The Enemy hostis Ch Draft

Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University / Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy On the Concept of the “Unjust Enemy” (hostis injustis) Abstract: Neither the concepts of peace and hospitality can be determined primarily by religious or ethical-moral ideas that have accrued temporally and historically to give content to these concepts; rather, they are “pure” juridical and legal concepts that must be deduced or inferred to belong to a doctrine of juridical Right. Accordingly, the concept of hospitality represents the quasi-legal right (or guarantee) of the stranger not to be treated as an enemy when traveling through a foreign territory; the concept of peace represents the fundamental state of internal security that is guaranteed by an original instrumental compact (oath, promise, treaty) with a neighbor in order that he may no longer be treated as an enemy. Both concepts are treated today in legal theory and international law under the general terms of “security,” or “international security.” In both situations, the designation of an “enemy” is derived from the incongruity between politics and morality, that is, when the justification for violence (the right “to kill”) is political rather than moral and often directly contradicts the ethical prescription of both religious and civil law, contradictions that form positive “states of exception” within international law which is made powerless to restrict or limit the right of nations to act in their own interest, often in concert or in alliance with other nations. As I will develop the concept of the “unjust enemy” hostis injustis or gerechter fiend, to compliment the previous concepts I developed in Philosophy After Friendship (2017) the fundamental issue that both examples address is the concrete determination of the enemy as a substantial modification of the prior social relations to the nomad stranger (perigrinus) and the neighbor (xenia). I will begin by invoking the fundamental Kantian axiom that should serve as either a signpost or warning sign on the road to perpetual peace: “Intuition without concepts is blind, concepts without intuition are empty.” According to this maxim we can easily determine the nature of the confusion that has constantly surrounded Kant’s proposal of perpetual peace like a great fog, and which continues to cloud any clear understanding of the idea today. This is because, owing to a dereliction in the source of our understanding itself, that is to say, experience (or rather, its absence in this case), our idea of perpetual peace either appears as either a blind intuition based on purely subjective feelings of pleasure and unpleasure (e.g., the end of strife and conflict replaced by a feeling of tranquility) or as a purely empty concept (a metaphysical abstraction). Moreover, this problem concerning the source of our understanding has been compounded by the many cultural, linguistic, mythopoetic, religious and/or moral representations that have been employed to conceal or cover over the initial dereliction caused by the complete absence of any legitimate source for representing this idea in actual, if not real, experience. Therefore, when one simply assumes the state of perpetual peace first proposed by Kant in his 1795 Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf is merely the expression of an utopian idealism, one has not really grasped the fundamental principle of Kant’s entire argument concerning the contradiction between natural biological desire and rational desire which finds and agreement or consensus in the spirit of law, but also its dialectical embodiment in the principle of right (which is also translated as justice). Hegel will later call this spirit of consensus at the basis of both right and law by the term “recognition,” which he says is the only state of civil society where political man (not merely biological man) will achieve complete “satisfaction,” which is also equated with universal recognition. Thus, the state of universal recognition is the promise of a civil society where every individual in his or her own particularity will receive “recognition” and thus be satisfied in his or being. Before this moment, however, there can only be endless strife, anxiety, conflict, even enmity from all the forms of nonrecognition that are worked out historically through the concrete dialectic between races, nations, and classes. According to this thesis, for example, one can easily understand the forms of “nonrecognition” represented by the invisible and silent populations of colonized and stateless subjects, etc. representing the concrete dialectic of this spirit of recognition working itself out in a negative form. Of course, even though the eternal war of the spirit that as first motivated by the division of self-consciousness into the unequal consciousness of master and slave, the end of history (or, the end of politics and the classless society as foretold by Marx and Engels), perpetual peace was not Hegel’s idea of the end of history represented by a universal and homogenous state, a point to which I will return to later in my commentary on the neo-Hegelian and Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojeve from his later correspondences with Carl Schmitt in 1956. Perhaps one way of framing the difference between the two ends of history first envisaged by Kant and Hegel is that in Hegel’s system Man (or self-consciousness) is the Subject, whereas for Kant he is more of a spectator, as well as the crooked material out of which the demiurge of Nature fashions her design of natural right using the material of self-interested desire, greed, social competition, and finally, war itself—ultimately leading “toward a state that only approximates perpetual peace. However, for Kant this would entail nothing less than the end of all war and the establishment of peaceful form of federation under in a cosmopolitical constitution of a new polity of government, although in a form that, once again, is fundamentally different from the Hegelian dialectical realization of a “universal and homogenous state.” However, to realize such a universal polity, this would first require a universal form of recognition of all concrete particulars, which Marx and Engels later identified with the idea of a classless society in which the conflict between all particulars and classes are “cancelled out” in one absolute form of social recognition, but which would thereby also “cancel out” any further need for “politics” which only serves