Political thought asks how to fight the enemy, never what the enemy is

Evidence

To the extent that this question-the question of the enemy-does, on occasion, emerge, it does so mainly as an institutional issue, made to attend to modes of behavior (“How to treat the enemy”), or modes of engagement (“How to fight, vanquish, or annihilate the enemy”), and finally, to modes of appearance (“faces of the enemy”) and identification (“Who is the enemy?”). The question of ontology-”What is the enemy?”-hardly surfaces, and when it does, as we will briefly consider in Chapter 3 (“De inimicitia”), it is only too quickly rendered almost ephemeral and a testimony to the vanishing, the drawing away of the enemy. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 77

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes operational/institutional questions about the enemy from the ontological question Anidjar will pursue.
• XREF: connects to: Radical transformation always requires drawing political frontiers against an adversary. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 533