“Who shall be lord of the earth?” Nietzsche,Schmitt,and thinking “beyond the line”

Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth (1950) outlines an ambitious, far-ranging history and theory of political power, tracing its sequential development through regimes based on land, maritime empire, domination of the air, and anticipating new forms of rule based on nuclear weapons and space exploration. This work related to global hegemony arose in a dialog with Nietzsche that has scarcely been acknowledged. ¹ Articulating that dialog clarifies both Schmitt’s theory and the political sense of Nietzsche’s thought concerning the “direction of the Earth [Sinn der Erde]” and his question “who shall be lord [Herr] of the Earth?” This essay examines the two thinkers’ concepts of Herrschaft, their divergent routes from political theology, and their distinct perspectives on the elemental Earth.

Schmitt is notorious for having provided legal justification for the Nazi Reich. In recent decades, his definition of sovereignty as the power to declare states of exception to legal and constitutional rule provoked Giorgio Agamben to suggest that states of exception have (paradoxically) become the political norm. In Homo Sacer, Agamben argues that the camp—the place of confinement for those the state excludes from social recognition and common rights—is the distinctive contemporary political form. To this extent, Nietzsche and Schmitt are polar opposites. Nietzsche denounced the state as a “cold monster” exercising control over the lives of peoples. During the Bismarck era, he analyzed the state’s use of Kulturkampf and states of exception as doomed attempts to prolong a decaying institution. ² The two thinkers agree that state sovereignty is ultimately a theological concept; therefore Schmitt dedicated himself to its justification, while Nietzsche rejected it as a dangerous “shadow of God.” As a theorist of state sovereignty, Schmitt had reason to distance himself from this Nietzsche. Yet the later Schmitt, who outlined a sweeping general account of forms of earthly hegemony in The Nomos of the Earth thought that he had discovered a thinker on a parallel track, one speaking of a “great politics” and foreseeing a century of struggle for “Erd-Herrschaft.”

In his published works, Schmitt rarely mentions Nietzsche. When he does so, he consistently marks his distance from him. In Political Romanticism (1924) he dismisses Nietzsche because of his atheism, ranking him with Byron and Baudelaire among the “high priests and, simultaneously, sacrificial lambs of the private priesthood.” Even in The Nomos of the Earth (1950) Nietzsche is mentioned just once among a series of 19th century Europeans who remained “isolated and unfashionable individualists.” ³

In addition to avoiding association with a supposed irrationalist, Schmitt suggests another reason in his posthumously published post-war notebook, Glossarium. He does not criticize Nietzsche for holding the idea of the will to power, but for teaching it, a fault he also finds in Mussolini.

Power is and remains secret. Public power is the most impenetrable power. He who has power, knows this, and he who wants power, ought to know it. A consistent and effective Machiavellian speaks like a Tolstoyan. But an openly expressed philosophy of Will to Power is the summit of the most miserable tastelessness and existential stupidity. ⁴

Yet Schmitt was engaged with Nietzsche during the years he was preparing his Nomos book. In 1950, Schmitt welcomed him as a predecessor, writing in his Glossarium:

My Nomos der Erde is arriving at the right historical moment. The time is coming (said Nietzsche in 1881–82), when the battle for the domination of the Earth will be waged; it will be waged in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines; i.e., an ideological battle for unity. ⁵

Schmitt and Nietzsche are both paradigmatic thinkers of geophilosophy, in the sense given to that term by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy? Each throws a fresh light on the other. Schmitt’s Nomos (both concept and book) is concerned with questions of order and orientation in the post-Columbian age charged with finding meaning on the globalizing Earth. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra first descends from his mountain and speaks to the assembled multitude, he calls on them to give heed to the Sinn der Erde, and even to sacrifice themselves for it (the German Sinn connotes direction and orientation more than the standard translation “meaning,” while “sense” manages to play between meaning and direction). Later in his journey, Zarathustra explicitly raises the question of hegemony or Herrschaft—“who shall be lord of the Earth?” Schmitt helps us to read the geopolitical and geophilosophical Nietzsche. At the same time, Nietzsche can call attention to phenomenological and ecological dimensions of the human earth (Menschen-Erde) absent from Schmitt’s analysis. Both thinkers were fascinated by what Nietzsche called Hauptgeschichte, the time of great epochs or periods, as well as with questions concerning temporal acceleration and retardation.

