In our discussion of Carl Schmitt's philosophy, there were a few interesting points where it seemed that Schmitt's ideas about otherness and war start to unravel.
One of the problems we had was in sorting out what political entities qualified as "enemies." Some of us were able to come up with aliens that had a completely alien system of coordination, which doesn't necessarily qualify as "political." The buggers in Ender's Game never thought of human beings as an "enemy" or even as sentient beings. Likewise, the humans did not recognize the sentience of the buggers. Nevertheless, the humans wipe out the buggers. The bugs in Starship Troopers share this quality, but are still recognized as an "enemy" of humanity.
Carl Schmitt unfortunately didn't have the same Sci-Fi pedigree the rest of us do, and was probably unable (or unwilling) to envision a non-human, non-political enemy. Hive-mind aliens like the buggers, The Borg, or the Zerg from StarCraft lack whatever human politics Schmitt saw as being necessary for enmity. Someone in our class likened a hive-mind "enemy" to a weather system or natural disaster, something Schmitt would not see as an "enemy."
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