Baroque Catastrophe Now? On Space and Power and Carl Schmitt.

Faculty of Social Sciences - School of Law.

Critical Legal Conference (1st-3rd of September 2017). Theme: Catastrophe.

By Fernando Gómez Herrero, Warwick ([email protected]).

Note: What follows is a selection of the final paper presented at the above conference. This work will be presented in other venues in 2017.

Introduction

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) has been a strong point of reference among social scientists and "humanists" from the Right and the Left in the last three decades, in continental Europe and the US, or the North Atlantic and elsewhere. Many issues come to the fore with this dangerous intelligence: the thinking of politics in moments of severe crisis and war (Weimar Republic, Spanish Civil War and Franco Regime, WWII, Cold War); the legal enabling of authoritarian and repressive regimes; the critique of the foundations and principles of liberal democracy, far-Right or extreme Right (al-Right) positions, even Nazi collaboration historically against the spectral enemy of the Soviet Revolution; deep skepticism about the march of history proposed by the “liberal West;” skepticism at human-rights and/or humanitarian-law proposals, the end of Eurocentric ordering of world affairs, etc. These are big themes indeed.

This paper focuses on Dialogues on Power and Space (Polity, 2015; Spanish edition of 1962 published by the Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Madrid; translated by Schmitt's daughter, Anima Schmitt de Otero). But Spain is not an immediate or strong association with Schmitt, particularly in Anglophone countries, inside which Schmitt has enjoyed a revival, a return from the dead, almost like a zombie highlighting our predicaments. One of these: the normalization, or Americanization, of Schmittian thought apropos politics and law at least since 9/11 (2001, 16 years ago, hard to believe), perhaps taking his ghost, and us with him, by surprise. The said date should not be festishized, but it is valid numeral shorthand for the unavoidable realization of liberal-democracies’ adoption of state-of-exception measures, avowed or disavowed, towards foreign and native populations (immigrants and foreigners, minority subjects). The record speaks of targeted assassinations, a tremendous debilitation of international law, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, right-wing revolt of the masses (populism), 100 years after Ortega y Gasset’s famous best-seller, and now Trump Presidency and Brexit Britain disrupting political and economic alliances across the Atlantic and Europe… The Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben is of course a salient name associated with this revival that puts liberal Western democracies in the receiving direction of the accusatory finger. It is a very ugly picture that pushes what constitutes who we (say we) are and blurs easy distinctions with what we do not say we are not in the eerie vicinity of state terrorism. Try to catch the concept in conventional media and academia willing to bring burning issues of the day, with the chicken, “home.” Liberalism learns good lessons from the dyed-in-the-wool hard-Right Nazi-collaborator Schmitt and puts some of that learning to practice. It does so sotto voce or blatantly. Intelligent objections will say: nothing new under the sun before and after 9/11.

Perennial questions: How do we understand politics and the types of politics? What is the subject of politics? What constitutes a polity then there and here and now? Who is in and out, above or below, who is lesser or even a non-subject? What are we to make of this "power" and this “space” in the title of these dialogues? There is a whole host of associations with “space:” territory, geography, geopolitics, circumstance, context, nation, habitat, earth, globe and this is happening in the vicinity of one acknowledged theoretician of the lebensraum (or the Nazi conception of vital living space used to promote German expansionism in Eastern Europe). How do we come to terms with Schmitt vis-à-vis our current moment in global politics? How do we explain the longevity and account for the persistence of this “old” thinking, almost a hundred years old, in our current moment in global politics, institutional crises in our mass societies?

