I first saw the term “borrowed functioning” in David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage, and I’ve kept repeating it ever since because it is such a concise summary of a painful reality. In my case, I’ve often added a friend or two along the way, and when this happens, I move on from my typical stray dog psychology and I feel great as I cruise along in society, until I get separated from my friends, and then as one woman told me after seeing me looking lost at a large Shabbat dinner, “I just felt so sorry for you.”
I only need one good friend to function properly!
David Schnarch uses borrowed functioning to describe how people regulate their sense of self through their proximity to others rather than through what he calls a solid flexible self. The borrowed functioner feels competent, alive, and purposeful when fused with someone whose emotional state or social energy he can draw on. The problem is not the relationship. The problem is that the regulation is external. When the other person is unavailable, moves away, or simply has a bad week, the borrower has no internal reserve to draw on. He returns to baseline because the baseline was always what was actually there.
What makes the pattern hard to break is that it works. The friendships are real. The good feeling is real. The period of borrowed elevation is not false, which is why it is so compelling and why the drop feels so catastrophic rather than merely disappointing.
The exception works on populations the same way a vitalizing friendship works on a borrowed functioner. The sovereign names a crisis and people who have been running at a depleted baseline suddenly feel real, purposeful, and connected. Then the exception passes and the flatness returns. Liberal order is the baseline. The exception is the friend whose energy you ride.
The therapeutic question Schnarch would ask is what it would mean to generate that from inside rather than borrow it. He is not optimistic that most people get there. It requires tolerating the baseline without immediately reaching for someone to regulate against, which is genuinely uncomfortable rather than theoretically uncomfortable. Most people find a new friend before they have to sit with what the absence reveals.
Claude says:
You found a concept that named your experience precisely, then used the concept to borrow functioning from the concept itself, riding its explanatory energy until the therapist’s patience ran out and you were back at baseline with a worn-out term.
Schnarch would probably find that illustrative rather than surprising. The borrowed functioner does not only borrow from people. He borrows from ideas, frameworks, communities, therapists, and therapeutic vocabulary. The pattern is substrate-independent. A good theory can carry you for a while the same way a good friend can. The collapse when the term loses its charge is the same structural event as the collapse when the friend moves away.
This also explains something about your intellectual work that is worth naming directly. The theoretical stack you have built, Pinsof, Becker, Turner, Collins, Schnarch, works partly because it gives you a set of frameworks energetic enough to borrow from consistently. The Jurisdictional Wars series runs on that borrowed charge. But the best essays are the ones where the friction between the frameworks and the material generates something new, something that could not have come from the frameworks alone. Those moments are closer to what Schnarch means by self-generated functioning. The analysis is not riding the theory. The theory and the subject are producing heat together that neither contained independently.
The question your therapist probably got tired of is not really about the term. It is about whether you can tolerate your baseline long enough to find out what is there rather than what the next framework, friend, or crisis makes temporarily available.
That is a harder question than anything in the Schmitt literature.
The Schmitt secondary literature is largely a parasitic enterprise, and the scholars who live inside it derive their intellectual energy almost entirely from the charge in the primary texts rather than from anything they generate themselves.
Much of it reminds me of the impenetrable post-colonial gobbledygook of notorious Harvard English professor Homi K. Bhabha, the most over-rated academic in the Ivy Leagues.
Carl Schmitt’s prose, and much of the secondary literature that orbits him, shares with Bhabha a quality of deliberate difficulty that functions as a coalition signal. To read Schmitt seriously, to engage with the friend-enemy distinction, the state of exception, constituent power, and nomos, is to mark yourself as someone willing to handle politically dangerous material with theoretical sophistication. The difficulty is not purely stylistic. Schmitt’s concepts are compressed and require unpacking. But the aura of danger around him, the fact that he was a Nazi jurist whose ideas are nevertheless indispensable to certain arguments about sovereignty and political theology, adds a layer of initiation to the reading. You signal something about yourself by citing him approvingly, and that signal functions coalitionally in Turner’s and Pinsof’s sense.
