Jacques de Ville’s Constitutional Theory: Schmitt after Derrida reads Carl Schmitt’s major texts through Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with them. Its argument moves across Schmitt’s Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political, Constitutional Theory, Land and Sea, Ex Captivitate Salus, The Nomos of the Earth and The Theory of the Partisan, and it treats Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, Khora and Fors as the decisive interpretive lens. De Ville, a professor of law at the University of the Western Cape, asks what it would mean to take Derrida’s reading of Schmitt seriously for the basic concepts of constitutional theory: sovereignty, the state, the political, constituent power, democracy, representation, the constitution and human rights.
“This book advances a new reading of the central works of Carl Schmitt and, in so doing, rethinks the primary concepts of constitutional theory.”
The wager is unusual, because Derrida and Schmitt sit on opposite political and theoretical shores. Derrida devoted three chapters of Politics of Friendship to Schmitt, largely affirming his analysis of the enemy while pressing toward a friendship beyond the traditional metaphysical conception. That reading has found little echo among constitutional theorists, who have preferred Leo Strauss’s political-theological Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben’s Schmitt of sovereignty and the exception. De Ville grants those readings their value but gives Derrida’s priority, and the book’s answer to what that priority yields is deliberately double: yes and no.
From the Concept of the Political to the Constitution
Schmitt and Derrida: A Reading Against the Grain
The book opens by proposing a new reading of Carl Schmitt’s central works in order to rethink the primary concepts of constitutional theory. Jacques de Ville works through Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political, Constitutional Theory, Land and Sea, Ex Captivitate Salus, The Nomos of the Earth, and The Theory of the Partisan, tracking sovereignty, the state, the political, constituent power, democracy, representation, the constitution, and human rights. His guide for this rethinking is Derrida’s analysis of Schmitt in Politics of Friendship, alongside Derrida’s engagements with Freud and the psychoanalysts, and his readings of Khora and Fors set beside Schmitt on the positive concept of the constitution.
Despite their pronounced political and theoretical differences, Derrida devoted three chapters of Politics of Friendship to Schmitt, seeking a beyond to the traditional metaphysical conception of friendship. He largely affirms Schmitt’s analysis of the enemy, working through The Concept of the Political, “The Theory of the Partisan,” and “Weisheit der Zelle.” That reading has found little resonance in constitutional theory, where Meier’s political-theological interpretation and Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the exception have been more influential. De Ville values both but gives Derrida’s reading preferential status, asking what it means to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political. The answer, promised for the final chapter, is an ambivalent yes and no.
Constitutional Theory and the Liberal Dislocation
Constitutional Theory is the 2008 translation of the Verfassungslehre of 1928, where Schmitt spells out the radical implications of The Concept of the Political and dislocates liberal constitutionalism. The political component of modern constitutions, repressed by liberalism’s privileging of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and freedom, turns out to be the most important component. Schmitt distinguishes constitution from constitutional laws, distinguishes identity from representation while showing their interdependence, resurrects sovereignty as constituent power, treats equality as necessarily implying inequality toward those excluded from political unity, and subjects freedom to the political component.
How to Read Schmitt
Three strategies present themselves. Refutation is rejected as primary, since refutation, as Derrida says, still belongs to metaphysics. Ignoring Schmitt because of his Nazi collaboration and anti-Semitism is also rejected: his anti-Semitism was pervasive rather than an opportunism of 1933–36, yet a reductive reading fails the Freudian insight into life’s tensions and contradictions. Malpas, writing on Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, is cited to the effect that the Holocaust proceeds from a possibility belonging to human being itself, not from an excludable group. There is an obligation to understand thinkers like Heidegger and Schmitt, including the relation between anti-Semitism and philosophical thinking—an obligation Derrida took seriously. Schmitt’s texts will undergo a quasi-psychoanalysis, not a psychoanalysis of Schmitt himself.
Derrida’s reading is neither affirmation, nor critique, nor a separation of the good from the bad. It follows his general project, the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, executed singularly for each text, with no uniform method. In Limited Inc, engaging Austin and Searle, he exposes the structural impossibility and illegitimate logic of metaphysical thinking. Schmitt’s own strategy is telling: in “Reich — Staat — Bund” he holds that concepts are energy-laden, sharp weapons, and that world history is a battle for words and concepts. He reaches pure concepts—the political, the partisan, constituent power, representation, the constitution, equality, freedom, nomos—through idealization against twentieth-century conceptual dissolution, collapse, or boundless extension, treated as extrinsic and contingent and posited in hierarchical opposition: political against depoliticisation, telluric against world-revolutionary partisan, the first term as presence (concrete, earth, home), the second as fall (abstract, normative, rootless, sea).