Schmitt seeks to restore an obscured archaic sense of nomos, one preceding Sophistic and Platonic enlightenment. This Schmittian sense of nomos is not simply a legislated law or rule but involves a concrete spatial order and orientation of some portions of the Earth. In a land-based nomos, Schmitt’s recurring touchstone, it is the operative order of a territory, the primal measure of the life of a group or people. Every such order refers back to a Landnahme, or originary appropriation of ground. It is a fundamental measure. Schmitt finds this earlier notion still operative in early Greek thinkers and poets, notably Heraclitus and Pindar. ⁶ In his 1953 essay, “Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden” Schmitt attempts to “determine from nomos the basic questions of every social and economic order.” ⁷ In Nomos, Schmitt explained that other regimes of spatial order had been or were being developed. Specifically, he described in detail the nomos worked out by the European powers consequent upon the “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the Americas, an order characterized by the growth of maritime power. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, he saw the emergence of a nomos based on the air power that sealed the Allies’ victory and sketched the possibility of a “fiery” order involving nuclear arms and space travel.

Nietzsche’s Herrschaft can be paired with Schmitt’s Landnahme. There are parallels (and also significant contrasts) between this triad—appropriation, distribution, production—and central aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. If originary appropriation and orientation, transcending the is/ought dichotomy of modern ethics, is the crux of Schmitt’s nomos, Nietzsche’s call to determine the “Sinn der Erde” and to be loyal to the Earth asks us to recognize a given condition as value-laden; in his case, but not in Schmitt’s, this stands in stark opposition to otherworldly norms. In developing his call to the future “Herren der Erde,” Zarathustra identifies the desire to rule with something close to Schmitt’s distribution (teilen), naming the hitherto nameless gift-giving or bestowing virtue (die schenkende Tugend). ⁸ Paired with Schmitt’s productivity (weiden) is Nietzsche’s insistence on the fundamental nature of will to power, exceeding mere survival, a point underlined in his critique of Darwinism.

We should see that Nietzsche’s concept of Earth is a political concept, among other things. Commentators rightly observe that Nietzsche’s Erde suggests a life of immanent passion and action, as opposed to otherworldly and life-denying values. Yet Erde is also a political concept for Nietzsche, opposed to the Hegelian Welt, conceived as an ordered hierarchy of states. ⁹ As the site of human habitation and mobility, “Earth” is more comprehensive than “world.” This, as we will see, sets up a potential conflict with Schmitt’s nostalgia for the jus publicum Europaeum of sovereign states, but not with his implicit question “what next?” Despite differences in their concepts of the Earth, Nietzsche and Schmitt are working the same territory; both are constructing concepts to comprehend what Deleuze and Guattari call territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization.

Why was Schmitt so careful to avoid any explicit public association with Nietzsche? Schmitt’s motives, I speculate, were similar to Freud’s when he dissimulated his own debt to the author of The Antichrist. Neither Freud nor Schmitt wanted to see their projects of rigorous political philosophy or scientific psychology compromised by complicity with the writings of a “wild” philosopher whose irrationality was supposedly confirmed by his descent into madness.

Nevertheless, Schmitt could privately acknowledge Nietzsche as precursor. The notebook entry cited above continues:

The Kellog [sic] Pact is creating a free path; war as means of rational politics is despised, condemned; war as means of global domination of the earth is the just war. The world becomes an object, says Martin Heidegger. ¹⁰

Schmitt considers it timely that his Nomos corresponds to Nietzsche’s proleptic intuition of “wars like those never seen before.” ¹¹ The cited date, 1881–82, is very close to what Schmitt saw as the first signs of collapse of the European world order or jus publicum Europaeum. ¹² The 1928 Kellog–Briand Pact sought to outlaw war as a means of national policy, opening up a development in which war could be waged only for humanitarian reasons, thereby requiring the criminalization of the enemy. In apparently accepting Nietzsche’s description of the coming war as “waged in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines,” Schmitt distinguishes it sharply from war between states. It is natural to think that in 1950 Schmitt had in mind the conflict between international communism and capitalist liberalism. This war for ideas would fit his conception of global civil war, a disaster he still hoped could be delayed now, post World War II, by a metastable balance of a plurality of Grossräume. Schmitt was reading Nietzsche’s notes closely, for the words he employs—wo der Kampf um die Erd-Herrschaft geführt werden wird—are precisely Nietzsche’s.

