The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ distance at one remove, and of an absolute acceleration in the spanning of space by the very structure of the sentence (it begins at the end, it is initiated with the signature of the other). Rendering, making, transforming, producing, creating – this is what counts; but, given that this happens only in the auto-tele-affection of the said sentence, in so far as it implies or incorporates its reader, one would – precisely to be complete – have to speak of auto-teleiopoetics. We shall say teleiopoetics for short, but not without immediately suggesting that friendship is implied in advance therein: friendship for oneself, for the friend and for the enemy. We all the more easily authorize ourselves to leave the self of the autos in the wings, since it appears here as the split effect rather than as the simple origin of teleiopoesis [téléiopoièse]. The inversion of repulsion into attraction is, in a way, engaged, analytically included, in the movement of phileîn. This is a logic that will have to be questioned: if there is no friend elsewhere than where the enemy can be, the ‘necessity of the enemy’ or the ‘one must love one’s enemies’ (seine Feinde lieben) straight away transforms enmity into friendship, etc. The enemies I love are my friends. So are the enemies of my friends. As soon as one needs or desires one’s enemies, only friends can be counted – this includes the enemies, and vice versa – and here madness looms. At each step, on the occasion of every teleiopoetic event. (No) more sense [Plus de sens]. That which is empty and that which overflows resemble one another, a desert mirage effect and the ineluctability of the event.

      (Of course, we must quickly inform the reader that we will not follow Nietzsche here. Not in any simple manner. We will not follow him in order to follow him come what may. He never demanded such a thing anyway without freeing us, in the same move, from his very demand, following the well-known paradoxes of any fidelity. We will follow him here to the best of our ability in order, perhaps, to stop following him at one particular moment; and to stop following those who follow him – Nietzsche’s sons. Or those who still accompany him – to them we shall return much later – as his brothers or the brothers of his brothers. But this will be in order to continue, in his own way again, perhaps, turning the virtue of virtue against itself; to dig deeper under this ‘good conscience’ of the ‘last Europeans’ that continues to impel Nietzsche’s statements. This good conscience perhaps leaves on them a mark of the most unthought tradition – and the tradition of more than one tradition – all the way down to the overwhelming thought of friendship. This following without following will be undertaken in several stages, in varying rhythms, but it will also derive its authority from an avowal, however ironic it may be.

      In ‘Our virtues’, Nietzsche continues to say ‘we’ in order to declare his appurtenance qua heir who still believes in his own virtues:

      And is there anything nicer than to look for one’s own virtues? Does this not also mean: to believe in one’s own virtues? But this ‘believing in one’s virtue’ – is this not at bottom the same thing as that which one formerly called one’s ‘good conscience’, that venerable long conceptual pigtail which our grandfathers used to attach to the back of their heads and often enough to the back of their minds as well? It seems that, however little we may think ourselves old-fashioned and grand-fatherly-respectable in other respects, in one thing we are none the less worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience (wir letzsten Europaer mit gutem Gewissen): we too still wear their pigtail (ihren Zopf).’¹⁰

      This good conscience of the last Europeans might well survive in Nietzsche’s head, beyond what he believes, what he thinks he believes, as well as in the heads of his ‘philosophers of a new species’: those who, in our century and beyond, have not broken any more radically than Nietzsche with the Greek or Christian canon of friendship – that is, with a certain politics, a certain type of democracy.)

      These philosophers of a new species will accept the contradiction, the opposition or the coexistence of incompatible values. They will seek neither to hide this possibility nor to forget it; nor will they seek to surmount it. And this is where madness looms; but here, too, its urgency indeed calls for thought. In the same paragraph, Beyond Good and Evil opens our ears, and delivers the definition of the fool we need to understand the ‘living fool’ of Human All Too Human, such as he presents himself (I who shout, who exclaim, I the living fool, ruf ich, der lebende Τοr); at the very moment when he turns the address into its antithesis, when the friends become the enemies or when suddenly there are no more enemies. What in fact does Beyond Good and Evil say to us? That one must be mad, in the eyes of the ‘metaphysicians of all ages’, to wonder how something might (konnte) rise up out of its antithesis; to wonder if, for example, truth might be born of error, the will to truth or the will to deceive, the disinterested act of egotism, etc. How is one to ask a question of this kind without going mad? Such a genesis (Entstehung) of the antithesis would end up contradicting its very origin. It would be an anti-genesis. It would wage war on its own lineage, as the ‘metaphysician of all ages’ believes; this would be tantamount to a monstrous birth, an ‘impossible’ origin (‘Solcherlei Entstehung ist unmoglich’). Anyone who merely dreams of such a possibility (wer davon traumt) immediately goes mad; this is already a fool (ein Narr). Here we have yet another way of defining, from the impossible thought of this impossible, both the direct lineage and the dream – and its madness.

      Perhaps! (Vielleicht!) But who is willing to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a new species of philosopher (einer neuen Gattung von Philosophen), one which possesses tastes and inclinations opposite to and different from (umgekehrten) those of its predecessors – philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps’ (Philosophen des gefahrlichen Vielleicht) in every sense. – And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers arising (Ich sehe solche neue Philosophen heraufkommen).¹¹

      Nietzsche renews the call; he puts through – from a different place – this teleiopoetic or telephone call to philosophers of a new species. To those of us who already are such philosophers, for in saying that he sees them coming, in saying they are coming, in feigning to record their coming (further on: Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf¹²), he is calling, he is asking, in sum, ‘that they come’ in the future. But to be able to say this, from the standpoint of the presumed signer, these new philosophers – from the standpoint of what is being written, from where we (Nietzsche and his followers) are writing to one another – must already have arrived. Nietzsche makes the call with an apostrophe to his addressee, asking him to join up with ‘us’, with this ‘us’ which is being formed, to join us and to resemble us, to become the friends of the friends that we are! Strange friends. What are we doing, in fact, we the friends that we are, we who are calling for new philosophers, we who are calling you to resemble and to join up with us in shared enjoyment (Mitfreude, this is what ‘makes the friend’; macht den Freund, as we read elsewhere,¹³Mitfreude and not Mitleiden, joy among friends, shared enjoyment [jouissance] and not shared suffering)? What are we doing and who are we, we who are calling you to share, to participate and to resemble? We are first of all, as friends, the friends of solitude, and we are calling on you to share what cannot be shared: solitude. We are friends of an entirely different kind, inaccessible friends, friends who are alone because they are incomparable and without common measure, reciprocity or equality. Therefore, without a horizon of recognition. Without a familial bond, without proximity, without oikeiótēs.

      Without truth? We should wait and see. What truth is there for a friendship without proximity, without presence, therefore without resemblance, without attraction, perhaps even without significant or reasonable preference? How can such a friendship even be possible, except in a figure? Why still call this ‘friendship’ except in a misuse of language and a diversion of a semantic tradition? How could we not only be the friends of solitude, born friends (gebomen), sworn friends (geschwomen), jealous friends of solitude (eifersuchtigen Freunde der Einsamkeit), but then invite you to become a member of this singular community?

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