a class-based society. Of course, this is the most speculative and utopian aspect of their early writings that were quickly censored by the history of Marxist thought, beginning with Lenin in 1916, but especially with the arrival of the universal and homogeneous state imagined by Stalin after the third international. Returning to the 1795 treatise, which has been subjected in the history of political philosophy to misinterpretation or derision, first, we must understand the unique and highly speculative form of the entire treatise was invented to illustrate the complete schematization of the concept of natural right to a point of maximal extension, as he earlier outlined in the first critique. At the same time, this expansion of the powers of the imagination must also be curtailed or restrained in order to not become a pure fantasy, or even a mythic delusion, and so it must also be accompanied by a dialectical method which is more Platonic in conception and not Hegelian, which is to say, by a “critique” of the various sources that the imagination uses to replace the empty concept with representation, and; in some cases, to prohibit or censor certain sources in representing the concept for the understanding, and ultimately in the interest of a “pure reason” by avoiding both illusion and error.As in the other writings from the last period of Kant’s philosophy, and in the context of the actual censorship of his writings on theology he addresses in the Conflict of the Faculties, we can immediately surmise that the sources that are “critiqued” in representing the idea of peace (as well as another fundamental idea I will speak to in a moment, which is the idea of universal hospitality) are the religious, moral, ethical or “philanthropic” representations of both concepts or ideas. “Here,” as Kant says at the beginning of the definite article on universal hospitality, “it is not a question of philanthropy but of right” (102). In other words, strict ly speaking, neither the concepts of peace and hospitality are not to be determined primarily by religious or ethical-moral ideas that have accrued temporally and historically to give content to these concepts; rather, they are “pure” juridical and legal concepts that must be deduced or inferred to belong to a complete and systematic doctrine of Right. As Kant expounds three years later in the Metaphysics of Morals, both concepts are determined to belong to a science of Right, which is followed by a science of Virtue that expounds the ethical concepts of duty and obligation; however, the principles must first be deduced and then established (or grounded) in a complete system of right and law, before their moral sense for the subject can be determined in the form of an Ethics. Accordingly, the concept of hospitality represents the quasi-legal right (or guarantee) of the stranger not to be treated as an enemy when traveling through a foreign territory; the concept of peace represents the fundamental state of internal security that is guaranteed by an original instrumental compact (oath, promise, treaty) with a neighbor in order that he may no longer be treated as an enemy. Both concepts are treated today in legal theory and international law under the general terms of “security,” or “international security.” In both situations, the designation of an “enemy” is derived from the incongruity between politics and morality, that is, when the justification for violence (the right “to kill”) is political rather than moral and often directly contradicts the ethical prescription of both religious and civil law, contradictions that form positive “states of exception” within international law which is made powerless to restrict or limit the right of nations to act in their own interest, often in concert or in alliance with other nations; however, the fundamental issue that both examples address is the concrete determination of the enemy as a substantial modification of the prior social relations to the nomad stranger (perigrinus) and the neighbor (xenia). “Concrete determination of the enemy…” This is the echo of the well-known phrase that Schmitt frequently employed with his friend-enemy dyad, which Derrida often criticized in his Politics of Friendship (1991) and elsewhere, but which I will here attempt to develop from the Kantian deduction or system of Right, which I will then place in a dialectical opposition with the Hegelian deduction of right as pure “political right,” which is more in keeping with the later theory of Schmitt (and Kojeve, as I will demonstrate in a moment). First, however,, to say that the concepts of peace and hospitality are purely juridical-legal concepts does not imply that they belong any existing legal codex of positive law, either civil law or in international law that defines the right of nations, which is why most definitions are strictly provisional or promissory, which is why their original “concrete determination” must be deduced from the pure principle of Right, which both Kant and Hegel claim to accomplish by different methods. Nevertheless, as Sternberg later concluded hundred after both Kant and Hegel (and exactly fifty years after Marx), “in the current state of the science [of jurisprudence] a fully satisfying definition of the concept of ‘Right’ is excluded” (Kojeve 9). Consequently, in the beginning of the first definitive article of Perpetual Peace, “The Civil Constitution of Every State should be Republican,” Kant outlines the three adjoining areas of positive law under the fundamental maxim that grounds the entire deduction of the principle of juridical right, which is later developed in the Metaphysics of Morals under the Doctrine of Right: “all men who can reciprocally influence one another must stand under some civil constitution” (92). However, first I would immediately underline that the more general postulate, which would be the condition of any determination of any action, either virtual or actual, being determined juridically either as a “wrong,” as an “injury,” or morally as an “evil” or an “injustice,” the constitution is not necessarily Republican. Rather, it only postulates some kind of civil constitution (including Monarchy and Despotism, even Totalitarianism, which is not absent some form of a juridical constitution) must exist as the necessary condition of any positive expressions or codex of legal rights. Moreover, general postulate of some form of civil constitution is further subdivided into these three areas: a civil constitution of law within a nation or territory (ius civitas); a law of nations in their external relations to one another (ius gentium), and finally, what is unique in Kant’s theory of right, a law of world citizenship in so far as all men are considered as citizens and therefore subjects of a universal state of humanity in external mutual relationships (ius cosmopoliticum). Of course, as the entire argument of Perpetual Peace, but especially the preceding preliminary articles that lay out the necessary conditions for the establishment of a state that approximates perpetual peace, all three areas are shown to be in different stages of imperfection, and there are present many gaps, blindspots, and overt contradictions are historically present to refer to any complete system of right. In order to dramatize that this fact, this was the basis of my contemporary redaction of the preliminary articles on the PPP website, and in the context of the current Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022, to show that there has been very little improvement in existing political and civil constitutions of international law (ius gentium) that regulate the reciprocal influence and competition between nations, in particular, and there has certainly been no progress in the third area, the cosmopolitical constitution of the government of all nations, unless that is, one already assumes the economic constitution of global capitalism by the political alliances of the contemporary liberal democratic nation-states is the only legal representative of such a world order, as it is often defined in liberal journalism today in both the wars in the Ukraine and in Gaza, which already betrays a polemical and thus ideological distortion of this third area of law. Once again, however, I will emphasize, what Kant describes as a cosmopolitanism or rather a cosmopolitical constitution of world government does not yet exist, or exists only in a negative form in the case of the United Nations, and thus is often mistaken for either a utopian ideal or a totalitarian dictatorship, and especially since the “peace of the state” has been employed by totalitarian states to suppress any political desire that exceeds or looks beyond the limits of the state for the source of its ideal (such as freedom, community, or God). 2. Since I cannot fully address all three areas in the space of this lecture, in attempting to establish the concrete determination of the “enemy,” I will restrict my analysis to the causal root of existential “enmity” (designating both an objective situation of extreme insecurity and the subjective response of hatred toward an enemy (hostis) in the examples that Kant employs to illustrate the conditions of both external and internal security, or peace. Of course, the first example is a common topic that is present in all political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Machiavelli, which concerns the presence of an immediate territorial neighbor who, either explicitly by his past actions, or implicitly by his mere proximity, is “hostile” by refusing to enter any pledge of mutual security with his neighbors. In this case, as Kant stipulates the traditional terms of natural law, each may treat his neighbor, from whom he demands this agreement to security (or state of peace), “as an enemy.” Therefore, the enemy can be compelled by some measure of force to submit to their Juris-Diktion (form the Greek dike, the archaic interfamilial law that determines the external relations between families and peoples, but which has evolved into the formal legal institutions of international law). Second, the enemy may be “chased away” from the neighborhood or territory to someplace more remote, or according to a third remedy, he can be exterminated or negated precisely qua enemy, that is, his independent existence in a state of (so-called) “lawless freedom” can justifiably be treated as “invalid” and rightfully negated. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant further expands and codifies the definition of the “unjust enemy” (hostis injustis or gerechter fiend) as “an enemy whose publicly expressed will (whether by word or deed) reveals a maxim by which, if it were made a universal rule, any condition of peace among nations would be impossible and, instead, a state of nature would be perpetuated” (cited from M.A. Thesis by Matthias Kaufmann). This definition is still present in the scholarship of international law today and has recently been applied to determine the just war (justus belli) against Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine as an irremediable injury that has no other choice than war, but especially recently by Israel’s declaration of war against Hamas as the political organization of the Palestinian people, the claim to the right to exterminate the existence of Hamas as a future enemy in the neighboring territory of Palestine. This introduces a new determination of the enemy concept that postdates both the Kantian concept and the absolute enemy of a which does not exist as the formal or abstract political entity of another state, which is different from the concrete individualities of family, kinship, and ethnic membership, can be politically negated as an individual; but rather as a population that is either genocided or absorbed into a larger territory, perhaps as the “colonized” or ethnic minority who retain cultural and spiritual personality, but who have “no share in the political rights of the community” (Benveniste). In any case, the existence of an enemy speaks to the extreme situation of territorial insecurity that cannot be tolerated by any state or civil society and must be dealt with by the negation of independent freedom of the enemy whose very existence represents a constant threat of “hostility,” once again, whether this is actual or merely feared. This will become the source of true enmity and hatred that is historicized particularly in the neo-colonial geopolitics of the 20th century. In all cases this represents an existence that must be cancelled out by one of the above means to secure or to restore a state of relative peace in the neighborhood and among friendly nations. So far, my discussion of the concept of an enemy has not departed from the traditional and medieval tradition of international law by Grotius, Vattel, and Pudendorf (who Kant refers to as the “miserable comforters” of Job in Perpetual Peace). Although it would appear, as many have indeed argued, that by employing this common topic of Kant that either admits (or perhaps simply resigns and is forced to accept, as in Hegel’s depiction of Stoic