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The Structuring Enemy and Archival War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Allen Feldman
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Extract

In the wake of the collapse of the cold war bipolar world order, Jacques Derrida wrote:

Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself. … The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are: this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the “structuring” enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases it to be identifiable and thus reliable—that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential interchangeable metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with one another: conjuration. (Politics 84)

Information

Type
Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 5: Special Topic War , October 2009 , pp. 1704 - 1713
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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References

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