There is perhaps no single statement more famous–or, perhaps, more infamous–in the loosely-assembled canon of political theology than the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s foundational maxim: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Political Theology, 5). Invoking a dilemma that has structured not only the philosophy of law, but philosophy more generally since at least Plato’s Euthyphro, Schmitt insists that sovereignty is founded on the power to decide whether the situation demands the application of the law or its suspension. His reading of sovereign power responds to an ineluctable inconsistency that vexes the relationship between law and its own foundation. Is the law the law because, like Euthryphro’s gods, the sovereign decides to enforce it? Or is the sovereign the sovereign because this is what has been decided by the law? By insisting on the decisive character of sovereign power, Schmitt attempts to resolve this constitutive inconsistency in the figure of sovereignty itself.
In his work on philosophy and religion, François Laruelle took his point of departure from his diagnosis that both discourses are haunted by a structure of decision that bears no small resemblance to the one invoked by Schmitt. By deciding on the difference between immanence and transcendence, a kind of law and its own constitutive exception, philosophy and religion, like sovereignty, ensure that any failure on the part of their paradigm can be recuperated for shoring up the authority of the paradigm itself. As Andrew Reszitnyk puts it, “Laruelle illustrates that a kind of Schmittian absolutism is at work even within philosophies that, on the surface, seem diametrically opposed to that of Schmitt” ("Wonder Without Domination: An Introduction to Laruelle and Non-Philosophy,” Chiasma, vol. 1, no. 1 (2014), 31). Philosophical consistency–or “sufficiency,” in Laruelle’s terms–depends, like sovereignty, on an arbitrary decision to carve up the conceptual world according to a law which can only recognize criticism levied from the standpoint of a similarly arbitrary decision in a position to supersede its own.
Instead of advocating a ‘break’ with philosophy or religion in favor of a competing paradigm, however, Laruelle invites his readers to ‘suspend’ decision in order to engage with the materials offered by philosophy and religion otherwise. This paper offers a reading of Laruelle’s invitation to indecision, one intended to distinguish it from a number of more familiar political-theological tropes. In an important sense, Laruelle insists, humanity has never really been captured by the decisional pretense of philosophy or religion; as a result, humanity has no need to be emancipated from it. The meaning of this insistence, the paper argues, can be clarified by analogy to the difference between two twentieth-century critics of Schmitt whose criticisms have been habitually confused for one another’s: Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz.
According to François Laruelle, philosophy and religion are haunted by a structure of decision–one that bears no small resemblance to the one invoked by the infamous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. This paper offers a reading of Laruelle’s invitation to indecision, one intended to distinguish it from a number of more familiar political-theological tropes. In an important sense, Laruelle insists that the human has never really been captured by the decisional pretense of philosophy or religion; as a result, the human has no real need to be emancipated from it. The meaning of this non-emancipatory posture, the paper argues, can be clarified by way of an analogy to the difference between two political theologians whose criticisms of Schmitt have been habitually confused for one another’s: Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz.