The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ have too many friends, but it nevertheless resists enumeration, counting–off, or even pure and simple quantification.

      Why do we insist on this difficulty here and now? First of all, because it announces one of the possible secrets – thus hiding it still – in the cryptic tradition of the apostrophe brought up by Montaigne and so many others. One of the secrets which has remained a secret for the reporters themselves, as if it had to reserve itself for a few people. We will come back to this later. Next, because this secret merges with virtue’s (ateté). We should not pretend to know what this word means without having thought the enigma of phileîn. No doubt they are one and the same. And finally, because the quantification of singularities will always have been one of the political dimensions of friendship, of a becoming-political of a friendship which may not be political through and through – not originarily, necessarily or intrinsically. With this becoming-political, and with all the schemata that we will recognize therein – beginning with the most problematic of all, that of fraternity – the question of democracy thus opens, the question of the citizen or the subject as a countable singularity. And that of a ‘universal fraternity’. There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ (koína ta philōn), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. Tragically irreconcilable and forever wounding. The wound itself opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other.

      But where every other is equally altogether other. More serious than a contradiction, political desire is forever borne by the disjunction of these two laws. It also bears the chance and the future of a democracy whose ruin it constantly threatens but whose life, however, it sustains, like life itself, at the heart of its divided virtue, the inadequacy to itself. Would virtue ever have existed without the chaos opening in silence, like the ravenous mouth of an immeasurable abyss, between one or the other of these laws of the other? There is no virtue without this tragedy of number without number. This is perhaps even more unthinkable than a tragedy. The unthinkable filters through Aristotle’s staid treatise, under his worldly-wise counsel, under the wisdom of his precepts: my friends, if you want to have friends, do not have too many.

      Note that the counsellor never says how many, nor at what number virtue becomes impossible. What knowledge could ever measure up to the injunction to choose between those whom one loves, whom one must love, whom one can love? Between themselves? Between them and the others? All of them?

      At stake is virtue, which is no longer in nature, this virtue whose name will remain suspended, without an assured concept, as long as these two laws of friendship will not have been thought. For the reliability of the stable (bébaios), that on which virtue depends – therefore of liberty, decision and reflection – can no longer be only natural. No more so than time, which does not belong to nature when it puts primary friendship to the test. In the history of the concept of nature – and already in its Greek history – the virtue of friendship will have dug the trench of an opposition. For it obliges Aristotle himself to restrain the concept of nature: he must oppose it to its other – here to virtue – when he classes friendship among stable things (tôn bebaíōri), in the same way as happiness belongs to self-sufficient and autarkic things (tôn autárkōn). It is the same immanence that provides shelter from external or random causalities. And constancy is virtuous only by reason of its autonomy, of the autarky of decisions which renew themselves, freely and according to a spontaneous repetition of their own movement, always new but anew and newly the same, ‘samely’ new. This is not possible without some naturality, but that is not in nature: it does not come down to nature. Having quoted and approved Euripides’ Electra (e gar phúsis bébaios, ou ta khremata: for nature is stable, not wealth), Aristotle adds that it is much more beautiful (polu de kállion) to say virtue (ateté) in this case rather than nature (polu de kállion eipein oti ē aretē tés phúseds).³⁰ Since friendship does not – and above all must not – have the reliability of a natural thing or a machine; since its stability is not given by nature but is won, like constancy and ‘fidence’, through the endurance of a virtue, primary friendship, ‘that which allows all the others to be named’ (di’ēn ai állai légontaí), we must say that it is founded on virtue (é kat’aretēn estí).³¹ The pleasure it gives, the pleasure that is necessary – this is the immanent pleasure of virtue. There may well be other forms of friendship, those whose name is thereby derived from primary friendship (for example, says Aristotle, with children, animals, and the wicked), but they never imply virtue, nor equality in virtue. For if all the species of friendship (the three principal ones, according to virtue, to usefulness or to pleasure) imply equality or equity (isótēs), only primary friendship demands an equality of virtue between friends, in what assigns them reciprocally to one another.

      What can such equality in virtue be? What can it be measured against? How do you calculate a non-natural equality whose evaluation remains both immanent, as we have just seen, but at the same time obliged to reciprocity – that is, to a certain symmetry? One wonders what is left of a friendship which makes the virtue of the other its own condition (be virtuous if you want me to love you), but one wonders, too, what would be left of friendship without this condition, and when the number without number intervenes, when virtue is not dispensed in excess. And how can we reconcile this first imperative, that of primary friendship, with what we have begun to uncover: the necessary umlaterality of a dissymmetrical phileîn (you are better off loving than being loved) and the terrible but so righteous law of contretemps?

      Is there a conflict here in the philosophy of phileîn, in the Aristotelian philosophy of friendship? For other Aristotelian axioms, which we shall consider, seem to forbid or contradict the call of dissymmetry and this law of contretemps. For example, the axiom which holds that the friend is another self who must have the feeling of his own existence – an inseparable axiom which makes friendship proceed from self-love, from philautía, which is not always egoism or amour-propre.

      Unless one would find the other in oneself, already: the same dissymmetry and tension of surviving in self, in the ‘oneself thus out of joint with its own existence. To be able or to have to be the friend of oneself – this would change nothing in the testamentary structure we are discussing. It would break all ipseity apart in advance, it would ruin in advance that which it makes possible: narcissism and self-exemplarity. We are speaking about anything but narcissism as it is commonly understood: Echo, the possible Echo, she who speaks from, and steals, the words of the other [celle qui prend la parole aux mots de l’autre], she who takes the other at his or her word, her very freedom preceding the first syllables of Narcissus, his mourning and his grief. We are speaking of anything but the exemplarity of the Ciceronian exemplar. An arche-friendship would inscribe itself on the surface of the testament’s seal. It would call for the last word of the last will and testament. But in advance it would carry it away as well.

      It would be extraneous neither to the other justice nor to the other politics whose possibility we would like, perhaps, to see announced here.

      Through, perhaps, another experience of the possible.

2

       Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb

      Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake

      Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.

      Blake

      Love of one’s enemies? I think that has been well learned: it happens thousandfold today.…¹

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