Derrida’s counter is that corruption cannot be a mere extrinsic accident; the ideal structure must include this possibility. The inside’s purity is constructed by accusing exteriority of being a supplement, and the parasite is its internal and positive condition of possibility, the very force and law of its emergence. This strategy is motivated not by logic but a-logically by metaphysics’ relationship to death—feared and desired, the desire repressed and forgotten. It seems intolerable that the pure concept’s self-implosion lodges within the concept, so ethical concepts are constructed as a circular return to the self. Affirming this force lets metaphysics break the circle. Derrida locates the disruptive force in Schmitt’s political texts; this book does the same for constitutional theory, concerned not only with conscious intention but with what lies behind it.
Human Rights, Nomos, and the Shape of the Argument
The chapters to come reconsider the foundation of human rights through Schmitt’s analyses of freedom and equality.
The Brother as Absolute Enemy
Derrida’s reading of Schmitt turns on a single, ghostly word: the brother. In Schmitt’s account of the partisan’s movement from Lenin to Mao, the brother appears furtively, almost as an apparition, and Derrida seizes on it. For Schmitt, the absolute war that drives partisan theory to its extreme—the revolutionary war that violates every law of war—can be a fratricidal war. Derrida’s thesis is that this is no anomaly: there is only absolute hostility for or against a brother. The phantasm of the brother links up with technology and the spectrality of the partisan, and Schmitt’s equation of brother and absolute hostility accords with the whole history of friendship—an unspeakable synonymy, a deadly tautology. Derrida’s “double passage of a brother” occurs in Schmitt’s discussion of the brutal internal wars in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945, where Tito, backed by Stalin, fought Mihailovich, and of the long civil war between Mao and the Kuomintang. Absolute hostility directs itself at the brother, converting internal war into real and absolute war, and thus into absolute politics. At first sight Derrida seems to confuse Schmitt’s strict distinction between real and absolute hostility, yet Schmitt’s own passage on Mao supports him: racial, class, national, and fraternal enmities did not relativize one another but were confirmed and intensified. What by Schmitt’s schema should be restricted, telluric enmity turns out to be the worst violence—that between brothers. A vertiginous reversal occurs at the limit of oneself or one’s double, the absolute friend who always comes in the guise of the brother. A footnote adds a third mention Derrida ignores: Schmitt’s Salan, whose brother enemy is worse than the Algerian front, prompting Schmitt to admit confusion within the concept of the enemy itself. Derrida also doubts the viability of Schmitt’s distinction between annihilation and mere killing, noting that where polemos once provided the paradigm for war, stasis now takes its place. The figure of the double recurs in Politics of Friendship: Cicero’s true friend as ideal double, the other self, and the self as Narcissus dreaming of immortality. Commenting on Schmitt’s identification of friend and enemy, Derrida remarks that philautia, narcissism, the fraternal double, are obscurely at work. Poe’s purloined letter enters through Dupin’s invocation of Crébillon’s Atrée et Thyestes—again the rivalry of brother enemies, Cain and Abel—as Dupin predicts his rival’s self-destruction.
Stirner and the Naked I
Schmitt’s essay “Weisheit,” written from his cell in Ex Captivitate Salus, begins from the self-evident definition of man as naked: the unclothed before the clothed, the disarmed before the armed, the powerless before the powerful—the experience of Adam and Eve driven from paradise. Schmitt sees himself as clearly naked, comparing his small cell to Daübler’s desert expanses; the clothing left to him only confirms his nakedness ironically. He recalls Wagner’s Siegfried—“Singularly do I inherit my own body, living, I feed on it”—a line originally from Max Stirner, whose radical individualism Schmitt finds both compelling and problematic. In the Glossarium he doubts whether he is an I at all, a fixed star or marsh light, one self or a thousand. He has known Stirner since high school; The Ego and Its Own appeared in 1844, and the debris field of German theology and idealism since 1848 has become a force field of theogonic approaches—uranium mines of intellectual history, including “poor Max.” The praise is not unqualified: Stirner is hideous, boorish, boastful, a severe psychopath crowing “I am I.” Schmitt agrees with those who regard man as dangerous, and his polemic against anarchism and liberalism can be read as aimed at Stirner, for whom every consistent individualism amounts to a negation of the political. Yet Schmitt credits Stirner with realizing the “I” is not an object of thought, and admires the title Der Einzige und sein Eigentum as the most beautiful in German literature. Stirner’s longing for a new paradise of perfect bodily presence, man become like the animals and flowers, Schmitt compares to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Rossini—a blissfully accelerated blood circulation, Stirner being one of the first Panists of German literature. Modern technology overtook this Pan; today the poor I can only wed its own echo, organisationally monopolised. Schmitt plays on Pan and Plan: planning has monopolised the I, Pan founders and planning appears on the agenda.
