Between the 18th and 19th centuries the enemy became classified as inhuman

Evidence

The link between war and the enemy constitutes a central and difficult moment of Carl Schmitt’s reflections. (Schmitt after all both affirms and suspends that link, asserting that no “actual” fighting need take place between enemies who challenge each others’ very existence.) Elaborating on the history of European law, Schmitt came closest to write a history of the enemy in Der Nomos der Erde----most notably, perhaps, in his argument that “Roman law was able to distinguish the enemy, the hostis, from the robber and the criminal” (Schmitt, Nomos, 22), his tracing of the emergence of the justus hostis, and, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the enemy as inhuman, the enemy as “Unmensch” (72); his descriptions of the criminalization of the enemy, tantamount to a “destruction of the concept of enemy” (93); and finally his famous claim to a joint depoliticization announced by the “sublation” of the concept of justus hostis fr~m theological and philosophical discourse (“der Begriff eines justus hostis, kann also … aufgehoben werden,” 143) and finally to the disappeance of the friend/enemy distinction described in Schmitt’s Concept of the Political If there is a concept of the enemy, it is no doubt in law that one could find its most consistent formulation. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 806 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humanism’s progress demoted animals to the inhuman, like racism after slavery. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 434; Justifying everywhere war requires reviving the archaic category of common enemies of humanity — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 830; European legal history transformed the enemy from justus hostis into the inhuman Unmensch. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 806

Broader Connections

• European legal history transformed the enemy from justus hostis into the inhuman Unmensch. #expands (0.95) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 806