The Politics of Friendship

Jacques Derrida, George Collins

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788738590
• eBook ISBN: 9781839763052
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Jacques Derrida was one of most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In The Politics of Friendship he explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future in order to explore invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy.

1

Oligarchies:
Naming, Enumerating, Counting

‘O my friends, there is no friend.’

I am addressing you, am I not?

How many of us are there?

– Does that count?

– Addressing you in this way, I have perhaps not said anything yet. Nothing that is said in this saying. Perhaps nothing sayable.

Perhaps it will have to be admitted, perhaps I have not yet even addressed myself. At least, not to you.

How many of us are there?

– How can you count?

– On each side of a comma, after the pause, ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ – these are the two disjoined members of the same unique sentence. An almost impossible declaration. In two times [deux temps], Unjoinable, the two times seem disjoined by the very meaning of what appears to be at once both affirmed and denied: ‘my friends, no friend’. In two times but at the same time, in the contretemps of the same sentence. If there is ‘no friend’, then how could I call you my friends, my friends? By what right? How could you take me seriously? If I call you my friends, my friends, if I call you, my friends, how dare I add, to you, that there is no friend?

Incompatible as they may appear, and condemned to the oblivion of contradiction, here, in a sort of desperately dialectical desire, the two times already form two theses – two moments, perhaps – they concatenate, they appear together, they are summoned to appear, in the present: they present themselves as in a single stroke, in a single breath, in the same present, in the present itself. At the same time, and before who knows who, before who knows whose law. The contretemps looks favourably on the encounter, it responds without delay but without renunciation: no promised encounter without the possibility of a contretemps. As soon as there is more than one.

But how many of us are there?

And first of all – you already sense it – in pronouncing ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, I have yet to say anything in my name. I have been satisfied with quoting. The spokesman of another, I have reported his words, which belong in the first place (a question of tone, syntax, of a gesture in speech, and so on) to a slightly archaic language, itself unsettled by the memory of borrowed or translated speech. Having signed nothing, I have assumed nothing on my own account.

‘O my friends, there is no friend’ – the words not only form a quotation that I am now reading in its old French spelling. They have a different ring: already, such a very long time ago, they bore the quotation of another reader hailing from my homeland, Montaigne: ‘that saying which’, he says, ‘Aristotle often repeated’. It is found in the Essays,¹ in the chapter ‘On Friendship’.

This, then, is a cited quotation. But the quotation of a saying attributed, only attributed, by a sort of rumour or public opinion. ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ is, then, a declaration referred to Aristotle. There will be no end to the work of glossing its attribution and its very grammar, the translation of these four words, three or four in Greek, since the only substantive in the sentence is repeated. Like a renowned filiation, an origin thus nicknamed seems, in truth, to lose itself in the infinite anonymity of the mists of time. It is not, however, one of those proverbs, one of those ‘sayings’ with no assignable author, whose aphoristic mode is seldom in the form of the apostrophe.

Quotation of friendship. A quotation coming from a chapter entitled ‘On Friendship’, after a title that repeats, already, an entire tradition of titles. Before naming Aristotle, Montaigne had massively quoted Cicero, his De Amicitia as much as the Tusculanes. Occasionally he had drawn the Ciceronian treatise within the genius of his paraphrase, precisely around this ‘O my friends’. The ‘sovereign and master-friendship’ had then to be distinguished from ‘friendships common and customary, in relation to which you must employ that saying which Aristotle often repeated’.

We have in memory our Laelius de Amicitia: we already hear the Ciceronian echo. Let us specify, in anticipation, just that the Ciceronian distinction between the two friendships (‘true and perfect’ or ‘vulgar and mediocre’) works only with an arithmetical twist. How many friends? How many of us are there? Determining a nomination and a quotation (pauci nominantur. those who are named or whose name is quoted are few and far between when true or perfect friendship is named), the distinction expresses rarity or the small in number. We shall never forget that. Are friends rare? Must they remain rare? How many are there? What account must be taken of rarity? And what about selection or election, affinity or proximity; what about parenthood or familiarity (oikeiótēs, as Plato’s Lysis already put it), what about one’s being-at-home or being-close-to-oneself in regard to that which links friendship to all laws and all logics of universalization, to ethics and to law or right, to the values of equality and equity, to all the political models of the res publica for which this distinction remains the axiom, and especially in regard to democracy? The fact that Cicero adds democracy as an afterthought changes nothing in the force or the violence of this oligophilial [oligophilique] note:

