This category of “depoliticalization” in Schmitt is one I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. Essentially, the question for me is one of foundations, of taking our categories as artifactual. We made it, not found it. As I read Schmitt, depoliticalizations don’t render nonpolitical. Rather, they render ostensibly nonpolitical. They camouflage. The political, for Schmitt, can not and will not end.
“Detheologization” is another term of Schmitt’s that I’ve just encountered, via an article by Arthur Versluis on Schmitt and early church matters that are bit beyond me, particularly someone named Tertullian. I need to look Political Theology 2 over and it will take a while as my German is bad, but the connection between depoliticalization and detheologization is what I’m fascinated with here, and the implied terms politicalization and theologization.
If the terms are parallel, then is it the case that there is an detheologization? On my read, depoliticalization never occurs, in a sense where it actually happens. Rather it’s a political act of camouflage. Does detheologization ever occur? Or is it parallel - that is, one can cloak theological components but they do not (one does not) cease to be theological?
I’m also intensely curious about the relationship between these terms. Schmitt seems to use them in parallel, but they should be opposite. The theological is not subject to decision, a deity is absolute. The political is. To theologize then would be to ontologize, to depoliticalize. To politicalize is to decide, to hold as product of a decision (Kant’s “acting as if”). One link here is Schmitt’s remarks in the Partisan piece - he wants a limited, contained enmity and politcal, not an absolute one. The theological, then, might be the absolute from which the political hangs. The role of the people/nation/state and sovereign for Schmitt is similar, as ground of the political. All of this is speculation, I need to read more and formulate arguments to back this up.
To my mind, if this is so, then Schmitt’s wrong. The political should be absolutized (the problem with Lenin, despite Schmitt’s take, is that for him the political is not absolute but still too telluric), the political should be its own ground or not have a ground. (That’s a different and second question - no ground, or own ground? Absolutes. Hegel recurs. Drat.)
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Quote to think about for later - Versluis writes that
“in the afterword to Political Theology II, Schmitt—in the very passages in which he refers to Gnosticism and in particular to dualism—ridicules modern “detheologization” [Die Enttheologisierung] and “depoliticization” [Die Entpolitisierung] characteristic of a liberal modernity based upon production, consumption, and technology. What Schmitt despises about depoliticizing or detheologizing is the elimination of conflict and the loss thereby of the agonistic dimension of life without which (…) the juridical trial and judging of humanity cannot take place.”
(…)
The work of Schmitt belongs to the horizontal realm of dualistic antagonism that requires the antinomies of friends and enemies and perpetual combat. Schmitt is a political and later geopolitical theorist whose political theology represents, not an opening into the transcendence of antagonism, but rather an insistence upon antagonism and combat as the foundation of politics that reflects Tertullian’s emphasis on antagonism toward heretics as the foundation of theology. When Schmitt writes, in The Concept of the Political, that “a theologian ceases to be a theologian when he . . . no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen,” we begin to see how deeply engrained is his fundamental dualism.[24] This dualism is bound up with Schmitt’s insistence upon “the fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man” and his adamant rejection of those who deny original sin, i.e., “numerous sects, heretics, romantics, and anarchists.”[25] Thus “the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”[26] The enemy, here, just as in Tertullian’s work, is those deemed to be heretical.
The enemy is recognized, not declared: it’s a sorting of names of things that really adhere, rather than being assigned.