Hegel defines the enemy as a self-posited ethical difference to be negated

Evidence

In an early and striking formulation that achieved the status of definition only in Carl Schmitt’s work, Hegel suggests that the enemy is difference. The enemy is an ethical difference, a difference of ethical life with itself posited by itself as something “to be negated,” ein zu Negierendes. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 406

In an early and striking formulation that achieved the status of definition only in Carl Schmitt’s work, Hegel suggests that the enemy is difference. The enemy is an ethical difference, a difference of ethical life with itself posited by itself as something “to be negated,” ein zu Negierendes. Hegel writes: … In its movement ethical life enters difference and cancels it; [its] appearance [is] the transition from subjective to objective and the cancellation of its antithesis. … This activity of production does not look to a product but shatters it directly and makes the emptiness of specific things emerge. The above-mentioned difference in its appearance is specific determinacy and this is posited as something to be negated. But this, which is to be negated, must itself be a living totality. What is ethical must itself intuit its vitality in its difference, and it must do so here in such a way that the essence of the life standing over against it is posited as alien and to be negated … A difference of this sort is the enemy, and this difference, posited in its [ethical] bearing, exists at the same time as its counterpart, the opposite of the being of its antithesis, i.e., as the nullity of the enemy, and this nullity, commensurate on both sides, is the peril of the batde. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 406

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Hegel’s distinctive definition of the enemy as internal ethical difference within a community.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the enemy is ethical life’s difference with itself — self-posited otherness — is dense and paradigm-reframing for understanding enmity as constitutive rather than accidental.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 406