Enemy (Ger. der Feind)

We began with an image of the friend “who places thinking in distress” and concluded that this marks the exhaustion of the earlier Greek concept of “friend” (phílos), an exhaustion of its original sources that can be detected in a tradition of post-war continental philosophy, particularly in France, that no longer departs from the earlier Greek sources of phileîn and philía but rather from the philosophies of Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. By the term “post-war” I am referring not only to the historical period of post-war societies—that is, the period we continue to be in the process of quitting, but have not yet left, a period that makes of us all, in a very strange way, either survivors or deportees—but also to the overturning of the Platonic ground of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and the emergence in its place of what I will call a nonphilosophical understanding that has determined war (pólemos), even “permanent war,” as the ultimate ground from which any realistic understanding of the concept of the political must depart. Consequently, it is for this reason that we should immediately turn to the concept of “the enemy” (der Feind) that has resurfaced in the recent commentary around the writings of Carl Schmitt, especially those offered by Agamben and Derrida.

As we know from several recent commentaries on The Concept of the Political (1932), and those by Agamben and Derrida in particular, Schmitt focuses almost exclusively on what he calls “the concrete situations” of the determination of the enemy relationship in order to arrive at what he claims to be a pure concept of the political as being first of all founded on the need to determine the friend–enemy distinction as a point of certainty that structures the social field—that is, the need to identify the enemy of my friend and the friend of my enemy. In his reading of Schmitt, which I will return to in greater detail below, Derrida is completely accurate in determining the character of this certainty as not an epistemological certainty but rather a practical certainty (prâxis), which is why Schmitt calls it a “concrete situation,” referring to the nature of the knowledge to the subject who knows, who is capable of acting and in this case, referring to one who is capable of knowing and acting on “who is the enemy” and “who is the friend” from among all social relationships in which the subject is situated. As Derrida writes:

If the political exists [in Schmitt’s sense], one must know who everyone is, who is a friend and who is an enemy, and this knowing is not a mode of theoretical knowledge but one of practical identification: knowing consists in knowing how to identify the friend and the enemy.1

As could also be demonstrated regarding the praxis demanded by a Marxist determination of “scientific materialist practice,” as the result of which the recognition of the “friend–enemy” couple first becomes an acute political problem, lending credence to Schmitt’s analysis. In other words, something striking occurs when we realize that in both concepts of the political—that of Schmitt and that of Marx—the fundamental order of determination is first focused on the enemy. The enemy comes first, prior to the friend, in the order of this distinction; it is only after the enemy is determined that the relations to friends (or comrades) is made possible. It is the certainty of the identity of the enemy that first allows for the “recognition” of the friend (i.e., the enemy of my enemy is my friend). In a certain manner, this already fulfills Schmitt’s argument that the polemical character that determines the concept of the political in a nonphilosophical sense is a pragmatic or concrete situation of alliances in a more or less generalized situation of war, something that can also be found in Marx’s concept of the political in accordance with the image of generalized (or international) class warfare, which also follows the changing conception of war itself as a form of conflict that exceeds the earlier boundaries of nation and territory and, by the end of the nineteenth century, enlists entire populations and “races.”

In the case of Schmitt’s concept of the political, however, this allows for the emergence of the modern state to appear as the purest and most instrumental determination of the friend–enemy distinction; in a Hegelian sense, we are conscious of the certainty of the state’s identity and the political by its function to wage war on the basis of this distinction. It is in relation to the state and its power to determine the enemy that the subject becomes conscious of the political as such. The importance of Marx was to have recognized the certainty of both this identity and this power and to turn their instrumental function into a weapon that could be wielded by the working classes in their own national spheres. Marx “demythologized” this identity by revealing that “the state” was itself only a “modern machine” invented by a certain class, one that could in turn be turned against them. In order for this to happen, a new class-consciousness needed to emerge that would find itself directly in opposition to the certainty of the political founded on the nation-state. The certainty of national identity, by which the friend–enemy distinction was determined by the different national classes of bourgeoisie competing for their own particular class interests through the political instruments they had invented, would need to be replaced by the “concrete situation” of a new universal class at war against all national elites, who in the end would be revealed to be only the different bourgeoisie each in its own sphere of influence, all having an integral role to play in the states they have instituted to pursue their own particular interests. However, for our purposes it is important to notice that this is a radical overturning of the original Greek concept of the polis as the common or open space (agorá) that is shared by friends who must organize the form of conflict (stásis) into generalized forms of competition (philotimia) that do not approach the extreme division implied by war (pólemos). Let us be clear on this point, however: war (pólemos) is still a distribution or partition of space (even when this distribution takes the form of occupation or colonization), as well as the economic distribution of goods (even through their destruction). Nevertheless, it is this distribution or economy that Plato sought to keep “outside” the polis, admitting only those specific forms of antagonism and violence that originally belonged to the term stásis, which is why the Greek term indicates both equality and strife; therefore, it is the identity of these two opposing and contradictory meanings that form a specific dialectical trajectory for the history of the polis to resolve.

