Carl Schmitt among the Negroes: Benito Cereno as the Reactionary intellectual
I am sending you Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’. […] I am overwhelmed by the unintentional symbolism of the whole situation.
I am sending you Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’. […] I am overwhelmed by the unintentional symbolism of the whole situation.
— Carl Schmitt, Letter to Ernst Jünger, 1941
Melville’s novella ‘Benito Cereno’ was published in 1855. It tells the story of Amasa Delano, captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, who embarks upon the San Dominick, a Spanish ship full of black slaves, that appears to be in distress off the Chilean coast. He learns that a storm struck the ship, killing officers and sailors alike and greatly damaging the San Dominick. Captain Delano notices the defiant conduct of the ‘slaves’ on board. They lack discipline, they scream a lot and do not care much for the ship’s condition, ‘repairing’ it in a strange manner that seems out of place. The chaos on the ship appears uncanny, surreal even.
When Delano finally finds the Spanish captain amidst the turmoil, he does not seem to care much for the dissolution of discipline on his ship; it seems to be not unwelcome to him. Everything that happens on the ship turns out to be an illusion that has been staged by Babo, the black slave leader. Benito Cereno appears to be in control of the San Dominick while in reality a slave revolt took place that deposed the Spanish captain and took him hostage. Babo styles himself a loyal and concerned servant of the captain, following him around on the ship; actually, he is monitoring Cereno’s every step. The black giant Atufal is also part of the trickery. He is wrapped in heavy iron chains & Cereno carries the key around his neck — yet there are no locks on the chains. The simulation of order creates the impression that Cereno conquered the ship’s struggles and remains in control. In reality, the black slaves have already slaughtered all the white people on board except for those they need for navigation. They want to return to their homeland of Senegal at any cost.
In the end, Cereno overcomes his indecisiveness and jumps into Delano’s boat, unveiling the bizarre deception. A battle commences; Babo is captured & later executed, Cereno is freed. His escape, though, does not in any way free him from the consequences of what happened. Benito Cereno remains a prisoner of the inherent entanglement in his own fate; a ‘shadow is cast upon him’. In the end, the whole story proves to be a psychotic and depressing affair.
Carl Schmitt, the so-called ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’, was an intellectual of terrifying clarity. He belonged to the milieu of the Conservative Revolution, the loose Interwar association of German thinkers who tried to overcome the death & destruction of the Great War by synthesizing a new kind of political and cultural thought. There is no ‘ideology’ of the Conservative Revolution, no fixed set of dogmas that can be ascribed to this ‘movement’. The term itself was used by Armin Mohler, Ernst Jünger’s secretary, to describe the various oases of thought that sprung up in Germany between 1918 and 1933. The common thread among them was a certain feeling that literature was the spiritual space of the nation & the precursor to direct political action. As such, the Conservative Revolution can be described as a metapolitical movement.
Schmitt developed many concepts and theories that allowed him to grasp the complex reality of the Inter- and Postwar world; among them the friend/enemy distinction as foundation of ‘the political’, a theory of sovereignty based on the ‘state of exception’, a theory of constitutionalism, dictatorship and legitimacy, a theory of international law & a theory of globalization. His more ‘esoteric’ geopolitical writings, dipped in philosophical insights, served as precursor both for the so-called ‘Fourth Political Theory’ and several developments in poststructuralist thought. It is difficult to overstate Schmitt’s importance for political theory in the 20th century, even though he had been almost forgotten for three or four decades (there has been somewhat of a Renaissance in Schmitt scholarship in the last 10–15 years, especially in China and among American Straussians).
Schmitt, often described as a sycophant of the Nazi regime if not outright Nazi himself, suffered from a deep internal conflict in the Third Reich. He — together with Jünger, Heidegger, Spengler and other right-wing intellectuals, both of the reactionary and the modernist variant — paved the way for Hitler’s ‘National Revolution’. They did not disagree with the Nazis in principle, at least in the fact that something must be done. The Weimar Republic was imploding amidst sectarian strife of all colours and variants; the parliament was impotent; international finance was bleeding Germany dry, uninhibited by the weak liberals who designed the new German state.
