ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt’s authoritarian and existential political thought was rooted in the distinction between friend and enemy, and attached conceptual and concrete significance to matters of soil, territory, spatial order and geographical division. The grounding of the friend-enemy distinction in law and the state is central to Schmitt’s 1932 Concept of the Political. This distinction is also evident in much of Schmitt’s 1950 The Nomos of the Earth, but it is more muted and tied more directly to the appropriation, distribution and production of space. I seek here to remark briefly on how Schmitt came to articulate ‘space’ and ‘the political’ anew in his 1963 Theory of the Partisan (Theorie des Partisanen), a short book that stemmed from two lectures he gave at the Universities of Pamplona and Zaragoza in Franco’s Spain in the spring of 1962; on how Schmitt used this work to address some of the shortcomings in his previous attempts to relate the idea of nomos to the question of friend and enemy; and on how Schmitt’s attempt to construe a theory of partisanship (one with glimmerings of a new nomos of the Earth) from the history of the partisan as he told it (in Eurocentric terms and with strong Prussian inflections) coincides with the 1950s and 60s guerrilla wars (principally in Malaya, Kenya, Cuba and Vietnam). These were dubbed ‘hot wars’ of the Cold War and decolonisation because many of them were located in the tropical world.