As Leo Strauss has already observed in his epilogue to the 1976 reedition of The Concept of the Political, one of the distinctive characteristics that he finds in Schmitt’s analysis of the political is that, unlike other regions of culture and society, the political has no sphere of its own.2 In other words, the friend–enemy grouping can be found in other spheres and regions of “culture” (civil society) such as the religious, economic, legal, scientific, and ethical. However, it is only the political that names the point of actuality and “concrete determination” of a particular friend–enemy grouping at a given historical moment. Religious conflicts can intensify within or between societies, but they become political only to the extent that they threaten to become actualized as lethal conflicts, empowering each side with the power to kill or to sacrifice the members of their own association. Although it would seem that Schmitt is founding the political on the actuality of war—a thesis that is more in keeping with that of Foucault—he reminds us many times that it is not the actuality of war that proves to be most decisive in determining the political but rather a purely virtual decision that lies at the basis (or the ground) of the “right to kill,” even though this ground will have no grounds of its own, and will hang suspended and in abeyance, as if waiting to be justified or officially sanctioned by a form of sovereignty, even if this justification appears on the most arbitrary or natural of grounds, such as self-defense or “might makes right.”

The political, then, would be the purest expression of a decision to kill and it is for this reason that it has no separate sphere of its own; rather, it lies beneath every sphere of culture, every religious argument, every quarrel between neighbors, every encounter with a stranger, in every murderous impulse or genocidal thought. However, in all these expressions it is without the power to actualize itself—that is, to become decisive. The political would simply be the name for the “concrete situation” of a decision once it has been made; it would come after the thought of killing, but before the actual act of killing. It would become not only possible but also a form of potentiality that can be realized at any moment afterward, and in this sense we can understand the nature of this decision as something that divides time into a “before” and an “after” and institutes itself as a ground for the future determination. It is only in this way that we might understand Schmitt’s clarification that “the State must presuppose the political” in the sense that the state emerges from the ground of a decision to kill, which then subsequently must also be deprived of its simple moral meaning for the individual. Rather, it must first be purified of all psychological motives so that it can then appear sanctioned, legalized, excused, ordered, justified, rationalized, and condoned. If, for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the state represents the specific historical entity of the community’s consensus iuris, according to Schmitt, it does so only as bearing all the responsibility for the community’s decision to kill on behalf of the community itself (to preserve, to protect, and even to expand or to subjugate other communities in its own interest). At the same time, the personality of the state must assume all the consequences and the risk for the decision to kill, including the risk of provoking sacred violence in which the state itself would become the divine victim and scapegoat. In other words, the state assumes the position and historical consciousness of a Master who enters into a life-and-death struggle over recognition and prestige (fama), and the wilderness of history is replete with the epic examples of individuals (such as Agamemnon) who were condemned for seeking personal immortality, becoming instead the divine goats who wander through the wilderness of eternal ignominy.

And yet, if Schmitt derives his theory of the state from Hegel, he clearly departs from Hegel by so narrowly cauterizing the character of the decision on which the personality of the state is grounded. Although for Hegel the state represents the conscious decision of the community to bring itself into existence as a subject—as an emanation of the desire of consciousness itself to become embodied in an entity—he would not so narrowly define the consciousness of negation as the power of annihilation of the subject who stands opposed to the I, since for Hegel, negation takes on many forms, only some of which take the form of negating the other I in itself in order to restore the subject to its own certainty. For Schmitt, however, it seems that the specific negation that stands for the concept of the political is nihil negativum. In other words, Schmitt is thinking as a jurist and not as a philosopher. And therefore, as in jurisprudence, he strictly determines the deciding issue on the existence of a precedent that will function as a rule for each “concrete situation” in which the political appears as the condition of the entity of the state. As we noted earlier, moreover, the rule that Schmitt claims is jus belli: “The right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and to unhesitatingly kill its enemies.”3 It is on the basis of this rule that the concept of the political can be purified of all the murkiness to which it has been subjected by romantic philosophy and by liberal humanists alike. It becomes similar to Ockham’s razor in the sense that it allows Schmitt to identify precisely the transformation of cultural association into political association (for example, religious association into a political entity) and thereby becomes the basis for the emergence of new and separate entities in the geopolitical sphere, in some way similar to Kant’s representation of nations as unique “moral individuals.”4

