ABSTRACT
One problem with reading Schmitt, Dean notes limpidly, is that for many contemporary scholars the Nazi concentration camps ‘. . . haunt every word Schmitt writes, no matter how illuminating [they might be]’ (Dean 2006: 12). Like Heidegger, here is a thinker compromised by the stain of Nazi associa - tions. The long shadow of National Socialism darkens his reputation as it does with other intellectuals who were affiliated to the regime. Indeed, as Moses points out, twenty-first century Germany still witnesses left-leaning thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Gunter Grass interrogated over their slender connections to Nazism when young (Moses 2007). Schmitt by contrast, and despite his undulating influence in the higher reaches of the regime, remained an enduring supporter of Nazism and, after 1945, refused to be de-Nazified. Neither was he typical of the European intellectuals drawn to ‘the seductions of unreason’, the apparent glamour and ‘the intellectual romance of fascism’ – in Wolin’s (2004) terms – because he was too significant politically. His work as an advisor to Papen and Schleicher under the Weimar Republic, plus his later associations with Göring and his drafting of key early legislation for the Nazis, lent him influence well beyond mere fascist sympathisers such as Paul de Man, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or, Wolin adds, George Bataille (Cristi 1998; Moses 2007; Stirk 1999; Wolin 2004). Consequently, his politics tarnish his work due to a mass of (often understandable) preconceptions and reservations about the man and his oeuvre. Some critics worry about the responsibility of exploring and unleashing these ideas; others saw Schmitt more plainly as a moral pollutant (Dean 2006). Many writing about him seem to respond to an affective requirement to condemn Schmitt’s politics. Indeed, so conspicuous are these disconcerting, discomforting Nazi associations that Balakrishnan opens his biography by stating that ‘In the English-speaking world [Schmitt] is terra incognita, a name redolent of Nazism [whose work comes] to us from a disturbing place and time’ (Balakrishnan 2000: 1).