Most members of the Conservative Revolution had a difficult relationship with the new regime. The Nazis desperately tried to mobilize them for their cause. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who coined the term ‘Third Reich’, refused to openly associate with the National Socialist Movement. During a personal meeting with Hitler — prior to the Machtergreifung — the future leader told van den Bruck: ‘You have everything I lack. You forge the spiritual armour for Germany’s renewal. I’m merely a drummer’. He urged him to join the Party, but van den Bruck refused again and again. Ernst Jünger was offered a membership in the parliament, but he also refused, saying ‘It would be better if I wrote a poem than if I represented 60,000 idiots’ (the German parliament had no fixed number of seats, the number of members was calculated based on population — one seat for every 60,000 citizens).
Schmitt was more open to collaboration despite his reservations. There is still a discussion among scholars whether 1933 marked a break in Schmitt’s thinking or ongoing continuity. It seems to me that Schmitt did not particularly like the new regime, nor the forces that stood behind it. He agreed to work with and for them because of his own idealism (or opportunism — that remains in the eye of the beholder), since it gave him a chance to put his ideas into practice without beind hindered by the liberal state which he so despised.
1934, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (during which many of Schmitt’s, Jünger’s and Spengler’s friends were arrested or killed) and the stiffling of intellectual life came as a shock. Increasingly, Schmitt felt that he was trapped among the barbarians who wore the noble face of German thought as a skin mask. He endured the humiliations of being ruled over by savages but lacked the conceptual vocabulary to properly describe his position. Then, in the spring of 1941, he read ‘Benito Cereno’. Later that year, in October, Schmitt met with Ernst Jünger in Paris. Jünger describes the meeting in his Paris diaries:
Lunch in the ‘Ritz’ with Carl Schmitt, who gave a lecture the day before yesterday on the implications of the difference between land and sea on international law. With us were colonel Speidel, Grüninger, count Podewils. We discussed the scientific and literary controversies of our time. Carl Schmitt compared his situation with that of the white captain in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’, who is ruled over by black slaves. He quoted: Non possum scribere contra eum, qui potest proscribere.
The Latin phrase means: ’I cannot write against him who has the power to condemn me’. It is a quote from Macrobius’ lost Saturnalia. Schmitt’s thoughts are imbued with the feeling of being trapped. He identifies with Benito Cereno, seeing himself aboard a broken ship captured by Negroes. The novella had a profound effect on Carl Schmitt. Over the next two years, several letters between him and Jünger discussed it and probably countless personal exchanges which, sadly, have not been recorded.
Schmitt regarded Melville as a cosmic author — he saw in ‘Benito Cerene’ a work of acute allegory, a dantesque, multi-layered prophecy and analysis, filled to the brim with symbolism on all levels of thought — and wholly unintented by the author!
The first level is deeply personal and, therefore, literal. Schmitt sees himself as the ‘white captain’, an agent of intellect and culture, of tradition and regality, in short: as a representative of Germany as ‘the land of poets and thinkers’, just as Cereno in the novella is a representative of the Spanish Empire (it should be noted that Schmitt, as a traditionalist Catholic, held the Portuguese and the Spanish in great admiration). Cereno chose to be captain of a slave ship; Schmitt chose to be a legal scholar in service of the Third Reich. It was personal fate that brought them both into their positions and personal choice that kept them there. Both were ruled over by savages — Negroes and Nazis, perhaps the comparison can be seen as a progenitor to the ‘wignat’ slur — who disregarded all the laws of God and men.
The second level is allegorical. The San Dominick is a rotting carcass of a ship, drifting aimlessly. In Schmitt’s mind, and perhaps in Melville’s as well, the ship represents the Old World — the decaying Europe. The dialogues between Cereno and Delano, the American harbinger of the New World, reinforce the feelings of hopelessness that have gripped Cereno’s, that is Europe’s, heart. Cereno sees that his ship is going nowhere; yet he is powerless to turn the mere simulacrum of activity into an actual voyage. Unlike most people who overlook the absurd situation, he cannot ignore or forget this brutal fact, hence his constant oscillation between resistance, acedia, and fear.
