The enemy, the stranger and the subject: towards the possibility of a subject-oriented expansion of the concept of the "political" by K. Schmitt

Komarov Mikhail Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0002-3134-1540 Postgraduate student; Branch of Philosophy of Russian History; Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences 119501, Russia, Moscow, Matveevskaya str., 4, k2, sq. 100 komarov.m.saoirse@gmail.com

Within the framework of modern political philosophy, for more than a century there has been an open discussion around some key concepts that define the development of political and philosophical discourse. The most important of them, from the author's point of view, is the ongoing debate around the content of the concept of "political", described as an independent phenomenon, category, or even as a topological space. Throughout European history, starting from Antiquity, the word "political" was perceived variably and more often as a predicate of something, rather than as a separate object. Moreover, thanks to such a "background", the concept of the political turned out to be one of the least concrete meanings in political philosophy by the beginning of the twentieth century. Which, with varying success of interpretations and redefinitions, continues to this day.

The resumption or, if it is appropriate to say so, the reincarnation of the discourse on the definition of the political as an independent category of political and philosophical thought rightfully belongs to K. Schmitt. His work "On the Concept of the Political", despite the obvious polemic of a number of its key provisions, proved to be the foundation for modern political philosophy. Last but not least, this is due to the uniqueness of the very goal-setting of K. Schmitt, who in later notes to the text ^[10] designated as a "challenge", which served as an incentive for its creation, a specific temporal ambiguity around the concept of "political". Reasoning in the logic subsequently shared by the school of the "history of concepts" by R. Kozellek ^[3], the author identifies the semantic loads of "political" as a signifier peculiar to different epochs and traditions. K. Schmitt notes that such a variety of meanings, as well as the constant borrowing of this category in conjunction with legal, theological or statist meanings, has long prevented crystallization of the political and philosophical meaning of the political. Therefore, he builds his definition by means of exclusion, highlighting specific dispositions in such a way that they do not overlap in meaning with ethical, aesthetic or economic dispositions. As a result, the dyad "friend—enemy" appears at the center of Schmitt's definition of the political, constituting the provisions and consequences of his concept.

Defining the friend—enemy disposition as fundamental and unique for the political as a concept and category, K. Schmitt stops short and emphasizes the emerging parallelism with the dispositions of the ethical category. Judgments about good—evil and friend—enemy do not accidentally intersect, and therefore the author deliberately separates them, pointing out that the enemy does not necessarily have to have a correspondingly negative ethical coloring. The emergence of hostility does not stem from any other criteria^{[10, p. 301]}, it is self-sufficient and therefore selected as a criterion for determining the political. As V. V. Bashkov notes ^{[5, p. 95]}, the political in itself means the potential for conflict and the emergence of enemies — the acceptance of the ontological incompatibility of a number of objects with subjects as a fact gives rise to the political. The idea of enmity in this vein is borrowed by K. Schmitt from F. Hegel, as he himself testifies in the quote he gives from the work "Systems of Morality": "Such a difference is an enemy; and the difference posited in the ratio exists simultaneously as its opposite to the existence of opposites, as the "nothing" of the enemy, and this "nothing" for both sides is equally a risk of struggle"^[6].

In the "Concept of the Political" it is repeatedly emphasized, despite references to judgments about the state and interstate dimension of the political, that the author's interpretation is not reducible to an escalatory loop. K. Schmitt separately puts war as one of the final instruments of hostility outside the political brackets, which seems to deprive his rather accentuated approach of a logical conclusion. If the political can be defined as defining the attitude of hostility as such, then the resolution of this hostility in the spirit of escalation (otherwise, the political would seek to eliminate the potential of hostility, which would lead it to self-elimination) must be political. Against this background, Schmitt's desire to take the war beyond the limits of conceptual belief, despite the great attention paid to it in the text, seems illogical.

To clarify this point, it is necessary, based on the point of view of V. V. Bashkov ^[5], to focus on K. Schmitt's specific understanding of subjective existence. Being influenced by S. Kierkegaard, the author of the "Concept of the Political" pays special attention to the existential side of the subject. The latter is not just present in being, being involved in a dynamic network of eventual transformations, it exists, i.e. it is self-existent, it is in continuous becoming itself ^{[5, p. 88]}. Such an existential focus of K. Schmitt's judgments allows us to focus research attention not on the details of the application of the "friend—enemy" disposition and ways of its implementation, but on that fundamental property leading to the expression of subjective existence into the political. The researcher intends to address the expansion of his interpretation.

