This is the first in a pair of two sessions on the figure of the enemy. Carl Schmitt famously insisted that politics relies on the friend-enemy distinction, and later theorists such as Chantal Mouffe have harnessed this claim in service of democratic theory. Whereas some religious traditions gesture toward nonviolence as an ideal, the polarization of contemporary politics suggests that the figure of the enemy retains a powerful force.
The presentations in these sessions will revisit the history of reflection on the enemy in order to ask how it illuminates political conflicts that we face today - whether in relation to migration, racialized violence, and the conflict between religious communities.
In response to the question “Who are you?”, directed at Carl Schmitt during his 1945-47 incarceration, he returned to his jurisprudential foundation and used his friend-enemy axiom to exculpate his self from any criminal guilt and moral responsibility. The theorem of this “theorist beyond theology” cannot be reduced to a ‘pseudo-theological myth of the enemy’ (Groh) or a discourse on *Political Theology* (Meier). Rather it permits him to remain a Pharisees and enclosed in his idealist self (Bonhoeffer). To safeguard his *Gestalt*, Schmitt abstracted the objective from the subjective within juristic guilt and his official roles, and revised the beginning of conflict from Original Sin to Cain and Abel. This reinforced his concept of history as perpetual inter-human fight of dichotomist ideas and accepted a new domain in which the enemy becomes the new elite and friend, thereby betrays, and reinforces, his “sovereign” and devises a mechanism for ideological manipulations.
Why does the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom’s plan for the “De-Islamization” of the Netherlands include defunding wind energy? Why did Viktor Orban lump “demography, migration, and gender” into a single “great historic battle”? The global far right increasingly refuses to distinguish between its targets—queer and trans people, Muslims, immigrants, decarbonization, etc—instead seeing them as different faces of a single, kaleidoscopic enemy. This paper draws on Schmitt’s concept of the enemy, Freud’s theory of displacement, and Vamik Volkan’s large-group psychoanalysis to argue the far right’s collapsing of its various enmeties can best be understood as a displacement of death anxiety through secularized salvation theology. The very real threat of communal death posed by climate change or nuclear proliferation is repressed and returns in the various guises of a single fantasmatic enemy, whose vanquishing by sovereign violence is imagined to guarantee the eternal preservation of the nation.
Carl Shmitt’s assertion that the friend/enemy distinction is the foundation fo the political might be interpreted backwards, suggesting that where there is the political, there is enmity. The political, however, is not the only mode of relation produced by enmity. Emile Benveniste’s philological examination of the origin of the term hostis suggests that the Other is not only understood politically, but economically as well. As such, economy might equally suggest the presence of an enemy. The question that this paper will pose and seek to answer is whether enmity within the self might be helpfully understood as expressed economically, and if so, whether “the economic” remains the appropriate term or whether, as this paper will argue works by Georges Bataille suggest, an internal economy of friend/enemy can best be understood as constitutive of the erotic; thus suggesting that the erotic is indicative of an internal enemy.
In assessing the genealogical trajectories of modern political theological discourse leading up to Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, this paper will explore how both traditional and burgeoning approaches to thinking the katechon (i.e., the 'force that withholds’ the ‘mystery of lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7) might inform ways of theorising the proximity or coincidence between the anarchic and the messianic vis-a-vis the state and its administration. I therein ask of the eschatological significance of the concept of civil war and what a political theology of the latter might mean for the relationship between two terms which have fuelled the western machine of history: eschatology and economy. Today, the latter has become aimlessly totalised in the absence of its other, and so a new engagement between the two offers the potential to reveal and thus throw the archic fixations of contemporary economic life into relief.
| Paul W. Kahn, Yale University | paul.kahn@yale.edu | View |