The Real Possibility of Physical Killing: A Feminist Critique of Carl Schmitt

This article offers a feminist critique of Carl Schmitt, with a particular focus on Political Theology and The Concept of the Political. It addresses a pathos of masculinity that pervades Schmitt's rhetoric and helps to explain the hold that his ideas have on so many thinkers across the political spectrum. It argues as well for the surprising insights that feminists can draw from Schmitt's abstract political concepts. In decentering the infamous friend—enemy distinction and developing instead the existentialist claim about “the real possibility of physical killing,” we can see Schmitt's pathos more clearly, but we can also theorize the political in ways that Schmitt could not. Schmittian existentialism permits us to see the family as a primary political institution, sex and gender as forms of political power, and femicide as a real political problem. This article concludes with a discussion of Andrea Dworkin, in some ways more Schmittian than Schmitt himself, who pursues this principle of political existentialism—“the real possibility of physical killing”—in a radically feminist direction.