I would like to do this reflective post based on the entirety of our conversation yesterday, but I would like to tie it in to a quote from one of my favorite books ever: Grendel, by John Gardener. This is the modern-era book, written from the perspective of Grendel - the antagonist in the ancient epic Beowulf. The quote goes as follows:
"What is the state in a time of domestic or foreign crisis? What is the state when the chips are down? The answer is obvious and clear! Oh yes! If a few men quit work, the police move in. If the borders are threatened, the army rolls out. Public force is the life and soul of every state: not merely army and police but prisons, judges, tax collectors, every conceivable trick of coercive repression. The state is an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call 'legitimized' violence. Revolution, my dear prince, is not the substitution of immoral for moral, or of illegitimate for legitimate violence; it is simply the pitting of power against power, where the issue is freedom for the winners and enslavement of the rest." -The old peasant to Hrothulf |
In this instance, Grendel, with his monstrous inhuman appearance, has not yet been detected by the human guards, and so he overhears this conversation in their camp. Both within the content of this speech, and more generally the entire tale of Grendel's persecution based on his inhumanness, the book follows what Schmitt predicts fairly closely. The various bands of human warriors are all tied together by blood in some way or another, hence Beowulf being greeted as cousin, albeit very carefully when he approaches the camp of Hrothgar. These groups are all loosely tied then by blood, but still consider each other Schmittian enemies, in that they push at each other's borders time and again and then relent; yet also Schmittian friends, in that they have some things in common and can see each other as friends. Grendel, once identified, clearly becomes the foe of Hrothgar - he cannot face him alone, so requests Beowulf (the strongest in the land) to come to his aid. He arrives, and eventually bests Grendel in one-to-one combat (which is where Grendel the novel ends up at) - but as can be gleamed from reading the poem Beowulf, Grendel the inhuman, existential threat of a monster is cut down: at this the Danes all celebrate his destruction. Although I did not read much of the [epically long] poem beyond the Grendel and his mother portion, my teacher at the time mentioned the various problems the Danes later encountered amongst themselves, when there was no other enemy such as Grendel to unite against. All in all, a story that fits well into Schmitt's ideas. It is uncanny how well that quote I picked out of Grendel fits into Schmitt's haunting vision of the future (I am not sure if Gardener actually meant to allude to it or not, but I feel like he did).
I do actually suggest that ye who read this post also pick up a copy of Grendel and read it - I could even loan it to you, so just ask me
I also request that you do not ever go to see that epic failure of a movie they attempted to make out of this..... "The American Movie Business: Ruining Good Stories from as early as 1100 AD"
-Mike
2 comments:
Goddamn postmodernism. Nothing can actually be evil anymore. How's this? Grendel kills and eats people. Evil. He can't touch Hrothgar because Hrothgar is protected by God. Evil. Grendel is evil, and no amount of reanalysis will change that. We must accept that Grendel is evil not because we believe that there is true, complete evil in the world, but because there are completely evil things in 11th century literature.
I think you're giving Schmitt too much credit. The Greeks of antiquity figured out a long time before Schmitt or the author of Beowulf that a fist is stronger than individual fingers. War has always forced unlikely alliances that usually dissolve immediately after the war. This, I believe, is self-evident. Usually, the only way you keep a group like that together is to pull an Athens and take over the entire alliance.
This doesn't really work anymore, though as I mentioned, Patton and MacArthur both wanted to march right into the Soviet Union after defeating the ostensible enemies, the Axis.
All one really needs to make the prediction that after a common enemy falls, allies go back to being enemies, is to know basic history. Though in class we discussed some concepts that Schmitt did synthesize, this simple model of history was already well-accepted in 1000 AD, let alone 1929.
I guess for the vast majority of wars, the unlikely alliances do break down afterwards. I would like to bring up the European Union, though: it is the end product of mutual dislike for the prevalent wars they had fought so often, and it was an amalgamation of countries once split and opposed to each other during the Cold War. In this case, I am fairly familiar with basic history, and the expectation that these allies would break down isn't even applicable - they have no enemy to unite against.
-Mike
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