"The specific political distinction is that between Friend and Enemy."
"The distinction between friend and enemy is essentially public and not private. Individuals may have personal enemies, but personal enmity is not a political phenomenon. Politics involves groups that face off as mutual enemies."
"Two groups will find themselves in a situation of mutual enmity if and only if there is a possibility of war and mutual killing between them. The distinction between friend and enemy thus refers to the 'utmost degree of intensity of an association or dissociation.'"
"The utmost degree of association is the willingness to fight and die for and together with other members of one’s group, and the ultimate degree of dissociation is the willingness to kill others for the simple reason that they are members of a hostile group."
"Political enmity can have many different origins. The political differs from other spheres of value in that it is not based on a substantive distinction of its own."
"The political distinction between Friend and Enemy is not reducible to any particular distinction — be it linguistic, ethnic, cultural, religious, etc. — that may become a marker of collective identity and difference."
"Any distinction that can serve as a marker of collective identity and difference will acquire political quality if it has the power, in a concrete situation, to sort people into two opposing groups that are willing, if necessary, to fight against each other."
"Whether a particular distinction will come to play this role is not determined by its own intrinsic significance but by whether a group of people relies on it to define its own collective identity."
"Since the political is not tied to any particular substantive distinction, it is naïve to assume that the political will disappear once conflicts arising from a particular distinction no longer motivate opposing groups to fight."
"Political identification is likely to latch on to another distinction that will inherit the lethal intensity of political conflict."
"But wherever a distinction has political quality, it will be the decisive distinction and the community constituted by it will be the decisive social unit."
"Since the political community is the social unit that can dispose of people’s lives, it will be able, where it exists, to assert its superiority over all other social groups within its confines and to rule out violent conflict among its members."
"The decision whether someone else’s behaviour constitutes a threat to one’s own life, in some concrete situation, and the decision whether it is necessary to use reactive or even pre-emptive violence to remove or to escape that threat, cannot be delegated to a third person."
"A group that perceives its own existence to be threatened by some other group finds itself in an analogous position. The possibility of third-party mediation is therefore ruled out in a truly political conflict."
"A political community exists, then, wherever a group of people are willing to engage in political life by distinguishing themselves from outsiders through the drawing of a Friend-Enemy distinction."
"The drawing of a Friend-Enemy distinction, therefore, is never a mere reaction to a threat to a form of existence that is already given. Rather, it actively constitutes the political identity or existence of the people and determines who belongs to the people."
"Herein lies Schmitt’s essential Hegelianism: the friend-enemy (those who are part of your community and those who are not part of your community) is foundational to understanding oneself."
"Following Hegel, one only knows oneself through the Other. The Other is almost always going to be an enemy as the Other stands apart from you and your community (the Other may be an ally but is always potentially an enemy)."
"This is a consequence of pluralism – that is, real difference. If we’re not all the same (monism) then there must be difference and differentiation by definition."
"At the very beginning of human existence there has always been something, or someone, that threatened existence. That was the Enemy."
"[But today,] the Enemy is principally the force that threatens what humans have achieved [in the political realm]."
"The Enemy, which leads to conflict, is essential to the nature of the world and meaning in life. Without the Enemy, life would be meaningless and shallow."
"To have no power to decide who to include as a member of the body and who to exclude as a member of the body, is to not be political at all."
"And since man is political, and this is part of his human nature, those who attempt to eliminate conflict and transform enemies into 'rational actors' whom one can persuade to not have qualms with, are nihilists out to destroy man’s political nature."
"Even if everyone managed to become Friends, Schmitt implies that we would make someone an Enemy just because that is human nature and that is what politics is about."
"And, on top of it, Schmitt also says that such a view that we don’t have Enemies is a flawed view of human nature. Man lusts for domination. Man lusts for power. Man lusts for control."
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