Know thy enemy exposes the Enlightenment promise of knowledge as peace

Evidence

The enemy thus exceeds the parameters of war and remains a persistent and, it seems, constant site of multiple imperatives-and perhaps first among them the imperative to know (“Know thy enemy!” -the promise or threat of the failure of Enlightenment, the constitutive failure of knowing and understanding as the sure path of peace)-all the while disrupting as well as establishing the legality of such urgent and essential cognitive tasks. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 381

Categorization

• XREF: The imperative to ‘know thy enemy’ as intrinsic failure of Enlightenment epistemology connects to the book’s earlier dismantling of the notion that understanding enemies brings peace.