Western thinking about the enemy fused theology with politics into one question

Evidence

We go to war, then, with the enemies, hostis or inimicus, each divided between a theological failure to think these peculiar love objects and the political and strategic obligation to fight (and even hate) them. With Aquinas, the question of the enemy becomes thoroughly sedimented as a theologico-political question, as the question of the theologico-political. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 199

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Echoes Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology and the concept of the theologico-political as a single analytic category.
• SEED: The insight that ‘the enemy’ is not a purely military or political but theological category could seed an essay on how modern concepts of enmity retain sacred scaffolding.

Related

• The enemy fuses theological love-object and political target into one problem (similarity 0.92)
• The categories of Jew and Arab jointly constitute the Western concept of the enemy (similarity 0.85)
• Political thought asks how to fight the enemy, never what the enemy is (similarity 0.85)
• Distinctions between enemies are actively performed, not naturally given (similarity 0.84)
• The enemy concept resists any single disciplinary location, making its history near-impossible (similarity 0.84)
• Theologians endlessly theorized enemy-love while evading who exactly the enemy is (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval theology theorized enemy-love while never asking who the enemy actually is (similarity 0.84)
• Theological reflection defines the enemy through the lover, not the enemy himself (similarity 0.84)
• Three theological traditions each transformed the concept of the enemy. (similarity 0.83)
• The enemy is not definable solely through war (similarity 0.82)
• Enemy relations historically include impulses beyond mere hostility (similarity 0.82)
• The enemy question must be separated analytically from the question of war (similarity 0.82)
• The enemy resists ontological definition despite asserting a threatening essence (similarity 0.82)
• Schmitt alone established the friend-enemy distinction as the condition of the political (similarity 0.81)
• The enemy vanished from Western political philosophy almost from its start (similarity 0.81)