The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ (ihre Wahrheiten). But certainly (Sicherlich aber) they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman, which has hitherto (emphasis added) been the secret desire and hidden sense (Hintersinn) of all dogmatic endeavours. ‘My judgement is my judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it’ – such a philosopher of the future may perhaps (vielleicht, once again) say. One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many (mit Vielen ubereinstimmen zu wollen). ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a ‘common good’ (‘Gemeingut’)!. The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders (Schuder, also shivers or quivers or thrills) and delicacies (Zartheiten, also fragilities and weaknesses, etc.) for the refined (Feinen, the delicate, the subtle, the weak also, the vulnerable, for the aristocracy of this truth of election is both that of force and weakness, a certain manner of being able to be hurt), and, in sum (tm ganzin und kurzen), all rare things for the rare.²¹

      So that is what this philosopher of the future will say, perhaps. That, perhaps, is what he would say, the friend of truth – but a mad truth, the mad friend of a truth which ignores both the common and common sense (‘I, the living fool’), the friend of a ‘truth’ in quotation marks that reverses all the signs in one stroke.

3

       This Mad ‘Truth’: The Just Name of Friendship

      It seems to me that the meditations of a man of state must centre on the question of enemies in all its aspects, and he owes it to himself to have taken a keen interest in this saying of Xenophon: ‘the wise man will profit from his enemies’. Consequently, I have collected the remarks I have recently made, in approximately the same terms, on this subject, and I will send them to you. I have abstained as much as possible from quoting what I had written in my Political Precepts, since I see that you often have this book in hand.¹

      Plutarch

      A good-natured hare wanted to have many friends.

      Many! you say – that is a major affair:

      A single friend is a rare thing in these parts.

      I agree, but my hare had this whim and didn’t know what

      Aristotle used to say to young Greeks upon entering his school:

      My friends, there are no friends.

      Complacent, assiduous, always driven by zeal,

      He wanted to make everyone a faithful friend,

      And believed himself loved because he loved them.²

      Florian

      Now. Perhaps we are ready, now, to hear and understand the Nietzschean apostrophe, the cry of the ‘living fool that I am’: ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!) Perhaps we are better exposed to it, there where its destination also depends on us. Its destiny, perhaps, rides on the event of a response that has come, like the responsibility of a countersignature, from its addressees. Who will come to countersign? What? How? How many?

      The apostrophe resounds in Human All Too Human, in the chapter ‘Of friends’.³ It also plays with a tradition deeper and wider than any of us could fathom: Aristotle, Montaigne, Plutarch, Gradan – Oráculo manual – Florian, and so many others awaiting us. Most often they appeal to a wisdom, and this wisdom usually derives its authority from a political experience. In any case, it draws from such experience political lessons, moralities and precepts to be used by wise politicians.

      Once again – we will hear it – the provocation strikes and opens with a ‘perhaps’. It opens as much as it opens up, it breaks in. The irreducible modality of the ‘perhaps’ always gives the opening note. ‘Perhaps’ gives it as a sharp rap is administered. ‘Perhaps’ gives it with the announcement of a first act or a first scene; but also as the only chance granted to the future. More precisely, the chance of the future as chance itself. Future there is, if there ever is, when chance is no longer barred. There would be no future without chance. The rap of the ‘perhaps’ not only effects a catastrophic inversion, a reversal of the tradition – already paradoxical (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) – it provokes the avowal of the opposite, the confession of an error that is not foreign to the truth. This is perhaps truth itself, a superior or more profound truth.

      And 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.

      Und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal the freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt:

      ‘Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!’ so rief der sterbende Weise;

      ‘Feinde, es gibt keinen Feind!’ – ruf ich, der lebende Tor.⁴

      Numerous roads promise to open up on a reading of this reversing [renversante] apostrophe – an overwhelming one, too, since it converts the friend into the enemy. Someone complains, in sum, about the disappearance of the enemy. Would it already have taken place? In any case, this person fears that it has; he recalls it, announces and denounces it as a catastrophe. We shall listen once again, at more or less regular intervals, to a double clamour, the two times and two voices, the two persons of this exclamation: he/I, he exclaimed/I exclaimed, past/present, dying/living, wisdom/madness. But a single cry answers the other: this is what the dying sage cried, this is what I cry, I, the living fool, etc.: so rief der sterbende Weise … ruf ich, der lebende Tor.

      ‘That saying which Aristotle often repeated’ is, then, indeed one of someone who is dying – his last will and testament – already speaking from the place of death. A testamentary wisdom to which must be opposed, even at the price of madness, the exclaiming insurrection of the living present. The dying person addresses friends, speaking of friends to them, if only to tell them there are none. As for the living person, he addresses enemies, speaking to them of enemies, if only to tell them there are none. The dying person dies, turning towards friendship; the living person lives on, turning towards enmity. Wisdom on the side of death, and the past came to pass: the being-past of the passer-by. Madness on the side of life, and the present is: the presence of the present.

      This is far from the only time, as we have seen, that Nietzsche associates the thought of the friend-enemy or of the brother-enemy with madness, with sheer madness that begins by inverting all the senses of sense into their opposites. For sheer madness is a priori inscribed in the very sense of sense. The fool is already on the premises as a guest who would have preceded his host. He haunts him in advance, his shadow is watching in the darkness of all hospitality: Human All Too Human is a fool addressing fools, his friends the fools.

      The book is literally dedicated to a corporation of fools (Narren-Zunft). The madness is the dedication and the signature at the end. The verse epilogue, the post-lude (Ein Nachspiet), is entitled ‘Among Friends’ (Unter Freunden), and it also addresses an apostrophe to them, the СКАЧАТЬ