Occasional decisiveness: Exception, decision and resistance in Kierkegaard and Schmitt
| Author | Birte Löschenkohl |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115619301 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(1) 89–107
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885115619301
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Article
Occasional decisiveness:
Exception, decision and
resistance in Kierkegaard
and Schmitt
Birte Lo
¨schenkohl
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Abstract
This article explores the political potential of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and develops a
model of non-sovereign agency by analysing the figure of the ‘young man’, the main
protagonist of the book. A curious reference in Schmitt’s Political Theology serves as a
cue for exploring Repetition through contrast with Schmitt’s notions of sovereignty,
decision and exception, as well as his critique of occasionalism in Political Romanticism.
As in the case of Schmitt’s sovereign, the young man’s conflict is centred on the question
of the exception. But by contrast to the former, the young man struggles with the
exception from a position of opposition to the powers that govern. Furthermore, the
exception in Repetition does not seek to stabilise a given order in the face of a threat,
but, rather, to destabilise and transform order. The perspective offered facilitates a shift
from thinking the exception as a state of exception, a concept that mostly concerns
state politics, to an exception from the state. Kierkegaard’s Repetition is thus shown to
be relevant for conceptualising transformative agency from a position of marginalisation
and exclusion from the hegemonic political order.
Keywords
Kierkegaard, Schmitt, agonism, exception, resistance, decisionism, realism, agency,
sovereignty
Introduction
The political potential of Kierkegaard had long been underestimated.
Taubes (2004: 69), The Political Theology of Paul
Corresponding author:
Birte Lo
¨schenkohl, Harper-Schmidt Fellow,Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, Gates-Blake Hall, Room
410, 5845 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: loeschenbirte@gmail.com
An exception deviates or is excluded from the norm; it thereby identifies limits of
or conflicts within such norms, while highlighting their historicity and thus a cer-
tain contingency. It is in this sense that the exception can help us understand the
‘universal’ and think it ‘with intense passion’, as both Søren Kierkegaard and Carl
Schmitt – the latter quoting the former – insist (R, 227; cf. PT, 15).
1
Both thinkers
agree that, by virtue of its deepening our understanding, the exception bears trans-
formative potential. They disagree, however, about how exactly to understand this
potential. For Schmitt, the exception induces a transformation of the universal in
order to stabilise it – the sovereign decides in response to the exception, seeking to
stabilise and renew a given order. Conversely, as I will argue, for Kierkegaard, the
exception remains undecidable. Tarrying with the exception instead of sovereignly
deciding it, he brings to the fore its potential to alter the universal and bring about
the new. Kierkegaard discusses the exception in the context of theological, ethical
and aesthetic questions: the religious and the aesthetic both are construed as excep-
tions from the ‘universal’, understood here first and foremost as ethical norms and
duties. As is well known, the ‘universal’ that Schmitt’s exception allows us to think
through is the law of a particular state; he considers the exception in the context of
the political. This article explores how Kierkegaard’s own notion of the exception
might translate in this context, and how his notion of the exception relates to that
put forward by Schmitt.
There is widespread interest in contemporary political theory in both the con-
cept of the exception in general and Carl Schmitt’s thought more particularly.
2
However, despite the prominent place in which Kierkegaard appears in Schmitt’s
Political Theology – Kierkegaard is cited and has the last word in the first chapter
of the book on the ‘Definition of Sovereignty’ – not much has been written on this
peculiar connection.
3
Whilst it has indeed been noted and remarked upon, most
notably by Lo
¨with (1995), there currently exists no systematic, conceptual explor-
ation of the curious notion of exception in Kierkegaard’s Repetition – the book that
Schmitt draws on – and its political potential.
4
This article seeks in the first instance
to address this lacuna. But more than that, it argues that Kierkegaard’s own elab-
orations allow us to add a new perspective to recent discussions of the problem of
exception and decision in agonist political theories. Such a perspective shifts atten-
tion from thinking the exception as a state of exception, a concept that mostly
concerns state politics, to thinking about an exception from the state that struggles
with and resists hegemonic forces from below.
5
Kierkegaard’s most substantial explorations of the exception take place in two
different books he published on the same day. The first, Fear and Trembling,
explores what we might characterise as a ‘decisionist’ approach to the exception,
whereas the other, Repetition, details the fictional study of a man who is, in short,
both unable and unwilling to decide. While it would seem obvious for Schmitt’s
exception to be related to the former, he interestingly cites the latter in his Political
Theology. This article thus focuses on exploring the exception encountered in
Repetition in more detail. As will be seen, Schmitt’s and Kierkegaard’s notions
of exception are in many respects analogous. Ultimately, however, a close reading
of Repetition reveals at least three aspects of Kierkegaard’s exception that contrast
90 European Journal of Political Theory 18(1)
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