Loving enemies erases the friend-enemy distinction entirely

Evidence

The commandment to love one’s enemies, moreover, installs a peculiar logic of momentous consequences. As Derrida explains, “where there can be an enemy, the ‘there must be the enemy,’ or the ‘one must love one’s enemies’ (seine Feinde lieben) transforms without delay enmity into friendship, etc. The enemies I love are my friends. So are the enemies of my friends. As soon as there is need or desire for one’s enemies, one can count only friends. Including the enemies, and inversely, here is the madness that threatens us.” Jesus’ mad commandment, the madness of a commandment to love one’s enemies indiscriminately, is already at work and “reverses, perverts and converts (good) sense, makes opposites slide into each other and ‘knows’ very well, in its own way, how the best of friends are the best of enemies … hence the worst.” Jesus’ commandment thus places us on the brink of madness, or, as Derrida puts it later, it places us “on the brink of a work of infinite reading.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Derrida’s friend/enemy collapse connects to Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction of the political, which the book elsewhere engages.