Hobbes turned the abstract enemy into every individual human being

Evidence

As Carl Schmitt remarks, however, Hobbes would soon “make the concrete enemy evident.” He would soon reconsider this abstraction of “office, or quality” and bring the enemy closer to earth (“the Enemy and his kingdome must be on Earth also,” ch. 38, 314), closer to an “lndividuall person.” Ultimately, Hobbes makes of every such individual (or at least of every human being) an enemy. In the well-known war of all against all, the most insistent name of “the Enemy” is, precisely, that of enemies. “That in a condition ofWarre, wherein every man to every man, for want of a common Power to keep them all in awe, is an Enemy, there is no man can hope by his own strength, or wit, to defend himselfe from destruction (ch. 15, 102). But let us proceed slowly, for in spite of the apparent dominance of his name, the enemy withdraws. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Connects the political-theology of the enemy in Hobbes to the Schmitt invocation of the friend/enemy distinction foundational to the antisemitism-Islamophobia cluster elsewhere in this batch. — connects to: Hobbes’s state of nature reframed humans as atomized, appetitive competitors — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 812