The enemy is knowable and constitutes a culmination of the knowledge drive.

Evidence

As I will argue, the question of the enemy is not reducible to the question of war, even if it is hardly independent from it, something that would be only partly addressed, if at a different level of analysis, by what Vilho Harle describes as “the current interests of peace researchers in culture, language and their relationship to the questions of peace and war.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 821 (#complicates, via linked claim)

For a scientist who would aspire to know everything about a phenomenon would dissolve it within the totality; and a man who would aspire to act upon the totality of the Universe would see the meaning of all action vanish. Just as the infinity spread out before my gaze contracts above my head into a blue ceiling, so my transcendence heaps up in the distance the opaque thickness of the future; but between sky and earth there is a perceptional field with its forms and colors; and it is in the interval which separates me today from an unforeseeable future that there are meanings and ends toward which to direct my acts. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 118 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Intelligence and knowledge-gathering define the enemy as knowable. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 388; Know thy enemy exposes the Enlightenment promise of knowledge as peace — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 381; The enemy persists as a readable text after having been historically present. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 373 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The enemy is not definable solely through war #complicates (0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 821
• Meaningful action requires finitude; total knowledge dissolves meaning. #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 118