Chantal Mouffe’s prose is considerably more accessible than Bhabha’s and more accessible than Schmitt’s, which is one reason she reached a broader audience with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written with Ernesto Laclau, and later with her agonistic democracy project. She domesticated Schmitt for the left, which required a kind of conceptual laundering. She took the friend-enemy distinction and converted it into agonism, conflict without annihilation, which made Schmitt usable for democratic theorists who would otherwise find him toxic. That move was both intellectually productive and coalitionally convenient in Turner’s sense. It allowed a left academic coalition to draw on Schmitt’s insights about the irreducibility of conflict without bearing the full reputational cost of citing a fascist thinker without qualification. Mouffe made Schmitt safe to use, which served the coalition that needed his concepts but could not afford his politics.
Where the Schmitt scholars diverge from Bhabha is in the structure of the difficulty. Bhabha’s impenetrability is primarily rhetorical. The sentence-level density, the layering of Lacan over Derrida over Fanon, the neologisms, the resistance to paraphrase, all of this creates difficulty at the surface of the prose. The underlying concepts, hybridity, mimicry, the third space, are not themselves extraordinarily complex once extracted. They can be stated in plain language, and when they are, they lose much of their authority. The difficulty is doing significant work in maintaining that authority. Stripping it away would reveal arguments that are interesting but not overwhelming.
Schmitt’s difficulty is different in kind. The concepts are hard because they are doing something philosophically precise. The state of exception is not merely a dramatic phrase. It names a real problem about the relationship between norm and decision, between the legal order and the sovereign act that both founds and suspends it. The friend-enemy distinction is not merely provocative. It makes a specific claim about the nature of the political that resists easy refutation. The difficulty here is more like the difficulty of Hobbes or Weber than the difficulty of Bhabha. It comes from conceptual compression rather than from rhetorical obscurity.
This distinction matters for the Pinsof analysis. Bhabha’s coalition maintains itself partly through prose difficulty that functions as a barrier to entry and a test of loyalty. Schmitt’s coalition maintains itself through a different kind of gate: the willingness to engage with a thinker whose political history makes citation professionally risky. The cost of joining the Schmitt conversation is not primarily stylistic. It is reputational and political. You have to be willing to say, or at least imply, that a Nazi jurist produced ideas worth taking seriously. That willingness itself becomes the coalition signal. It marks you as someone who puts intellectual rigor above political comfort, which is its own form of academic prestige, particularly on the right and in certain strands of the academic left that pride themselves on going where the argument leads regardless of the destination’s associations.
Giorgio Agamben sits between these two poles. His prose is difficult in a way that combines conceptual density with a certain oracular quality that functions rhetorically. His extension of Schmitt through the figure of homo sacer and the camp as the nomos of modernity has the same initiation structure as Bhabha: to engage with it seriously you must master a particular vocabulary, and mastering that vocabulary marks you as belonging to a particular intellectual formation. But Agamben’s difficulty, like Schmitt’s, has more philosophical content beneath it than Bhabha’s does. The bare life concept does real work. The critique of biopower extends Foucault in a direction that produces new insights rather than merely restating old ones in harder language.
The deeper difference is the relationship each tradition has to political stakes. Schmitt scholarship carries danger because Schmitt’s ideas about sovereignty, emergency powers, and the limits of liberal legalism have direct application to contemporary politics. Governments actually use states of exception. The friend-enemy distinction describes things that happen in political life. Engaging with Schmitt is risky not just reputationally but intellectually, because the concepts can be used to justify things their user would prefer not to justify. That pressure is mostly absent from Bhabha’s world. Hybridity and mimicry describe real phenomena in colonial and postcolonial cultures, but they carry nothing like the same political charge. The stakes of getting Bhabha wrong are primarily academic. The stakes of getting Schmitt wrong, or of using him carelessly, are potentially larger.
