Enmity must be analyzed separately from war

Evidence

As I have already indicated, the question of the enemy must be addressed as distinct from the question of war. That, however, is of course not to say that the latter is irrelevant for an understanding of the former. In this context, it may therefore be important to note that commenting on Clausewitz, Andre Glucksmann describes war as a “work of intelligence” (Glucksmann, Discours de laguerre, 29). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1002 (#expands, via linked claim)

Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.” Thus Emmanuel Levinas who, from the beginning of Totality and Infinity, describes the violent opening of a space within which the question of the enemy at once emerges and vanishes. In this space of suspended morality~ the space and state of war, in which the enemy may be subject or object, presupposed or produced-the enemy has already drawn away, having traversed the distance opened, the eloignement produced by a rupture that does not signifY alterity. The enemy is not the other-and the movement by which the enemy vanishes into the distance (something that, neither recoil nor retreat, exceeds all strategy) is a movement that remains within the space of the same, there where what there is, what one catches sight of, is the permanent possibility of war. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 87 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As Derrida puts it in a different, but relevant context commenting on Schmitt, the question of the enemy “is no longer a theoretical question, a question of knowledge or of recognition, but first of all, like recognition in Hegel, a calling into question, an act of war. The question is posed, it is posed to someone; someone puts it to himself like an attack, a complaint, the premeditation of a crime, a calling into question of the one who questions or interrogates. It is posed to oneself in terms of a break into the other, or its breaching. One cannot question oneself on the enemy without recognizing him -that is, without recognizing that he is already lodged in the question” (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 162-63/F187-88) 23. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 999 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Political enmity exceeds both private hostility and the question of war; The enemy question must be separated analytically from the question of war — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 1002; Enmity is defined politically before it is acted upon violently — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 51 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• The enemy question must be separated analytically from the question of war #expands (0.97) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1002
• The enemy is distinct from the other and belongs to war #complicates (0.88) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 87
• Asking who the enemy is already constitutes an act of war #complicates (0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 999