Western self-love is structurally founded on hatred of the enemy-other

Evidence

Being sentenced to a life of labor precisely means labor against the self, against what man is. The finitude of life, inescapable nakedness, and moral failure are enmeshed with endless labor, the labor of hating the self. And the more hatred there is, the more domination is exercised upon that self, or on a substitute for it. In the deist and secular continuum of the Western tradition, issuing from a biblical seed, there is no knowledge without domination. Always clothed with politics and the political, knowing the self is the summation of knowing the enemy. The Schmittian adage “tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who [what?] you are” eviscerates any Christian concept of love, relegating it at best to the simplified individual and private act. Collective identity is thus an identity of bellicosity and hate, for by Schmitt’s own logic (the implications of which he does not seem to realize) the “love” of the self is structurally grounded in the hate of the other, always the enemy. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 179

Categorization

• XREF: The Schmittian friend-enemy distinction and its role in Western identity connects to Schmitt’s own work on the political and to broader postcolonial critiques of Western self-definition.
• DEFINE: Clarifies how Schmitt’s enemy principle logically implies that self-love requires a hated other, even against Schmitt’s own intentions.