The European intellectuals of his time were divided. Some of them, analogous to Benito Cereno, eventually went into exile in America. Alas, the novella shows, through the Spanish captain’s tragic end, that voluntary exile in the New World — which stands for egalitarianism and liberalism — cannot and will not end his suffering. Others stay on the European ship, even though they are fully aware of its morbid descent into degeneracy and oblivion. They chose Europe — and Germany — over the splendour of America, represented even in the name of Delano’s ship — Bachelor’s Delight. Schmitt clearly found himself in the latter group.
The allegory, of course, works on both a lower and a higher level. The San Dominick is not only Europe, but also Germany, and even the whole world. Schmitt saw himself in the tradition of the great Spanish philosopher Juan Donoso Cortés, of whom he wrote: ‘For him, world history is merely the staggered drifting of a ship, with a crew of drunken sailors who bellow and dance until God pushes the ship into the sea, so that silence may reign again’. It is clear that Schmitt refers to Melville’s novella and the fate of the San Dominick, even though he does not mention them by name.
Schmitt echoes Cortes’ pessimistic worldview, who, in turn, echoed Joseph de Maistre and his famous aphorism: ‘The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death’.
The vast majority of people is content with the seemingly normal, but in fact absurd situation of the drifting ship, while a minority, an intellectual elite, tries to prevent the very worst and save what is left. However, they are aware that their efforts to steer the condemned ship will ultimately prove futile. Here, once again, Schmitt’s negative view of the world and humanity — his extreme emphasis on the wickedness of the human world — becomes clearly apparent. Or, as Spengler put it: ‘Optimism is cowardice’.
The third layer of meaning contains what Dante called the moral level of allegory. Clearly, Schmitt sees himself in the figure of Benito Cereno. The captain’s position is a reflection of what happened to Schmitt after his disenfranchisement following a confrontation with his higher-ups in 1936. Like the Spaniard, Schmitt feels trapped in an absurd farce where he can clearly see the doom, yet is compelled to participate in ultimately meaningless charades that justify what is taking place. Benito Cereno clearly represents the most prolific self-image of Carl Schmitt during his life in the Third Reich.
In 1945, he wrote the following sentence (in the ‘Remarks in Response to a Radio Speech by Karl Mannheim’): ‘Benito Cereno, the hero of Herman Melville’s novella, was elevated to a symbol of the position of the intelligentsia in a mass system.’ He relates this to a passage in his 1938 ‘Leviathan’, perhaps to show that he was resisting even then.
He adds:
A researcher and scholar cannot select the political regime according to his wishes either. In general he accepts it initially as a loyal citizen, like every other person. If the situation then becomes completely anomalous and nobody from the outside protects him from the terror within, he must determine the boundaries of his loyalty himself, namely when the situation becomes so abnormal that one no longer knows where even his closest friend really stands. The duty to unleash a civil war, to conduct sabotage, and to become a martyr has its limits. Here one should grant something to the victims of such situations and should not be allowed to judge only from the outside.
Obviously, Carl Schmitt tries to justify his behaviour — mostly to himself, but also to the general public. There is some discussion in scholarly circles on whether Benito Cereno is aware of his own guilt concerning the mutiny on his ship — if he had not participated in the slave trade, the slaves would not have tried to get home in such a savage way. Schmitt barely — or perhaps never — mentions the question of slavery that is brought up in Melville’s novella, written six years before the start of the Civil War in America. He casts aside any discussion of the morality of slavery, or the implied karmic guilt Cereno perhaps acquired through his action and for which he suffers so greatly. It is also questionable whether Schmitt was truly compelled to serve the Nazis in the same way Cereno was forced to serve the Negroes; after all, he voluntarily offered his services.
Of course, Schmitt sees himself as part of a group — the European intellectual elite — that despite their inner resistance collectively chose to tie their fate to that of the National Socialist Regime. If one were to accept the interpretation of Schmitt as Benito Cereno, the whole group — among them generals, scientists, writers, academics, civil servants — is ‘excused’.