consciousness) the traditional justifications of the right of war (ius belli), this cannot address a lawful right, given that it refers to a situation of the 18th century nation-states which continue to exist in a state of nature, and their exercise of this right (or power) is permissible simply given the fact that there no existing codex of international law (ius gentium) that is powerful enough to stop it, as is clearly evident in light of contemporary events as well. Of course, concerning the current right of nations, as well as the concept of global security that is framed politically, and is only juridical in the form of permissive laws (leges permissivae) such as those framed in the U.N. Charter, Kant’s rejection of a strictly political deduction of war as a principle of natural law in the right of nations is made unequivocable in the following well-known statement in the second definitive article concerning a federation of free states: The concept of the law of nations as a right to make war does not really mean anything, because then it is a law of deciding what is right by unilateral maxims through force and not universally valid public laws which restrict the freedom of each one. The only conceivable meaning of such a law of nations might be that it serves men right who are so inclined that they should destroy each other and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows up both the atrocities and their perpetrators. (101) Of course, this critique of the existing right of nations that is conditioned by the right of national sovereign jurisdiction within their own territory, is somewhat prophetic concerning the vast graveyards that have been carved into the territory of Europe, but especially in the Ukraine, first by the Germans in the extermination of the Ukrainian Jewish populations, which was completed by Stalin during the hordimore, and today, or finally, the vast network of trenches in the Eastern Donbas today that will serve as the final graveyard for both Ukrainians and Russian soldiers. It is critical to point out the geographical location of the Ukraine, or the portion of Eastern Europe that forms the boundary between the Russian Empire and the Western European nations, has served as what Lacan called a “point de caption” in the Europe from the Westphalian peace to the current day, just as Palestine has served as in the same structural function of the cushion button that is pinned to the geopolitical framework of the Middle East since the UN resolution of 1948 giving Israel the right to a nation state in the Palestinian territory administered by the British. I could also point to other stitching points in the world order, all having different dates, including the DMZ in Korea and the Taiwan straight between China and Formosa, now Taiwan. But, moving quickly, if according to the first example, the enemy represents the immediate proximity of the hostis (the neighbor who willfully remains a stranger to the civil constitution and mutual security of the neighborhood), what do we make of the other example concerning the external insecurity caused by the stranger who arrives in the foreign territory and who is summarily treated as an enemy by the local neighbors except that it provides a maximal extension of the concept of right that corresponds to the incipient phase of globalization during the consolidating phase of European consolidating history and the corresponding development of the second area of international, that is, basically between the period of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the beginning of WW1? Thus, the right of universal hospitality appears as the third definitive article of perpetual peace, after the article concerning the federation of free states according to a cosmo-political constitution that determines the reciprocal interaction between nations and peoples through commerce and economic exchange. The third definitive article reads “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to the Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” Once again, we must understand the purpose of the three definitive articles as more prescriptive modifications of the fundamental postulate at the basis of all three articles, corresponding to the three areas of law covered above, which presupposes that “all men who can reciprocally influence one another must stand under some civil constitution.” Thus, all the articles are “limiting” of this general postulate (i.e., of the minimal genus of both a constitution of sovereignty and form of government) by “defining” the best constitution from all the historical possibilities. In providing more definition and limiting this this basic postulate, in other words, the first article stipulates that the kind of civil constitution (ius civitas) must be a Republic; the form of sovereignty must be composed of a federation of free states (ius gentium), and finally, the form of World citizenship of all individuals must by conditioned by a practical law of hospitality (ius cosmopolicum). But it is also here in the third article that we find a second concrete determination of the enemy concept as a second limit situation to this principle, and the historical examples that Kant gives of this other concrete determination of the enemy-concept are drawn from the inhospitable regions of the world during his own time (e.g., the deserts, the oceans, the artic wastelands, etc.) where there is no juridical form of right to govern the mutual interactions between stranger and host-guest. In addition to the Barbary Coast or the Bedouin desert, or today the waters off the coast of Northern Africa where Somali pirates operate, where the encounters with strangers and foreigners are understood implicitly as the right to plunder them, the first major example (or rather, counter example) is precisely the economic activity of the European colonial nations in America, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. “In East India (Hindustan),” he writes, “under the pretense of establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to repress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils that afflict mankind” (104) (alluding once more to the affliction of Job under God’s war). Consequently, he mentions the practice of the Japanese who, having learned of the threat of this new host of strangers who “don’t peacefully keep to their place in the countries they sojourn,” have developed a polity of immediately determining the stranger as the enemy who can be killed, incarcerated, or sold to the Dutch