Yet, Nietzsche’s notebook passage opens with an element that does not fit well with the latter’s geopolitical thought.

I wish Germany would conquer Mexico, in order to create a tone on the earth for a future humanity through an exemplary nursery (Forstkultur). – The time is coming when the battle for hegemony of the earth will be waged – it will be waged in the name of fundamental philosophical teachings (Grundlehren). Now the first power groups are forming, in line with the great principle of blood and racial relationship. “Nations” are much finer concepts than races, basically a scientific discovery that feelings can be incorporated: wars are and are becoming the great teachers of such concepts. – Then come civil wars – and again concepts will be incorporated! Until finally the concepts no longer merely provide placards, names, etc. for peoples’ movements, but must rather become the most powerful concepts.

The civil wars are specifically wars against the spirit of commerce and the limitations of the national spirit. Climatic divisions concerning populations and races in America. – Slavic-Germanic-Nordic culture! – the fewer, but stronger and more hard working! ¹³

Nietzsche’s portentous sentence about the battle for Erd-Herrschaft immediately follows the suggestion, sounding rather whimsical now, that Germany should conquer Mexico. That would be a violation of the US Monroe doctrine, seen by Schmitt as a significant precedent for his legitimation of the Grossraum (when Hitler adopted the argument, Schmitt was advised not to stir his wrath by indicating that he had provided it earlier). While we could read this as Nietzsche’s idle notebook jotting, this was precisely the time when Germany was exploring ways to join in Europe’s great rush to colonize, especially in Africa.

Elsewhere in his Glossarium, Schmitt says that Nietzsche thought “beyond the line” (in English). One sense of this suggestive observation is that he did not take for granted the spatial spheres already marked out by the great powers. But then in a war for Erd-Herrschaft, why should he? Schmitt too, at this point (29 August 1950), sees the possibility of a global civil war, a theme regularly recurring in his post-war writings. Moreover, like Schmitt, Nietzsche agrees that such total war would no longer be international but rather a civil war; the war for Erd-Herrschaft would be a war for ideas. He welcomes such war, portraying it as a real alternative to the domination of the herdlike letzte Mensch, which might be understood as the hegemony of the British Empire, utilitarianism, and the ethos of a nation of shopkeepers. ¹⁴ In his post-1945 writings, Schmitt envisions the future in terms of an analogous dichotomy: either universal administration carried out in the name of human rights (a hypertrophied Wilsonianism) or general civil war. Schmitt believed that it was the decline of the classic European nation-state and of the jus publicum Europaeum which opened up these possibilities. Nietzsche too saw the fragility of the nation-state as precipitating new battles for hegemony over the earth.

Drawing on medieval theological traditions, Schmitt saw the national state as a katechon, or restraint, against the descent into general civil war, identified with the coming of the Antichrist. From the late 30’s on, he at first believed, then hoped with decreasing confidence, that the restraining role would pass to a few Grossräume, transcending the system of smaller states that had been outdated by industrial development, air travel, and instantaneous communication (e.g., radio). We can see then how Schmitt could have read Nietzsche’s talk of “Europe’s desire to become one,” in Beyond Good and Evil, as a recognition of the possibility of a new European Grossraum, a reading reinforced by the philosopher’s admiration for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. Yet Nietzsche’s chapter “Peoples and Fatherlands” reveals that he saw the “desire to be one” as independent of any specific national European culture. This Europe without a Reich would be geared to the emergent nomadic European workforce; its highest exemplars would be cultural hybrids or cosmopolitans who would draw political audiences in “the century of the multitude!” ¹⁵ Nietzsche’s note of 1881 cited by Schmitt appears in the context of his beginning to imagine a great civil war of ideas. That war would pit monotheism and its secular transforms (“shadows of God”), against the most affirmative possible thought—the eternal recurrence of all things. It is significant, but almost unremarked in the literature, that Nietzsche’s first August 1881 notes on recurrence present it not only as a challenge to the individual—can I will that each and every one of my experiences, in the same order, will recur infinitely?—but also as a teaching meant to have major political effects. The task set for those who have understood and incorporated the thought is to teach it, expecting its influence to grow over centuries, encouraging the stronger while dispiriting and enervating the weaker. Will those teachers eventually gain Erd-Herrschaft? ¹⁶