If Schmitt narrows and cauterizes, in a certain sense, Hegel’s theory of the state, it is not the case that he simply invents a new definition or merely reduces all existing definitions to one rule, the rule of jus belli, for the sake of ease. In point of fact, I would argue that Schmitt actually derives his precedent from the concrete situation in the his-tory of law itself, which is decisive in transforming the nature of jus belli and its relationship to sovereignty. This situation is that of the Roman Imperium, where the rule of jus belli is exclusively claimed by the personality of the state (Caesar and his procurators) in the situation of its sovereignty and imperial jurisdiction. One of the distinctive features of Roman law was the separation of Roman imperial sovereignty from the cultural and religious sovereignty of subjected peoples or “nations” (ethnē), which were defined as politeuma (a term that later signifies “commonwealth” but officially serves to designate a “colony,” particularly a colony of foreigners, within the urban precincts of the polis).5 Subjected peoples placed under the jurisdiction of Roman sovereignty through war and imperial conquest could still maintain their ethnic identity, their religious and cultural laws, and even certain aspects of their political personality (usually in the form of the despot or rulers); however, as the price of preserving their separate identity and distinctive personality as a people or culture, subjected colonized peoples had to sacrifice to the Roman sovereignty two things that would be essential to the preservation of a completely independent form of sovereignty: the right to kill or to make war and a willingness to martyr themselves for the preservation of their own sovereignty. It is here we see the separation of the political from jus belli and perhaps the very beginning of the creation of a modern concept of the political that is deprived of the very sovereignty on which the identity of the modern state can appear as a distinctively separate entity based on the “right to kill.”

We can illustrate the function of Roman imperial law by referring to the early Christian gospels surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and to Flavius Josephus’s account in The Antiquities of the Jews. In both sources, we have the representation of a distinct politeuma (the Jewish people), which is represented by the religious tribunal of the Sanhedrin, on one side, and by the sovereignty of King Herod, on the other. Between these authorities, and transcending both, is Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator of Judea who is charged with the garrison in Jerusalem. In the midst of these different authorities, a man is brought to the Sanhedrin under a charge of violating the Jewish religious laws; after a hearing a decision “is made to execute this man, Jesus of Nazareth.” However, having no power to act on this decision, the man must be brought before the Roman authority Pilate, who is the only authority invested with the power to confer on this decision an official sanction that will result in the execution of this man. Upon questioning this man, initially Pilate finds no claim that could support the exercise of his right to kill; basically, Pilate does not identify Jesus as “an enemy of Rome.” Although he has become a popular religious leader, he has not incited war or claimed for himself jus belli, which would place him in the position of a sovereign enemy. At the same time, Pilate perceives a tricky situation among his own politeuma, and so he defers his own decision to the Jewish king, Herod. In other words, he grants a “state of exception” to Herod, and this implies that Pilate temporarily gives to Herod the power of capital punishment but only to exercise in this concrete situation and in this case only. However, Herod perceives the trap set for him and redirects this authority back to Pilate, invoking the terms of Roman law that it would be a violation of his own authority to exercise this power even just once. Pilate is once more at a loggerheads and decides once more to exercise a state of exception and to offer an actual “enemy of Rome,” one of the Sikarites (so-called freedom fighters or terrorists) who has committed political murder and who was already under Pilate’s ban of death, thinking that the people would agree with him concerning who is the greater enemy of Caesar and spare the life of Jesus from this decision. According to the narrative of John, the people choose the other man, and the elders threaten that if he does not condemn Jesus, then he will prove himself to be “no friend of Caesar” (John 19:12).6