Living Schmitt is our catastrophe, Baroque if you wish. I use Baroque expansively and provocatively particularly within Anglophone societies that have never made the term its own intellectual history in relation to politics.  I wish to mean it in the common lax sense of the term, confusing and complex, excessively ornate and "messy," historical in relation to the early times of European absolutism in the 17th century, which was foundational period of modernity for Schmitt and for many others, whilst passing through processes and disasters in the 20th century and our own: Baroque is our own global legacy and Schmitt’s Hobbes is also Condoleezza Rice’s inclusion of Hobbes in official memos during the George W. Bush administration’s Iraq war. I use "catastrophe" in the sense of great destruction, but also in the theatrical sense of dramatic resolution, imagined, artistic or not, of major forces in superlative conflict, pick your favourite (Spanish Civil War, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.).  Am I being too dramatic? Schmitt is one name option of possible intellectual capture of our contemporaneity inside historical vistas which I wish vast. I suppose the whole point is to make our way through him (ugly mirror image of ourselves if you wish) and try to come out the other anti-Schmittian and utopian side. 

Rendition of the Second Dialogue on New Space.

The “Second Dialogue on New Space” has three participants: social-scientist Altmann (Old Historian), natural-scientist Neumeyer (Chemical Physicist) and MacFuture (North American, the only one territorialized type, external to Europe, representing unqualified faith in technical progress. As mentioned, the dialogic conditioning is literary ploy, mental tease if you like. It is unclear whether readers and listeners are dealing with one mindset holding one worldview holding different ideational possibilities or whether we have instead three voices holding three entirely different worldviews with irreconcilable political discourses. E pluribus unum? Tug of war between the one and the three. Three in one? Holy trinity? Monism instead of paganism or liberal pluralism? The universe of sameness pulling stronger together than the multiverse of irreconcilable differences? The Schmittian vision of belligerent politics allows for no desirable final coexistence of worlds: one wins over the plurality at the end of the historical day that will see a new dawn tomorrow.

And what’s better than binaries to bring about the idea of conflict? The second dialogue begins with Schmitt’s favourite pairing, the land and the sea. Metaphoric language should not distract us. Nor is this escapist naturalization or dilution (tellingly, capitalism is not explicit addressed, thematized, etc.; and its official enemy, Communist Russia during the Cold War, swept unceremoniously under the carpet of the land). Space explorations in the 1960s will not do violence to this fundamental binary, Schmitt unequivocally siding with the “human” on the side of the “land” against the victorious maritime English as we will see soon.

The waterbound-landbased split is understood by Schmitt to have crucial heuristic power reaching long-lasting existential meaning (language redolent of philosophical existentialism). We should not dismiss this intentionally figurative language, as merely fictional or literary. We should instead take it seriously as one possible symbolic (i.e. collectively referential) synthesis for politics (we can also contemplate the possibilities that such metaphorical language is displacement of class divisions that nationalism is also a kind of mythical-symbolic camouflage of other types of divisions cutting through all calls for unity). Hegelianism of the Master-and-Slave dichotomy is breathing life behind the Schmittian formula, if you ask me. Schmitt’s choice will be for the generic formula of the concretization of space, the making of territory and the marking of its boundaries, and for the parceling of the profiting of the goods. It is for others to provide the ethnographic rendition to fight over. For him, the formula suffices, whether in Germany, Spain, England or the United States by 1962. Border conflicts constitute existential fights exceeding the physicality of the material markers, walls and the like (ask Trump’s followers about Mexico). We are earthlings still, now and forever, this is the fundamental message in the second dialogue, no matter how big the tally of the spaceships you get to spot flying around by 1962. This type of space exploration solves, for him, nothing crucial, neither dissolves, not adds. No estrangement: no Edward Artemiev’s musical seduction of otherworldly possibilities for the future political in Schmitt (would the phenomenon of the digital culture throw a fundamental challenge to Schmitt’s vision two or three decades later? I suspect his ghost will stay gives us the no).