Given Nietzsche’s and Schmitt’s parallel concerns with Earth’s order and future, let us compare their geographical imaginaries. Both involve renewals of elemental perspectives, recalling the Greek division of earth, air, water, and fire, highly charged with myth and affect. Both deploy these concepts phenomenologically and politically, not as proposed replacements for modern science’s table of elements. Schmitt’s metahistory of the nomos of the Earth (not the element but the Erdball), traces a development from land to sea to air. The first primary orientation takes hold on territories that have been appropriated or captured, named, cultivated, and marked off. There is a profound archaism in Schmitt’s evocation of primary agricultural settlement. Here, a Nietzschean/Deleuzian question can be raised: what are the consequences of Schmitt’s marginalizing those who lead nomadic, migratory, or wandering lives on land? Schmitt’s study of guerilla or asymmetric war in The Partisan is a late recognition of the nomadic mode that might have been further developed. ¹⁷

What is repressed in Schmitt’s fetishization of the earliest nomos returns in his account of maritime power. The sea offered 15th and 16th century Europeans new spaces of exploration and exploitation. By way of the “amity lines” (discussed below), this leads to Schmitt’s “golden age” of the jus publicum Europaeum, a formal, mutual understanding among European states, limiting the terms of any war among them while permitting of more predatory and violent conduct at sea or in colonization struggles. Schmitt’s affective connection with the life of the sea is evident in his enthusiastic descriptions of whaling, piracy, and privateering, both in The Nomos of the Earth and its lively, condensed forerunner, Land and Sea. World War II showed Schmitt that air power and instantaneous communication had created a new sphere in which a nomos could be imposed or contested. A few suggestive but undeveloped passages forecast that the era of air power may merge with or be superseded by that of fire, understood in terms of nuclear science, atomic war, and space travel.

Nietzsche does not attempt a comprehensive archeology or genealogy of the Earth. He presupposes that only in the late 19th century has it become possible to speak of the Earth as a whole. What shall be the Sinn der Erde? In whose hands will its Herrschaft rest? As Zarathustra asks “Who shall be lord of the Earth?” His answer, in the highly charged poetry of his drunken or “Night-wanderer’s Song” is “The purest shall be lords of the Earth, the most unrecognizable, strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day.” ¹⁸

Already in the early 1870’s, Nietzsche had engaged with the notion of a total world order, closed or reaching closure, as found in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and in later quasi-Hegelian spinoffs like Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. These were the targets he mercilessly savaged in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; we could compare these thinkers—and David F. Strauss, subject of Nietzsche’s first Unmodern Observation—to figures like Alexander Kojève and Francis Fukuyama with their versions of the “end of history.” ¹⁹ Also, just as Schmitt was intensely concerned with the British sea empire, with Germany contesting its hegemony in two world wars, so Nietzsche worried about the increasing prevalence of the British model, a commercial culture whose economistic reductionism could lead to the triumph of the letzte Mensch.

The Earth opposed to this threat is elemental, and in Zarathustra Nietzsche takes his hero through varied landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes, in which he climbs mountains, traverses plains, sojourns in cities, sails the sea, island hops in an archipelago, and descends into the heart of the earth. Nietzsche’s geoaesthetics is a phantasmatic encyclopedia of the lived earth (Menschen-Erde). At the crisis point of the book Zarathustr awakens from a swoon provoked by his struggle with the abyssal thought of eternal recurrence. As he reorients himself he is told by his animal companions that “the world awaits you as a garden” and happily accepts this pronouncement. ²⁰ While Schmitt has much to say about the productive cultivation of the land, he is silent about the esthetic dimension of living on the Earth so prominent in Nietzsche, where gardens are theaters of the elements, not merely farms. Schmitt could have been challenged and frightened by Zarathustra’s chapter “The Seven Seals” whose title evokes the Christian Apocalypse. There, not at the end of time as such, but at the end of linear time (as eternal recurrence is affirmed), all borders and boundaries dissolve in a fantasy of infinite sea and air with no fixed territories or points of orientation. This is the Antichrist’s Lied der Erde. ²¹

