Enemies at Home: A Political-Theological Approach to Civil War

After 9/11, Paul Kahn theorized the difference between the criminal and the enemy as involving law and sovereignty: the criminal opposes the law, the enemy opposes the sovereign. Now, Kahn turns to the case of civil war in conversation with Schmitt and Hobbes. Civil war signals a gap between law and popular sovereignty: citizens no longer perceive their collective authorship in the law. This gap is closed when a revolution succeeds in constituting a new state, a new legal order retaining a trace of sovereign presence. Such a movement traverses the categories of criminal and enemy. Rather than the state emerging from “nature,” one state replaces another. Friends become enemies in this process of revolutionary birth, or civil war, generating the force of sovereignty. This dynamic may haunt us as long as we invest our politics with an ultimate meaning.