The enemy, whether external or internal, is always a kind of embodiment of what we fear or want to reject. The enemy does not need to be a real presence to have an effect on us, as it can be a generated construct, an internal demon, or even a nebulous, oppressive threat that sometimes holds us together and sometimes tears us apart.
Enemy imagery is a means of directing the emotions or tensions within us towards a nameable target. But what happens when it suddenly dawns on us that this image, forged from assumptions, is an illusion, a disintegrating mirage, born only of the particular interference of our perspective and our mental perspectives.
In the image of the enemy, we see the invisible alterity of ourselves revealed, the suggestion of the unrepresentable: the nameless taking shape in alter egos and doppelgangers, the paranoid figuration of shadow and absence. The mirage is the haunted place where all this happens: the scene of the figure, removed, alienated, ever receding from itself, and its perpetual inaccessibility.
The body is also a mirage, its essence always escaping. The promise of representation shimmers out of embodied matter like a mirage: this is flesh and blood. We give the enemy an appearance, wrapping it in mirages, just as we force our own bodies into ambivalent forms: objectifying the gaps and distortions to make our inner tensions more tangible.
But at the same time, it is not only disgust but also attraction that can fuel the development of an enemy. Hidden in this oscillation between desire and rejection, the projection oscillates in a double form: sometimes attracting, sometimes repelling, sometimes pushing, sometimes holding back, constantly questioning our value and our identity. Does it even exist? In essence, it is shaped by the fears and doubts projected upon it, and its impact is felt in our daily struggles, both personal and interpersonal.
But when does it become clear that the enemy we are fleeing from does not exist, but that we have given it a face? What is able to dispel the spherical fog from the hazy edges of a vision shaped by emotions, revealing the sharp contours of flesh-and-blood reality? Proximity? Why do we walk the precarious space between light and shadows, reading the shadows of a haunted earthly existence, when we could be chiseling the backdrops of details bathed in light?