According to the different versions of the episode from the gospel literature, various new evidence is brought in to justify this decision, including that Jesus ordered the people to stop paying taxes and that some people have been calling Jesus “King of the Jews,” which would directly violate Roman rule, since the people already have King Herod, who has been identified by Roman authorities as the only legitimate sovereign personality of the people by blood. Thus, fearing that a popular appearance of a second king, a king identified as the return of the archaic personality of David, who would liberate Israel and restore her sovereignty under God’s rule rather than Caesar’s, Pilate agrees under the weight of this new piece of evidence to identify Jesus of Nazareth as an enemy of Rome and to order his execution outside the gates of the city, along with other criminals and enemies of the domestic peace, or Pax Romanum. According to the legend, therefore, Jesus is crucified and one of the garrison soldiers nailed a placard above his corpse bearing the sentence IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM (also translated into Greek and Hebrew) as the name of the capital offence.

From this example we might immediately confirm the validity of Schmitt’s thesis that the power of the state rests on the various mechanisms that flow from jus belli, including the legal–juridical power to rule in the case of identifying the enemy who is subject to the sentence of death. And yet, the very nature of the example already reveals a “state of exception” that could not logically be assumed to apply to all incarnations of the state, either past or present, given the fact that this example belongs to a particular imperial formation, which one would expect might only be applied to situations of colonization, occupation, or territories secured and administered as “tributes” of war. Of course here what I am implying has already been suggested by Marx (and can be found encrypted in Schmitt as well), that the theory of the modern state is thoroughly derived from the juridical and political institutions adapted from the period of the Roman Empire, including the exclusive reservation of the right to make war, and that the personality of sovereignty is no longer a “temporary state of exception” (in a situation of colonization or postbellum occupation) but rather should be regarded as a permanent feature of sovereign state power. Perhaps this would go a long way in explaining the contamination between the two senses of conflict noted above, between pólemos and stásis, as well as various confusions that occur between the determinations of the public and private enemy but particularly the confusion of the form of violence pertaining to the inside/outside—that is, between internal and external precincts of the polis, the former being subject to the dialectic of the political and the latter being circumscribed as belonging to the conditions of total war against one who is judged to be “a natural enemy of the state.” For example, in a post-9/11 world, it might serve to outline the archaic imperial grounds of the various justifications for war made by the Bush administration against an “enemy” who, according to the definition offered by Schmitt, has decisively demonstrated “the readiness to die and to unhesitatingly kill its enemies.”7 Ironically, according to Schmitt’s own logic, if the concept of the political can be understood to appear in its purest and most threadbare sense in the current “war on terror,” it is because any moral sense of evaluation (i.e., that of a “just war”) must be assumed to already express a polemical or oppositional meaning and cannot be employed theoretically or scientifically to grasp the truth of the situation.

Again, it is from this “concrete situation” that we might now return to the original context of The Republic, where the determination of civil conflict (stásis) is set apart from a more violent opposition with a “natural enemy”: the war (pólemos) between the Greek and the “barbarian” (barbaros). In other words, the character of the friend–enemy distinction can only emerge from within the Greek polis in which there is a tacit identity that unifies opposites in the form of conflict and that can then be submitted to the specific labor of the dialectic to unify opposites on the basis of a produced recognition of identity. This distinction can only occur among Greeks, or between Greeks, and can never be extended to encompass the form of antagonism between Greek and barbarian, who Plato defines as “one who is naturally an enemy.” This is a point that Schmitt notes in passing early in The Concept of the Political, and it is odd that he does not spend any time dealing with the contradiction that it implies.8 This is because the practical decision concerning “who is the enemy” in the case of the barbarian does not belong to the concept of the political but occurs “naturally” and thus remains outside it (just as the Greek term refers to the lawless area outside the precinct of the city). For Plato, according to Schmitt’s note, it was unthinkable for such an antagonism to occur between civil identities, since “a people cannot be at war with itself,” which is why civil war may not be understood as a creative conflagration (or the creation of a new sovereign people) according to Plato’s argument. The barbarian, however, names a “natural enemy,” either through inheritance or designation, and of course, Plato here is referring to the Persians who are the natural enemies of the Greeks. The very existence of the barbarian is a natural antithesis to everything Greek; such an antithesis cannot be resolved politically but only by total war that seeks to “exterminate all the Brutes!” according to the famous line by Colonel Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.9 This would seem to imply, however, that the friend–enemy distinction is secondary to this more archaic determination of the opposition Greek–Barbarian: as an “exception” that must be excluded from any purely political determination of civil hostility, even though it may continue to persist as a “natural metaphor” that can be employed in a polemical sense of “winning the hearts and minds.” Therefore, given the nonpolitical origin of the friend–enemy grouping, rather than attempting to erect a pure concept of the political on the grounds of an impure distinction (which is already present in Plato), perhaps instead we should question the basis of this “other enemy” who arrives by nature and who never belongs to the dialectic of the political as such.

