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It should become clear
that The Jew, the Arab is about Europe: Europe is its limit and its
limitation.
Europe, then, and, concerning
it, the following questions. Is there a concept of the enemy? And, if there
is such a concept, to what discursive sphere (politics, theology, law,
philosophy, psychoanalysis - but there are others) does it belong? Which does
it determine? Or - and in the oscillation of this "or," hovers
everything that follows - if there is no concept of the enemy remains yet to
be formulated (or simply to be thought), what, then, are the factors that
could have prevented such a formulations? One answer to this last question
(and some engagement with the former) as it will be offered here is that the
enemy - as a concrete, discursive, vanishing field, "the shadow of an
ageless ghost", as Derrida puts it - is structured by the Arab and the
Jew, that is to say, by the relation of Europe to both Arab and Jew.
A second answer is that this
structuring has, in turn, everything to do with religion and politics. The
challenge of these two no doubt insufficient answers to what are already too
numerous questions will be to demonstrate that, in Europe, in "Christian
Europe", they - the Jew, the Arab on the one hand, religion and
politics, on the other hand - are distinct, but indissociable.
Stated in a different idiom: The Jew, The Arab constitute the condition of
religion and politics.
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