The old historian embellishes the land-and-sea distinction with Biblical references. The chemical physicist remains unmoved cool cucumber: the Bible is no science; hence, unfair play for the scientific mind. Undeterred, the old historian does an almost poetic rendition of the dwelling place with its boundaries against the foreignness of seas, declared to be inimical to the human (p. 54). Spanish students of old letters may wish to recall the existentialism of the migrant scholar, the “morada vital” [vital dwelling] of Américo Castro, stranded in the land of MacFuture whilst these dialogues came into being (any direct contact between both figures of about the same age?). Only dry land is living space (lebensraum). This is where Schmitt’s heart ticks, poetically and politically speaking, bringing the talk of God or theology to bear it away in the end. Repetition: Only the violent bear it away, in the famous formulation of the American novelist Flannery O’Connor and politics is mostly part of that violence. Creation and genesis on one end of the imaginary spectrum and one equally imagines doom and gloom, apocalypse on the other bad end. Sea is not properly human. Monstrosity, brink, beasts… Recall the maps of early European cartography: there is no holding anything there. No “liquid modernity” in the language of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for our German thinker. The scientist in the dialogue remains with cold feet, unmoved by the theology, the poetry, the myth.

He fulminates the lack of “the good thing” (science, valid actionable or operational knowledge, I suppose) of the whole narrative provided by the historian and calls for the supersession of these anachronistic examples of old modes of thinking, odd pieces of the museum of thought and feeling: we have already moved from agrarian societies to industrial and modern (and now post-industrial and postmodern, the postcolonial world is invisible figure here). The historian, obstinate, perhaps deaf, dwells imaginatively in the biblical section of the Book of Revelations of Saint John. The younger scientist, perhaps a spy?, does not come in from the cold. The opposition of sea and land is antiquated tale, he declares. It comes from the old doctrine of the four elements long. It is primitive natural philosophy, an insult to modern scientific sensibilities reaching out. Imagine what would digital natives think of such land-water business three decades later, in our global societies?

The historian will not learn the science-alone lesson. Instead, he volunteers an unrequested trajectory in world history still caught up in the continuous confrontation between land and sea powers. The quick list includes the names of Sparta and Athens, Rome and Carthage, “England” and the European powers with the implicit final victory of the former (it is indeed isolated and singularized “England” within the Isles). The immediate 20th century world of global affairs is left void, vacant, implied, surely still too close to touch rhetorically. The human qua mammal is separated from the frog and the whale. No joke: the animosity between England (no Britain, no U.K.) and Russia is not between that of the bear and the whale. Wrong metaphors: the creatures of the earth fight with each other and so do the creatures of the seas, never against each other. Man belongs to the earth like the fish takes to the sea and there is no animosity between the two. No Moby Dick here. We are dealing with the human continuum fighting for either land or sea. Another silence: no ethnic groups, no class divisions. The history that matters here is still, make no mistake, that of oppositionality and extremity: tensions build up and escalate to reach world-historical dimensions climaxing in wars, little and big, cold and hot, sorting things out. Sorting things out is here close to the next stage of release and outlet of the strongest and most dominant unit caught between something like thesis and countre-thesis (Ausgebung), right-wing regression against all revolutionary expansive collective emancipatory attempts. History is the history of violence and the current [for 1962] tension between East and West is, whether land, ocean, air, or stratosphere in the grand spatial scheme of things, the latest modality of the general Land-and-Sea formula that will not go away. Mentioning MacKinder, but also Seeley and Toynbee, the garrulous historian develops a historical trajectory that combines geopolitics with a certain geographical determinism, (Robert D. Kaplan’s recent “revenge of geography” is contemporary popular-culture example; see my https://www.fernandogomezherrero.com/blog/?p=1748 ). Schmitt looks over his shoulder and checks out the English side of the European fence of geo-politics in unison with the United States taking the lead from mid-century on. Land and sea or fight for civilization against an expansive barbarism, or the rest of the world prioritized by postcolonial criticism. Schmitt’s preference is for the telluric, the esoteric, the mythical, the dialectics, credited to Hegel, “that ingenious bird of ill omen” (p. 63), the ‘baroque’ in the broadest sense of the term, refusing to be explained away and terminated as dark or complex language, poetry and nonsense according to another film analogy, computer Alpha 60 in Godard’s Alphaville. If Hegel is ill omen qua revolutionary potential instrumentalized by Marx and Lenin, Schmitt poses no counter-philosopher except the deliberate “poverty of theory” of Hobbes. And he remains flexible and supple enough to allow for internal contradictions in moving from one manageable treatise to another, particularly during his Weimar Republic moment of official political visibility. Baroque may be invoked again in relation to this collective excess of individual decision, reason or logic since the existentialist dilemma of politics, in the language of the early 20th century, cannot be brought down to the quantitative and measurable level of policies and polls, institutional in-fighting for resources, strategies and tactics, good or bad decisions, numbers, statistics, percentages, etc. There is always the feeling of something slippery and cunning, “something more” out and about in Schmitt’s political passion, typically not fully fleshed out, and in these dialogues. When it is, we are dealing with ad hoc interventions, occasional pieces, so to speak, seeking to intervene forcefully into the conjuncture (“Nazi Behemoth,” Minca and Rowan, pp. 129-52). Schmitt’s conception of politics: Machiavellian, anti-foundational.

