Distinctions between enemies are actively performed, not naturally given

Evidence

There is more at stake here than apparent contradictions (as if love and war were simply opposites). What is at stake is the integrity of the concept “enemy,” which is to say, in this case, its lack of integrity. The enemy is not one, as we saw (hence, love your enemies). The enemy must be legion, and it is this becoming-plural of the enemy that gives it a productive and dynamic dimension. The enemy which is not one must henceforth and in fact does come to belong to different spheres, which will increasingly have to be kept separate, that is to say, they will have to be actively separated-the difference between them affirmed or performed precisely because of an otherwise unacknowledged proximity. This is no empirical “error,” therefore, but the sedimentation of conditions that have brought about what appears to be an unbreachable (if ever-weakened) separation. The constat I want to make here is double. If, as Aquinas’s text would seem to show, there is no lexical integrity to the different terms used to refer to enemies, how are we to understand the success of the distinction between theological issues (“love thy enemies”) and political ones (war-just or not, holy or not-against politically and legally defined enemies)? At stake is the crucial distinction between the theological and the political, between jus divinus and civil or natural law, jus naturale, which articulates itself within the concept of the enemy. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 207

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The genealogical core: the theological-political division itself articulates within the concept of the enemy, so enemy-distinctions are constitutive rather than epiphenomenal. This is the load-bearing theoretical claim.
• XREF: Directly anchors the whole Islamophobia-theoretical-spine batch: the separation of theological from political enemy IS the structure that lets antisemitism and Islamophobia proliferate as distinct enemy figures.
• SEED: The claim that separations are ‘performed because of an otherwise unacknowledged proximity’ is a usable critical method for essays on how modern secular categories police what they depend on.