slavers, but who are never permitted to come into contact with the local inhabitants. However, the second example of absolute inhospitality of the stranger refers to the slave economy that the French and Spanish have developed in the plantations along the Sugar Coast, but which he foresaw would gradually subside (along with the institution of slavery) because “slavery produces no real revenue (i.e., no surplus value, or capital) and primarily only serves as an excuse to build up the naval armaments for the Spanish and Anglo-French wars of coalition in Europe. As an aside, among the many historical limitations that inform Kant’s predictions (and thus problematize his plan of Nature’s design) it is the ultimate historical irony that 1795 also marks the invention of a new process of refining sugar on the plantations around New Orleans, which was under Spanish rule at this time, and that this was subsequently followed by the most expansive period of the Middle Passage and by the establishment of the slave institution as a dominant mode of agricultural production in the new world, responsible for over one-third of the total wealth in the Americas after the Louisiana Purchase by the U.S. from Napoleon in 1803. Nevertheless, once again, while the institution of slavery was morally objectionable, the concept of hospitality that Kant invokes has nothing to do with the ethical and philanthropic maxim to “Welcome the stranger” or “the Other,” since as both examples demonstrate, the enemy is always a stranger, even though not all strangers are necessarily enemies at first. As the famous Indo-European linguist Emile Benveniste argued, the enemy concept must first emerge in the statutes of positive law concerning the identity of concrete strangers, before it can become an element of any moral sentiment or ethical duty to the Other. Rather, ‘Although I have rejected any religious or philanthropic (much less onto-theological) source for the concepts of “peace” and “hospitality,” in the case of the latter, as I have already discussed in the first volume of my Philosophy After Friendship (2017), Benveniste has determined a very archaic Indo-European practice of hospice that particularly concerns the duty of hospitality to strangers, which I would call a proto-religious and pre-juridical source that subsequently can be found in every historical religion and constitution of every legal system of rights and obligations, particularly in the area of ius gentium. Its existence can easily be demonstrated by the fact that, even though I am legally defined as a stranger in the Czech Republic and do not share in any of the political rights of the community, if I happen to walk outside the lecture room tonight and get run over by bus, there is an obligation to give ‘hospitaliziation,” which is the root meaning of the institution of hospitality. Moreover, as in the case of the mutual and reciprocal agreement of a civic and legal state of peace, as Benveniste shows, the original duty of hospitality requires a “oath” or some form of spoken convention between the host (hôte) and stranger (xenos), who thereby is converted into a “guest” rather than an “enemy” (hostis). As Benveniste also argued, even though in the earliest ages of the Roman Empire, where the stranger was usually defined as an enemy, designating the quasi-permanence situation of inter-hostility between foreign peoples and nations, there also existed this ceremonial convention that favored reciprocal human relations, but it was only after the juridical statutes were instituted that the concept of hospitality could denote any form of sentiment or moral obligation to the stranger determined as guest. Of course, I am only speculating that this is one reason why Kant makes it a central concept in his plan for perpetual peace, since he is also referring to the construction of a juridical system that would allow society to depart from a state of nature and war where the juridical right of the stranger has little or no existence (Benveniste 360). In any case, what both situations exemplify is the geographical determination of the origin of the concrete enemy as the immediate presence of a social being whose very existential being represents hostility, whether this is actual hostility or merely latent in his refusal to enter into a state of civil society under some form of agreement, which is a real contradiction that cannot be allowed to remain in all three areas of law enumerated above, but especially in the context of the increasing economic globalization and international competition of nations that is presupposed as the historical condition of the second and third areas of law, international law and cosmopolitical institution of world government, whether in the form of a federation of liberal nation-states or according to some other world constitution of an ”homogenous and universal” world state of economic-political organization, or Empire. Finally, concerning the development of juridical, if not universal, right of hospitality (temporary sojourn, exchange, communication) as a fundamental condition for the increasing development of the areas of international law and eventually the institutions of global citizenship, the very fact that there are few external spaces that exist outside some juridical constitution of international law remaining globally today where the stranger is immediately determined as an “enemy,” and who is either killed or incarcerated by the local inhabitants (except in some regions where piracy and kidnapping remains an economic form of subsistence, where strangers are kidnapped and held for ransom)—in any case, this seems to confirm Kant’s view of hospitality as a fundamental condition. This also confirms the “cunning of reason” behind Kant’s design of Nature—a term that is most often ascribed to Hegel, but originates in Kant’s Perpetual Peace—to use wars and the economic migrations caused by regional and local wars to populate the earth, including the economic wars of European colonial and later global capitalism. As Schmitt had argued early on in “Land and Sea” which later became his opus Der Nomos der Erde, the peripheral and lawless spaces on the edge of territories are gradually disappearing and the vast oceans have become internalized as “inland seas.