The Enemy Within
The essay closes by asking whom one can ultimately recognize as one’
Democracy’s Deferral and the Weakest Force
Schmitt’s account of sovereignty and commissarial dictatorship—the president’s near-unlimited power to “save the constitution” by suspending democratic rights and institutions against a domestic enemy—can be read as an admission of democracy’s structural deferral. The dictation that democracy be sent elsewhere, expelled under pretext of protection, mirrors Derrida’s insight. At stake is safeguarding the form of political existence decided through constituent power; for Schmitt, revolution, unlike reform or revision, is a hostile confrontation. The demos he describes is formless, a groundless force whose unity is fictional, sourced not in imagination but in khora. It offers no presence or substance, only a hauntology modeled on a dualist God—loving savior and just creator at permanent war. Constituent power returns to itself yet holds a weakest force, a powerlessness, split before the friend/enemy distinction. This grants the demos the right and obligation to call constituted powers to account.
Identity, Representation, and the Unrepresentable
Political representation is in crisis: low turnout, shrinking party membership, distrust, movements preferring direct action. Schmitt’s reflections answer conceptually. The people is political unity and subject of constituent power, yet also natura naturans—formless, unorganized, disrupting identity, involving alterity and self-destruction within the self. Identity depends on representation; there is no escaping their interrelation in any state form. Representation enhances rather than reproduces, drawing strength from the unrepresentable. Schmitt sees representation establishing itself by overcoming “fanatical” prophetism tied to the soul’s darkness—an overcoming readable psychoanalytically as incorporation whose object returns in every sovereign act of self-preservation. Constituent assemblies should be thought not as strongest force but, paraphrasing Schmitt, as lowly, unrepresentable, the weakest force; all constituted powers must guard this weakest force.
The Concept of the Constitution
The modern written constitution dates from the late eighteenth century. Schmitt distinguishes four concepts, defending only the positive one. The absolute concept splits into an existential sense (every state “has” a constitution) and a normative one (a closed system of higher norms). The relative concept identifies constitutions by formal criteria like writtenness or adoption procedure; the ideal concept demands content such as liberal rights and separation of powers. Schmitt’s positive concept separates constitution from constitutional law: the constitution is the decision on the form and nature of political unity, often in the preamble, while constitutional laws are secondary norms. It also separates the formation of political unity from its precise form.
Khora and the Constitution as Gift
Schmitt’s positive concept involves a conscious decision about political existence that unity gives itself through constituent power. Yet he insists the constitution “does not give itself to itself, but is given to a concrete political unity,” attaining validity through the existing political will of those who give it. This resonates with Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus and khora—the placeless place that receives everything beyond exchange and gift, Necessity without debt. Socrates places himself in khora’s position, withdrawing through simulation to give place to those who have place, operating from a neutral space where everything is marked yet nothing belongs. The Republic assigns proper places to rulers, guardians, and craftsmen; children have potential place, poets and sophists none. The Timaeus is fiction upon fiction, an abyssal narrative with no fixed origin, staging the city’s decisive exposure in war.
The Wolf Man and the Crypt
Freud traced the Wolf Man’s neurosis to a primal scene witnessed at eighteen months, reading the wolf dream through fairy tales and his father’s playful threats. Abraham and Torok relocate the cause: Sergei witnessed his father seducing his sister, and the mother’s imposed silence built a crypt in his ego—a false unconscious, a false return of the repressed. Derrida’s foreword rethinks trauma as coming from the future, repetition as original. Incorporation erects a secret tomb holding the object buried alive; the crypt is a foreign body both inside and outside the self, a non-place where the living dead continue to speak. Torok’s mourning illness stems from feeling an irreparable crime—having been invaded by desire. The forbidden Russian word fieret operates only from the unconscious as a word-thing, lodged between introjection and the dynamic.
