I love politics. I love the sense of competition, of strategy, even of partisanship. When Schmitt says that the political is defined by the creation of the friend-enemy distinction, I think he does so knowing the nearly libidinal joy experienced by every devout follower of politics. As a progressive, I long to help out those often wayward Dems, to help think of ways to frame the debate, alter the language, and win the homefront's hearts and minds. I even think doing so is valuable - immensely valuable.
But I also think doing so is insufficient. At the end of the day, partisan politics and the jouissance upon which it is predicated remains a fundamentally problematic institution. Progressive change cannot obtain if it invests itself solely in the throes of politics. Thinking otherwise would be almost as wrong as thinking that investment in fighting the evils of capitalism is the end-all, be-all of the lefty fight. Laclau and Zizek, so often pitted against each other as opposite interpretations of the nature and favored means of political struggle, are nevertheless both very wrong in how much they let their thought be overdetermined by the political (Zizek being significantly more wrong, but whatever).
I suspect that ultimatelya more subtle type of progressive change is needed. For me, at least, it's hard to admit this just now. This administration has been so mind-numbingly horrible that it has transformed this Halloween into an almost pervasive state of existence. No haunted houses are needed for the invocation of fear, nor does any day need to be singled out as a day of the dead. With Iraqi dead clearing a hundred thousand (possibly six hundred thousand), American soldiers exhausted and dying, placed in escalating harms way by an insurgency we were assured was in its death throes, and with enemy combatants occupying some liminal space in which they are more or less purely biopolitical ghosts, and with Americana trucking along as if all is more or less well with the world, we are all already ghouls of a most heinous nature. I'm not talking Hamlet's father's type of ghoul. I'm talking vampiric undead, drinking blood for sport, without the good sense to notice the slightly floral scent of decay under their Hot Topix t-shirt. In a state like this, it's hard to see beyond ending this administration and its congressional enablers. So much work needs to be done to ensure a change in direction, and so much good will come from that change, that it seems foolhardy or indulgent to think a beyond the political for this particular political nightmare.
I want to acknowledge the importance of this sort of political change, and all the work that goes into it. But I also want to acknowledge the sort of limitations that are a part of its structure. Schmitt is right to define the political by means of its primary tendency - the friend-enemy distinction - but this tendency is not an absolute condition of the political (indeed, Schmitt's desire to elevate it to such is one of the things that makes his thought smack so sadly of fascism), and there is a way of thinking politics from a less calculative perspective.