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that one doesn’t still encounter pirates on these inland lakes, in addition to roving bands of corporate robber barons who are still busy “grazing” in the Global South, sending boatloads of economic migrants to the North, as well as refugees and survivors of the most recent and terrible local war; nevertheless, it might appear that the second concrete determination of the stranger as enemy is dissipating, if not disappearing altogether, and what remains is the first concrete determination of the enemy (hostis) as the territorial and civil enemy. However, Schmitt’s thesis of the contraction of the earth that is no longer bounded by external spaces where there is no established juridical right also poses the most pressing problem for us to consider today, which is the increasing proximity and even the more terrifying existential threat of the immediate territorial and political enemy, as the current wars in the Ukraine and Gaza exemplify. Earlier on I evoked the forms of negation employed to produce the concrete determination of the enemy, the first of which is to negate the individuality of the moral person or subject in order to allow the soldier to be killed merely as the most abstract expression of quantity (e.g., one hundred enemy soldiers who are killed in the last battle). However, as in the case of the unlimited tactics of partisan warfare, as Schmitt foresaw, we have witnessed the production of new forms of absolute enmity (existential hatred) and the corresponding tactics that seek to negate the enemy as a member of the same biological species or race, including those tactics aimed at negating the future objective existence of the moral existence as a people (e.g., rape warfare, mass extermination of civilian populations in all wars since WW2 that were conducted by the Western alliance and culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but especially the destruction of the psychological and subjective integrity of the person through acts of extreme brutality and trauma that is aimed to destroy the reproduction of the sense of belonging to a nation or people except in being the object of a genocide, ironically the Jewish people who came into modern existence in the European holocaust belong to the same category as the Palestinian people today ). For example, in the context of the war in the Ukraine, I might remind you of a video that circulated briefly in spring 2022, before it was censored, that showed the leader the leader of the Wagner Mercenary group recruiting prisoners in a Moscow jail with the promise that they would be allowed to rape the civilian populations, including children and young boys, with impunity. For these extreme acts of negation, and often for the propagandistic purposes, the enemy must be reduced to the non-human by reactivating the most primitive significations belonging to the enemy concept: the enemy is an animal (namely a “wolf,” from the Old Germanic wargoz, whose etymological source stems from the Old Norse vargr "outlaw"); in Scmitt’s determination of the enemy as “Der Feind,” the enemy is a “Devil” or “demon,” whose English source that was employed in the Crusades means “an adversary of God,” or “a heathen.” Of course, recently we have witnessed many of these archaic significations employed by both sides in the current Russo-Ukrainian war (animal, devil, Satanic horde), as well as a host of “fighting words” such as “Blyat” (bitch, shit), “Kurva” (slut, from the Polish term), “Khuy” (cock, in Russian, used in “Ida na Khuy” as in “go fuck yourself’), “Katsap” (billy goat, the Ukrainian slur for Russians), “Gayrope” (“Gaylord,” the pro-Russian term for the moral decay of the West), “Khuylo” (dickhead), and finally “Orcs” (a word derived from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings that Ukrainians often employ to refer to Russian soldiers on the front because they don’t consider them human). [from GlobalSecurity.org “Russo-Ukrainian War—Fighting Words). 3. For lack of time, for the remaining part of this lecture I will turn to the concrete determination of the enemy-concept in Kojeve’s more orthodox Hegelian system of right from his Esquisse d’une phenomenologie du droit (which was composed at the end of the war in 1943) which can be placed in a dialectical relationship with Kant’s deduction of juridical right. Here is the relevant passage that outlines the abstract determination of the enemy as a “common enemy” or several nations who form a political alliance of friendship. In the articles on “international right,” he defines the essence of political right as “The State [which] is constituted by a group of political friends having a common political enemy.” They are friends precisely because they have a common enemy. It follows from this that, by definition, every foreign state is a political enemy of any given State whatsoever. The interactions between States qua States, which is to say, political interactions, are only realized in the form of wars. A society organizes itself into the form of a State only because it is already in a war or in order to go to war. The political existence of the State may dwell in a state of peace only in preparation for war. One can likewise conclude that when the State comports itself as a State, that is to say politically, it comports itself in fact as a Master. It is only as matter of victory or perishing. And victory signifies nothing but the complete submission of the Enemy state, its annihilation as a State, that is to say, its political assimilation in a form of “recognition” of the State that is not “recognized” in return. Here, in perhaps the most stark and brutal realism comparable to the style Soviet architecture that still exists near the central station in Usti, Kojeve says explicitly that the concrete determination of the enemy engenders a form of recognition of the State that is incompatible with reciprocal recognition and thus cannot be deduced from a form of mutual recognition of right that is the basis of any juridical form of law of consensus between equals, as in the Kantian deduction of the principle of law. By contrast, Kojeve’s deduction of the pure political right of the State to exist, all coexistence with other freedoms that threaten this existence must be cancelled out, annulled, that is to say, “assimilated politically” into the State itself, “which constitutes a form of ‘recognition’ without ‘recognition’ in return … “since war is not properly speaking an “interaction” [a juridical exchange of mutual recognition by equals] but instead it is a relation of mutual exclusion which terminates in principle by the suppression [the cancelling out] of one of the two agents” (378). Consequently, the question that Kojeve poses is whether it is possible to imagine any existence of right that