MacFuture interrupts the spirited mano-a-mano. The national allegory appears clear: American technicity and spatial exploration supersede the rivalry between England (sea, stand-in for natural science, industrialism, liberalism) and Germany (land, stand-in for old history, myth, but also advanced science and industrialism, Nazi authoritarianism, Heidegger’s formula in the final Spiegel interview, Nazism, the perfect synthesis of collectivity and technical prowess, I see it also fundamentally operative in Schmitt). Russia is invisible allegorical figure with no say. How to account for this no-show of the other superpower (impossible mirror image of the ugly Americans?)? MacFuture appears untied by either historical sense or scientific-knowledge etiquette or protocol. He theoretically sees no conflict between them either and between knowledge and morality. His Americanism, the name appears fair to his political ideology, is triumphant black hole genially and amiably sucking the contradictions of others. Should not contemplate the future-oriented global-history permanent sunshine of MacFuture’s mind at least by 1962? Technicity means unequivocal obsolescence of old forms and moving on to something else with no apparent drama. We appear to be moving towards a global society that wants routine reactivation of the superficiality of synchronic surfaces with no deep histories (hence, the anti-humanities). High old times are to be sooner or later well, simply old, history, kaput. There is apparently nothing to preserve, nothing holding back, nothing holding tight: Good riddance. Let bygones be bygones: MacFuture.

Let us again say it: nature and history have been superseded in the age of the atomic energy (p. 63). MacFuture appears to inhabit some type of para- or post-natural, post-historical neither-land-nor-sea plateau of no cultural content in particular, but a wild bunch instead of future-oriented, endless possibilities. He remains faceless, undefined, unattached by geography, apparently uncircumscribed by race and ethnicity; his chronology is nothing but short-term, thin present and immediate-future projection (he great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s joke of the tinkering with the expiration dates of the blinds to sell to the Americans so that they can comprehend nothing else but the here-and-the-now may be inserted here). And what to invoke to stop this historical march of history inside which we have been involved at least since the 1950s? Stereotypical American “you-want-to-be-like-us-we-are-the-global-future ideology:” Nature and history, are like “fat in the glowing oven” (p. 64). Chilling imagery. The invocation of the atomic energy means at least two things: stand-in for advanced science and the contemplation of the possibility of massive annihilation. MacFuture is thus a kind of prophetic voice with no apparent emotion holding nothing back: “nature and history are atomically altered” (p. 63). Game changer, therefore, from Hobbes’s times?

There is already by 1962 the possibility of the manufacture of “artificial elements” (p. 63). Today, we would perhaps add elite-athletic doping, medical advancement, genetic manipulation, robotics and artificial intelligence, computing, internet and visual culture, security-surveillance mechanisms and militarism, global interconnectedness in the age of mass tourism and massive migration. The world wants to be American and the Americans want the world: The message from MacFuture is clear. It is delivered with no particular emotional register, no rich humanities, no passion for science necessarily, as though politics, once firmly on your side, had nothing to do with respecting spatial boundaries intersecting with thick chronologies. 

