The enemy resists ontological definition despite asserting a threatening essence

Evidence

The enemy-is there one? Presenting all appearances of a substantial threat even when vulnerable, weak, or nonviolent, the inevitable outcome of a kind of essentialism, the enemy’s being enemy, the enemy’s essence, has managed to assert itself (“who is the enemy?”) while paradoxically eluding the ontological apparatuses of scientific discourses of the most varied forms-What, after all, is an enemy? Could one argue-but on what secure basis?-for the semantic specificity (but in what language?) of”enemy” over against “opponent,” “adversary,” “rival,” or “antagonist”? — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 380

Categorization

• QUESTION: The semantic distinction between enemy and opponent/adversary/rival/antagonist is opened but left unresolved — worth chasing in political theory and international law.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — the enemy asserts its essence while eluding every ontology — is a dense distillation of why enmity is politically foundational yet conceptually slippery.
• XREF: connects to: Things resist all relational designations humanity tries to impose on them.; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”