrestrained wars
meant to exterminate the enemy, such as civil and colonial wars. (Later on Schmitt
will add the partisan war, with the reappraisal of the concept of absolute enmity in
Theory of the Partisan.) What actually makes possible and effective the restraints
of the inter-State war violence within the jus publicum Europaeum is only the
corresponding unrestricted warfare characterizing the non-State war violence (be
it intra-State wars, like civil wars, or extra-State wars, like colonial wars). To put
it in more tragic terms, there can be no normatively legitimate status quo without
a constitutively anti-normative counterbalance.2
The tragic character of the anti-normative side of any normative reality
culminates in the concept of decision, through which Schmitt clearly shows the
dark side lurking in any pacific state of affairs. The enactment and the context
of political order owe their very possibility to a previous, consubstantial, and
constitutive exclusion carried out violently. There is no universal inclusion with-
out the proportionate exclusion and the saving sacrifices of a determined set of
people (including the self-sacrifice of the community’s members, ready to die and
to kill for it). Schmitt lucidly points out that violence represents the immanent
fate and the hidden side of any enacted order. By deciding, Schmittian sovereign

2. The function of relief (Entlastungsfunktion) that Schmitt assigns to the anti-

normative contexts can be usefully compared with the Christian concept of felix culpa,
conceived—in its classical formulation—as the necessity that evils happen in order to
bring a greater good therefrom. See Andrea Salvatore, “Carl Schmitt e René Girard: un
confronto,” Behemoth 41 (2007): 43–47.
184    Andrea Salvatore

cuts out the social configuration, element, or group, which appears to alter the
general homogeneity of the widespread social practices and is thus regarded as
responsible for the partial or total impossibility of reaffirming the effectiveness
of law (namely, for the non-normal situation). The reliance upon the actuality
of an unavailable state of affairs, which follows from the genealogical relation-
ship between norm and normality, explains the irrationalism that, according to
Schmitt, characterizes any decision. Here, irrationality refers to the intrinsic logi-
cal impossibility normatively to justify an actual and historical state of affairs,
whose confirmation does not depend on any human power. Hence, a sort of cat-
egorical error shapes the following normativistic fallacy: as it is true that what
ought to be cannot be inferred from what is, so it is true that what is cannot be
inferred from what ought to (or could) be.
The actuality of the tragic era. Schmitt relates what he considers to be mod-
ern nihilism to the crisis of legitimacy of the State, conceived as the extreme
form of the political. The decline of the West is defined in Heideggerian terms as
the oblivion toward the ontological difference between legal norm and juridical
nomos. Modern State is at the same time the last stage of and the extreme remedy
for the depletion of the traditional sources of legitimacy, such as sacral power,
which has determined the transition from the theological to the technical field as
the pivotal and foundational point of the whole social unit. Differently from all the
previous stages of Western modern history, the epoch of technology presents only
an instrumental character, irrespective of any concrete or possible final aim. This
condition ultimately leads to the impossibility of an ordering foundation of the
State, which ends up being systematically swept away by the magmatic, formless,
and undifferentiated contingency of the political formation devoid of its substan-
tial legitimacy. The disenchantment of the world causes disorder and proves the
necessity of a new decision regarded as the “founding unfounded,” that is, the
groundless criterion that gives life to a new order of references.
Yet, the instrumentality characterizing the epoch of technology is unable to
produce a decision, since it provides only the most rational means to a given and
predetermined end. Likewise, the irreducible ambivalence of the political—the
fatal reversibility of the political form and formless unrest, order and chaos, war
and peace, measure and incommensurability, stabilizing definition and borderless
revolution—turns out to be incapable of both creating a new order and constrain-
ing its degeneration (the function of katechon). Late modernity is thus an endless
transition to an unknown destination, a blind halfway between a lost universality
and a new concreteness still in the making. This long-lasting powerlessness is
precisely the distinctively modern expression of the tragic dimension. Different
from pre-modern tragedy, the “tragic” is no longer constituted by acting in one
(ill-omened) way rather than in another (licit), but, on the contrary, by inaction,
regarded as the epochal impossibility of any ultimate decision. In Schmitt’s view,
 The Tragic Theory of Carl Schmitt   185

modern tragedy consists in the acknowledgment of the absolute need and the
equally absolute lack of an ordering orientation, the consciousness arising out of
the necessity and the impossibility of the ultimate political solution.3 This twofold
perspective explains why in Schmitt’s theory decisionism ends up being the final
and consistent outcome of the groundlessness of modernity and, at the same time,
the final and extreme remedy against such a formless drift. Let us, then, note a
further tragic aspect of this last ambivalence. On the one hand, Schmitt claims
that a new founding order has to be decided upon; on the other hand, in doing so,
Schmitt reveals the artificial, contingent, and, in the last resort, nonbinding nature
of such an order.
The theory of the tragic that can be implicitly drawn from Schmitt’s work is
made up of the two different theses advanced in the two parts of the present note.
The first thesis—the meaning of the tragic dimension—states that any normative
and/or political order relies on a fundamental set of factual preconditions, whose
actual enforcement in turn depends on a contextual and epochal contingency
beyond human control. The second thesis—the actuality of the tragic era—states
that the contemporary era is necessarily characterized by a set of factual precon-
ditions that makes any ultimate decision and political order unfeasible. The first
conceptual thesis means that the range of human agency is determined by a super-
human contextual contingency, to such an extent that we have to abandon the
illusion of being able to decide everything. The second substantive thesis implies
that late modernity’s contingency is determined by the lack of any ordering prin-
ciple and foundational reality, with the consequence that we have to abandon the
illusion of being able to decide something. The awareness of the vital necessity
of something lacking and still impossible to restore marks the tragic character
of Schmitt’s thought considered as a whole: it is tragic in that it is inescapable,
pernicious, and deadly, because ultimately unable as much as to restrain the fun-
damental and now widespread political violence.
This conceptual reference to historical facticity also constitutes the origi-
nal background of the specific form of political realism endorsed by Schmitt.
Through what can be defined as a methodological reassessment, Schmitt’s realism
ends up being neither the inescapable reference to a factual necessity, as claimed
by descriptive realism, nor the vital prescription of the most optimal amorality, as
claimed by the prescriptive realism, but, more fundamentally, the making explicit
of the factual conditions of possibility for any normative project and enterprise
(hence the conditional character of any constructivism).

