Carl Schmitt's Myth of Benito Cereno

Abstract

Carl Schmitt's Myth of Benito Cereno Thomas O. Beebee Ich bin der letzte, bewußte Vertreter des jus publicum Europaeum [...] und erfahre sein Ende so, wie Benito Cereno die Fahrt des Piratenschiffs erfuhr. (Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus 75) Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), specialist, as he tells us in the epigraph, in public and constitutional law, remains the most controversial figure in the history of German legal scholarship, and one of the few right-wing intellectuals to continue attracting interest from a variety of political spectra (Müller 272). He is also the most literary political thinker of the twentieth century, one who allowed myth and fiction to shape his ideas about law to create a unique "political theology," or, to use Ellen Kennedy's term, a "political ex-pressionism" ("Politischer Expressionismus" 233–51). Kennedy has also sug-gested, controversially, that Schmitt's thought had a far-reaching influence on the theory of the Frankfurt School ("Carl Schmitt"). Nikolaus Müller-Scholl suggests that several early plays by Bertolt Brecht were meant to exhibit the aporia of state order that Schmitt theorized and that led to Nazi totalitarianism (supported by Schmitt at least through 1936) as its answer. Together with his friend Ernst Jünger, Schmitt read the American authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe as prophets of the global situation of World War II and of the postwar period, including, as the epigraph points out, the waning of the epoch of national sovereignty. Schmitt's student Armin Mohler claims that Schmitt cited Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" more than any other work of world literature. Mohler states further that the title character of the novella "hat C. S. aufs intensivste beschäftigt" (Mohler and Schmitt 153 n. 74). Two paradoxes accompany these facts: the first is that Schmitt, a German nationalist, would use an American piece as his personal motto; the second is that, despite his fascination for the story, Schmitt never published a complete essay on the novella, as he did on Theodor Däubler's Nordlicht, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and other works. Schmitt's reading of "Benito Cereno," or, more accurately, his use of "Benito Cereno" as a political and legal allegory and as a persona, does not find incorporation into a single treatise, but rather emerges indirectly [End Page 114] from a series of reflections and diary entries and as an influence on Schmitt's treatment of the law of the sea. This article traces the genesis of Schmitt's reading, compares it with other possible readings of "Benito Cereno," and explains Schmitt's use of the Cereno myth to critique the phenomenon of what we today call globalization within its historical and mythic contexts. ("Myth" here means simply that a story – in Greek, muthos – is seen as having truth value apart from its factual or contrafactual basis.) The reading of an American literary classic by a German homme de lettres so as to apply its events to world law and world history is susceptible to comparative treatment, as well as to analyses from within Germanistik or Amerikanistik. In addition, as we shall see, Schmitt's broad reading of classical and other authors further internationalizes the Cereno complex. On the other hand, this article emphasizes the dialogic reading of the story as carried out between Schmitt and his friend Ernst Jünger, who also holds an important if controversial place in German letters. This article will consider multiple "directions" of influence, that is, of the story on Schmitt as well as of Schmitt's reading of it on further reception of the story. As Schmitt tells us in the epigraph, he saw in "Benito Cereno" situations, characters, and themes that reflected his own thinking, and thus an account of his reading elucidates Schmitt's theories of law and politics and their relation to literary texts. Current literary interest in Schmitt rests on his mythic approach to texts that makes them available to political readings. David Pan has summarized Schmitt's contribution thus: Schmitt rejects the establishment of the autonomy of art in the bourgeois private sphere, not because of its elitism but because both the autonomy of art and the bourgeois private sphere...