The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ is announced the anchoritic community of those who love in separation [who love to stand aloof: qui aiment à s’éloigner]. The invitation comes to you from those who can love only at a distance, in separation [qui n’aiment qu’ à se séparer au loin]. This is not all they love, but they love; they love lovence, they love to love – in love or in friendship – providing there is this withdrawal. Those who love only in cutting ties are the uncompromising friends of solitary singularity. They invite you to enter into this community of social disaggregation [déliaison], which is not necessarily a secret society, a conjuration, the occult sharing of esoteric or crypto-poetic knowledge. The classical concept of the secret belongs to a thought of the Community, solidarity or the sect – initiation or private space which represents the very thing the friend who speaks to you as a friend of solitude has rebelled against.

      How can this be? Is it not a challenge to good sense and to sense tout court? Is it possible?

      It is perhaps impossible, as a matter of fact. Perhaps the impossible is the only possible chance of something new, of some new philosophy of the new. Perhaps; perhaps, in truth, the perhaps still names this chance. Perhaps friendship, if there is such a thing, must honour [faire droit] what appears impossible here. Let us, then, underscore once again the perhaps (vielleicht) of a sentence, the one ending the second section of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled ‘The free spirit’ (para. 44).

      After the ‘frog perspective’, with the eye of the toad – on the same side but also on the other – we have the eye of the owl, an eye open day and night, like a ghost in the immense Nietzschean bestiary; but here too, above all, we have the scarecrow, the disquieting simulacrum, the opposite of a decoy: an artifact in rags and tatters, an automaton to frighten birds – the Vogelscheuchen that we are and should be in the world of today, if we are to save, with madness and with singularity itself the friendship of the solitary and the chance to come of a new philosophy. We shall focus on a moment of this clamour – only the conclusion of this long-winded [au long souffle] address. It should be allowed to ring out in a loud voice in its entirety, and in its original language. In the light of the night, for this solitude of which we are jealous is that of ‘midday and midnight’. Before quoting these few lines, let us recall, however, that this passage begins with an attack on a certain concept of the free spirit, of free thought. Nietzsche denounces the freethinkers, the levellers with their enslaved pens – in the service not of democracy, as they sometimes claim, but of ‘democratic taste’ and, in quotation marks, ‘modern ideas’. It is out of the question to oppose some non-freedom to the freedom of these free spirits (since they are in truth slaves); only additional freedom. These philosophers of the future (diese Philosophen der Zukunft) that Nietzsche says are coming will also be free spirits, ‘very free’ spirits (freie, sehr freie Geister). But through this superlative and this surplus of freedom, they will also be something greater and other, something altogether other, fundamentally other (Grundlich-Anderes). As for what will be fundamentally other, I will say that the philosophers of the future will be at once both its figure and its responsibility (although Nietzsche does not put it in this way). Not because they will come, if they do, in the future, but because these philosophers of the future already are philosophers capable of thinking the future, of carrying and sustaining the future – which is to say, for the metaphysician allergic to the perhaps, capable of enduring the intolerable, the undecidable and the terrifying. Such philosophers already exist, something like the Messiah (for the teleiopoesis we are speaking of is a messianic structure) whom someone addresses, here and now, to inquire when he will come.¹⁴ We are not yet among these philosophers of the future, we who are calling them and calling them the philosophers of the future, but we are in advance their friends and, in this gesture of the call, we establish ourselves as their heralds and precursors (ihre Herolde und Vorlaufer).

      This precursivity does not stop at the premonitory sign. It already engages a bottomless responsibility, a debt whose sharing out [partage] is differentiated enough to warrant a prudent analysis. Nietzsche sometimes says ‘I’ and sometimes ‘we’. The signatory of the precursory discourses addressed to you is sometimes me, sometimes us – that is, a community of solitary friends, friends ‘jealous of solitude’, jealous of their ‘proper and profound solitude of midday-midnight’ who call other friends to come.

      This is perhaps the ‘community of those without community’.¹⁵

      But the declared responsibility, the Schuldigkeit thus named, is mine, that of the person saying I. It says, I say, I must answer at the same time before the philosophers of the future to come (before them), before the spectre of those who are not yet here, and before the philosophers of the future that we (we) already are, we who are already capable of thinking the future or the coming of philosophers of the future. A double responsibility which doubles up again endlessly: I must answer for myself or before myself by answering for us and before us. I/we must answer for the present we for and before the we of the future, while presently addressing myself to you, and inviting you to join up with this ‘us’ of which you are already but not yet a member. At the end of the teleiopoetic sentence you, readers, may have already become, nevertheless, the cosignatories of the addresses addressed to you, providing, at least, that you have heard it, which you are invited to do to the best of your ability – which thus remains your absolutely and irreplaceably singular responsibility.

      This is a double but infinite responsibility, infinitely redoubled, split in two [dé-doublée], shared and parcelled out; an infinitely divided responsibility, disseminated, if you will, for one person, for only one – all alone (this is the condition of responsibility) – and a bottomless double responsibility that implicitly describes an intertwining of temporal ekstases; a friendship to come of time with itself where we meet again the interlacing of the same and the altogether other (‘Grundlich-Anderes’) which orientates us in this labyrinth. The to-come precedes the present, the self-presentation of the present; it is, therefore, more ‘ancient’ than the present, ‘older’ than the past present. It thus chains itself to itself while unchaining itself at the same time; it disjoins itself, and disjoins the self that would yet join itself in this disjunction.

      Shall we say that this responsibility which inspires (in Nietzsche) a discourse of hostility towards ‘democratic taste’ and ‘modem ideas’ is exercised against democracy in general, modernity in general; or that, on the contrary, it responds in the name of a hyperbole of democracy or modernity to come, before it, prior to its coming – a hyperbole for which the ‘taste’ and ‘ideas’ would be, in this Europe and this America then named by Nietzsche, but the mediocre caricatures, the talkative good conscience, the perversion and the prejudice – the ‘misuse of the term’ democracy? Do not these lookalike caricatures – and precisely because they resemble it – constitute the worst enemy of what they resemble, whose name they have usurped? The worst repression, the very repression which one must, as close as possible to the analogy, open and literally unlock?

      (Let us leave this question suspended, it breathes the perhaps’, and the perhaps to come will always have anticipated the question. It is a subsidiary question, always late and secondary. At the moment of its formation, a perhaps will have opened it up. A perhaps will perhaps always forbid its closing, where it is in the very act of forming. No response, no responsibility, will ever abolish the perhaps. The perhaps must open and precede, once and for all, the questioning it suspends in advance – not to neutralize or inhibit, but to make possible all the determined and determining orders that depend on questioning (research, knowledge, science and philosophy, logic, law, politics and ethics, and in general language itself): this is a necessity to which we are attempting to do justice in several ways.

      For example:

      1. By recalling this acquiescence (Zusage) more originary than the question which, without saying yes to anything positive, can affirm СКАЧАТЬ