And I am not now speaking of the friendships of ordinary folk, or of ordinary people (de vulgari aut de mediocri) – although even these are a source of pleasure and profit – but of true and perfect friendship (sed de vera et perfecta loquor), the kind that was possessed by those few men who have gained names for themselves as friends (qualis eorum, qui pauci nominantur, fuit).²

An important nuance: the small in number does not characterize the friends themselves. It counts those we are speaking of, those whose legendary friendship tradition cites, the name and the renown, the name according to the renown. Public and political signs attest to these great and rare friendships. They take on the value of exemplary heritage.

Why exemplary? Why exemplary in a very strict sense? Rarity accords with the phenomenon, it vibrates with light, brilliance and glory. If one names and cites the best friends, those who have illustrated ‘true and perfect’ friendship’, it is because this friendship comes to illuminate. It illustrates itself, makes happy or successful things shine, gives them visibility, renders them more resplendent (secundas res splendidiores facit amicitia). It gives rise to a project, the anticipation, the perspective, the pro-vidence of a hope that illuminates in advance the future (praelucet), thereby transporting the name’s renown beyond death. A narcissistic projection of the ideal image, of its own ideal image (exemplar), already inscribes the legend. It engraves the renown in a ray of light, and prints the citation of the friend in a convertibility of life and death, of presence and absence, and promises it to the testamental revenance [ghostly apparition of the revenant, the ‘ghost’, its haunting return on the scene (Translator’s note)] of more [no more] life, of a surviving that will remain, here, one of our themes. Friendship provides numerous advantages, notes Cicero, but none is comparable to this unequalled hope, to this ecstasy towards a future which will go beyond death. Because of death, and because of this unique passage beyond life, friendship thus offers us a hope that has nothing in common, besides the name, with any other.

Why is the future thus pre-illumined, beyond life, by the hope that friendship projects and inspires in this way? What is absolute hope, if it stems from friendship? However underdeveloped it may be, the Ciceronian answer leans sharply to one side – let us say the same side – rather than to the other – let us say the other. Such a response thus sets up the given state of our discussion. In two, three or four words, is the friend the same or the other? Cicero prefers the same, and believes he is able to do so; he thinks that to prefer is also just that: if friendship projects its hope beyond life – an absolute hope, an incommensurable hope – this is because the friend is, as the translation has it, ‘our own ideal image’. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word exemplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model. The two meanings (the single original and the multipliable copy) cohabit here; they are – or seem to be – the same, and that is the whole story, the very condition of survival. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognized in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes – in truth in ours – survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured, for this Narcissus who dreams of immortality. Beyond death, the absolute future thus receives its ecstatic light, it appears only from within this narcissism and according to this logic of the same.

(It will not suffice to claim exactly the contrary, as we will attempt to do, in order to provide a logical demonstration, in a decidable discourse; another way and another thought will be necessary for the task.)

This text by Cicero will also have been in turn, for a history (long and brief, past and to come), the glorious witness, the illustrious exemplar, of Ciceronian logic. This tradition is perhaps finished, even dying; it always will have been in its essence finishing, but its ‘logic’ ends up none the less, in the very consequence of the same, in a vertiginous convertibility of opposites: the absent becomes present, the dead living, the poor rich, the weak strong. And all that, acknowledges Cicero, is quite ‘difficult to say’, which means difficult to decide. Those who snigger at discourses on the undecidable believe they are very strong, as we know, but they should begin by attacking a certain Cicero as well. By reading him, then:

For the man who keeps his eye on a true friend, keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself (tamquam exemplar aliquod intuetur sui). For this reason, friends are together when they are separated, they are rich when they are poor, strong when they are weak (et imbecilli valent), and – a thing even harder to explain – they live on after they have died (mortui vivunt), so great is the honour that follows them, so vivid the memory, so poignant the sorrow. That is why friends who have died are accounted happy (ex quo illorum beata mors videtur), and those who survive them are deemed worthy of praise (vita laudabilis).³