The Wolf Man’s Verbarium and the Crypt Beyond Metaphysics
Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok on the Wolf Man turns on the root tr: truth, Turkey, the river Tierek, trout, Theresa, the silent tieret, mercury, and trud, force. Truth rhymes with its scattered cryptonyms, and Derrida links Trud to an entire history of Being, to absolute forgetting, and to the Thing whose law demands the impossible. He then generalises the crypt beyond therapy. Abraham and Torok treat incorporation as pathology opposed to healthy introjection; Derrida sets the two in differential relation and makes the crypt a universal structure, a non-place neither inside nor outside, escaping metaphysics’ circular economy. The Wolf Man’s mytho-poetic narration attempts the impossible: to tell the event, the pleasure, the Thing that never appears. The analysis is interminable, dreams have an indecipherable navel, and only because of this no-place can we speak of place at all. Institutions and metaphysical language likewise harbour cryptonyms, haunted by encrypted absolute unpleasure—visible in oppositions like speech and writing, and in concepts such as justice, the gift and hospitality, which exceed economy yet appear only bounded.
The Traumatic Foundation of Constitutions
Bennington’s “traumatic memory” of the non-legal foundation extends to the state: its origin is violent and illegitimate, tied to a secret enclave within it. Derrida’s “Force of Law” supplies the image—silence walled up in the founding act. Each founding differs by its preceding trauma, yet something universal is secreted there: trauma, deadly pleasure, the desire for self-destruction translated into justice and absolute hospitality. The violated sepulchre was never legal; the death drive returns nachträglich to haunt every act of constitutional self-preservation. Constitutional discourse, like philosophical discourse, deals with this traumatism by repeating it to control it, keeping speech alive between total forgetting and annihilation.
Hobbes’s Schism and Spinoza’s Inversion
Schmitt locates the liberal private sphere in Hobbes. On miracles, Hobbes separates outer confession from inner faith: the sovereign decides what counts as a miracle, while the subject may believe otherwise in his heart. This distinction, Schmitt argues, planted the seed of death that destroyed the Leviathan from within, threatening the state’s monopoly of the political. Spinoza inverted the relation: individual freedom of thought becomes form-giving, public peace a mere proviso. Schmitt reads this as a “Jewish” switch, a haunting return Hobbes tried to master by naming Leviathan and underestimated. His anti-Semitism, on display in the 1936 conference and the Leviathan book, ties the “origin” of religious and opinion freedom to the death drive and the uncanny return of the absolute stranger. Freedom is thus re-conceived: not mastery or autonomy but pre-subjective exposure, welcoming the unforeseeable event, opening the self to its own destruction.
Equality, the Stranger, and Living Together
Equality belongs to the political component and first implies inequality—separation to form a unity of equals. Schmitt rejects empty universal equality; every equality gains meaning through possible inequality with non-equals. Yet the author finds a “democracy to come” beyond state and citizen, an incalculable equality welcoming the absolute stranger, linked to irresponsibility, formlessness and self-destruction—a demos without kratie. Derrida asks whether such equality stops at borders or extends to all singularities, living and nonliving. Living together, then, demands unconditional hospitality beyond calculation, owed even to the dead and unborn, requiring a reassessment of human rights as a biased domestication of absolute welcome.
Nomos, Großraum, and the Elements
Schmitt’s later work turns to the nomos of the earth: land appropriation as the first measure, preceded by an a-nomos to be overcome, unfolding in three stages from Antiquity through the jus publicum Europaeum to the twentieth century. Against nihilism—linked to the one-world state and civil war—space stands against the nothing; every rule requires a free space outside it. Utopia foretold the abolition of locations. As the earth divides into East and West, land against sea, technology robs the sea of its elemental character; air war becomes pure destruction, and Schmitt leaves open whether air or fire will dominate. Of his three futures—world unity through one victor, a new balance, or recognised great spaces—he prefers the last, in keeping with nomos as division and his opposition to universalist interference.