It is at this point that we now turn to Derrida’s relentless attack on Schmitt’s purity of the concept of the political in his deconstruction of all of Schmitt’s claims to purify the term “politics” from every weakened, mixed, abstract, and metaphorical sense (economic, religious, aesthetic, and even moral). In the several commentaries on Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship, Derrida argues that these claims are founded on an impure presupposition (if not prejudice) of “the political as such” in a Platonic sense. This is most clearly argued in a note that appears in his chapter “On Absolute Hostility,” where Derrida recounts the transcript of Schmitt’s interrogation by the American prosecutor at Nuremburg, Professor Robert Kempner. When asked about a sentence in which Schmitt asserts that “Jewish authors” were not responsible for the creation of a theory of space (Raun), nor indeed for “the creation of anything at all,” Kempner asks: “Do you deny that this passage is in the purest Goebbels’ style?” Schmitt replies, “In its intent, method, and formulation, it is a pure diagnosis . . . a scholarly thesis that I would defend before any scholarly body in the world.”10 Here we see the word “pure” employed in Schmitt’s own discourse in a manner similar to how it is used not only in The Concept of the Political but also with regard to Schmitt’s original intent, method, and formulation in this scholarly work. It would seem that this scene, to Derrida’s mind at least (and here I am only speculating), has so contaminated the usage of this term as to make suspect any claim to the neutral (i.e., scientifically objective, or “purely diagnostic”) status of his discourse. As Derrida writes: “He [Schmitt] would wish—it is his Platonic dream—that this ‘as such’ should remain pure at the very spot where it is contaminated.”11 It is no accident, then, that Derrida frequently evokes “a Schmittian-style discourse” (perhaps an allusion to the previously cited phrase by Kempner, “in the purest Goebbels’ style”).

Recalling again the passage in Plato’s Republic on which Schmitt’s own argument heavily relies, where Plato attempts to exclude the stranger from the boundaries of the polis, Derrida alludes to the long tradition of historical scholarship on this passage to show that Plato is here himself engaged in a polemic, or diatribe, one that seeks to remove the political possibilities of real war from “civil war.” As Schmitt himself acknowledges in a note on the passage, “Civil war is only a self-laceration and does not signify perhaps that a new state or people is being created.”12 As Derrida rightly observes, “The purity of the distinction between stásis and pólemos remains in the Republic a paradigm, accessible only to discourse.”13 The conceptual distinction is only accessible through the metaphors that Plato employs to establish the difference between “killing the enemy” and “self-laceration.” In other words, for Plato civil war is tantamount to an act of misrecognition or misidentification in which one thinks one is aiming at an enemy only to shoot oneself instead. In politics as in war, the problem of “friendly fire” is an ever-present threat, and it is crucial to know “who the enemy is” and practically “how to recognize the other who is the enemy” in order to avoid mistaking the enemy for oneself (or one’s friend). To assist in this process of identification, Plato employs the analogy of the barbarian (or one “who is an enemy by nature”) in order to orientate this distinction outward in an appropriate direction, away from the polis, and also, metaphorically or poetically, away from one’s own body or the body proper of the people itself and toward the foreign body of the hostis. In other words, Plato employs the paradigm of “barbarian vs. Hellene” to assist his Greek audience in conceptually orienting this distinction between proper and improper identification, even though he then worries about the metaphorical properties of this analogy when applied to antagonisms internal to the polis. Returning to Schmitt’s use of this identification and for the mechanism of identification at the basis of the political decision of “who is the enemy?” how can this purely political determination be made on the basis of an analogy to one “who is the natural enemy?” which is to say, on the basis of an impure, prepolitical determination? Race would only be one concept that has emerged in the modern and colonial world on the basis of this analogy, perhaps in order to orient social antagonisms toward a foreign body, but others no less problematic have preceded it. In fact, we know that the entire history of the concept of the political is plagued by the inappropriate, or metaphorical, uses of this analogy, especially in the politico-strategic uses of “the natural enemy” up to and including the strategic use deployed by Marx and Engels when they identified the bourgeoisie as the natural enemy of the proletariat. Perhaps this is enough to throw into sharp relief Derrida’s criticism of Schmitt’s constant claim of purifying the concept of the political from all abstractions (by which he means of all weak analogies) and the friend–enemy concepts from all metaphor and symbol, when the concept of the enemy is impure from the start—that is to say, a bastard concept.