In this possibility of a post mortem discourse, a possibility that is a force as well, in this virtue of the funeral eulogy, everything seems, then, to have a part to play: epitaph or oration, citation of the dead person, the renown of the name after the death of what it names. A memory is engaged in advance, from the moment of what is called life, in this strange temporality opened by the anticipated citation of some funeral oration. I live in the present speaking of myself in the mouths of my friends, I already hear them speaking on the edge of my tomb. The Ciceronian variety of friendship would be the possibility of quoting myself in exemplary fashion, by signing the funeral oration in advance – the best of them, perhaps, but it is never certain that the friend will deliver it standing over my tomb when I am no longer among the living. Already, yet when I will no longer be. As though pretending to say to me, in my very own voice: rise again.

Who never dreams of such a scene? But who does not abhor this theatre? Who would not see therein the repetition of a disdainful and ridiculous staging, the putting to death of friendship itself?

This premeditation of friendship (de amicitia, peri phillas) would also intend, then, to engage, in its very space, work on the citation, and on the citation of an apostrophe. Of an apostrophe always uttered close to the end, on the edge of life – that is to say, of death.

What transpires when an apostrophe is quoted? Does an apostrophe let itself be quoted, in its lively and singular movement, here and now, this impulse in which I turn towards the singularity of the other, towards you, the irreplaceable one who will be my witness or whom I single out? Can the transport of this unique address be not only repeated but quoted? Conversely, would the apostrophe ever take place, and the pledge it offers, without the possibility of a substitution?

We will read these themes of the apostrophic pledge and its quotation later on; they are no doubt inseparable from the theme of the name: from the name of the friend and, in the name, from the mortality of the friend, from the memories and from the testament which, using precisely the same appellation, these themes call up.

Familiarities. What is familiarity? What is familial proximity? What affinity of alliance or consanguinity (Verwandschaft) is concerned? To what elective familiarity could friendship be compared? In reading Montaigne, Montaigne reading Cicero, Montaigne bringing back a ‘saying’ ‘often repeated’, here we are already – another testament – back with Aristotle. Enigmatic and familiar, he survives and surveys from within ourselves (but how many of us are there?). He stands guard over the very form of our sentences on the subject of friendship. He forms our precomprehension at the very moment when we attempt, as we are about to do, to go back over it, even against it. Are we not obliged to respect at least, first of all, the authority of Aristotelian questions? The structure and the norm, the grammar of such questions? Is not Aristotle in fact the first of the maieutic tradition of Lysis, to be sure (Lysis, è peri philías), but beyond him, in giving it a directly theoretical, ontological and phenomenological form, to pose the question of friendship (peri philías), of knowing what it is (tí estí), what and how it is (poîón tí), and, above all, if it is said in one or in several senses (monakhôs légatai è pleonakhôs)?⁴

It is true that right in the middle of this series of questions, between the one on the being or the being-such of friendship and the one on the possible plurivocity of a saying of friendship, there is the question which is itself terribly equivocal: kai tís o phílos. This question asks what the friend is, but also asks who he is. This hesitation in the language between the what and the who does not seem to make Aristotle tremble, as if it were, fundamentally, one and the same interrogation, as if one enveloped the other, and as if the question ‘who?’ had to bend or bow in advance before the ontological question ‘what?’ or ‘what is?’.

This implicit subjection of the who to the what will call for question on our part – in return or in appeal. The question will bring with it a protestation: in the name of the friend or in the name of the name. If this protestation takes on a political aspect, it will perhaps be less properly political than it would appear. It will signify, rather, the principle of a possible resistance to the reduction of the political, even the ethical, to the ontophenomenological. It will perhaps resist, in the name of another politics, such a reduction (a powerful reduction – powerful enough, in any case, to have perhaps constructed the dominant concept of the political). And it will accept the risk of diverting the Lysis tradition. It will attempt to move what is said to us in the dialogue elsewhere, from its first words, about the route and the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating, Counting
• 2. Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb
• 3. This Mad ‘Truth’: The Just Name of Friendship
• 4. The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of ‘Democracy’)
• 5. On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political
• 6. Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization or the ‘Armed’ Question
• 7. He Who Accompanies Me
• 8. Recoils
• 9. ‘In human language, fraternity…’
• 10. ‘For the First Time in the History of Humanity’
• Notes