Is this American experiment genuine alternation or qualitative alteration? Irresistible force then? Even the old historian agrees (“It’s wonderful that you’ve alerted us to humanity’s completely altered situation,” p. 64). Are the good old historical and natural ways gone for good? Another chilling imagery (“hydrogen bomb falls upon their heads,” p. 64), the deicitic is not to be missed. Is this a reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or to the Korean War (1950-3)? Is the old craft of philosophical, juridical and political thought any obstacle? What can poetic care of language do? Is it entirely superseded? The old historian remarks that the dialogue has moved to another level (p. 64). Do we all need a new tongue, head, brain, body, system, being? Is post-foundationalism and post-structuralism the way to go? Do we pursue family-friendly exhibitions, stroll the museum of historical and cultural curiosities in family-friendly exhibitions in our happy vacations in a world of immense indistinction (Francis Fukujama’s “post-history” dixit)? The Schmittian horror is this (liberal) imposition of depoliticization or neutralization of all boundaries. No need for drama: the North American character claims to be all about “simplification and disentanglement” (p. 64). Freedom is freedom from entanglements and complexities: call it Baroque excess. No need, at least not in this polite exchange, to throw heavy objects at the screen spaces of unintelligibility holding hands with Jeremy Prokosch in the famous Godard film, Mepris (Contempt), contemporaneous with Anima Schmitt de Otero’s Spanish translations. Spoiling the ending, the North American youngster will not “get the girl” in the end, should we wish to be true to the figure of the old historian.

The scientist cannot conceive of science without boundaries and invokes “insurmountable moral boundaries” (p. 64). It is the first time that morality makes an appearance, as though coming from nowhere. It is not clear how it relates, it at all, with the previous Bible stories and the old historian’s talk of God the scientist had resisted beforehand. A Godless, Bible-free natural-science type of morality? MacFuture finds this appeal to morality self-evident, so much so that it is not developed. His is cogitus interruptus, scanning, skimming, surfing what the crisscrossing of objections by the two older interlocutors. Mr Abbreviation is the linguistic order of the historical day, and today we would receive it from a twitter account. The North American affirms the boundary-free freedom to do scientific research. “Our” [adjectiveless] civilization depends on it” (p. 64), against the commonplace invocation of the “dark Middle Ages” poorly serving anyone’s mal-nourished historical imagination. There is dematerialization: “Light” is always already the latest stage moving ahead of us leaving “darkness” behind. For MacFuture, there is an awful lot of darkness behind the motorized engine, spaceship travel or the drop of the hydrogen bomb: the whole history of the world, Eurocentric and otherwise from which North America appears somehow exceptionally exempt, something like a new solar system, permanently new world indeed. Both, the scientist and the historian, are “rolled over” as Schmitt himself writes in the 1962 Spanish prologue (p. 20). The latter will mount poetic resistance in the end.

The “humanities” (or the liberal arts, preamble to more contemporary forms of cultural studies and postcolonial studies) are missing in action, except for the occasional embellishment, mostly at the hands of the historian, perhaps mostly fulfilling an ornamental function. The University Campus of the future will prioritize the STEM disciplines: will you believe? No explicit concrete word of politics is forthcoming from MacFuture; thus, perfect epitome of neutralization of politics, also of Spenglerianism (the survival of the fittest, the stronger, the faster, the further as some kind of Olympic-Games motto). Blessed by “history,” what is there to fear by 1962?, readers have no reason to suspect foul play or guile. His confident precociousness displaces the two other and older interlocutors who do not explicitly dare politicize the conversation either. 

