This is the second 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.
This paper is an invitation to explore a post-liberation context focusing on the role of the enemy and enmity in the nation-building process driven by political-theological desires. Situating the research in the context of modern and contemporary (South) Korea, a former victim of colonization that has now become one of the neocolonial agents in the 21st century, this paper attends to the development of the theological concept of minjung—the people. In so doing, the lurking presence of the friend-enemy dichotomy will haunt the concept of minjung, which has once served to empower the Korean people in their fight toward liberation but which has also created a problem of racial discrimination and demarcation through the sense of ethnic chosenness. This paper will attempt to exorcise the ghostly presence of the enemy and to re-envision minjung theology to reclaim its spirit that privileges and prioritizes diversity—the true manifestation of minjung.
Chantal Mouffe's agonistic political theory bears a striking resemblance to a form of democratic practice that has attracted significant attention from political theologians in recent years, namely, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) in the tradition of Saul Alinsky. Both agonism and FBCO see the figure of the enemy as ineradicable within democratic life. Yet both also insist that when properly channeled, enmity can be a constructive force, provided it is not absolutized. At the same time, some recent work in political theology has sought to highlight key differences between agonism and FBCO, claiming the latter is better understood as a form of "common life politics." This paper places agonistic theory and FBCO in tensile dialogue with each other, to compare their respective approaches to enmity, and to ask what insights each might have to offer to contemporary political theology about the proper place--and potentially constructive role--of political conflict.
Carl Schmitt’s description of the political world, in which the friend-enemy distinction is foundational to the state, remains influential. For instance, Kelly Brown Douglas fills out this account by exploring the U.S. narrative of exceptionalism. However, while Schmitt asserts that political enmity serves to control the worst of human sinfulness, I argue that a closer look at the current U.S. context illuminates how the friend-enemy distinction in fact bolsters sinful tendencies. In particular, U.S. racialized political enmity relies on notions of essentialized innocence and problematic understandings of rituals of absolution. To explore this challenge, I first engage the work of Judith Gruber and Marika Rose, who examine the problem of white innocence and its maintenance through acts of anti-racist confession. I then look to M. Shawn Copeland and Katie M. Grimes, whose respective work illuminates the complex and demanding nature of sacraments and ultimately disrupts the enmity paradigm.