Hobbes presents the enemy as an ineradicable permanent threat to civil power

Evidence

A few pages into Leviathan, Hobbes first acknowledges that the enemy-or “the Enemy”-may well be a figment of one’s imagination, the result of dream production. “And that as Anger causeth heat in some parts of the Body, when we are awake; so when we sleep, the over heating of the same parts causeth Anger, and raiseth up in the brain the Imagination of an Enemy” (ch. 2, q). Hobbes is alreadyindicating that the question of status, the ontological or fictional “state of nature”-and thus the very existence of the enemy-may be less relevant than expected here, insofar as the enemy-every man as enemy, the enemy in everyman-is the result of passions or “appetites” that are supposed to be tamed by reason and, ultimately, left behind. The enemy withdraws, or so he should, and Hobbes clearly states that the end of men is, in fact, to seek peace, and to escape the “condition of war.” “The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men … [is] getting themselves out from that miserable condition ofWarre” (ch. q, 117), no longer to be enemies to each other. Yet invoking “the Outworks of the Enemy” in the first pages of Leviathan, Hobbes seems to consider that there is a persistence, indeed, a permanence of the enemy, which, in the form of “certain Texts of Holy Scripture,” threatens civil society, or, more precisely, “Civill Power.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 353

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The double move — enemy as imaginary passion that should be left behind, yet persisting as permanent scriptural ‘outworks’ threatening civil power — captures the oscillating status of the enemy that Anidjar builds his whole genealogy on.