Action is done in reaction to crisis, or the anticipation of crisis. Crisis has three sources: natural occurrence such as a natural disaster (and at times compounded by human incompetence, as was the case in the Bayou), a culmination of human inactivity such as procrastination in the case of most university students, and interhuman miscommunication, the broad catch words of "alienation" and "antagonism" apply to this.
The first type of crisis is created by means beyond man's control, although prudent and reasoned measures can be employed in anticipation. Such measures are left to decision makers, who are assumed to govern with virtú (political virtue). Hence, decision-makers are entrusted with the lofty task of making such decisions.
The central premise of modern sovereignty, as Carl Schmitt presents it, is the potentiality of crisis. The need for the sovereign decision is justified against the possibility of crisis, of a situation in which a decision regarding exceptional measures must be made to address abnormal conditions. Schmitt was a prominent jurist in Weimar Germany, but his formulation, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception", is indeed an extralegal notion; a notion that is not specific only to matters of legality. But a question must be asked, why must the decision be defined by what are crisis points? Or to pose the question another way, why do people leave the decision to the sovereign?
Crisis, Schmitt argues in Political Theology, is an inescapable limit condition of humanity. The norm cannot be without exception. The exception, at once, proves and transgresses the norm. The norm explains nothing, the exception everything. As is beautifully explored in Sören Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, embodies a crisis of faith. Schmitt cites Kierkegaard's Repetition in Political Theology, relating how the sovereign decision on the exception breaks from the "crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition". But from what I can recall from Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard concludes that there is a "teleological suspension of the ethical".
God, in asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, is demanding an act of faith that crosses the borders of the ethical, into the realm of the absurd. Abraham's act of faith is, hence, a transgression of the ethical norms set down by God himself. But his transgression is also one demanded by God. In short, the paradoxical delimitation of limits present in Schmitt's exception elaborates upon a theological problem long present in Christian theology. This revelation isn't groundbreaking or necessarily all that interesting - he basically implies it in Political Theology, but it helped make a clearer connection between Schmitt and Kierkegaard. What Schmitt envisions in modern sovereignty is a return to a potent decision: of life and death. But what then is the crisis. Why must crisis come to be before this decision is to be made?
It is of course that such a decision cannot come about inside or outside; it is a product of the limits. The sovereign decision is analogous to the miracle in theology, he writes. The miracle is, of course, a paradox of presence and absence. The source of a miracle is assumed to be transcendent, although it happens in the immanent world. The miracle is at the limit between the absent, unknown, and inexplicable mystery and the known rational world of experience. The mystery of the source of the sovereign decision does not translate in the analogy; the sovereign makes the decision. But the manner in which the decision is made is not necessarily rational or adherent to existing norms. The civic humanist ideal of the magistrate who comports himself with virtue, while also beholden to the same codes as other citizens, does not apply here.
The sovereign cannot be sovereign without being able to act extralegally. He who cannot transgress the norm is not sovereign. When Schmitt writes about the Counter-Revolutionary thought of Donso Cortés, he focuses on Cortés' disdain of base humanity. Donso Cortés, according to Schmitt, thought that "the victory of evil is self-evident and natural, and only a miracle by God can avert it" (Political Theology, 58) Cortés despised the bourgeoisie as a "discussing class", a class wanting to evade the decision (59). The vital and virile quality of the decision is apparent when compared to liberal norms. Schmitt, although a highly problemmatic thinker, poses an integral question, what are norms without the exception? The norms are illusions if the exception is ignored. The limit-conditions define the inside and the outside.
If one looks to Alberti's simple illustration of perspective, he constructs it from a point and lines. The representation of depth, shadow, and perspective is not possible without first defining -
definition being the domain of the artist - the centric point and the rays (lines) that provide the painting with a form that content fills. To approach content prior to form would be empty and meaningless. Freedom is not possible without limits, as Kant would contend. The question still remains: why must matters come to crisis before a decision can address it? The decision, according to Schmitt, addresses a concrete situation; it is formulated against a pressing situation. In other words, the decision is at its most sharpest and effectual when addressing the conditions of crisis. The assumption is that the state must possess this "monopoly to decide" because only the sovereign, possessing intimate knowledge of the definitions of the state (lines, points, planes - laws) and a monopoly over information regarding changing conditions can best recognize the presence of crisis.
The particular individual, mired in private matters, most pressing of all, subsistence, cannot possibly recognize much less confront such crises. Hence, the monopoly to decide, for Schmitt, underlies even Weber's notion of the "monopoly over violence". The former justifies the latter; without the possibility of dangers, threats, and crisis, a "monopoly over violence" could not be held by the state. Overawed the possibility of danger, i.e. violent death, and unable to address crisis, individual citizens consent amongst themselves to the power of the state. The possibility of crisis, of violent and uncurbed strife, is in Schmitt's estimation ever-present. Decisions come to between people are, by definition, ones that only can deal with norms, and cannot address 'emergency situations'. That is left to the sovereign, who is at once within and above the law.