is not expressly political and does not stem from any institution of public right. The answer is decidedly “NO.” This is because there does not exist any form of right that acknowledges war as a concrete juridical situation, and there is no war that can engender a Right by transforming it into a juridical situation. “War is essentially a-juridical,” which is to say, purely political, since there is no Right without the state (378). It is for this reason that one cannot even say there is a war-crime in the juridical sense of the term, since war is outside all Right, juridically determined, and “this situation can engender nothing but a pseudo-right,” that can also be determined as in the corollary arguments of Schmitt concerning the forms of international and humanitarian law as “ideological” distortions of the real political and economic motives behind every concrete situation of war (378n). Here we witness two completely different and opposed deductions of the principle of right, one political and one juridical, or since Kant’s deduction also includes the historical formation of political sovereign right established by the European nation states as the end of the18th century, we might say one that is purely political (or I would say theologico-political) and one that is politico-juridical in its rationalization of final end of history. And yet, do they not essentially say the same thing, even though each arrives at a different conclusion concerning whether or not there can be any juridical constitution of politics. In some ways, Kant’s attempt to deduce a juridical principle of right out of a purely political practice might be compared to Hegel’s “knight of faith,” who attempts to accomplish by faith in reason from behind the backs of the nation state in order to establish a law that compels the nations to obey the juridical principle even out of their own self-interest for security of the state’s own sovereignty. In this regard, it is a similar tactic that Kant also employs in the Conflict of the Faculties where he argues that the statesmen and practical politicians should be subordinated to the reason of the philosophers, because as the lowest of the faculties, the philosophers have no vested interest in their own powers and thus can do no harm to the sovereign. And yet, one could also argue that what Kant describes as the federation of free states and the establishment of a universal law of Humanity is the same that Kojeve describes in reference to the post-Westphalia order of alliances between friend-states against a common enemy, which would be renewed in the post-WWII world by the creation of NATO against the common enemy of the Soviet Union. In other words, we might understand this coincidence of Universalism in a dialectical manner, as a realization of the idea of reason within the particular and historical form. But how are we to understand the identity between the Kantian description at the end of history and the neo-Hegelian description of the post-WWII order of alliances, except dialectically? The only difference between the two systems is the absence of a common enemy in the Kantian description; unless that is, the “enemy” itself has already been annulled or suppressed as in the case of Kojeve’s description. This raises the question of whether these two systems of political and juridical right are indeed identical and the establishment of the juridical principle of right as the condition of a universal state of equal states is the annulment of a concrete enemy that must take place prior to this state. And yet, here we find the very condition of the end of history as foretold by Marx, which the annulment of the class enemy and the establishment of a nonpolitical and classless society of equals at the end of history. In other words, the Kojevian system of political right of the state and the Kantian deduction juridical right are exactly identical if one removes one element from both, which is time. Thus, if we strip the mythical and temporal element of narrative diegesis from both deductions of the concept of right, whether the didactic narrative of progress of universal reason through the fiction of “Providential design” effected by the genius of Nature as an artist, or the mythical-cosmological narrative of History in both Hegelian and Marxist deductions of the “end of history” (“the end of capitalism,” the final objectification of Spirit in the establishment of a classless society), we come to realize two completely opposed and contradictory principles of right: a pure political right (particularly present in Schmitt and Kojeve) and a pure juridical right, or rather, a transcendental concept of right in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morality. (Perhaps this is what Kant had attempted to conceive of in his last work, whose form is metaphysical deductive system of concepts rather than narrative, didactic, and propaedeutic teleology). Nevertheless, the condition of the purity of the deduction of each system is the final annulment of the enemy concept which disappears at the end of the process; either by the complete extermination of the last concrete instance of the enemy, or adapting a phrase from Althusser, the determination of an enemy in the last instance (the class enemy, the bourgeoise, the imperialist enemy of Western capitalism, the Jews, the West, etc.) at the end of the historical deduction of pure political right of the State; or the “common enemy” who is the cause of war and whose real elimination allows the federation of states to enter into a peaceful confederacy that is “limited” to the quasi-juridical terms the cosmo-political constitution of world government, which would not resemble the totalitarian world government imagined by Stalin, nor even perhaps the world government imagined by the CCP today. Here, returning to Kojeve, who absolutely denies that such a constitution could be created within juridical right, such a constitution would therefore be an “illusion.” This deceptive illusion (or ideology of the non-political nature of international law) has been a constant source of contradiction that also strikes against the concept of “equality” between nation-states that is established by the cosmopolitical right, which Kojeve identifies as essentially aristocratic, as in the case of the post-Westphalian order, which represents, in reality, only the “equality” of a small group of “Masters” who recognize each other’s political right as equal but this “recognition” (to use Kojeve’s Hegelian concept) would never be extended to