After reading Schmitt’s Nomos, certain neglected themes in Nietzsche emerge with greater definition, notably his discussion of “great events” on the earth, which we might consider as possible parallels to Schmitt’s account of spatial revolutions that are embodied in new great nomoi. In the fourth of his Unmodern Observations, Nietzsche anticipates that such an event will be ushered in by Wagner’s cultural revolution. He says that the last great event in human history was Alexander’s severing the Gordian knot dividing East and West, Asia, and Europe. Wagner’s name, he expects, will be associated with a coming great event, the reassertion of an integral Europe freed of its cultural ties to the East, Christianity being seen here as enabled by Greco-Roman civilization’s corruption by Oriental religions. More significant than the Wagner-event’s specific character is Nietzsche’s more formal concept of the event: it is unpredictable, transforms our sense of the past and the possible future, and must be carried forward by disciples. Nietzsche was soon disillusioned regarding Wagner, and dropped his talk of great events for some years. However, 6 years later, when possessed by Zarathustra’s Iranian-nomadic spirit, he spoke “Of Great Events,” recounting his avatar’s conversation with a “fire-hound” embodying the spirit of political rabble-rousing. Without further specifiying such events’ content, Zarathustra does emphasize their earthly site. He says that they will not be heralded or instantiated by states and churches with their exaggerated, blustery heat and noise. The most important events approach unsuspectedly, as if on doves’ feet. ²² Beyond Good and Evil, the more “realistic” counterpart to Zarathustra, suggests that human beings experienced a great event about 10 thousand years ago with the transition from a premoral age of custom to one of morality, with its emphasis on intention. ²³ The Genealogy of Morality identifies this cataclysmic change with the urban revolution and the origin of the state. ²⁴ Now, Nietzsche says, we may be experiencing a similarly holistic shift to a postmoral era of the Earth, one that we might suppose will go hand in hand with a decline of the state. By the time of Ecce Homo, he suggests that his own work will contribute to a “great politics” of the Earth. ²⁵

In the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche alludes to the earliest massive symbolic constructions of Egyptian and near eastern civilizations, describing them as archaic ways of marking the meaning of the Earth. From his perspective these were grotesque, masked anticipations of a contemporary task having to do with the Sinn der Erde. Nietzsche approaches this problem of the present in his concern with the figure of the “good European,” Europe’s supposed desire to become one, and the changing role of “peoples and fatherlands” in the age of the multitude. To speak Schmittian, we could say that Nietzsche sketches the conditions and prospects of an emergent European Grossraum, one with a decidedly Mediterranean orientation. There is not a sequential succession of elemental eras, as in Schmitt, but a simultaneity. Distance and movement—whether up mountains, across the sea, or even into earth’s depths—takes priority over autochthonous and sedentary inhabitation, which Nietzsche dismisses as Schollenkleberei, clinging to the soil or being stuck in the mud. If any element takes precedence in Nietzsche, it is the sea, beckoning to exploration, adventure, and confrontation with the unknown. His übernational (trans-national) geophilosophy would reject Schmitt’s nostalgia for land-based sovereignties.

The crucial hinge in political–ethical development, according to the Genealogy of Morality, was the seizure of land by previously wandering tribes who now found it necessary to live within enclosed territories. Consequently, their aggressive instincts had to be rechanneled, producing a self-directed bad conscience, which was then intensified by the growth of powerful states. This would be an originary nehmen in Schmitt’s terminology. As with his nomos, such a territorial-ethical order transcends the modern bifurcation of is and ought. But where Schmitt sees the emergence of national political structures, which provide fundamental order and orientation, Nietzsche sees the original nomos of civilizations as a kind of fortunate fall, enabling a new internality of consciousness, leading initially to the psychologization of debt as guilt. Eventually self-critical resources develop, capable of reducing the burden of guilt and bad conscience produced by life in the state, allowing alternative constructions of the human situation—enter Nietzsche and his “free spirits.” The Genealogy then is a kind of inverted theologico-political treatise, tracing the intertwined growth of monotheism, and the state from the perspective of their possible overcoming. In that sense, Nietzsche is at the opposite pole from Schmitt, who thinks of state sovereignty as modeled on God’s rule of the world, and draws on the medieval justification of the state as the katechon restraining the appearance of Antichrist. As early as Human-All-too-Human (1878), Nietzsche had suggested approvingly that the state was in a process of dissolution, maintained in part through arbitrary states of exception. For Schmitt, the state of exception was the crucial hinge of state authority.