To begin with, it seems appropriate to pay attention to K. Schmitt's remark, revealing the nature of the political division into friends and enemies. He points out the always implied commonality that stands out on both sides of the political disposition: "The phenomenon of the political can be understood only through referring to the real possibility of dividing into groups of friends and enemies, whatever follows from this for a religious, moral, aesthetic, economic assessment of the political" ^{[10, p. 311]}. The philosopher thinks of politics not as the lot of individuals who have defined themselves in relation to others in a spirit of hostility — his views are not close to the revolutionary individualistic spirit — but as an intense confrontation between groups united by a common existence. Based on K. Schmitt's arguments, it can be concluded that he believes that such an intense existential conflict lies at the center of the friend—enemy division, which can only arise from the fundamental dissimilarity of being between two enemies. In this case, the radicalization of the difference serves as a marker of the fundamental ontological "untranslatability" of the participants in the polemic for each other. The consequence of this will be a radical escalation of the political into the field of war and extermination, because the otherness of the enemy's existence should provoke the elimination of the possibility of de-escalation. In other words, if we follow the logic of K. Schmitt's judgments about the difference between the existence of a friend and an enemy, about the insoluble difference in their existences, the war previously bracketed by him becomes an inevitable result of the political ^{[5, p. 109]}.

At the same time, following the logic of the separation of groups, the intensity of which is political, it seems appropriate to pay attention not to what the enemy hinders the existence of a friend, but what effect he has on it. In other words, why should groups have enemies, since they are ready not to succumb to radical escalation, but to preserve the spirit of hostility in continuous polemics ^{[11, p. 305]}? To clarify this point — looking ahead a bit, demonstrating the fundamental commonality of existences involved in the political — it is necessary to turn to the social side of the issue. Namely, to the view of sociological science on the dynamics of intergroup interactions.

According to G. Simmel's point of view, social interactions necessarily imply the formation of group boundaries ^[2]. Their external dimension serves as a way of self-determination of the group, and an outsider plays a key role in this view "from the outside" for the group. Its importance is determined not by its own content, but rather by the anti-content imposed on it by an alien group ^[4]. An outsider turns out to be a way for the group to articulate its own uniqueness, those features that constitute its existence. Within a group, the community of being, which is a factor of unification, inevitably leads to a decrease in the intensity of individualizing differences — similarity is perceived by default, and therefore is not articulated. Outside the group, everything that does not have a definite relation to the existential features of the group has the potential to project phenomenal experience, symbolic statements and value attitudes onto it. That is why it is vital for the association of friends to have an outsider as the addressee of self—identification, a kind of mirror - it is noteworthy that the illusion of mirror "flipping" perfectly illustrates this mechanism: the group wants to see a reflection of itself in exactly the opposite meaning. Then, in order to constitute oneself through negation ^{[11, pp. 210-213]}, to embody oneself for the sake of polemical appropriation. As A. Yuran notes ^{[11, p. 220]}, the asymmetry between affirmation and negation demonstrates a much more nuanced topological separation between the external and the internal: the external always contains more of the internal than the internal can afford to capture. Against this background, it is not superfluous to point out the fact that G. Simmel first places the stranger as spatially different, distant from the group ^[2]. The alienated is always outside the group, but always in its orbit and acquires its significance only through involvement in the "gravitational influence" of group identification. A stranger becomes such only through the intensification of His Own, and in this sense, his existence has shades of a group to which he does not belong. The disposition of friend—enemy, or rather friend—stranger, is formed not from the difference in the existences of the poles, but from the expansion of one of them to the other, from the involvement of an object in the orbit of a stranger in relation to the group. And in this sense, the intensification of the alien itself is not so noteworthy: the enemy is only a special case of an outsider.

An outsider is necessary for self-contemplation, and in this sense, K. Schmitt should be given credit: he notes the existential need for hostility itself to intensify the group's own meaning, although he does not descend into such subtleties, and from that the scale plays a cruel joke with his arguments. The subject does not really need to destroy the enemy, but needs the practice of enmity itself, the practice of expressing his traits by alienating the enemy. This shows his need to intensify his own being, which is necessarily always interconnected with other objects, and this reflects the inevitability of the political. As long as there is the ability of objects to self-subjectivate, namely, to intensify their own content (K. Schmitt speaks about them at the same time when he mentions that the intensity of ethical, economic or religious differences sooner or later becomes political), there will be a political one.