It is already a Blade-Runner type of universe out there already by 1962: the machines exceed humans in outputs and velocities, indeed “every human capacity of sense and muscular strength” (p. 65), the apparatuses calculate numbers surpassing the human brain, there is always a beyond to the new world, there is already a newer version to the new product, and it is mostly a matter of putting our heads and feelings around it, declares MacFuture. Everything appears to be a matter of page update, site refresh, activating the latest backups of the newest version of the most efficient program within the operating system, otherwise you will be dysfunctional and obsolete. The North American represents boundless (na?ve) faith in the power of technicity. The faith, it appears, sells itself without need for complex sentences or handicaps: no hiccups in the pipeline of perennial progress. Ni tin cans in the streets of the world either, it appears. The youngster is the least loquacious party in the trio, yet his paucity stops the polite disagreement of worldviews between Bible-inspired mythical, land- historical texture and modern-sober natural-science knowledge turning to submarine explorations. This future world is ever-expanding and frictionless and, on the face of it, unimpeded by nominal attachments to culture, language, geography and ideology. There is eerie ethereal and faceless ghost-like quality to MacFuture’s global future. The opposition of the land and the sea, the East and the West, boil down to the triumph of technicity. We are thus inevitably bound for the cosmos and the stratosphere with nothing apparently holding humanity back: the scientist agrees, and adds, looking at the older man: “the historical sense ought not to make one blind when a new world opens itself” (p. 66).

Altmann, the old historian, offers no immediate resistance to ride the historical advance of technicity, apparently unstoppable force. His lesson returns to the island England (sic with italics in the original). This is the motor of global history in the Eighteenth Century. The motor is this opening up to the challenge of the seas. “The English became oceanic” (p. 70), completing the transition from terrestrial to maritime existence (p. 71). Water is the way to go, the way to the future. Neumeyer, the chemical physicist, is in his true element citing dates of technical discoveries: first coal furnace (1735), first cast-iron steel (1740), first steam engine (1768), first modern factory in Nottingham (1769), first spinning jenny (1770), mechanical loom (1786), first steam locomotive (1825). First Brexit: “the island turns its countenance away from the continent and glances out upon the great seas of the world. It lifts anchor and becomes the bearer of power over an oceanic world empire” (p. 69). Was this done in a fit of absence of mind (Schmitt quotes from John Robert Seeley, endnotes 16 & 17 on pp. 100-1). If so, better unconsciously done than never done: conquest accomplished. Imperial history is what matters mostly or solely, its political conscious dimension shared by the voices, ever so naturally, in both dialogues. The old historian is not ungenerous with the victors of wars: it is “no accident, not undeserved” (p. 69), the English overtook the Spaniards, exhausting themselves in the American land appropriation, the Catholic French remaining land-bound, the Portuguese and the Dutch, also maritime, had too small a foundation. The Eurocentrism of this march of history (entirely Hegelian?) is unmissable.

Altman’s old-historical “lyricism” appears to put nothing substantial on the table. Such vision finds deaf ears in Neumeyer’s more-prosaic-and-sober chemical-physicist eager attitude towards technologically enhanced maritime explorations, supposedly with moral boundaries, left unspecified (p. 73). In the metaphorical language of the old historian: the “ship” wins over the “house” and there is “abysmal fullness” of the two modes of existence (terrestrial and maritime). The modes appear irreconcilable: no amphibian life is imaginable for the human dimension in this political vision. The English made the historical choice of the sea and they won. Period. The association with Arnold J. Toynbee’s method of the challenge is explicitly made (p. 75). Its language is endorsed by both older men with a silent MacFuture who we must imagine on standby perhaps lingering impatiently around, waiting for their penny to drop without much else to have to add, apparently. He has said plenty, and has left plenty of things unsaid as well, but who is to tell. This is allegory of nationalized victory against multitudes of surrenders and defeats, Germany prominently left unnamed against immediate decades in the past century. England is the territorialized allegory of the victorious name pushing forth “the logical second stage of a transition toward maritime existence and the challenge of the world oceans opening themselves” (p. 75). It is still in the end the old historian doing most of the talking, as though he is the one most capable of digesting the vistas of Nomos of the Earth, from the discovery of America until the 1950s. Yet, his erudition is not winning the argument. The second dialogue signifies a retreat and a defeat of sorts, to which he will not concede. Admirable obstinacy? Hardheaded stubbornness carrying the lignified attributes of old age?

