Carl Schmitt as a Theorist Biopolitics: Analysis, Inner Transformations and Actuality

The notion of biopolitics has become popular largely through the influence of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Robert Esposito, and Hardt & Negri. With the exception of Foucault, all of these thinkers draw lessons from the notorious German political theorist and jurist Carl Schmitt. His analyses of sovereignty, dictatorship and of the state of exception as well as his visions of future geopolitics as based on Grossräume inspire many of the most well-known critiques of the current biopolitical human condition. However, considering this wide reach of Schmitt´s influence within the discourse of biopolitics, it is curious that none of the thinkers who draw on his ideas have provided a detailed analysis of Schmitt as a theorist of biopolitics. In short, while Schmitt´s ideas have been widely applied in the discourse of biopolitics, they nevertheless remain largely unanalyzed. Beyond the sporadic use of some of his ideas in the commentaries, would it be possible to read Schmitt´s thought through lens of biopolitics as such? Can Schmitt´s political thought be located within the discourse of biopolitics? My paper aims to tackle these questions through two arguments/analyses. First, I show that Schmitt´s historical narratives provide original critical insights into the entanglement of life and politics in the last few centuries. For him, the spiritual development of the modern world is defined by three great movements; from Medieval theology to seventeenth century metaphysics; from metaphysics to a world defined by humanitarianism and moralism, and finally, from here to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which appear as eras of economics and technology. This corresponds with governmental change from the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, via the liberal-neutral state of the nineteenth century, to radically interventionist total states in the twentieth century. I maintain that when Schmitt´s work is read against this historical background, his Weimar era writings can be interpreted as an original critique of early twentieth-century biopolitics. Second, I argue that Schmitt´s involvement in the Nazi movement can be interpreted from the perspective of biopolitics. When Schmitt joins the Nazi party, he abandons his earlier critique of biopolitics and purposefully opens up his theoretical concepts for racial and völkisch interpretations. In other words, Schmitt´s decision to join the party discloses as an opportunistic move and an exception in his oeuvre. This interpretation is supported by the fact that after abandoning the German Reich during the Second World War, Schmitt once again retreats to a position that aims to criticize biological notions of the political. By analyzing Schmitt´s continuous and alternating reflections on the relationship between life and politics, I propose that Schmitt can and should be seen as one of the father figures of contemporary biopolitical discourse; he is both an original critic of biopolitics, and during his Nazi era, a thinker who uses biopolitical metaphores in a racist manner.