Outras Inimizades: o problema da Guerra para Carl Schmitt e Pierre Clastres

Abstract

The New Wars literature poses a challenge to the Clausewitzian understanding of war as a continuation of politics in the contemporary world. Nevertheless, this approach The approaches leaves, nonetheless, under-specified the characterization of the political dimension of war, that is: an existential and concrete decision that cannot be subsumed in rational models. In the 20th century, the German jurist Carl Schmitt stipulated the political specificity of the Clausewitzian war as the extreme realization of enmity, thereby inscribing war as a corollary of friend-enemy relations. With this, the political remains central to the understanding of war, also following the historical and structural transformations of the international system. However, should the Schmittean political character of war remain invariably applicable? According to Pierre Clastres, war is an omnipresent sociological structure in Amerindian societies, and which also acquires its tonality through the definition of enmity. In this article, we seek to answer the question, comparing Schmitt and Clastres, whether the concepts which give meaning to war under both authors reside in distinct cosmological conceptions, allowing for an inquiry into the nature and reality and of sovereign power as experienced by Western and Amerindian societies as interpreted by each author.