Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
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)