The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ He who lives to combat an enemy must see to it that he remains alive.²

      Nietzsche

      ‘O my friends, there is no friend’: wisdom and last will. The tone of the address is at first uncertain, no doubt, and we shall try here only one variation among so many other possibilities.³

      But on a first hearing, one that lets itself be ingenuously guided by what some call ordinary language and everyday words, by an interpretation very close to some common sense (and that is quite a story already!), the sentence seems to be murmured. Mimicking at least the eloquent sigh, this interpretation takes on the sententious and melancholy gravity of a testament. Someone sighs; a wise man, perhaps, has uttered his last breath. Perhaps. Perhaps he is talking to his sons or his brothers gathered together momentarily around a deathbed: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’.

      The testament thereby reaches us who also inherit it, beyond its natural and legitimate heirs, through an unindicated channel and with the meaning of the inheritance remaining to be deciphered. We are first of all ordered to understand it correctly. Nothing can justify once and for all my starting off, as I am in fact doing, from the place of the language and the tradition in which I myself inherited it – that is to say, the French of Montaigne. It so happens that we worry over this love of language when, in the place of the other, it becomes a national or popular cause. Without denying this limit, which is also a chance (for one must indeed receive the address of the other at a particular address and in a singular language; otherwise we would not receive it), I would like to recognize here the locus of a problem – the political problem of friendship.

      The apostrophe ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ states the death of friends. It says it. In its ‘performative contradiction’ (one should not be able to address friends, calling them friends while telling them that there are no friends, etc.) this saying hesitates between the established fact – it has the grammatical form of such a fact – and the judgement of the sentence: so be it, since it is so; and keep it intact in memory, and never forget it. The address is addressed to memory but also comes to us from memory – and quoted from memory, for ‘the saying that Aristotle often repeated’, is quoted by Montaigne, as others had quoted it before him; he recites it by heart, where such an event is not attested by any literal document.

      The death of friends, as we were saying above: both the memory and the testament. Let us recall, to begin with, that the chain of this quoted quotation (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) displays the heritage of an immense rumour throughout an imposing corpus of Western philosophical literature: from Aristotle to Kant, then to Blanchot; but also from Montaigne to Nietzsche who – for the first time, so it would seem – parodies the quotation by reversing it. In order, precisely, with the upheaval, to upset its assurance.

      There is indeed something of an upheaval here, and we would like to perceive, as it were, its seismic waves, the geological figure of a political revolution which is more discreet – but no less disruptive – than the revolutions known under that name; it is, perhaps, a revolution of the political. A seismic revolution in the political concept of friendship which we have inherited.

      Let us try to hear the ancestral wisdom of the address from within this place of reversal. What is there that is so stunning [renversant] here, and what has thereby been reversed? Here we have, for the first time, someone – another witness – coming forward to contest. He refuses even the accepted propriety of its paradox, as if the stakes were, then, to make it avow its other truth. In the history of the quoted quotation, in the incessant working? of its unfurling, Nietzsche’s upheaval would arrive as an interruption. It would inscribe in that history the scansion of an unprecedented event; but – hence the upsetting structure of the event – it would interrupt less than recall (and call again for) a rupture already inscribed in the speech it interrupts.

      By starting with at least a clue to this event, at the other end of the chain, we would, once again, wish to throw up the question of friendship as the question of the political. The question of the political, for this question is not necessarily, nor in advance, political. It is perhaps not yet or no longer thoroughly political, once the political is defined with the features of a dominant tradition.

      This counter-testimony occurs, as it rightly must, in Human All Too Human, when the excess of the beyond itself folds back into immanence, when what is human in man folds into the hem of the ‘all too’ of Nietzsche’s title, in the hollow of its vague [vague] modality, trembling and inscrutable but all the more forceful [déferlante, as in ‘une vague déferlante’ (breaking wave)]. The irresistible wave of the all too, a wave rolling up into itself, the enveloped violence of a wave welling up and falling back on itself. In this turn of the ‘all too’, around the ‘all too’ in its very revolution, another sentence begins in fact with a ‘perhaps’: there will come, perhaps; there will occur, perhaps, the event of that which arrives (und vielleicht kommt), and this will be the hour of joy, an hour of birth but also of resurrection; in any case, the passage from the dying to the living. Let us prick up our ears, for the moment, towards this perhaps, even if it prevents us from hearing the rest:

      Perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim:

      ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ thus said the dying sage;

      ‘Foes, there are no foes!’ say I, the living fool.⁴

      Why madness? And why should thought, the thought of friendship to come, lend itself inevitably, maddeningly, to madness? This long sentence should be quoted again, and in its original language. But let us observe in advance: such an event presents itself, certainly; it is, thus in the present, the event of a saying that speaks in the present. In the living present. It is the living fool that I am who is presently speaking to you. I say to you. Shouting, calling out (ruf ich…). An I is speaking to you. I am saying to you. You. I am speaking to you. To you, here and now, me: to remind or to announce, certainly; thus to tell you what is not yet, or what is no longer (the wisdom of the dying sage), but speaking to you in a perfectly present way.

      If it reaches us none the less with something of a delay – that of a quotation already – this saying of the living fool speaks in the present. It spoke to you, it was in the present speaking to you in order to make a promise. This is not, this was not, just any promise. The promise promises in that fundamental mode of ‘perhaps’, and even the ‘dangerous perhaps’ which will open, as Beyond Good and Evil prophesies, the speech of philosophers to come.

      What is going to come, perhaps, is not only this or that; it is at last the thought of the perhaps, the perhaps itself. The arrivant will arrive perhaps, for one must never be sure when it comes to arrivance; but the arrivant could also be the perhaps itself, the unheard-of, totally new experience of the perhaps. Unheard-of, totally new, that very experience which no metaphysician might yet have dared to think.

      Now, the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event – of friendship to come and friendship for the future. For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’. Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose possibilization must prevail over the impossible. For a possible that would only be possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak, life-assured. This would be a programme or a causality, a development, a process without an event.

      The СКАЧАТЬ