Culture and politics both rest on inescapable critical judgement and division.

Evidence

For missing in this bifurcation is a sense of culture as a battlefield, that divides its protagonists. That is the plane of politics, understood as a space in its own right. We do not have to yield to sectarian temptations within Marxism, or overheated conceptions of an avant-garde, to realize this. Such an understanding goes back to Kant, for whom philosophy itself was constituted as a Kampfplatz — a notion in the air of the German Enlightenment, whose military theorization came a generation later in Clausewitz. It was a major thinker of the Right who gave consequent expression to this emphasis in the field of politics. Schmitt’s definition of the political as inseparable from a division between friend and foe is, of course, not exhaustive. But that it captures an ineliminable dimension of all politics is scarcely to be doubted; and it is that sense of the political which bears on the culture of the postmodern. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Schmitt’s friend/foe distinction connects to the broader intellectual history of the political — links to the reader’s wider debate framing of postmodernism, and echoes Kant’s Kampfplatz lineage. — connects to: Politics is living with tension rather than postponing criticism
• DEFINE: Traces definitional lineage of the political as battlefield from Kant’s Kampfplatz through Clausewitz to Schmitt.

Broader Connections

• Politics is living with tension rather than postponing criticism #corroborates (0.75)