In the Glossarium, Schmitt remarks on Beyond Good and Evil in terms of his own concern with borders, lines, and demarcations. He says that the book is a theologization “beyond the line” (in English). The statement alludes to the “amity lines” established by the European powers early in their exploration and exploitation of the Americas. In The Nomos of the Earth, he attributes great importance to the demarcation of regulated and unregulated possession and conflict accepted by the European states. The lines separated areas of the Americas and the sea that were open to all forms of war, conquest, and exploitation from those in Europe and sections of the sea where such activities were subject to agreed European law. European powers could license pirates, privateers, and the like to operate with very few restrictions “beyond the line.” According to Schmitt, the lines enabled the jus publicum Europaeum, the formal and informal understandings governing relations among European states until they began to collapse in the late 19th century, eventually setting the stage for the World Wars. ²⁶ He claims that the amity lines enabled a distinction between the space of intra-European law, governing war, and other relations among the European states, and the space “beyond the line” open to colonization and consequent colonial wars, piracy, privateering, and the like. The “good” of permitted actions within the European world could be neatly separated from the “evil” violations (e.g., of the laws of war) within that sphere. Beyond the line no such distinctions apply. As Schmitt writes expressively in Nomos:

The fact that the thoroughly Catholic King of France aligned himself with dangerous heretics and wild pirates, freebooters and buccaneers against the Catholic King of Spain and, together with such allies, pillaged Spanish cities in the Americas, can be explained only by the fact that these pirate raids were undertakings “beyond the line.” ²⁷

A few years earlier, Schmitt was musing in his notebook on Nietzsche’s “theologizing beyond the line.” There he says:

It gives an emphasis to the fact of the amity line, which makes possible a rich epistemic bounty (Beute), once the mere fact has yielded a satisfactory factual bounty. Ideas and convictions are destroyed in a double manner: first critically through dialectical negations, second uncritically through apologetic affirmations. The latter is the surest means of destruction. ²⁸

This highly compressed argument might be unpacked as follows. Nietzsche’s theologizing “beyond the line,” presumably means that, for him, no part of the earth is subject to the good/evil binary; all is analogous to the area free from such restrictions, given European public law. The epistemic reward of Nietzsche’s investigations, in which he articulates and deconstructs the line, is rich because he is able to think of the Earth beyond the constraining concepts of national sovereignties and the “Hegelian” world-history which hypostatizes them. (Given this essay’s limitations, I note only briefly that Schmitt had probably just read his friend Ernst Jünger’s essay “Über die Linie” (1949) published in a Festschrift for Martin Heidegger. ²⁹ )

Perhaps, Schmitt means to imply that Nietzsche takes the open conflict of powers in the new world as confirming his Heraclitean understanding of kosmos as polemos. The procedure of destruction Schmitt describes takes a double form; here, he comes close to anticipating Derrida’s classic formulation of the double strategy of deconstruction. On the one hand, critical negation of claims made on behalf of the distinction; on the other, production of novel affirmations that are not indebted to the distinction. These movements must be made together as parts of a concerted strategy. Consider the analysis of state and nation in Beyond Good and Evil. In the most clearly political chapter, “Peoples and Fatherlands,” Nietzsche begins with negations. First, he questions German national identity by means of a critique of Wagner. Germans only appear to be profound; in fact, they love all that is cloudy and indeterminate. Their boundaries are indistinct, and their attachment to territory is Schollenkleberei. ³⁰ The reality is that all forms of nationalism in Europe are being undermined by the new nomadism of adaptable, international workers, despite the chauvinism of leading statesmen and ideologists. Second, in an apparently affirmative vein, Nietzsche speaks of Europe’s desire to “become one,” which initially sounds as if he anticipates the formation of a European Grossraum in proto-Schmittian fashion.

