Conventional Enmity vs. the "Enemy of Humanity"

Mikkel Thorup defines “conventional enmity” as the “ideal to which other enmities are measured.” This was the “great achievement of the nation-state era,” a relation of enmity between states who “recognize, fight and negotiate with each other.” The conventional enemy is recognized as an equal. Thus war is contained through international law and a “code of honor among combatants.”

The “total enemy,” on the other hand, is one whose status is “derived from being rather than action.” In racism, for example, one “exists before one acts,” thus making one’s qualification as an enemy “something one bears as a body” (Zygmunt Bauman).

Thorup discusses Carl Schmitt’s idea of the “enemy of humanity,” where the concept of enemy is “lifted from the concrete confrontation.” The aim of war is no longer to defeat a “present and actual enemy.” The battlefield is no longer geographically contained, and the duration of the war no longer temporary. Rather, the enemy is conceived as a global threat, and the war aim suddenly “concerns the whole world and is of global significance.”

Absolute enmity, Thorup says, is the “radicalization of real enmity,” where the goal is no longer concrete and limited, but “pervasive and universal.” Absolute enmity is enacted by “world aggressive actors fighting for an abstract notion of justice.” The goal is the “liberation of mankind.”

Hannah Arendt: Enmity Derived
from Being Rather than Action

Thorup examines the thinking of Hannah Arendt, who distinguished between the “real enemy,” on the one hand—who is held responsible for concrete actions or constitutes a concrete threat—and the “objective enemy,” on the other, where enmity is derived “from being rather than from actions.” The latter form of enmity generates a “pervasive hatred of everybody and everything.”

The constraints of real enmity reside in “making persons or groups responsible for specific actions.” Totalitarianism, however, defined enemies ideologically, independently of what they actually had done. Arendt observes that Jews in Nazi Germany and descendants of the ruling class in Soviet Russia were “not really suspected of any hostile action.” They had been declared enemies of the regime “in accordance with its ideology.”

With totalitarianism, we witness the “decline of real enmity based on the perception of real provocation.” The enemy is “no longer he or she that threatens one’s existence.” Rather, totalitarian states do not have enemies in the sense of opponents, but as “enemies till death.”

Thorup notes that Arendt “fails to explain the destructive drive of totalitarianism.” The limits of her argument derive from her “conception of the modern state as a guardian of life.” Committed to a view of the nation-state as beneficent, Arendt ultimately can only “look at the killing machines with horror.”

Foucault: Biopolitical Enmity

Thorup builds upon Robert Lifton, and especially Michael Foucault, to provide deeper insight into the dynamics of totalitarian mass murder. In The Nazi Doctors (1988), Lifton writes about “killing as a therapeutic imperative.” In the Nazi case, war ceased to be primarily outward and contained, but became “inward and permanent.”

The line between friend and enemy is drawn with “biological rather than political criteria.” War is not confrontation against an armed threat, but rather against a “pollutant,” an invisible threat coming “not from any open enemies, but from hidden carriers. Illness rather than opposition becomes the problem.”

In biopolitical enmity, the enemy is “named in biological and psychological terms,” and is “found within the social body.” The line “between an inside and an outside” becomes the “abnormal threatening the health of the community.” Racism means “permanent purification.”

Life and killing, according to this conception, are not in opposition. Rather, the death of the other—of the bad or inferior race—will “make life in general healthier and purer.” This is the meaning of “total war”: not to reach a modus vivendi with the enemy, but to eliminate him. Foucault explains in Society Must be Defended (2003):

The enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population. In the biopower system, killing is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat.

Destroying Life to Enhance Life

Thorup observes that it is not only the sheer enormity of the killings which confounds us, but the “near complete disconnect between danger and enmity which the totalitarian enemy exhibits.” The traditional concept of the enemy is that of someone “out to get us.” Often the enemies of totalitarian regimes, however, have done nothing to justify the fate meted out to them.

Foucault calls totalitarian extermination “vital massacres”—vital because the perpetuators believe they are “destroying life to enhance life.” Through Foucault, Thorup says, we begin to see what totalitarian planners were thinking: how it came to be that one could “kill on an industrial scale while singing the praises of vital life.”

Yet—having realized that totalitarian thinkers believed that the destruction of life enhanced life—do we really understand why they embraced and perpetuated such a belief? What was the logic—or rather the psycho-logic—connecting the destruction and enhancement of life?