ABSTRACT
Schmitt’s “meditation” in the cell is also a reflection about another figure that has been present in his political thought from the very beginning: the figure of the enemy, or the foe. As it is well known, according to Schmitt’s discussion in his 1927 book Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political), the friend/enemy distinction is the very criterion of politics. But in 1947, in prison, the question of the enemy returned to Schmitt in a new light: the enemy was victorious. The context of Ex captivitate salus sees the enemy housing and feeding his prisoner. The enemy also questions Schmitt, in multiple meanings of this term: he submits Schmitt to interrogation, but he also questions
him politically and ethically, about his actions, about his participation in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Schmitt writes: “Who are you? Tu quis es? That’s an abyssal question. I felt it at the end of June 1945, when Eduard Spranger … was waiting for me to respond to a questionnaire” (“Gespräch mit Eduard Spranger,” Ex captivitate salus 9). So the enemy feeds him and asks him to respond about himself: is his enemy, then, not a kind of brother? This situation creates a problem for Schmitt’s notion of the enemy. The trouble figure of the enemybrother, or the brother-as-enemy, comes back as reminiscence in the cell-that of the story of Abel and Cain, the first brothers of history, according to the Bible, and the first enemies. With it comes the insight: this is, according to Schmitt in 1947, the very beginning of politics.
