Schmitt left the link between sovereign exception and enemy unstated

Evidence

It would take a few more years for Schmitt to place the enemy at the center of his political theory in The Concept of the PoliticaL Insofar as he was continuing to reflect on sovereignty and putting the emphasis on a sovereign decision, however, Schmitt may not have felt the need to make it explicit that the sovereign decision (a decision over the “state of exception,” or, as Political Theology famously puts it: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” 5) had been translated into a decision over the enemy (Concept of the Political, 38). At any rate, as we discussed earlier, Schmitt never made explicit the connection between political theology and the concept of the enemy. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1111

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the intellectual bridge Schmitt’s own work implies between the sovereign decision on the exception and the political decision on the enemy, a connection his texts never state outright.
• QUESTION: Interesting that a scholar central to friend-enemy political theory never explicitly connected the exception decision to the enemy decision — worth tracing whether later critics (Agamben? Derrida?) reconstruct this link.