Enemy relations historically include impulses beyond mere hostility

Evidence

Freud writes that “the impulses which [are] expressed towards an enemy are not solely hostile” (39/G330). Barely mentioning the word “enemy,” but attending to countless instances of Feindseligkeit, hostility, Freud comes perhaps closest to writing a history of the enemy-a history that, Freud shows, is not reducible to a history of enmity or hostility. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 435

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the book’s overall thesis about the Jew/Arab as enemy in Western thought, and to Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction in political theology.

Related

• An enemy relation is not reducible to hostility or enmity. (similarity 0.92)
• The enemy concept resists any single disciplinary location, making its history near-impossible (similarity 0.84)
• Schmitt alone established the friend-enemy distinction as the condition of the political (similarity 0.84)
• Theologians endlessly theorized enemy-love while evading who exactly the enemy is (similarity 0.84)
• The categories of Jew and Arab jointly constitute the Western concept of the enemy (similarity 0.83)
• Western thinking about the enemy fused theology with politics into one question (similarity 0.82)
• The love-of-enemy commandment marks a distinct and unexamined history. (similarity 0.82)
• The enemy vanished from Western political philosophy almost from its start (similarity 0.82)
• The enemy never achieved the status of a proper philosophical or political concept. (similarity 0.82)
• Loving the enemy becomes impossible when that enemy is God’s enemy (similarity 0.81)
• Europe’s concept of the enemy is structured by the Arab and the Jew (similarity 0.81)
• Freud collapsed enemy and neighbor into a single identity. (similarity 0.81)
• No academic or legal discipline has claimed the enemy as its proper object (similarity 0.81)
• Europe rendered its own role in the Jew-Arab enmity invisible to itself (similarity 0.81)
• Freud saw civilization itself as an adversary hostile to human alterity (similarity 0.81)