Humanité, hostilité et ouverture de l'ordre politique dans la pensée internationale de Carl Schmitt (Humanity, enmity, and the openness of political order in the international thought of Carl Schmitt)

This article examines Carl Schmitt’s critique of universal ethics made in his indictment of the discourse of humanity and addressed as a political concern of world order. It extends this critique further to include the ways in which the discourse of humanity transforms itself in the era of global governmentality. This kind of interrogation requires an almost ‘anti-ethical’ awareness that universal ethics fuels political discourses and practices that instantiate a political, indeed a biopolitical, universe. Schmitt’s discussion offers, it is argued, two iconographies of enmity, significant for mapping the contemporary world order. Together with Foucault, Schmitt helps articulate a notion of world-political obligation which is both for the other and for the openness of the political as a pluriverse.