Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
*
Lecturer in Politics at the Department of International Development and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford [
].
Gabriella Slomp's book, Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror, is excellent on its own terms. Her focus is on the friend-enemy distinction as proposed in Schmitt's Concept of the Political (1932) and developed in his Theory of the Partisan (1963). She shows that Schmitt was committed to finding political arrangements that would limit the violence, hostility, and terror that are commonly associated with friend-enemy constellations. She shows that Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his Leviathan (1651) in order to transcend the visceral hostility of the English Civil War, was an important reference point for Schmitt's thought. She looks at various forms of hostility, from the Westphalian order and its twentieth-century crisis to classical insurgencies and global terrorism, as well as the global 'war on terror'.
The focus of the book - on hostility, violence, and terror - is topical, and the tradition of political thought that connects Hobbes and Schmitt is relevant. It is perhaps somewhat surprising to find so little in the book on the notion of political theology, as this constitutes an important although rather subterranean link between the two thinkers. Also, Slomp does not seem to be entirely privy to the extensive literature by scholars of international law and international relations on terrorism interpreted in a Schmittian perspective. However, this hardly derogates from the remarkable quality and originality of the book as a contribution to political theory.
In short, this is a relevant and timely book. If I may say so, however, I believe that Schmitt's political thought is richer than Slomp, and indeed even Schmitt himself, has realized. As I shall show in the remainder of this review, the consequence is an exalted understanding of politics as a permanent state of exception. Just as it does not do justice to wars to reduce them to decisive battles, or to history to reduce it to revolutionary upheavals, so it does not do justice to politics to reduce it to a permanent play of existential hostility versus friendship.