3. Carlo Galli speaks of a “tragic hermeneutics of modernity”: see Carlo Galli,

Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna:
il Mulino, 2010). Similarly Michael Marder clearly highlights the risky, groundless, uncer-
tain, and magmatic character of the Schmittian political ontology: see Michael Marder,
Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (London: Continuum, 2010).
186    Andrea Salvatore

The present tragic reading of Schmitt’s philosophy allows us properly to

highlight the post-metaphysical character of his theory, since a shared sense of
epochal loss characterizes both the tragic and the post-metaphysical horizon. In
order to develop such a link in more detail, I would like briefly to recall the three
metaphysical pillars of modernity that Schmitt’s tragic theory radically rejects.
First of all, he rejects objectivism as a substantive conception of rationality. By
abandoning the conception of truth—and inquiry into truth—as a purely logical
process, Schmitt claims that there is no way to grasp and account for politi-
cal reality from nowhere. Second, what he considers to be the concreteness of
every political concept induces Schmitt to abandon universalism and abstractive
thought, considered as the most dangerous source of increasing conflicts between
a prevailing false universality and an underlying real exclusion. As we have seen
above, according to Schmitt’s genealogical inquiry, the universal and universalist
theories cannot but cut out a relevant part of social reality and neglect the real
counter-view. Third, Schmitt’s contextualism refuses foundationalism and the
transcendent grounding of politics, in favor of the complexity and plurality of the
forms of situated social life and actual historical practices. Humans are irreduc-
ibly social beings, whose process of socialization and sense of identity rest upon
the concreteness of the community interactions. Consequently, political philo-
sophical inquiry cannot but start from “within.” There is no way to circumvent
one’s own form of life, including one’s own conceptual background. There is no
view from nowhere, just as there is no reality beyond history.
Even this post-metaphysical insight, far from simply constituting the concep-
tual and methodological framework of Schmitt’s tragic theory, is to be considered
first of all as the ultimate contribution to the substantial relevance and the sense
of urgency of his tragic theory. Indeed, the Schmittian rejection of metaphys-
ics entails the rejection both of the modern aspiration to truth and of cultural
relativism that is usually considered as the necessary consequence of any refusal
of a universal foundation. Such an impasse is a noteworthy tragic outcome of
Schmitt’s genealogy of modernity. Accordingly, the substance of Schmitt’s tragic
theory seems to be more similar to Hamlet’s doubt concerning the very exis-
tence of a way out than to Hecuba’s conviction that the way out is impossible.
In this tragic character of Schmitt’s tragic theory—a sort of meta-theory of the
tragic, which highlights the vital necessity of a foundational theory that is lacking
and still impossible to reassess—we can see a clear demonstration of the post-
metaphysical character of Schmitt’s thought: there is no way for the theorist to
circumvent her own foundational theory, just as there seems to be no way for
modernity to escape its own tragic fate.
Through the lens of the tragic reading of Schmitt’s philosophy that I have
thus far proposed, the most relevant and controversial features of his work seem
to fit together in a more consistent way. First, it is possible to advance a unitary
 The Tragic Theory of Carl Schmitt   187

interpretation of Schmitt’s reflection as a whole, as opposed to a critical inter-

pretation claiming that Schmitt’s undeniable occasionalism cannot but lead to
an eclectic outcome. Far from overwhelming a more specific reading, the tragic
interpretation at stake aims to frame more adequately the hermeneutical horizon
within which the pivotal concepts of Schmitt’s theory can be better understood
in their widest and deepest meaning. Second, it permits one to account for the
distinctive contribution to Western philosophy made by Schmitt. According to
two of the most widespread critical positions, the philosophical core of Schmitt’s
theory is to be seen in the question of the legitimacy (as opposed to the legal-
ity) of power and in the unconditional quest for the political order/unity as such.
Of course, these interpretations are perfectly plausible. Yet, they are plausible
insomuch as they outline a general—and then generalizable—characterization of
most major political thinkers. As a consequence, they can be easily extended not
only to the theorists whom Schmitt considers to be, in different phases and to
different extent, his reference authors (from Machiavelli to Hobbes, from Hegel
to the counterrevolutionary thinkers), but also even to his philosophical oppo-
nents, including Kelsen. Third, the multi-leveled dimension of the tragic allows
us faithfully to reflect and account for the borderline nature of Schmitt’s theory,
based on the substantial, creative, and tragic intertwining of law and politics, the
intertwining of a multifaceted critique of modern ideology and a restless quest for
a post-metaphysical, and perhaps impossible, new order.