The Positive Concept and Its Constitutional Law
The edition’s closing analysis begins by setting Schmitt’s positive concept of the constitution against the absolute, relative, and ideal concepts. The positive concept rests on a distinction: the constitution proper is the existential decision about the nature and form of political unity—democracy, the rule of law, separation of powers, a representative assembly, a bill of rights, a unitary state—often declared in the preamble. Everything else is secondary provision, what Schmitt calls constitutional law. Sovereignty, on this account, never migrates into the constitution itself, as liberal constitutionalism assumes; it stays with the people as constituent power even after adoption. The adopted constitution, likely following the dominant liberal model, carries both a rule-of-law component and a political component that liberal thinking tends to repress. The first separates legislature, executive, and judiciary, limiting these constituted powers in view of individual freedom, which under this component is absolute in principle. The second concerns the state form—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—which liberalism dilutes into legislative or executive forms. Democracy rests on identity, monarchy on representation, aristocracy in between, and neither principle appears pure in any state. The democratic concept of equality, as against freedom, belongs to the political component and includes the possibility of distinguishing those who belong to a people from those who do not.
Nomos and the Law of the Earth
Later Schmitt turns to nomos: not positive law but the law of law, the original constitution of the earth, concerning appropriation, division, and production. Nomos rules out appropriation of the whole earth by a single empire as world state and implies drawing boundaries—as states, or, given the state’s twentieth-century demise, as Grossräume, large spaces dominated by powers that bar outside interference.
Derrida Reading Schmitt
Derrida’s engagement in Politics of Friendship with the concept of the political, “The Theory of the Partisan,” and Ex Captivitate Salus occupies the next stretch. Schmitt places the enemy outside the body politic: a public figure threatening a way of life, to be fought yet respected, unlike a hated private enemy. He fears that with the demise of the jus publicum Europaeum the enemy becomes hated again, and he seeks to contain absolute hostility. Derrida shows the demise is no fall from purity but reveals the political’s paradoxical structure; the self/other distinction breaks down because affect cannot be contained, and the enemy appears as brother in civil and partisan warfare. The distinction between the telluric partisan’s real enmity and the rootless revolutionary’s absolute enmity likewise collapses, since rootlessness structures enmity from the start; war against the brother is the most intense warfare. The brother involves ideal doubling and a turn against the self; in prison Schmitt concludes the enemy ultimately is the brother and/or the self—legible through Freud’s death drive, Plato’s denaturalization of phusis, the Gnostic war of God against himself, or Heidegger’s war between Being and its dissimulation. These surface as external or civil war, today international civil war. After Derrida the political cannot be simply friend/enemy; behind destruction lies a self-destructive force haunting the political, which Derrida affirms as its condition of possibility, demanding disproportionate friendship (aimance), absolute hospitality, the perfect gift given without expectation of return.
Schmitt After Derrida
The implications are traced through sovereignty, state, constituent power, identity, representation, constitution, human rights, nomos. The state rests on uncanny fear of the beast within coupled with love of this fear; the people as subject of constituent power is natura naturans, formless and unorganised; read with the Gnostic God of Political Theology II, the people is divided by self-destruction, so the sovereign decision is derivative, preceded by a law of absolute hospitality, its decisions achieving only conditional hospitality. This moves beyond the paradox of constituent power without reverting to sovereignty, adding hyper-political and hyper-ethical dimensions to crowd, multitude, people, opening a demos without kratos and beyond the nation state. Representation is enhancement, not simple doubling; “unbridled prophetism” must be repressed and overcome, yet prophetism represents the un-representable—the dead, weak, lowly, valueless—which is structural to representation. The modern constitution becomes readable as khora, unconditional giving of place, incorporating a crypt issuing a law of absolute hospitality, a gift without return to the demos, beyond absolute, relative, and positive concepts. Freedom and equality are not wholly opposed; Schmitt recognizes unconditional freedom and equality preceding liberal and democratic versions, demanding radical equality of everyone everywhere. Nomos responds to a-nomos—expropriation, uprootedness, homelessness, dislocation, dissolution of identity, total exposure of the self—allowing an alternative international law not founded on state sovereignty or Grossräume but addressing war, oppression, exploitation, inequality globally.
The Enemy Inside the Concept
The thread running through the whole book is Schmitt’s own strategy of purification and the way it undoes itself. Schmitt treats concepts as energy-laden weapons in a world battle over words, and he reaches his pure terms — the political, the partisan, constituent power, representation, the constitution, equality, freedom, nomos — by idealization, setting each against a degraded counterpart: political against depoliticized, telluric against world-revolutionary, concrete against abstract. Derrida’s objection, drawn from Limited Inc, is that corruption cannot be a mere extrinsic accident; the ideal structure must contain the possibility of its own fall. The parasite is not an intruder but the internal condition of possibility, the very force and law of a concept’s emergence. De Ville follows this logic into constitutional theory itself, asking not only what Schmitt consciously intended but what lies behind the intention.
