Chantal Mouffe ja Carl Schmitt: ystäviä vai vihollisia?
Chantal Mouffe ja Carl Schmitt: Friends or Enemies?
The article analyzes critically the postmodern political thought, focusing on Chantal Mouffe´s agonistic politics. In Mouffe, the relation between the self and the other constitutes a primary political relation. This relation is permanently conflictual. According to Mouffe, her theory of the political relation bears a resemblance to the friend-enemy relation in Carl Schmitt´s thought. It is argued in this article that the political relation in Mouffe has its roots not in Schmitt but in the Kojevian interpretation of Hegel. In Kojevian Hegelianism the conflict between the self and the other is seen as a condition for politics and history; further, internal conflict constitutes the basic structure of particular subjects. This article shows that there is a superficial relation between Mouffe and Schmitt. Further, the postmodern political thought is criticised for its self-contradictory ethics concerning otherness. Even that the other is valued by theorists like Mouffe, the otherness-recognitive ethics remains an abstract "beyond" as political subjects themselves are seen as permanently incapable of a proper acknowledgement of the other.