Toynbee’s language is included. Modern technology is conceived as detachable splinter that can therefore be applied elsewhere, added-on, removed, re-attached and made to travel from culture to culture picking up myriad hybrid tumble weed along the way. The entire island space called “England,” the author’s intentional geographical mistake, not mine, detached itself from the European continent and made the collective choice of maritime existence and the industrial revolution followed from that removal. Such twisted cause-and-effect logic sounds a bit like pro-Brexit-well-before-Brexit argument in between the gongs of detachment and continental removal pushing for a Victorian-Era global expansionism, that is also moral and pro-technology and good for business. What is there not to like?: we can almost imagine the nostalgia retroactively kicking in and being fed by the popular press in some suspicious quarters in the Isles. There are here no impediments to industrialism: no workers and no revolutions. There is no need to talk about liberalism. No talk of democracy disrupts this sunny picture. The old historian also sings the paean of the technical march of history, which appears irresistible force without thunder and no fury.

MacFuture surprises us all by returning to the conversation adding greater vistas, the stratosphere and beyond. The sky’s the limit! The 20th century means the new edition, amplification and intensification, of the prologue of the adventure initiated with the discovery of America. These dialogues were friendly to public radio broadcast: we are now in the wireless spacelessness of digitality. The push was already forward, the old historian reminds us, each nation wanting to eternalize its last great historical experience. There is a manageable number of three nationalities, the Germans, “we,” and the deictic does not lie, entering WWI, having in mind the 1870/71 precedent, the French, wanting to push forward the 1792 Revolution and the Americans typified by Henry L. Stimson’s Doctrine of 1932, left unexplained, pushing the 1861 war of secession forward and outward. New frontiers are wanted by all. Jackson-Turner’s fingertips are all over these frontier-challenging dialogues, and so is Bolton’s ghost bringing borderland issues, mostly Spanish American; but neither American historian is mentioned by name. It is hard to believe that Schmitt would not have been made aware of this type of American historiography. He remains holding hands with the English on this side of the Atlantic. He would have had no reason to fall for temptation and go south and question for example how Mexican historiography complicated (North) American visions. Thus, with or without Schmitt’s daughter’s translation skills, MacFuture really speaks no Spanish, with or without the frequent Iberian trips and residence of the German scholar, let us say it thus carefully.

Yet, nations have to stay alert, even after the foundation of the United Nations in 1945, in case the reader may wonder, 17 years before these dialogues were written: “historical answers are only given to a unique call once and are only right once (p. 79). You blink and you miss it, and the global-historical moment in imperial history has passed your collectivity for good. I imagine a Fritz Lang type addressing the aggressive American producer, a kind of ugly American abroad, as in Godard’s Mepris: “It is not always easy to heed this, MacFuture”(p. 79). Altmann speaks of this “reality of the historical call” and how the situation may be qualitatively different with the new phenomenon of space exploration.

The conclusion of the old historian: not so. New spaces will still require the configuration of a new order: no geography ever exists without its geopolitics or its nomos. There is no way around concrete order, time arrangement and the binding of technology. There is no escape from (political) fight over its best, more dangerous definitions. MacFuture is left affirming not so much the “call” but the “drive” (p. 81). The natural scientist, almost donning the red beret of a Jacques Cousteau, affirms the next frontier (“the depths of the sea, a whole new world has unexpectedly become accessible to us, with unthought-of new life forms and inexhaustible riches,” p. 81). There he goes, to those inexhaustible riches, it seems, quite happily to do so. Yet, the final word is for Altmann, old historical earthling affirming the earth, and the human firmly planted on it. Unimaginable for us today knowledge exploration without demarcating national flags.

