The enemy is distinct from the other and belongs to war

Evidence

Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.” Thus Emmanuel Levinas who, from the beginning of Totality and Infinity, describes the violent opening of a space within which the question of the enemy at once emerges and vanishes. In this space of suspended morality~ the space and state of war, in which the enemy may be subject or object, presupposed or produced-the enemy has already drawn away, having traversed the distance opened, the eloignement produced by a rupture that does not signifY alterity. The enemy is not the other-and the movement by which the enemy vanishes into the distance (something that, neither recoil nor retreat, exceeds all strategy) is a movement that remains within the space of the same, there where what there is, what one catches sight of, is the permanent possibility of war. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 87

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core Levinasian distinction: the enemy is not the other; the enemy’s movement stays within the space of the same.