The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ of revelation that would open – like a breaking–in, making it possible after the event – the field of the possible in which it appeared to spring forth, and for that matter actually did so. The event of revelation would reveal not only this or that – God, for example – but revealability itself. By the same token, this would forbid us saying ‘God, for example’.

      Is there an alternative here? Must one choose between these two orders? And is this necessary first of all in the case of the so-called ‘revealed’ religions, which are also religions of the social bond according to loving (love, friendship, fraternity, charity, and so forth)? Must one choose between the priority of revelation (Offenbarung) and that of revealability (Offenbarkeit), the priority of manifestation and that of manifestability, of theology and theiology, of the science of God and the science of the divine, of the divinity of God?²⁶ And above all, supposing there were an alternative between these two orders, what difference would it make to introduce this Aristotelian proposition according to which there could never be (primary) friendship between God and man? We shall come across this question again, but it implicitly organizes all reflection on the possibility of a politics of friendship.

      2. The thought of the act or the event from which the Aristotelian argument derives its authority is also, rather than a thought of each (good sense and common sense), a thought of ‘each one’, of individual singularity. It is true that this thought of each one can take root, in order to return, in phrónesis, in perspicacious judgement and in the prudence of common sense. If the indispensable possibility of éxis does not suffice, if for that one must pass to the act and if that takes time while overcoming time, this is because one must choose and prefer: election and selection between friends and things (prágmata), but also between possible friends – and this will soon lead us back to the vicinity of an ‘O phíloi oudeis phílos’, whose ‘O’ we shall not determine for the moment, and to its arithmetic lesson. Why are the mean, the malevolent, the ill-intentioned (phauloi) not, by definition, good friends? Why do they ignore the sharing or the community of friends (koina ta phílōn)? Because they prefer things (prágmata) to friends. They stock friends among things, they class friends at best among possessions, among good things. In the same stroke, they thus inscribe their friends in a field of relativity and calculable hypotheses, in a hierarchical multiplicity of possessions and things. Aristotle affirms the opposite: in order to accomplish the antithesis of these mean people or bad friends, I assign (prosnémō) relations otherwise, and distribute the priorities differently. I include good things among friends or in view of friends. Here is a preference neglected by the wicked. They invert or pervert this good hierarchy in truth by including their friends among things or in view of things, instead of treating things as things of friendship, as affairs (prágmata) belonging to the sphere of friends, serving the cause of friends, assigned first and foremost to friends.²⁷

      Recommending this preferential attribution, Aristotle speaks, then, of friends rather than of friendship. One must not only prefer friendship, but give the preference to friends. Since it is a question of singularities, this is an inevitable consequence: one must prefer certain friends. The choice of this preference reintroduces number and calculation info the multiplicity of incalculable singularities, where it would have been preferable not to reckon with friends as one counts and reckons with things. So the arithmetic consideration, the terrible necessity of reckoning with the plurality of friends (phíloi, this plural that we shall come across again later in the two possible grammars for the sentence quoted and examined by Montaigne), still depends on temporality, on the time of friendship, on the essence of philía that never works without time (áneu khrónou). One must not have too many friends, for there is not enough time to put them to the test by living with each one.

       For one must live with each him. With each her.

      Is that possible?

      Living – this is understood with with. Whatever the modalities may later be, living is living with. But every time, it is only one person living with another: I live, myself, with (suzao), and with each person, every time with one person. In the passage we will quote in translation, the conjunction between the test or the experience (peira) of time (khronos) and of singularity, of each one (ékastos) must yet again be underlined. This bond of time and number in the principle of singularity is never separated from the hierarchical principle: if one must choose, then the best must be chosen. A certain aristocracy is analytically encompassed in the arithmetic of the choice:

      The primary friendship (e philía e prōte) then is not found towards many (en pollois), for it is hard to test many men (kalepon pollôn peiram labein), for one would have to live with each (ekásto gar an édei suzêtaí). Nor should one choose a friend like a garment. Yet in all things it seems the mark of a sensible man (tou noun ékhontos) to choose the better of two alternatives; and if one has used the worse garment for a long time and not the better, the better is to be chosen, but not in place of an old friend (anti tou pálai philou), one of whom you do not know whether he is better. For a friend is not to be had without trial (áneu peíras) nor in a single day (mias ēméras), but there is need of time (alla khrónou dei) and so ‘the bushel of salt’ has become proverbial.²⁸

      The bushel-of-salt proverb recalls simultaneously the test and the parcelling–out, the experience and the part taken: one must have eaten the whole bushel of salt with someone before one is able to trust him, in a stable, sure, time-tested way, but the time of renewed ‘fidence’ eludes time, it conquers time in yet another way. Previously, the stable steadfastness of the reliable (bébaios) appeared to us in the form of continuity, duration or permanence: the omnitemporality that in time overcomes time. But to pass to the act beyond éxis, to be renewed and reaffirmed at every instant, the reliable in friendship supposes a re–invention, a re–engagement of freedom, a virtue (areté) that interrupts the animal analogy we were discussing above. This is another way of negating time in time, this time in the form of discontinuity, through the reinvention of the event. But here again the economy of time, even of the ‘at the same time’ (áma), commands that the instant of the act and the plenitude of enérgeia be linked to the calculation of number. The test of friendship remains, for a finite being, an endurance of arithmetic. Indeed, the friend must not only be good in himself, in a simple or absolute (aplôs) manner, he must be good for you, in relation to you who are his friend. The friend is absolutely good and absolutely or simply the friend when these two qualities are in harmony, when they are ‘symphonious’ with one another. All the more so, no doubt, when the friend is useful to his friend even if he is not absolutely virtuous or good (spoudaios). This last passage²⁹ is famous for its reputed obscurity, but the conclusion seems clear: it is not possible to love while one is simultaneously, at the same time (ama), the friend of numerous others (to de pottois áma einai phílon kai to phileîn kōlúet); the numerous ones, the numerous others – this means neither number nor multiplicity in general but too great a number, a certain determined excess of units. It is possible to love more than one person, Aristotle seems to concede; to love in number, but not too much so – not too many. It is not the number that is forbidden, nor the more than one, but the numerous, if not the crowd. The measure is given by the act, by the capacity of loving in act: for it is not possible to be in act (energein), effectively, actively, presently at the heart of this ‘numerous’ (pros pollous) which is more than simple number (ou gar oión te áma pros pollous energein). A finite being could not possibly be present in act to too great a number. There is no belonging or friendly community that is present, and first present to itself, in act, without election and without selection.

      This will have been understood in a flash: if the question of arithmetic seems grave and irreducible here, the word ‘arithmetic’ remains inadequate. The units in question are neither things, these prágmata to which the friend СКАЧАТЬ