Schmitt’s ‘The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes’ is by far his most cryptic work. In some ways, his life’s work can be interpreted as a dialogue with Hobbes. The ‘Leviathan’ is, on the surface, an analysis of Hobbes’ opus magnum. Veiled & hidden between the pages, though, the careful reader can find a criticism of the modern state per se. Hobbes, Schmitt writes, was not the prophet of the total state — on the contrary, he was a founding father of the rule of law.
Schmitt then tries to find out how and why the state bound by the rule of law died. He identifies the Jew as gravedigger of the state; first Spinoza, then Moses Mendelssohn, then Stahl-Jolson. It is a paranoid book — esoteric, hidden behind ciphers and coded language, alchemical in its composition and unclear to the highest degree in its conclusions.
In 1945, Schmitt did an interesting thing with this book. He asked his publisher to add a small note to every future edition of the ‘Leviathan’. The note read as follows:
Caution!
Maybe you have heard about the great ‘Leviathan’ and now you feel compelled to read this book? Be cautious, my dear! This is a thoroughly esoteric book, and its immanent esotericism grows the more deeply you read it. Better keep your hands off it! Put it back where you found it! Don’t touch it again with your fingers, whether they are clean or contemporary bloodied! Wait until you meet this book again and find out whether you belong to those, to whom its esotericism will open itself! The Fata libellorum and the Fata of her readers belong together in a mysterious way. I tell you this in the spirit of friendship. Don’t force yourself into arcana. Wait until you are initiated into the correct form. Otherwise you might fly into a rage that is unhealthy and try to destroy something indestructible. That would not be good for you. Thus, keep your hands off and put this book back!
Sincerely your good friend,
Benito Cereno
Aside from the cryptic warning, yes, he actually signed this note as Benito Cereno, not as Carl Schmitt! It would be easy to say that Schmitt started LARPing as Cereno to excuse himself from all wrong-doing during the Nazi era — but in truth, he started appropriating the role of Benito Cereno for himself much earlier. The question is: what does it mean? And who are the Negroes? The book is thoroughly anti-semitic and identifies the Jew as murderer of the state — so, does Schmitt want to say that he wrote this because he was compelled to do so? Or should his warning not be taken seriously because his country is currently occupied by Negroes in G.I. uniforms? Schmitt’s fragmentation into various degrees of role-playing as Cereno within several frameworks of interpretation can lead to some schizophrenic conclusions.
Last but not least, it is necessary to consider a hidden, unspoken but highly important fact in the narrative that Carl Schmitt was oblivious to: captain Cereno himself voluntarily helped to transport the black slaves onto the ship. While the massacre that the Negroes committed against the whites on the ship was, of course, cruel, it cannot be overlooked that the enslavement of the blacks was no less cruel. The threat of the slaves is the consequence of the violence of slavery. The horrible situation on the ship was not only caused by the bloody uprisings, but also by the conditions which provoked such uprisings.
In the same way, Schmitt was not innocent of the situation in Europe at the time. He was not only a victim, but as a supporter of the regime he was also an accomplice and should actually have assumed, at least to a certain degree, a moral responsibility. But in view of Europe’s stalemate and the failure of his own political concept, he chose passive dignity — the silent inner emigration characteristic of reactionary intellectuals in the Third Reich.
Fact is that on the San Dominick it is difficult to distinguish between perpetrator and victim. In the Spanish captain Cereno as well as in the black leader Babo, and the same applies to Schmitt, the evil that is within them meets the evil that they suffer.
And therein lies Melville’s genius. He is not clearly on either side. He shows that Cereno is a noble and responsible, but also fundamentally broken man. Delano is good-natured and confident, but at the same time gullible, superficial and short-sighted. The Negro Babo is a victim of slavery, but at the same time a bloodthirsty savage. Neither does Melville identify with any of the groups that his characters embody. Cereno stands for the old order with its attachment to Empire — the soil of the ruthless slave trade.
Delano symbolizes the new order — freedom and prosperity — but he fundamentally lacks a sense of good and evil. Babo represents the primitive order, which is not at all represented by Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ but quite the opposite: an even more cruel barbarism. On the basis of the novella we cannot judge who is more evil, who is more deserving of pity or which order is preferable. In this narrative, Melville deals primarily with the collapse of the overall moral framework.