In concluding my brief observations, one would naturally want to ask, what of the friend in all of this? Of course, if I have spent a lot of time talking about Schmitt’s enemy concept, this is because the enemy naturally comes first in the order of determination, and even in Plato the clear identification of the enemy helps to determine the direction in which one will look for one’s friends: the friend dwells inside the city, close to one’s own proper body, or one’s kind, toward whom one may bear a certain envy that even approaches enmity (in a psychological sense) but doesn’t approach hostility or open warfare. In other words, beginning with the “concrete situation” of the enemy, we are led in a certain direction toward the friend, but the identity of the friend remains equally abstract, either deferred to a future when one has complete practical knowledge concerning who all of one’s friends are or deflected to a private and interior space that dwells closest to one’s own body (in its very nakedness), where the friend assumes a nonpolitical determination of proximity with the self. Perhaps this sense of privation, which surrounds the identity of the friend almost like an aura, is constitutive of the concept as well. And yet, is friendship the result of the same forms of identification by which the enemy is determined, or is it the case that in the paradigm of the friend–enemy only one term is more concrete and recognizable than the other? Moreover, we know that the modern state has developed a vast and constantly self-updating technology of identification (from the issuing of papers, birth certificates, social security numbers, passport photos, verified signatures and fingerprints, digital passwords, retinal scans, DNA encodings, etc.), which, according to Schmitt’s thesis, are all telescoped onto the friend–enemy grouping. And yet, is there not a fundamental dissymmetry in the history of corollary technology for the identification of the friend? If such technologies exist, I am not certain what these might be—what or who operates them? Perhaps as a result of this lack of equivalent development by the institutions of state power, the concept of the friend remains no less of an abstraction, but for different reasons. For while in every given political society, today or historically, there is a general agreement (or consensus) concerning “who is the enemy?” there can only be multiple and highly variable responses to the question “who is the friend?” Perhaps this is Schmitt’s basic premise as to why in the friend–enemy grouping the enemy always appears more “concrete,” more knowable, than the friend, and for that reason it is more useful for political differentiation—useful, as I have underlined, in a practical manner, as a form of political praxis. Therefore, the enemy is always a “public enemy” who can become the subject of state propaganda and revolutionary treatises alike; whereas the friend always remains a nebulous and completely “underdeveloped” concept.

This is the very problem that Derrida invokes in the following passage from the chapter “In Human Language, Fraternity,” where he asks, “If a politics of friendship rather than war were to be derived, there would have to be agreement on the meaning of ‘friend.’ However, the signification of ‘friend’ can only be determined from within the friend/enemy opposition.”14 What Derrida is calling our attention to in this passage is that the signification of the term “friend” is itself fated to remain abstract within a system—linguistic, juridical, and social—that is ordered by the nearly univocal agreement of the term “enemy” (der Feind). In other words, it is not that the friend suffers from a lack of signification, but rather from too much signification, which is determined in various different manners such as individualistic, subjective, intuitive, culturally relative, probabilistic, spontaneous, and overdetermined. Here we might turn briefly to the philosophy of Deleuze in order to diagnose the failure of the concept of the friend to achieve the sense of a “concrete situation” in the Schmittian sense. Again, we must note in Schmitt that the literalness of the enemy designation exactly corresponds to the concreteness of the political signification; war (pólemos), whether virtual or actual, is precisely the point from which all social divisions are ordered into a hierarchy in which the state merely emerges as the operator of the most concrete realization of the friend–enemy designation. Today, from the popular culture of science fiction, we can only imagine that peace will be possible with the appearance of an enemy who threatens the life of the species, and yet this can only be viewed as the projection of our own peculiar friend–enemy concept onto other forms of life. It is not by coincidence that in the genre of science fiction the contemporary hero of these popular myths usually justifies the act of extermination with some ideological version of anthropocentrism, racism, speciesism, or even sexism, in the same language as earlier historical representatives. For example, in response to the moral claim that appears in Aliens, “You can’t just choose to exterminate an entire species,” one of the protagonists exclaims: “Yeah, just watch me!” In other words, “exterminate them all!”

