The enemy is plastic, an unstable unity of agency and passivity
Evidence
- Here emerges, perhaps, what can be called, after Malabou, the “plasticity” of the enemy as the “originary unity of agency and passivity, of spontaneity and of receptivity” (Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel, 249). The enemy, one could say, is “plastic”-that is to say also, explosive. It would demand therefore what Malabou refers to as an “explosive reading.” The necessity of a distinction between activity and passivity is, of course, a political question. Kant, for example considers it to be constitutive of the political concept of citizen. Finding its point of departure in the “quality” of free will, Kant writes that this quality “requires a distinction between active and passive citizens” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, §46, §92). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 856
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces Malabou’s ‘plasticity of the enemy’ as a concept: originary unity of agency and passivity, deployed for the political analysis of who counts as citizen.