The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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      Having said this, we are going to read the book’s final lines and the envoy. It, too, is pronounced in the form of a salute or a leavetaking. A moment of separation with friends at last – friends who have become friends – and the testamentary connotation is not absent. All the more so given that in the middle of the epilogue, the epilogual nature of the apostrophe – that is, the beginning of the end – does not fail to appear. We shall have to climb the road separating us from the cemetery: ‘Till we reach the grave together. Friends!…’ Bis wir in the Grube steigen. /Freunde!

      If the address requests that we go beyond excuse and pardon, it still moves in the religious space of benediction or malediction. Unless this space would at last be opened by it. It conjures up malediction (Fluch) and pronounces benediction twice (Amen!, Und auf Wiedersehn!) in offering the promised coming of the event – in exposing, rather, the arriving stance [arrivance] of the question of the perhaps (‘So soils geschehn?’):

      Shall we do this, friends, again? … (Freunde! Ja! So soils geschehn?)

       Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

      No excuses! No forgiving!

      You who laugh and joy in living

      Grant this book, with all its follies (Diesem unvernunftigen Buche)

      Ear and heart and open door!

      Friends, believe me, all my folly’s (meine Unvemunft)

      Been a blessing heretofore!

      What I seek, what I discover – (Was ich suche, was ich finde –,)

      Has a book contained it ever?

      Hail in me the guild of fools! (die Narren-Zunft!)

      Learn what this fools-book’s (Narrenbuche) offence is:

      Reason coming to its senses! (Wie Vernunft kommt – ‘sur Vernunft’!)

      Shall we, friends, do this again? (Also, Freunde, soils geschehen? –)

       Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

      The envoy thus confirms that the friend cannot address anything other than a fool’s discourse to his friends. The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to do with the wisdom which, throughout the history of philosophy qua the history of reason, will have set the tone of this truth – by attempting to have us believe that amorous passion was madness, no doubt, but that friendship was the way of wisdom and of knowledge, no less than of political justice.

      Let us return now to ‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’, at paragraph 376 of Human All Too Human, 1. Let us recall only the following for the moment: that the reversal had been prepared by an avowal. By a sort of response to self; already, the same ‘sage’ – the presumed author of ‘O my friends’ – when he was not yet ‘dying’, accepted in the prime of life to contradict himself. In any case, he consented to declaring to himself an ‘error’ and an ‘illusion’ while appealing, in sum, to responsibility. A responsibility which, following the more or less latent – and thus silent – logic of the argument, can be exercised only in silence – indeed, in secret – in a sort of counterculture of knowing-how-to-keep-silent. As though the sage were speaking silently to himself about silence, answering himself saying nothing – in order to appeal to responsibility. One must know how to reach such silence; ‘they’ must learn how (‘und Schweigen mussen sie gelemt haben’):

      When one realizes this, and realizes in addition that all the opinions of one’s fellow men, of whatever kind they are and with whatever intensity they are held, are just as necessary and unaccountable (unverantwortlich) as their actions; if one comes to understand this inner necessity of opinions originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent, environment – perhaps one will then get free of that bitterness of feeling with which the sage cried: ‘Friends, there are no friends! (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!).’ One will, rather, avow to oneself (Er wird sich vielmehr eingestehen): yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend (und Schweigen mussen sie gelernt haben um dir Freund zu bleiben); for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. Are there not people who would be mortally wounded if they discovered that their dearest friends actually know about them?

      Friendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself Hence it says, saying this to itself, that there are no more friends; it avows itself in avowing that. Friendship tells the truth – and this is always better left unknown.

      The protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friendship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friends protect themselves from the error or the illusion on which friendship is founded – more precisely, the bottomless bottom founding a friendship, which enables it to resist its own abyss. To resist the vertigo or the revolution that would have it turning around itself. Friendship is founded, in truth, so as to protect itself from the bottom, or the abyssal bottomless depths.

      That is why friendship had better preserve itself in silence, and keep silent about the truth. Over the abyss, on the shifting ground of our friendships: ‘how uncertain (unsicher) is the ground upon which all our alliances and friendships rest, … how isolated (vereinsamt, solitary, insularized, ‘solitarized’) each man is’ (ibid.); that is what you will say to yourself, with so much experience of ‘misunderstandings’, ‘ruptures’, ‘hostile fleeings’ [‘fuites hostiles’]. So you had better keep silent about this truth of truth. The truth of truth is that the truth is there to protect a friendship that could not resist the truth of its illusion. Nietzsche affects a mystical tone when he puts forward aphoristic precepts and sentences (Spruche) that he then names, in Latin, Silentium. Asceticism, kenosis, knowledge of how to evacuate words to gain breathing space for friendship. Here again, Nietzsche thinks silence from the standpoint of friendship, as though silence itself could not be spoken about, as though it could not be spoken elsewhere than in friendship, by friendship. Speech ruins friendship; it corrupts by speaking, degrades, belittles, undoes the speech (verredet) of friendship; but this evil is done to it on account of truth. If silence must be kept among friends, concerning friends, this is just as much so as not to tell the truth, a murderous truth. ‘Silentium. One should not talk (reden) about one’s friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship (sonst verredet man sich das Gefühl der Freundschaft).’⁵

      Not that friends should keep silent, among themselves or on the subject of their friends. Their speech would perhaps have to breathe with an implied silence. This is nothing other than a certain way of speaking: secret, discreet, discontinuous, aphoristic, elliptic, just in disjointed time to avow the truth that must be concealed; hiding it – because it is deadly – to save life. To avow or not to avow – what difference does it make, since the avowal consists in hiding the truth even more safely? What is the truth of a confession? Not the veracity of what it says, but its confessional truth?

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