The most striking result concerns the enemy. In Ex Captivitate Salus, Schmitt asks who can truly put him in question and answers: only I myself, or my brother. Derrida notices that the enemy is thus lodged in the proper, the familial, the home — the place where, by the logic of The Concept of the Political, only the friend should dwell. The most proper turns out to be the most foreign, the most unheimlich. Schmitt’s own texts on stasis, on the Trinity in revolt against itself, and on the fratricidal wars from Lenin to Mao all press toward the same discovery: absolute hostility is hostility toward a brother, and all destruction is self-destruction. The political is haunted by autoimmunity as its condition of possibility.
Constituent Power, Representation, and the Weakest Force
De Ville reads Schmitt’s people — the bearer of constituent power — as a secularized medieval God, the natura naturans that is formless, unorganizable, an abyss from which forms incessantly emerge and which it can shatter at any time. Because the people cannot draft a constitution itself, it needs representatives, and Schmitt concedes that the people’s will should remain unclear, since a clear will would be constituted rather than constituent. De Ville takes this further than Schmitt would: the demos provides no presence, substance or identity, only a hauntology modeled on the dualist God of Political Theology II, the God of love at war with the creator of an evil world. Constituent power is split in itself before the friend-enemy distinction, and its sovereignty rests on the repression of a certain powerlessness.
The same structure governs representation. Schmitt insists that identity and representation, though distinct, are inextricably interlinked in every state form, and that representation does not merely reproduce the people but enhances it, drawing strength from what cannot be represented. De Ville reads representation’s overcoming of “fanatical” prophetism quasi-psychoanalytically, as an incorporation whose object returns in every sovereign act of self-preservation. The upshot is a demand on constituted powers — legislature, executive, judiciary — to represent not the strongest force but the weakest, guardianship of a democracy still to come.
Human Rights, Nomos, and the Gift of the Constitution
On human rights, Schmitt couples freedom to the rule-of-law component of the constitution and equality to the political component, and struggles to keep the two apart. De Ville shows the distinction collapsing under the weight of the political, yet in that collapse a force beyond the political appears at the foundation of these rights: a radicalized freedom and equality that no longer rest on subjectivity, mastery or consciousness, that incorporate unconditionality, and that call for a welcome beyond conditional hospitality.
The book’s treatment of the constitution turns on a single sentence in Constitutional Theory: the constitution does not give itself to itself but is given to a concrete political unity. Read alongside Derrida’s Khora, this opens onto Plato’s Timaeus, the placeless place that receives everything without owning anything, and onto the fictive, abyssal layering of the dialogue in which the ideal city is exposed to war. De Ville also juxtaposes Schmitt’s claim that liberal constitutionalism represses the political — which nonetheless lies at the constitution’s origin — with Freud’s Wolf Man and the crypt of Abraham and Torok, a false unconscious issuing an impossible law from a foreign body lodged inside the self. The later chapters extend the argument to nomos as originary land-appropriation that is already a reaction to a pre-originary not-at-home-ness, and to the partisan, where Schmitt’s telluric and revolutionary figures, his invocation of the abyss and Acheron, and his silence about women lead Derrida to suggest that woman may be the absolute partisan, the other of the political and its condition of possibility.
Reading Schmitt After Derrida
The book closes by contrasting Schmitt before and after Derrida, and its ambivalent verdict is the point. De Ville does not refute Schmitt, since refutation, as Derrida remarks, still belongs to metaphysics; nor does he ignore him, since Schmitt’s anti-Semitism was pervasive rather than opportunistic and cannot be excised by separating the good thinker from the bad. What remains is a quasi-psychoanalysis of the texts, an obligation to understand how anti-Semitism and philosophical thinking could coexist in one mind. The Schmitt who emerges is one whose concepts cannot seal their own borders, whose pure political is structured by the friendship it excludes, and whose constitutional theory opens onto a democracy without presence, grounded in a formless people and a gift given without a giver. For constitutional theory, that is less a doctrine to adopt than a permanent warning against the dream of the pure concept.
