Held in Enmity

The June 2025 Israeli and American bombardment of Iran reignited a debate on the fate of Iranian freedom dreams amid domestic and foreign forces of violence and destruction. Most participants in this conversation settle on identifying the Islamic Republic and Israel as the sources of evil, thereby perpetuating a politics of enmity characteristic of these very states. This essay offers an alternative psychoanalytical and archeological problematization that emphasizes the limits of impersonal, epistemic, and political-theological traditions to sublimate destructive drives and existential dangers and create the possibility of self-fashioning and political debate. The author recognizes this condition as the incapacitation of tradition and theorizes it dialectically to encompass both the external, geopolitical, and environmental thresholds of debate and its internal, historical, and epistemological limits. The author suggests that the politics of enmity characteristic of our times can be denaturalized as a symptom of the incapacity of ethical and political paradigms: “the enemy” psychopolitically protects against a confrontation with limits of debate and the impossibility of politics.