Man and nature submit to the blind, amoral forces that are essential to their existence. The Schmitt case during the Nazi era is also an example of the very same collapse. Insofar as Schmitt looked from Cereno’s point of view — assuming the mantle of the radical right-wing revolutionary — he was blind to the evil he himself supported at one point — before morally cleansing himself & retreating into inner detachment to become Jünger’s Anarch.
This leaves the final stage of literary interpretation — the anagogical, the most complicated & most interesting level of hermeneutics. During an interrogation in Nuremberg, Schmitt described the reason for his collaboration with Hitler’s regime as ‘the satisfaction in the realization that one is experiencing something new’, which he clarified as ‘like the satisfaction an ethnologist derives when he sees a new tribe of Kaffirs’. As I have shown earlier, Schmitt derived some sort of morbid satisfaction from seeing himself as the white man stranded among the Negroes — either in the role of Benito Cereno captured by black slaves or in the role of an ethnologist surveying an African tribe. This fused with Schmitt’s apocalyptical Catholic view of Europe as an Empire (the Roman empire) that was under siege by barbarians (liberals, Marxists, the Nazis).
This, again, ties into Schmitt’s geopolitical worldview, his Großraum theory and, more importantly, his Land/Sea distinction that, in the later years, played as much of a role in his work as the Friend/Enemy distinction did in his earlier writings.
In his 1947 memoirs, Ex Captivitate Salus, Schmitt laments the dissolution of ius publicum Europaeum — the classical international law:
I am the last knowing representative of ius publicum Europaeum, its last teacher and researcher in an existential sense, and I experience its ending as did Benito Cereno the journey of the pirate ship. Silence is appropriate to this place and time. We need not fear it. By being silent we reflect upon ourselves and upon our godly origins.
Schmitt sees the end of this particular era in the legal order as the culmination of a struggle between land and sea, and the ascend of first the British and later the American empires as a side effect of what Alfred Thayer Mahan called ‘The Influence of Sea Power upon History’. In 1941, the same year he read ‘Benito Cereno’, Schmitt tells Jünger in a latter that ‘these pirates become more and more important to me’. In later decades, Schmitt came to see piracy as the main element both of British power projection (‘corsair-capitalists’, he called them) and the shift towards a spatial conception of the world that is imposed by sea power in general. The San Dominick under control of the slaves is, of course, a pirate ship. Thus, it represents the dissolution of traditional judicial norms that govern the land and puts sovereignty of interpretation into the hands of the sea.
Sea power is more insidious, because it appears as ‘ good and self-evident’ — it is based on commerce, on liberalism, on the deconstruction of traditional legal norms and on the supremacy of the economical over the political. There is a clear line from Schmitt’s Land/Sea distinction to Deleuze’s & Guattari’s concepts of the ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ spaces, whereas Schmitt’s land represents the regulated striated space and Schmitt’s sea the endless, free-flowing and ever-changing smooth space of the nomad — for whom there can be no binding laws, norms or traditions.
‘Benito Cereno’, thus, shows us that the Negro and the American both work together to dictate their ‘new’ form of control — the piratical sea power, that swallows & spits out the good captain & destroys the Spanish empire, replacing it with the coming globalized world of capitalism and liberalism — the New World Order.
Carl Schmitt shared one of his dreams with Ernst Jünger. In that dream, Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ merges with Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’. Schmitt sees himself as captain of the San Dominick that is being sucked into the vortex. Ernst Jünger comments: ‘I liked the connection between the imagery of Poe and Melville in your dream — while Poe sees as an individual, Melville sees politically and socially. By merging them you reach the behaviour of an individual against the cabal of conspirators.’
Thus, Schmitt was able to see a host of metaphors in ‘Benito Cereno’ — he self-identified through his personal situation in the Third Reich, he saw the San Dominick as an allegory of the dying continent of Europe and, last but not least, he read the story as prophecy of a coming world order, where the sea and its power, the element which ‘only Melville could make palpable’, destroys the traditional norms, leading to a general deconstruction of the old order.