Solicitude II ( <i>De Inimicis</i> )

The victim, the enemy. The victim or the enemy, if there is a difference. But how many are these? Against the expected odds, I have counted more than one, plus d’un. I count the Jew, the Arab and more, in any case, too many enemies. Here and elsewhere, there is always more, increasingly more than one enemy, few of which are identified or identifiable along state lines, much less confined to the state of nature, or even to the state of war, to the not-so secure difference between external war or internal war. Like the emergency, the enemy is never one. Never only one war; never only in war. The problem may well begin, if it ever begins, with counting (majority and minority, the living and the dead), or else it begins with the host, hospes or hostis, with what Derrida called so very aptly ‘hostipitality’, for which the stranger and the foreigner, ‘the concept and experience of the foreign body, of an incalculable number of figures given the foreign body’, emerge as paradigmatic, yet above which seems to culminate, perhaps even dominate, another, no more, nor less counted or countable, calculable, figure. For, ever mindful of ‘maternal solicitude’, upon which Derrida insists from beginning to end, the mother is, after all, ‘an absolute figure’, a figure of hospitality, which must be ‘reconciled’, Derrida says, ‘with the figure of power and of the master or mistress’ of the house, and therefore, as we shall have to witness, of hostipitality, of maternal hostipitality. Not only ‘la mort et le maître’, then, as Derrida had also put it, but the mother and the enemy, the mother and the master, mothers as sovereign masters (whence, no less inevitably, mothers and slaves). Or, to repeat: Plus d’une mère, plus d’un ennemi.