However, this emergent Europe has no central state or Reich; it lacks the cultural and political definition Schmitt considers essential. As Nietzsche casts about for specimens of the new European he compiles a diverse list of figures—Stendhal, Heine, Wagner, Napoleon and others—but then describes each as a complex hybrid of varied national characteristics. Even the supposed arch-nationalist Wagner turns out to owe much to French art and thought. Perhaps the most affirmative statement of political analysis that Nietzsche makes in this chapter—which could have been titled “Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands”—is “this is the century of the multitude!” The multitude (Menge) is diverse and heterogeneous, so that even if Europe wishes to become one, it actually is the site of multiple mixtures and hybridities. ³¹ Since the multitude is conceived on the model of a diverse theatrical audience, we might see Nietzsche as anticipating both the Schmittian understanding of the epoch of the air, with its instantaneous communications, and the Situationist “society of the spectacle.”

Finally, the parallels and differences between the two thinkers can be exhibited in terms of their characteristic ways of thinking about language and power, specifically the nature of naming. The topic is an ancient one in philosophy. In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates proposes that names should be understood neither (following the Sophists) as arbitrarily assigned labels nor (like Cratylus) as coded meanings to be interpreted hermeneutically. Socrates says that the true name-giver, the nomothetes, establishes the sense of things through a primary act of naming. Taking a clue from Schmitt, we could see “nomothetes” as suggesting that the name-giver establishes a realm of order and orientation—a linguistic and territorial space. Might our two thinkers be playing conscious or unconscious variations on this theme?

Schmitt’s article “Nomos-Nahme-Name” has a decidedly Nietzschean tone. Here, he maintains the importance of the relation between Nahme and name, taking and naming. His first example is the traditional European marital institution in which the husband takes a wife and gives her the patrilineal name. By analogy, and on a larger scale, he says

We are concerned with the legal historical meaning of the relation between Nahme and name, power and name-giving, and in particular, with the formative, even festive processes of many land-appropriations that are able to make Nahme a sacred act. A land-appropriation (Landnahme) is constituted only if the appropriator is able to give the land a name. ³²

For Schmitt, the activity of name-giving constitutes power’s tendency to “visibility, publicity, and ceremony.” Plaintively he asks “Where today are there still names?” ³³ Has the force it once displayed—as in the conquistadors claiming the new world in Christianity’s name—disappeared? No doubt Schmitt would be seriously disturbed by the contemporary practice of renaming places that bear memories of enslavers, racists, and imperialists.

Both Nietzsche and Schmitt understand naming as an act of power, not simply a process of labeling and classifying. Nietzsche, like Schmitt, recognizes the attenuated force of the old names. He speaks nostalgically of the “Herrenrecht of giving names,” as he recalls the Herrenmoralität of the early masters. ³⁴ Yet, contrary to some readers’ impressions, Nietzsche does not propose a return to old names for peoples, classes, or virtues. In Zarathustra, he first suggests that one’s ownmost virtue must be unique and nameless; later, in a definitive series of speeches he rebaptizes a previously unnamed—and unnameable!—virtue as the gift-giving virtue. ³⁵ When it comes time to speak of a new regime of the Earth or a new god, Nietzsche offers two “old” names in Beyond with revised senses (what Derrida calls “paleonymy”): Dionysus and the Antichrist. ³⁶ Both instances of thinking “beyond the line,” of course, are meant to shock readers whose thought is attuned to canonical names like Plato and Christ. By evading any identification with Nietzsche, Schmitt undertook his own project in which old words like nomos could be given new life, perhaps allowing the baptism of a new Reich. At some level Schmitt might have appreciated the force of Nietzsche’s reinvention of these old names. He could have recognized it as the affirmative dimension of thinking “beyond the line.”

What Schmitt would not have known in 1950, but would have discovered in 1967, if he had read the Colli-Montinari Nietzsche edition, was that the original Antichrist manuscript concluded with a one-page “Gesetz wider das Christentum” signed by “the Antichrist,” (originally withheld from publication by Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth). ³⁷ This Gesetz (law)—not exactly a nomos—has the format and tone of a decree promulgated by a conquering army, possibly the text of a placard to be posted. The Gesetz discourages Christianity by such measures as shunning Christian priests and designating ruined churches as grotesque, poisonous sites. It is impossible to know what mix of delusion, irony, and ambition went into this final addition to the manuscript as Nietzsche neared collapse in Turin. Given the decree’s emphasis on the movement of people and the partition of places, Schmitt could have understood from a politico-theological perspective that the Antichrist was claiming to be “the prince of this world,” the master of its nomos.