Schmitt alone established the friend-enemy distinction as the condition of the political

Evidence

What may be no more than philological vagueness, and even a lack of philosophical rigor, remains dictated, perhaps even governed, by a vanishing, the insistence of a drawing away (which is not quite the absence) of the enemy from any, privileged, discursive sphere. Is the question of the enemy a philosophical, legal, or psychological question? Is it a culturally contained, even a historical and (finally?) a political one? Aside from Carl Schmitt’s attempt not so much to revive as to virtually establish the concept of the enemy and to locate the decision concerning the distinction between friend and enemy as the condition of the political, aside from Jacques Derrida’s groundbreaking reflections on the enemy in Politics of Friendship, there is very little to authorize or even enable the claim that one could ever write a history of the enemy. Thus, again, the enemy draws away, leaving behind the question “Why?” and perhaps also, “How?” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy concept is the hinge for how the enemy is theorized across political theology literature.