The topic of politics has only obliquely been broached starting with the “discovery” of America, the unreconstructed word betrays the perspective of the speakers and the imaginary “master of puppets” or author behind them. Our three speakers style themselves as the brood, legitimate or not, of figures such as Christopher Columbus, Pizarro and Cortés, explicitly mentioned. MacFuture puts himself already on the moon, away from the “puny planet” (p. 81) as he calls it; Mr Neumeyer is already jumping with both feet in the depth of the sea, surely with good breathing, swimming and flotation devices; Altmann remains on the shore and there he wishes to remain for ever and ever in the estuary on the west coast of Galicia in August 1961, qualified as “tranquil,” calling himself the son of the earth qua human, whilst high above the thinking head Russian and American cosmonauts compete to see who’s first to reach what beyond the stratosphere. Such feat is trivialized by Altmann and also by Carl Schmitt in the 1962 Spanish prologue: identity of authorial intention and most likely alter ego of this extreme-Right understanding of history, politics and its inevitable demarcations. We are reminded in the end of the threat of unencumbered technology. Literature has been the purchase of the old historian. His is the final embellishment. Poetry is his metaphorical “way out.” Citing Goethe, Faust interpellates the firm-standing Earth after a hard night of atom-bomb threats, America and Russia early in the Cold War, Korea War, the Bay of Pigs, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, the West versus the rest and the rest retaliating, etc. Schmitt had various options then as we have now almost half a century later. The naturalism of the language use should not lead anyone blind-folded into the fools’ path of easy acceptance of the tired formulas of humanism or universalism  (“the son of a firmly grounded earth,” p. 82), unmistakable culture clash with this astringent and acerbic thinker to be sure, who saw none of the above in the many victims of global wars in the 20th century, before and after, and who was persona grata in Franco Spain in the twilight on his days and nights (“sacred festivity in the dusk of life” as Fraga Iribarne’s speech had it, echoing Schmitt’s own language, during the solemn act of 21 March 1962 in Madrid granting honorary membership to the Instituto de Estudios Políticos). Did Schmitt ever meet with Francisco Franco? And does it matter tremendously to the purposes of this analysis? From our temporal and geographical distance, such festivities may not seem like much, but they are still immensely significant against a sustained collaboration prior to our contemporary revivals of scholarly and intellectual interests in the still dominant Anglophone zone and others. A future line of inquiry will have to address how those less visible Spanish-language engagements with the Schmittian corpus, in Iberia and otherwise, proved to be significant in the 20th century and beyond, whether in relation to retroactive historical lessons moving chronologically backwards, inspirational and long-lasting, intellectually and politically speaking, and for reasons to celebrate or oppose, in relation to our current predicaments mentioned at the beginning of these pages.

Altmann receives my humanities-money bet for the speaker of Carl Schmitt’s authorial intention, keeping distance from the natural sciences and the technological finality in the end. Tacit embraces tactful: there is no explicit politics in these two dialogues, which remain polite exercise in creative letters, perhaps more private than public in its limited reach, but there is a bit of the latter. The sprinkling of literature here and there is perhaps secularized progeny of theology; that is, an attempt to try to keep something larger than logic and thought and reason, alive, myth?, narrative?, sense of historical purpose?, collective trajectory?, what about fusion of collectivity and technicity? We need to remind ourselves every third breath or so that politics is dangerous relations and we do not have to go very far with Schmitt. The renewal of a different sense of politics, right-wing or anti-Left in his case, was for the old historian, and also for Schmitt, writing and thinking from a position of historical defeat, neither American nor Russian, nor liberal imperial Leviathan, nor Russian Communism, would Putin’s Russia do it (parallels may be found between Schmitt and “Fourth Political Theory” by Aleksandr Dugin)? Is there a third way? The way of anarchy, hackers, protesters, “antifas”? A new reformulation for Europe, within Europe in these times of Brexit? It was not clear then and it is not clear at all by the time I finish writing these lines. We can indeed remain skeptical of Schmitt’s answers. We do not have to take him at his word passing through these five voices in two separate-but-equal dialogues. The fire and fury of antagonisms have been renewed. You only have to look around.

By Fernando Gómez Herrero, Warwick, England 6 September 2017. Any reactions, comments, do not hesitate to get in touch: [email protected]