No academic or legal discipline has claimed the enemy as its proper object

Evidence

Yet no discipline, no discursive or even legal instance has claimed or arraigned the enemy as its object, an enemy of its own and as its own. The enemy thus remains a permanent attribute (consider, however, that among the enemy’s most significant attributes, there is one that hardly applies to the enemy: the “mortal enemy” does not comment on the enemy’s “own” mortality), which is to say that the enemy remains an accident, a contingency of a no less indeterminate object or subject that always seems to deserve more attention. Indeterminate and disappearing, the enemy thus always emerges as new. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 399

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why has no discipline institutionalized the study of enmity, when war, peace, friendship all have dedicated fields? A puzzle worth chasing.
• SEED: Essay angle: the absence of ‘enemy studies’ as a discipline, and what that absence reveals about how scholarly fields select their objects.