The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ – in the sheer difference between hot and cold, exalted anger and icy lucidity – in feigning to be precisely what he is, in telling the truth to conceal the truth and especially to neutralize its deadly effect, to protect others from it. He loves them enough not to want to do them all the evil he wants for them. He loves them too much for that.

      And what if tomorrow a new political wisdom were to let itself be inspired by this he’s wisdom, by this manner of knowing how to lie, dissimulate or divert wicked lucidity? What if it demanded that we know, and know how to dissimulate, the principles and forces of social unbinding [déliaison], all the menacing disjunctions? To dissimulate them in order to preserve the social bond and the Menschenfreundlichkeit? A new political wisdom – human, humanistic, anthropological, of course? A new Menschenfreundlichkeit pessimistic, sceptical, hopeless, incredulous?

      A new virtue, from that point on?

      The Nietzschean thought of virtue will not be simplified here. So very many apparently heterogeneous propositions would have to be not only reread but harmonized. The immense but rigorously coherent medley of Zarathustra’s addresses to his ‘brothers’ would also – and this would be an awesome and hitherto unaccomplished feat – have to be taken into account. Addresses to his friends who are also brothers. This consequence, in its shimmering mobility, its untenable instability, appears no less rigorous even though it is not systematic: not philosophical, moral, or theological. Its expository mode can never be reduced to what it nevertheless also is: the discipline of a psychology, a prophecy, a poetics. Our hypothesis is that the ‘genre’, the ‘mode’, the ‘rhetoric’, the ‘poetics’, and the ‘logic’ to which Zaradiustra’s songs belong – ‘Of the friend’, ‘Of the bestowing virtue’, ‘Of the virtuous’, Of the belittling virtue’ (examples of what interests us here) – could be determined, following old or new categories, only from the place of the very thing that is said there, in this specific place, about friendship and virtue, fraternity, and the saying of what is said there, in that way. We shall consider these passages when the time comes.

      This said and this saying call for a new type of address. They claim as much, in any case, teleiopoetically. To take saying and the virtue of speaking about virtue seriously is to acknowledge the address of a vocation: the brothers (past, present or to come) for whom Zarathustra destines such a harangue on friendship and on virtue, an ever-evil virtue. The brothers? Why the brothers? The addressees, as always, lay down the law of genre. We must meditate upon this: the addressees are brothers, and their coming virtue remains virile. The Gay Science (para. 169) says that declared enemies are indispensable for men who must ‘rise to the level of their own virtue, virility (Mannlichkeit), and cheerfulness’.

      We shall return to this later, then. But to confine ourselves here to the barest schema, let us note that the motive of virtue is never discredited – no more so than the word virtue, in its Greek or Judaeo-Christian cultural context. Virtue is regularly reaffirmed by Nietzsche according to a logic or a rhetoric that can be interpreted in at least three ways (at least three when the question concerns the author of ‘Our new “infinite” which never ceased to designate in this way a world that had become infinite again since opening for us onto an “infinity of interpretations.”’¹⁰):

      1. the deliberate perversion of the heritage – the opposite meaning under the same word;

      2. the restoration of a meaning perverted by the inherited tradition (Greek, Jewish, or Pauline-Christian);

      3. or a hyperbolic build-up (more Greek or more Judaeo-Christian than the Greek or the Judaeo-Christian).

      For this reason, one must not hesitate to take the ‘Path to a Christian virtue’ (Weg zu einer christlichen Tugend):¹¹ to learn from one’s enemies is the best path to loving them, for it puts us in a grateful mood towards them (one suspects that this is not the most Christian way of going down such a path, nor of thinking the unconscious of virtues). This again is a question of path, of progress along a path, of steps, gait, a way of walking, rather than a question of content. For there are ‘unconscious virtues’ – this, morality and philosophy could never admit – and like visible virtues, like those that one believes to be visible, these invisible virtues ‘follow their own course’ (gehen auch ihren Gang, with Nietzsche’s emphasis), but a ‘wholly different course’.¹² This difference comes to light only under a microscope, a divine microscope capable of perceiving delicate sculptures on the scales of reptiles.

      Hence we will not be too surprised, alongside this praise of enmity or these calls to the enemy, to see Nietzsche honouring friendship, the ‘good friendship’ – even the Greek brand – and sometimes beyond ‘the things people call love’.

      ‘Good friendship’ supposes disproportion. It demands a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me. By the same token it signifies a divorce with love, albeit self-love. The few lines defining this ‘good friendship’¹³ mark all these lines of division. ‘Good friendship’ can be distinguished from the bad only in eluding everything one believed one could recognize in the name friendship. As if it were a question of a simple homonym. ‘Good friendship’ is born of disproportion: when you esteem or respect (achtet) the other more than yourself. Nietzsche points out that this does not mean that one loves more than oneself – and there is a second division, within lovence, between friendship and love. ‘Good friendship’ certainly supposes a certain air, a certain tinge (Anstrich) of intimacy, but one ‘without actual and genuine intimacy’. It commands that we abstain ‘wisely’, ‘prudently’ (weislich), from all confusion, all permutation between the singularities of you and me. This is the announcement of the community without community of thinkers to come.

      Is such a friendship still Greek? Yes and no. Does this question make sense? Yes and no. If what Nietzsche understands here under the name friendship, if what he wants to have us hear and understand or give us to hear and understand for the future still chimes with philía but is already no longer Greek, then this is another way of suggesting that this experience, with the help of no other, forbids us to place trust in some presumed unity of Greek culture, with respect to this point as to that of so many others.

      Nietzsche knows better than anyone, when he writes ‘In honour of friendship’,¹⁴ that he is speaking Greek and that his argument, illustrated with a tale, portrays a Greek possibility. He honours it, precisely. But the tale reveals an internal contradiction in the Greek concept of friendship, the Greek virtue of friendship – more precisely, in its philosophical concept, as it could be implemented in a philosopher’s life. Nietzsche notes that in Antiquity the feeling of friendship was the highest, more elevated than the most celebrated pride of the sages, who boasted of their independence, autonomy and self-sufficiency. Certainly, this ‘unique’ feeling seemed to be indissociable from this pride, this freedom of self-determination from which it thus stemmed. Now the tale, setting face-to-face a king and a philosopher, a Macedonian king and a Greek philosopher, tends to mark a split between this proud independence, this freedom, this self-sufficiency that claims to rise above the world, and a friendship which should agree to depend on and receive from the other. The Athenian philosopher disdains the world, refusing as a result the king’s gift (Geschenk) of a talent. ‘What!’ demanded the king. ‘Has he no friend?’ Nietzsche translates: the king meant that he certainly honoured the pride of a sage jealous of his independence and his own freedom of movement; but the sage would have honoured his humanity better had he been able to triumph over his proud self-determination, his own subjective freedom; had he been able to accept the gift and the dependency – that is, this law of the other assigned to us by friendship, a sentiment even more sublime than the freedom or self-sufficiency of a subject. The philosopher discredited himself in his ignorance of one of the two sublime sentiments, in truth ‘the more elevated’ of the two.

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