Here I simply point to these two forms of abstraction that surround and determine the concepts of both the friend and the enemy, which should not be considered as an opposition of two pure social identities but rather as two forms of social differentiation of self and other—according to Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, one molar and the other molecular. It is clear that the “enemy” is molar in the sense that it appears as the most abstract determination (i.e., lacking individuation) of both the self and the other. According to Schmitt, Hegel conceived of the concept of the enemy in its purest sense as “the negation of otherness in the self.” The enemy, therefore, would be the site of an undifferentiated otherness, which would be stripped of all its traits of individuation save one: that of being opposed to an equally undifferentiated self. Thus, the enemy is the most reductive and abstract form of differentiation, a differentiation that lacks the character of individuation and inclusion, which is to say, lacks the characteristics of a multiplicity. This is why the enemy is always one, and all the traits of individuality can be submerged behind the appearance of this opposition. The enemy does not have a particular face (only a general and indiscriminate one), and likewise the enemy does not speak (at least, the expression of an enemy is not individual and its speech is only undifferentiated hatred). The enemy stands for the nothingness in the self and in the world; therefore, in facing the enemy, I only glimpse the force of negation that threatens to reduce the self and the world to the same nothingness.

As we know from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, “the face” is anterior to the self-reflexive identity of the ego with the other, either as the coexistence of two terms in a “logical unity” or as the subject of “transcendental apperception” as in phenomenological intentionality (i.e., “consciousness of”). Therefore, ethical difference can only be phrased in the accusative mode, which is derived from intersubjective space that is primordially asymmetrical; it is only in this manner that it is introduced as not only severely restricting the ego’s own freedom and self-presence but also making possible and even provoking the two extreme poles of erotic obsession (eros) and destructive violence (abaddon). Accordingly, first, for Levinas it is the very appearance of the face that is not only responsible for provoking violence but also offers the only possibility of peace; second, as radically “unthematizable” (for example, as a generalizable sign of recognition that belongs to humanity), the face is always prone to misrecognition, distortion, and even “perversion” (foregrounding Derrida’s observation, which I return to in the next chapter, that any claim of hospitality is “an irreducible pervertibilty”).15 This is because the very form of egoistic recognition always flows from the self to the other, a polarity that cannot be reversed except in the recognition of a form of alterity that cannot be incorporated in the ego’s own substance; however, this alterity is perceived as a limit to the ego’s own desire for freedom, as a “hostage-situation,” and thus incites the primordial urge on the part of the conscious ego to withdraw from the world of others and to close itself up in its own substance.

In both his earlier and the later works, in his analysis of the relationships brought about by eros as a “pathos of distance in proximity” where the asymmetrical nature of this duality of beings is maintained, Levinas also locates the primary asymmetrical relationship between the enemy and the friend as determining key political concepts in which the asymmetrical formations belonging to racism and ethnocentrism are determined as well.16 Consequently, in the same but opposite measure that the failure of communication in love constitutes the alterity of the other as an object of obsession and desire, equally the failure of communication in hostility and warfare constitutes the presence of the stranger qua enemy as the object of impersonal hatred and derision. In both subjective states the other appears as the one who holds me hostage and persecutes me, and in the case of the latter the ego can only hope to escape by fusing its own being with the anonymous and impersonal power of the collective, the group, the nation, the people, or the race. “To this collectivity of comrades,” Levinas writes earlier in De l’existence à l’existant (1947), “we contrast the I-you collectivity which precedes it. It is not participation in a third term—intermediate person, truth, dogma, work, profession, interest, dwelling, or meal; that is, it is not communion.”17 Thus, paradoxically, the idea of fusion that informs the “we” of collectivity around a common object, a work, or a third term is always in danger of forgetting and potentially betraying the social relation to others, later defined in terms of passivity that is not simply passive, of a vulnerability that is not merely sentimental, and, finally, of a responsibility that is not merely moral. Recalling Deleuze’s conceptual persona of a “Socrates who becomes Jewish,” we might now define this more explicitly as Levinas’s ethical strategy, which takes the form of a radical wager (perhaps even more powerful than Blaise Pascal’s wager for the early modern Christian): to install in the very seat of subjectivity, in the heart of the ego, the obligation to the stranger-guest as a fundamental limit to sovereignty of the ego, a limit that is defined in terms of fundamental passivity, obsession, and desire.18

