Now at the airport to fly back to London. The conference was very interesting and lots of good contacts made. The first morning was a public seminar with presentations by Friedrich Kratochwil and myself, which seemed to go down well. A good audience of students, faculty and visitors, including someone from the Danish foreign ministry. There were some good questions and discussion and I think my paper was well received. Some of the questions will give me cause to think more, which is why this is worthwhile. (Also interesting to get a sense of how some of the terms I use are rendered in Danish).
The afternoon and the morning of the second day was a closed workshop with eight papers by a range of speakers. The topics were fairly wide ranging, with a lot of empirical detail on some interesting places – DR Congo and El Salvador, for instance – and issues (the high seas, arctic sovereignty claims). There was quite a lot of theoretical discussion – Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt in particular. The discussions on Foucault seemed to be around how we could use him to think about particular issues, recognising some of his work, especially in the lectures, is very provisional and sometimes wrong. But it enables different types of questions to emerge. I am very sceptical about the use of Schmitt.
Overall, for a predominantly but not exclusively IR event, this was a refreshing change. There was very little discussion of the ‘big debates’ that I found so suffocating when I was in a political science department; a real engagement with a wide range of literatures, and a lot of attention being paid to international law. I think this is crucial. The empirical detail was often really excellent. Many of the papers were made available in draft form, and I’ll look forward to reading the followup work.
And the organisers should be commended for facilitating this, and the great hospitality. Copenhagen is a really lovely city.
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If you get a few minutes, I’d love to hear about your issues with Schmitt.
I have a piece in the new issue of Radical Philosophy (issue 161) on just this. I’ll post a link when the piece is available online – I’ve had the paper copy but the site is still on issue 160. (Given what some of the people involved in the journal are fighting at Middlesex this is not surprising.) Basically my line is that Schmitt’s Nazism is deeply embedded in his thought, and that his formulations are the produce of a deeply reactionary mind. What he says about international issues in the Nomos book seems to me to be the direct product of his 1930s work in the service of a right-wing foreign policy, and I just don’t see an engagement with that earlier work in the way IR and some geographers are reading him. And, frankly, what he says about territory – my own focus, but also certainly crucial to accounts of international (geo)political order – is pretty weak. The rewards are pretty meagre, and the politics so distasteful, I just don’t understand the wish to use him for progressive political goals. With Heidegger the situation is similar, yet also substantially different. I worked through these issues in my 2006 book Speaking Against Number.
Hi Stuart, I couldn’t agree with you more about Schmitt. I have been completely mystified by the continuing interest in his work which I saw beginning to burgeon in the late 90s. I thought it would be a passing fad, but clearly not!
BTW, this is such an informative and useful blog and such a good way of keeping up with what you are doing!
Thanks so much for responding. Please do link to the essay when it comes out (and I agree, the people involved with RP have their hands full right now. And for all of our sakes, I hope they are successful). I’ve found Schmitt pretty useful, but I will hold off any real engagement with your position until I read your article. I would add that, for me, a lot depends on the way Schmitt is being utilized. The ways people like Balibar or de Sousa Santos use Schmitt is pretty different than the way someone like William Rasch, while still a smart reader, use Schmitt. For me, Santos and Balibar seem to have a better sense of internal limits and problems of Schmitt when they are dealing with him, and that for those of us dealing with a radical politics there is only so much Schmitt can do.
And I have read your Speaking Against Number. A remarkable book, and a favorite in the US academic policy debate community. Back when I coached a team, that book was required reading for our teams using Heidegger’s work for their arguments.