The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ indeterminable. It is indeed A perhaps that cannot as yet be determined as dubitative or sceptical,¹⁶ the perhaps of what remains to be thought, to be done, to be lived (to death). Now this perhaps not only comes ‘before’ the question (investigation, research, knowledge, theory, philosophy); it would come, in order to make it possible, ‘before’ the originary acquiescence which engages the question in advance with [auprès de] the other.

      2. By specifying recurrently: ‘if there is one’, by suspending the thesis of existence wherever, between a concept and an event, the law of an aporia, an undecidability, a double bind occurs in interposition, and must in truth impose itself to be endured there. This is the moment when the disjunction between thinking and knowing becomes crucial. This is the moment when one can think sense or non-sense only by ceasing to be sure that the thing ever occurs, or – even if there is such a thing – that it would ever be accessible to theoretical knowledge or determinant judgement, any assurance of discourse or of nomination in general. Thus we regularly say – but we could multiply the examples – the gift, if there is one; invention, if there is any such thing,¹⁷ and so forth. This does not amount to conceding a hypothetical or conditional dimension (‘if, supposing that, etc.’) but to marking a difference between ‘there is’ and ‘is’ or ‘exists’ – that is to say, the words of presence. What there is, if there is one or any, is not necessarily. It perhaps does not exist nor ever present itself; nevertheless, there is one, or some; there is a chance of there being one, of there being some. Perhaps – although the French peut-être is, perhaps, with its two verbs (pouvoir and Are), too rich. Would not the original possibility we are discussing efface itself better in the adverbs of other languages (vielleicht or perhaps, for example)?

      I underscore, then, we underscore – more precisely we, in turn, re-mark what the I itself (Nietzsche, if you like), will have underlined: its responsibility, the obligation to answer, the responsibility which consists in calling as much as in responding to the call, and always in the name of a singular solitude, proper solitude, solitude strictly speaking. In the name of the friend jealous of his solitude, jealous of his secret without secret. Let us then remark, too, the flexions and reflections of personal pronouns, between I, they, we and you: I feel responsible towards them (the new thinkers who are coming), therefore responsible before us who announce them, therefore towards us who are already what we are announcing and who must watch over that very thing, therefore towards and before you whom I call to join us, before and towards me who understands all this and who is before it all: me, them, us, you, etc.

      But in saying this I feel I have a duty (I feel I have the responsibility, the debt or the duty: fuhle ich … die Schuldigkeit), almost as much towards them as towards us, their heralds and precursors, us free spirits! – to blow away from all of us an ancient and stupid prejudice and misunderstanding which has all too long obscured the concept ‘free spirit’ like a fog. In all the countries of Europe and likewise in America there exists at present something that misuses this name, a very narrow, enclosed, chained up species of spirits who desire practically the opposite of that which informs our aims and instincts – not to mention the fact that in regard to those new philosophers appearing (heraufkommenden neuen Philosophen) they must certainly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, in short and regrettably, among the levellers (Nivellirer), these falsely named ‘free spirits’ – eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modem ideas’, men without solitude one and all, without their own solitude (allesammt Menschen ohne Einsamkeit, ohne eigne Einsamkeit), good clumsy fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! (wobei the Wahrheit glucklich auf den Kopf zu stehn kommt!) What with all their might they would like to strive after is the universal green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety (Sicherheit, Ungefahrlichkeit), comfort and an easier life for all; their two most oft-recited doctrines and ditties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ – and suffering itself they take for something that has to be abolished. We, who are the opposite of this … [we think that] everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species man (der species Mensch).¹⁸

      And here, once again, a ‘perhaps’ arrives to spread disquiet in the opposition itself. The perhaps carries away the extreme alterity, the possibility of this other end, this other term which structures no less the antidemocratic provocation, and results in there never being ‘enough to say’ or ‘enough to silence’:

      We do not say enough when we say even that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point, at the other end (at the altogether other end, Nietzsche’s emphasis: am andern Ende) from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: as its antipodes perhaps (als deren Antipoden vielleicht)?

      At each instant the discourse is carried out to its limit, on the edge of silence: it transports itself beyond itself. It is swept away by the extreme opposition – indeed, the alterity – by the hyperbole which engages it in an infinite build-up [surenchère] (freer than the freedom of the free spirit, a better democrat than the crowd of modem democrats, aristocrat among all democrats, more futural and futurist than the modem), swept away by the perhaps that arrives to undecide meaning at each decisive moment.

      All this (this surplus of democracy, this excess of freedom, this reaffirmation of the future) is not, so we suspect, very promising for the community, communication, the rules and maxims of communicational action. Nietzsche continues, in effect:

      Is it any wonder we ‘free spirits’ are not precisely the most communicative of spirits (die mitteilsamsten Geister)? that we do not want to betray in every respect from what (wovon) a spirit can free itself and to what (wohin) it is then perhaps driven? And as for the dangerous formula ‘beyond good and evil’ with which we at any rate guard against being taken for what we are not: we are something different (wir sind etwas Anders) from ‘libres-penseurs’, ‘liben pensatori,#x2019;, Freidenket’, or whatever else all these worthy advocates of ‘modern ideas’ like to call themselves.¹⁹

      And now, for the finishing touch, the owls in full light of day – ourselves again – the scarecrows that we owe it to ourselves to be today; friendship without friendship of the friends of solitude, the surplus of free will, and once again the perhaps in which I see you coming, you, the arrivants to come, you the arrivant thinkers, you the coming, the upcoming (das Kommenden), the new philosophers, but you whom I see coming, me, I who am already perhaps a little like you who are perhaps a little like us, a bit on our side, you the new philosophers, my readers to come, who will be my readers only if you become new philosophers – that is, if you know how to read me – in other words, if you can think what I write in my stead, and if you know how to countersign in advance or how to prepare yourself to countersign, always in imminent fashion, what you inspire in me here exactly, teleiopoetically:

      curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible, ready for every task that demands acuteness and sharp senses, ready for every venture thanks to a superfluity of ‘free will’ (dank einen Uberschusse von ‘freiem Willen’), with fore-and back-souls into whose ultimate intenions no one can easily see, with fore-and backgrounds to whose end no foot may go, hidden under mantles of light, conquerors even though we look like heirs and prodigals, collectors and arrangers from morn till night, misers of our riches and our full-crammed cupboards, thrifty in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemata, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of labour even in broad daylight (mitunter СКАЧАТЬ