Yet in approaching the question of “who is the friend?” is not the seemingly spontaneous recognition of the friend from an infinite number of possible different social relationships an actual instance of a concrete multiplicity? This would depend, however, on the factors that predetermine the possibility of friendship, and we must recognize that this apparent spontaneity is always already limited by a number of prior determinations. In a short philosophical text on the nature of free will, Gottfried Leibniz wrote the following on the limitations of spontaneity and predetermination:

Although we act with spontaneity, in that there is a principle of action within us, and we are not without life and do not need to be pushed around like puppets, and although our spontaneity is conjoined with knowledge and deliberation or choice, which makes our actions voluntary, nevertheless we must acknowledge that we are always predetermined, and apart from our previous inclinations and dispositions, new impressions from objects also contribute to incline us, and all these inclinations joined together and balanced against contrary inclinations never fail to form a general prevalent inclination. For as we are dependent on the universe, and as we act in it, it must also be the case that we are acted upon. We determine ourselves, and are free insofar as we act, and we are determined by external things and as it were subject to them insofar as we are acted upon. But in one way or another we are always determined on the inside or from the outside, that is to say more inclined to what happens or what will happen than to what will not.19

Following the logic in this passage, can we conclude that friendship is predetermined in the same way? In other words, the principle of spontaneity by which we appear to choose friends is already found to be determined “from the inside or from without.” Leibniz calls this form of determination an inclination, and I am particularly interested in the last sentence where Leibniz states that we are more inclined to what happens or what will happen than to what will not. This would appear to imply that friendship is a particular form of social habit that already predetermines the concrete situation of recognizing “who is the friend,” and we must admit that in the usual experience of friendship, especially intimate ones, there is a constant and often pathetic assertion of homogeneity (i.e., of like attracts like) that is more inclined to what happens than to what will not. (This is also confirmed by Cicero, who observes that friendship is bordered by so many dangers that “the avoiding of them [requires] not only wisdom but also sheer good luck.”20) From a Leibnizian perspective, therefore, all our friends are predetermined in a manner that also reduces the importance of individuation as a differential factor, since the one who is my friend and the one who will become my friend are, if not the same person, then at least two expressions of the same inclination. Given that such an inclination is both preindividual and unconscious, this is what Deleuze and Guattari define by the term “molecular.”

Nevertheless, as discussed above, even this rudimentary form of social differentiation may still be far preferable to the enemy distinction that reduces the social to one form of opposition, since the distinction operated by friendship still produces the concrete situation of multiple affirmations, even though this situation does not result in an absence of conflict (stásis). Perhaps this is because friendship must be understood as a particular kind of social conflict that is usually experienced as its own negation, or to employ Hegel’s terminology again, as a kind of self-negated otherness. To put it more starkly, friendship is the concrete social experience of the negation of the self as a unique, isolated, and purely solipsistic existence; friends must ally themselves against the existence of such a self through the production of common experience. Perhaps this is why in the practice of friendship there is so much discourse on the mutual affirmation of the same tastes, the same opinions, the same culture; moreover, many occasions are created in order to afford the opportunity of mutual affirmation: dinner parties, concerts, outings of various kinds. Friends will go out into the country to enjoy the landscape together, the first one saying, “isn’t that beautiful?” and the next one repeating, “yes, isn’t that beautiful?” This is the conceptual labor of friendship in creating a homonymy of taste, leading to the specific production of a sphere of culture that defines the association between friends, which I think is one of the root meanings of sensus communis. Here I believe we have found again the two senses of stásis evoked above in reference to Plato: the kind of conflict that determines the concept of the friend is the mutual conflict against an otherness defined as the separate or isolated existence of the self (or what Sartre defined as the struggle against “the dangerous reef of solipsism.”)21 The enemy would then be the name of a social existence reduced to its barest abstraction, bereft of all other social relations, as well as all forms of dependency and for this reason, either condemned to death, to nothingness, or to wandering outside the limits of community, the stranger determined as the barbarian or the foreigner.