In support of the thesis that the political is precisely the intensification of the subject's being, and not the conflict relationship between the subjects themselves for the elimination of one of them, it seems appropriate to use anthropological propositions as arguments. Just as earlier K. Schmitt distanced himself from the inevitable interdependence of the political and the state, P. Klaster argued that in Indian societies, traditionally perceived as pre-state, the absence of vertical consolidation did not mean the absence of the political in them. On the contrary, according to him, the pluralism of perceived objects inherent in the views of many Amazonian peoples contributed to the dynamic growth of the political sphere ^{[1, pp. 216-217]}. In particular, animist beliefs, with their giving a different ontological status to various objects of "nature", created a differential tension in the views of Indian societies, which led to a symbolic polemic with "non-them". The distinction between friends and strangers, between the tribe and the rest of the world, equally subjective to the group as it is to it, formed an environment of the political without formal "points of crystallization": the disciplinary structures of power and the state. Such a "superpolitical" state, the constant involvement of the group in self-intensification, did not allow the idea of power to escalate and transcend: there were too many differential relations to allow the intensification of one of them to go beyond the subjectivity of the group itself. In simple words, the example of P. Klaster proves the following two theses:

1. The political is able to exist without the state, the latter is not its prerequisite.

2. The intensification of any relationship, except the relationship of the subject group to the non-self, reduces the space of the political.

Power relations and political power were not alien to Indian societies, but at the same time, they never took shape into something more than a flat system of interactions. From the point of view of P. Klaster, this allows us to contrast the state/unity and the political, to assert that the latter should exist between people free from vertical structures and coercion. Such a radical anti-etatist logic is not close to K. Schmitt, however, he also notes that the fusion of the political with the state or party-state leads to the erosion and disappearance of the former. The German philosopher's distrust of absolutization is reflected in his criticism of the possibility of a single planetary state, to which he predicts inevitable civil wars.

It is interesting to note that in environments of multiple intense differentiation, even escalation continues to serve to strengthen the political. Moreover, even the most radical example of escalation in such environments turns out to be political in the Schmitt sense of the word. Continuing the anthropological "Indian" line, it seems appropriate to recall the arguments of E. V. de Castro about the cannibalistic practices of the Amazonian tribes. In the degree of radicality of hostility, anthropophagy can yield, perhaps, only to genocide, because it is not just about killing the enemy, but about his complete elimination in the physical sense of the word. At first glance, groups that carry out similar practices in relation to other groups should get out of the political. It has already been said about the exit of super-escalation from it. However, E. V. de Castro presents a different view of Amazonian cannibal sociality, saying that "... the "inner" of the social body is entirely created by the external capture of symbolic resources (names and souls, faces and trophies, words and memories). Having chosen the incorporation of attributes coming from the enemy as the driving principle, the Indian society began to "define" itself through the same attributes" ^{[10, p. 101]}. The physical dimension of Amazonian anthropophagy is inseparable from its symbolic load: it is not about meat or a physical person, but about the enemy in its material and symbolic unity. Even when defeated, the enemy remains part of the constitutive intensification of group existence. A friend is recognized in an enemy by his ultimate incorporation. Analyzing the military songs of the Arevete people, E. V. de Castro forms one of the key political theses ^{[8, pp. 100-101]}: through the murder of his enemy, the subject realizes himself and presents himself like the enemy, i.e. perceives himself and anti-himself from the enemy, the fullness of the idea of himself. An outsider is "created" for the political subject to grasp his own being.

Thus, the source of the friend—enemy differentiation at the base of the political lies with the subject itself. It is the definition of friends and enemies, as K. Schmitt claimed, that underlies the political. However, if for him the focus is more on the already existing hostility, already formed political ones, then for the researcher it is of great value to deepen into the very foundation of political education. In order to acquire ethical, economic, religious or any other interests of political intensity, these interests must first be appropriated by the subject. At the same time, the degree of this appropriation should be such that their existence is associated with the existence of the subject, with the necessary condition of his being. In this case, the political becomes a way of existence of a self-intensified subject, as well as an instrument of its expansion beyond its own experimental and phenomenal space. Based on this, it makes sense to consider the concept of political K. Schmitt as a deeper subjective-ontological phenomenon in which asymmetric self-positioning is more important than the interactive networks that the subject (being alone or as part of a group) connects in the process of resolving the existing imbalance.