The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ to be: in so far, that is, as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude (unserer eignen tiefsten mitternachtlichsten, mittaglichsten Einsamkeit) – such a type of man are we, we free spirits! and perhaps you too are something of the same type, you coming men? you new philosophers? (und vielleicht seid auch ihr etwas davon, ihr Kommenden? ihr neuen Philosophen? –) {Nietzsche’s emphasis}.²⁰

      Community without community, friendship without the community of the friends of solitude. No appurtenance. Nor resemblance nor proximity. The end of oikeiótēs? Perhaps. We have here, in any case, friends seeking mutual recognition without knowing each other. One who calls and questions oneself is not even sure that the new philosophers will be part of the free spirits that we are. The rupture will perhaps be radical, even more radical. Perhaps those whom I am calling will be unrecognizable enemies. In any case, I am not asking them to be like me, like us, as the French translation we have quoted puts it. Friends of solitude: this must be understood in multiple fashion: they love solitude, they belong together – that is their resemblance, in a world of solitude, of isolation, of singularity, of non-appurtenance. But in this singular world of singularities, these ‘sworn friends of solitude’ are conjurers; they are even called to be conjurers by one of the heralds, the one who says I but is not necessarily the first, though he is one of the first in our twentieth century to speak this community without community.

      To speak to it and thereby – let us not hesitate to clarify this – to form or to forge it. And to do so in the language of madness that we must use, forced, all of us, by the most profound and rigorous necessity, to say things as contradictory, insane, absurd, impossible, undecidable as ‘X without X’, ‘community of those without community’, ‘inoperative community’, ‘unavowable community’: these untenable syntagms and arguments – illegible, of course, and even derisive – these inconceivable concepts exposed to the disdain of philosophical good conscience, which thinks it possible to hold out in the shade of the Enlightenment; where the light of the Enlightenment is not thought, where a heritage is misappropriated. For us there is no Enlightenment other than the one to be thought.

      This secretless conjuration plots itself between day and night, between midday and midnight, in the risk of the perhaps – that is, in the already incalculable anticipation of this risk, this thought of risk which will be characteristic of the new philosophy. This already of the perhaps acts. We have already undergone the effects of its action; we have this in memory, do we not? It acts within itself – in immanent fashion, we will say – although this immanence consists too in leaving self. Leaving oneself as of oneself, which can be done only by letting the other come, which is possible only if the other precedes and informs me – only if the other is the condition of my immanence. Very strong and very feeble, the already of the perhaps has the paradoxical force of a teleiopoetic propulsion. Teleiopoesis makes the arrivants come – or rather, allows them to come – by withdrawing; it produces an event, sinking into the darkness of a friendship which is not yet.

      Autobiographical as it remains in the circular movement of its arrow, a boomerang that none the less relentlessly pursues its progress towards changing the place of the subject, teleiopoesis also defines the general structure of political allocution, its lure and its truth. We have indeed come into a certain politics of friendship. Into ‘great polities’, not into the one with which the political scientists and the politicians (sometimes too the citizens of modern democracy) entertain us: the politics of opinion.

      For one should not believe that our perhaps belongs to a regime of opinion. That would be a case of credulousness – just an opinion, and a poor one at that. Our unbelievable perhaps does not signify haziness and mobility, the confusion preceding knowledge or renouncing all truth. If it is undecidable and without truth in its own moment (but it is, as a matter of fact, difficult to assign a proper moment to it), this is in order that it might be a condition of decision, interruption, revolution, responsibility and truth. The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth. But the friends of truth are not, by definition, in the truth; they are not installed there as in the padlocked security of a dogma and the stable reliability of an opinion. If there is some truth in the perhaps, it can only be that of which the friends are the friends. Only friends. The friends of truth are without the truth, even if friends cannot function without truth. The truth – that of the thinkers to come – it is impossible to be it, to be there, to have it; one must only be its friend. This also means one must be solitary – and jealous of one’s retreat. This is the anchoritic truth of this truth. But it is far from abstaining from afar from the political – and even if the anchorite plays the scarecrow, such a person overpoliticizes the space of the city.

      Hence this remarkable redoubling of the perhaps (this time in the form of ‘in all probability’, wahrscheinlich genug) which responds to the question of knowing if, on their way or in the imminence of their arrival, the thinkers to come are ‘friends of the truth’. These friends of the truth that they will, perhaps, remain begin by denouncing a fundamental contradiction, that which no politics will be able to explain or rationalize, simply because it neither can nor has the right to do so: the contradiction inhabiting the very concept of the common and the community. For the common is rare, and the common measure is, a rarity for the rare, just as, not far from here, Baudelaire’s man of the crowds thought it. How many of them are there? How many of us are there? The incalculable equality of these friends of solitude, of the incommensurable subjects, of these subjects without subject and without intersubjectivity.

      How can a democrat handle this friendship, this truth, this contradiction? And this measurelessness? I mean the democrat whom we know so well, who is really not familiar with such things? Above all, he is unfamiliar with the practice of putting ‘truth’ in quotation marks.

      Let us listen, then. And first let us put into the present what the standard French translation deemed it necessary to render in a future tense. Those who are the future are on their way, now, even if these arrivants have not yet arrived: their present is not present, it is not in current affairs, but they are coming, they are arrivants because they are going to come. ‘Ils seront’ means: they are what is going to come, and what is to come is in the present tense; it speaks (in French) to the presentation of the future, sometimes planned, sometimes prescribed. In paragraph 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, the truth of these friends seems to be suspended between quotation marks:

      Are they new friends of ‘truth’ (and not, as in the French translation, seront-ils, [will they be], Sind es neue Freunde der ‘Wahrheit), these coming philosophers (diese kommenden Philosophen)? In all probability ([c’est assez vraisemblable {ou probable}], Wahrscheinlich genug, the French translations give here ‘probably’, thus losing this allusion to the true; for this response to the question of truth, of friendship for the truth, cannot be true or certain, certainly, it can only have a true-semblance [vrai-semblance], but already orientated by friendship for the truth): for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths.

      I have underlined hitherto (bisher): we will come across its import again later. Their truths – theirs, without quotation marks this time – this is what the philosophers have loved. Is this not contradictory with truth itself? But if one must love truth (this is necessary, is it not?), how will one love anything other than one’s own truth, a truth that one can appropriate? Nietzsche’s answer (but how will a democrat handle it?): far from being the very form of truth, universalization hides the cunning of all dogmatisms. Being-common or being-in-common: a dogmatic stratagem, the cunning of the common sense of the community; what is placed in common can reason [raisonner] only in order to frame or set [arraisonner]. And as for the apparently arithmetical question, the question of the number of friends in which we have begun to perceive the Aristotelian dimension – the question of great numbers qua the political question of truth – we shall see that it does not fail to crop up here:

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