The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency (Benjamin: 1999:248) The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy.(Schmitt: 1963:1) The purity of pόlemos or the enemy, whereby Schmitt would define thepolitical, remains unattainable… no politics has ever been adequate toits concept.(Derrida: 1997:114) I Why Hegel Died Schmitt begins Staat, Bewegung, Volk by stating that with the rise of the Nazi regime, Hegel died. By this, he did not mean that German Idealist philosophy had died, nor that the idea of the German state had died, far from it. Rather, Schmitt identified Hegelwith the bureaucratic class of the Bourgeois; Hegel died when the bureaucratic state was no longer a possibility, and the total or pure state emerged as a possibility. It is this attempt to find a pure politics upon which to base the coming community that characterises Schmitt’s work. Der Bergriff desPolitischen (1963) is a vital text for Schmitt’s argument. In it, he lays out his fundamental distinction between friend and enemy that hebelieves is the definition of politics. From this basic antagonism,Schmitt argues for a total state, which can provide the obedience andsecurity that liberal contractualist theories are unable to offer. Thistotal state allows the enemy to come into view in ‘concrete clarity.’Thus, the total state for Schmitt offers the transmutation of the enemy: friend relationship in the state of nature into the politics ofthe total state, where the sovereign can command the power over lifeand the power to name the enemy. It is only such a state, Schmittargues, that can resurrect the political from the morbid repetition ofthe bourgeois; only a total state can make clear the nature of sovereignty as an exception. This essay will analyse how Schmitt’s thought evolved in the historical context of the Weimar republic. It will lay out Schmitt’s critique of bourgeois thought in the context of the Nietzscheanleitmotif underlying many of the thinkers (Jünger, Spengler) of theperiod. It will then explain how Schmitt attempts to resolve thisproblem by using Hobbes to rethink the notion of the political, and byrelying on the state of exception to guarantee the power of the law. What is noticeable today is the extent to which scholars of the leftuse Schmitt. When Schmitt republished Der Bergriff in 1963, it was inan intellectual climate dominated by the Frankfurt school and theirreinterpretation of Marx. However, contrary to appearances andSchmitt’s intention, his work shares many characteristics with Adorno:both attack the notion of Enlightenment reason; both see reason as ableto co-exist with myth (though for Schmitt this is positive, for Adornocatastrophic). What is instructive about this convergence is the degreeto which what separated the thinkers of the Left from Schmitt is amatter of degrees. This issue will be explored further in this essay. This essay will argue that Schmitt makes a number of pertinent critiques of democracy, and that his theory of sovereignty is a powerful and subtle account of the exercise of political power. However, Schmitt’s theory in Der Bergriff is fundamentally incoherenton a number of counts. As Derrida notes at the start of the essay,Schmitt’s concept of the political is unobtainable, it is structurallyanalogous to the concept of redemption in Christianity: it can onlyever occur in the future when placed in the present utterance ofspeech. That he has created a ‘pure’ concept of the political is notonly immensely politically unsound, divorcing as it does the notion ofpolitics from the notion of the ‘good life’ that we find in politicalphilosophy since Aristotle, it is theoretically suspect. Schmitt basesthe entire of his political theory on an aestheticisation of violence,which is not born out by the phenomenological experience of violence,and misunderstands the relationship between sovereignty and the social world. That his concept of politics is unobtainable is tacitly admitted bySchmitt (19>