recognize smaller or weaker nations or peoples. “Thus, if the “international public right” [or as it is frequent called in the news today, “the rule of law’] is the right of a non-political society, it is necessarily aristocratic … and bears the principle that bears a bourgeoise character” [i.e., it is composed by a class of aristocratic elites that are present in each civil society or nation-state]; consequently, “it is founded not upon a concept of egalitarian justice, but rather a justice of equivalence” (383). Moreover, concerning the political third parties [for example, the countries that compose the European states today, they] have an interest in establishing a rule of law over allied enemies that corresponds to a Justice, whether an Egalitarian or aristocratic right. However, given the fact that these states politically comport themselves as Masters [for example, in administrating the weaker states who are not considered as equal], this attitude of equality is made to conform to their own ideal of Justice. One thus has the illusion of a political Right, or of a public international Right [i.e., of an international order, a common rule of law that governs the international community of nations, as we have often recently], that governs the inter-state relations, in as much as these states are part the alliance, and thus by definition at peace with each themselves. But this is only an illusion, due to the coincidence of two attitudes that are necessarily different: the political attitude and the juridical attitude. (379) Here, we can see the relevance of this argument for understanding the apparent contradiction of the ideal of Justice that belongs only to one federation of states; consequently, China’s alliance with Russia is primarily a political attitude against the “world order” (the political principles of right and justice) that corresponds to the Western alliance that is only guaranteed by the hegemony of the United States since post-WWII and the Marshall Plan. The current situation of multilateralism is only made more complicated today when political right is indistinguishable from economic interests between the larger and the smaller states, including India, Brazil, and South Africa. Although this is not a discussion of current international polity, I might point to the recent summit in Johannesburg where there were already the signs of conflict between members over the expansion of the economic bloc: whereas Putin and Xi were clearly in favor of the expansion to members from the Global South as part of a political alliance against the Western democracies, and particularly against the hegemony of the United States and the dominance of the dollar, India was cooler on the idea and did not want to cede too much hegemony to China, South Africa did not want to dilute its influence over the smaller and weaker nations in the continent, and Brazil’s Lula feared further isolation in South America and did not want to directly confront the United States.1 By parallel, the recent discussions in the U.N. about expanding the membership in the G7 to include African states does not include giving voting power to new membership on the Security Council, according to the Biden proposal. According to the famous maxim from Orwell’s Animal Farm that seems to describe the concept of equality as a practical problem of the imbalance between larger and smaller economies, or between the aristocratic composition of masters and the developing world, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This does not mean that over the course of the next twohundred years the coalition of smaller states and developing world economies against the Masters will not eventually lead to a more peaceful confederacy of nations as Kant outlined, even though the principle of political right accorded to this foeidous pacificum, as he imagined it, would most likely be restricted to the right of war which currently belongs only to the Masters, especially the nuclear states that compose the membership of the security council, as the current war in the Ukraine clearly demonstrates. In conclusion, I will return to a very widespread and very egregious “misreading” (if not, deliberate “misprison”) of Kant’s notion of the possibility of a future cosmo-political constitution of any polity of world government. In Perpetual Peace he explicitly rejects the notion that this implies that all of Humanity would become subjects under one form of 1 “BRICS divisions re-emerge ahead of critical expansion debate,” Reuters.com, Bhargav Acharya and Gabriel Araujo, accessed August 22, 2023 sovereignty such as a Totalitarian World State, which would be a contradiction in the very principle of political right, would be an absolute master in the same form of what was formerly called “Oriental Despotism,” a Hegelian concept that Marx revised under the term “mode of production.” This concept is making a utopian comeback in post-Marxist theory today, but only by repressing the one common feature of the mode of production itself in the Asiatic empires (including the Minoan and even Aztec empires) which is that it based on universal slavery, which would be defined by Marx as the attachment of material labor to the land. However, as Kant argues in the second definitive article, that would be contradictory, since the state implies the relation of a Master (legislating) to a Slave (obeying), i.e., the people, and many nations in one state would then constitute only one nation, which would be contradictory in principle since it would cancel out the existence of more than one people (98). Thus, as distinguished from the fanatical form of Christian Universalism embodied in the RomanCatholic Empire, for Kant God is only the Master of the Disjunctive Syllogism between completely heterogenous communities, including atheists, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, which is why the notion of a “federation” of republican states is not a Totalitarian state. Rather, it is defined as a limited or negative surrogate of the constitution of a world-state, whose power is limited or restricted only to the prohibition of war, and not as the positive idea of an Absolute Republic. That is, “only the negative surrogate of an alliance which averts war by holding back the hostile passions of enmity, quoting a line from the Aeneid (Furor impius intus…fremit horridus ore cruento—[i.e., “Within, impious Rage, sitting on savage arms, his hands fast bound behind with a hundred brazen knots shall roar in the ghastliness of blood stained lips”--Virgil). (102)