Mouffe understood this and managed it by insisting that Schmitt’s diagnostic power, his account of what politics fundamentally is, can be separated from his normative conclusions about what political arrangements are desirable. Whether that separation holds is itself a live question in political theory. But the attempt to make it is what distinguishes her from most Schmitt scholars, who tend either to embrace him more fully or to keep him at arm’s length through heavy qualification. Mouffe used him as a tool rather than as an authority, which is intellectually the most defensible position and also the one that required the most careful coalition management, since it satisfied neither those who wanted Schmitt rehabilitated nor those who wanted him quarantined.
Chantal Mouffe is the strongest case for creating value from Schmitt and still her work is as weak as the Luftwaffe in 1946. She has a political project, the agonistic democracy framework, and it connects to her earlier work with Ernesto Laclau on hegemony in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). That book has its own theoretical ambition drawn from Gramsci and Lacan as much as Schmitt but it adds no value to the reader. When you read her Schmitt-facing work, the animating force is always his diagnosis. She is interesting in proportion to how directly she wrestles with him and considerably less interesting when she moves to her own constructive proposals. Agonistic pluralism as a positive program is thin. The enemy becomes an adversary. Passions get mobilized toward democratic ends. The prescription is almost embarrassingly weak relative to the disease she has diagnosed. Schmitt would have found it touching.
Giorgio Agamben is another trendy overrated scholar. Homo Sacer and State of Exception try hard and draw on Aristotle, Foucault, and Benjamin in ways that are not purely parasitic. But the animating question, what is the structure of sovereign power and how does bare life get produced as its constitutive outside, is Schmitt’s question dressed in different clothes. Without Schmitt, Agamben has no motor. The borrowed functioning is more disguised than in Mouffe but no less structural.
Jan-Werner Müller, who has written probably the most careful intellectual biography of Schmitt in A Dangerous Mind (2003), is a good historian and a conscientious thinker. He is also almost completely uninteresting on his own terms. His value is entirely archival and contextual. He tells you what Schmitt said, who read him, and how the reception unfolded across different national traditions. The analysis is reliable and the prose is competent. Nothing in it would survive if Schmitt disappeared from the conversation.
Heinrich Meier’s argument that Schmitt is best understood as a political theologian responding to Leo Strauss is original as an interpretive move, and the Schmitt-Strauss correspondence he unearthed and analyzed in Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (1995) is one of the few contributions to the secondary literature that adds something the primary texts do not contain. Meier generates a real thesis: that Schmitt’s decisionism is not a secularization of theology but a defense of revelation against the Enlightenment, and that Strauss saw through this more clearly than Schmitt admitted. That is interesting independent of Schmitt, because it touches fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and revelation. But Meier is interesting at roughly 20 percent of Schmitt’s intensity, and that is the ceiling.
The deeper problem is that Schmitt’s writing has a quality almost nobody in the secondary literature possesses: he thinks in images that do the conceptual work rather than merely illustrating it. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” is not a slogan. It is a compressed argument about the relationship between norm and decision that unfolds the more you pressure it. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” does the same thing. The secondary literature produces sentences that explain these formulations rather than sentences that have equivalent force. That is borrowed functioning in its clearest form: the scholar’s prose runs on energy that was generated somewhere else.
The partial exception might be someone like William Scheuerman, whose work on Schmitt and emergency powers connects to original research on executive authority in contemporary American constitutional law. He uses Schmitt to illuminate something he cares about independently. That produces occasional moments where the Schmitt-derived analysis and the independent concern generate friction rather than smooth application, which is where thinking tends to happen. But even Scheuerman is most alive when Schmitt is most directly in view.
The honest verdict is that the Schmitt secondary literature confirms his own thesis about liberal discourse: it neutralizes and manages what it cannot generate. The scholars who study him perform, at the level of academic prose, exactly the flattening operation he diagnosed at the level of politics. They turn his charged concepts into objects of analysis, which is the only thing liberal institutions know how to do with force they cannot contain.
