Yaghoubi: You suggest that a reorientation of politics toward justice, and particularly the known unknown of the Other, might alleviate some of the present antinomies described above. I was especially interested in your placement of Carl Schmitt into this intellectual tradition. You trace the genealogy of justice as relating to the Other from Plato onward to Heidegger and Derrida, but you make a good case for including Schmitt. How does Schmitt's work, and his friend-enemy distinction, contribute to our understanding of the Other?

Magun: Well, this is kind of an unexpected thesis, particularly because we know Schmitt was a Nazi. But (see above) you cannot just dismiss the conceptual content of a theory because it went practically wrong—the task is to reorient it. Already Derrida drew attention to this interest of Schmitt in the figure of the Other. But Derrida clearly thought that he was reading Schmitt against the grain, showing how his writing and thinking subvert his explicit agenda, and so on. And I argue that these things in Schmitt have been present quite explicitly: like Plessner and Heidegger, he was a theorist of the open, but from the right. What is interesting is that this is not exactly the liberal openness, since it has to do with the divisive political action, with antagonism. However, in Schmitt this is not, of course, a left-wing revolutionary openness either. First, it is an openness that dialectically turns into aggressiveness, because one is too open and therefore needs to be violent against the intruder. We have seen this logic, unfortunately, in the left-wing revolutions too, in the moments of terror. Second, this openness is still too close to the liberal one, since it led Schmitt to accept just any interesting political development. His conservatism is here (and elsewhere) strongly marked by liberalism. Again, our task is to be aware of this dialectics and to remember for what you need this openness, what are you actually doing.

An interesting topic to develop—I did it a little bit in an article on terror, coming out this year in a Routledge volume on "Law and evil"—is the connection of this receptive openness with the active openness of manifestation, with the drive to reveal, which Heidegger affirms in An Introduction to Metaphysics and then criticizes in "The Question Concerning Technology." I think that his criticism of Gestell would also apply to liberal or conservative openness, which should be balanced, in my view, with a capacity to keep things hidden or latent, if needed (not to discover more atomic bombs, etc.). Openness should not be an absolute, of course.

¶ 5:43 AM