Schmitt

Two thoughts I had on Schmitt, first (and I'm sure this is intentional) it is possible to engage his writing with almost every novel we have read this semester. I realize that we've avoided utopian visions of the future because, lets face it, dystopias engage with our historical and political contexts in far more interesting and relevant ways. It seems though, that every author we've read agrees with Schmitt's assertion that in most cases other=enemy. While most of the protagonists we've read about don't necessarily occupy the moral high ground, it doesn't really matter, conflicts are possible because he is a stranger (Schmitt, 27). Like Liz mentioned, this goes straight to the heart of the human bugger conflict, but in this case not only are the buggers alien and strangers they are also (to the humans) morally evil and aesthetically ugly, giving humans all the more reason to exterminate them. Also, I found Schmitt's discussion on 54 very interesting in relation to not just science fiction in general, but specifically Card. Schmitt almost seems to imply that an enemy outside the planet could end friend-enemy dichotomies among humans, Card seems to agree with this in the form of the IF bringing universal stability to the world while the threat of the buggers was still present. However, literally as soon as the buggers were destroy, the friend-enemy paradigm switched back to earth as the various political groups began battling among themselves over the future of earth.
On a probably slightly less fruitful note, the historian part of my brain wouldn't let go of the fact that Schmitt ended up being a Nazi. I realize that circumstances and moments in history sometimes sweep people along with them, but it was really disturbing to me that someone who could so clearly visualize the dangerous shape that politics could take when the enemy became "an outlaw of humanity" (79) would be a party to the atrocities of the Nazi party.