The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ revealed. But one cannot love, and one must not love, in such a state of ignorance of friendship itself (ésti gar lanthánein philoámenon, philoûnta d’oú¹⁰). Axiom: the friendship I bear [porte] for someone, and no doubt love as well, cannot remain a secret for myself. Even before it is declared (to the other, in a loud voice), the act of love would thereby be, at its very birth, declared. It would be in itself declared, given over to knowledge or to consciousness. The declaration would in truth be inscribed upon its art of birth. One loves only by declaring that one loves. Let us call that, for convenience’s sake, an axiom: the premiss of this entire line of reasoning seems to appeal to good sense, it is posed as unquestionable. As incontestable, in fact: one cannot bear witness against it without being party to it.

      But there, in the dark, objections are massing up. We will abandon them to their virtuality for the moment. Being loved – what does that mean? Nothing, perhaps – nothing in any case of friendship itself in which the loved one, as such, has nothing to know, sometimes nothing to do. Being loved therefore remains – with regard to friendship itself, and therefore with regard to the friend – an accident (to men gar phileisthai sumbebekós¹¹). Friendship, what is proper or essential to friendship, can be thought and lived without the least reference to the be–loved, or more generally to the lovable – in any case, without having to set out from there, as from a principle. If we trusted the categories of subject and object here, we would say in this logic that friendship (philía) is first accessible on the side of its subject, who thinks and lives it, not on the side of its object, who can be loved or lovable without in any way being assigned to a sentiment of which, precisely, he remains the object. And if we do say ‘think and love’, as we shall see later, life, breath, the soul, are always and necessarily found on the side of the lover or of loving, while the being-loved of the lovable can be lifeless; it can belong to the reign of the non-living, the non-psychic or the ‘soulless’ (en apsúkhô¹²). One cannot love without living and without knowing that one loves, but one can still love the deceased or the inanimate who then know nothing of it. It is indeed through the possibility of loving the deceased that the decision in favour of a certain lovence comes into being.

      This incommensurability between the lover and the beloved will now unceasingly exceed all measurement and all moderation – that is, it will exceed the very principle of a calculation. It will perhaps introduce a virtual disorder in the organization of the Aristotelian discourse. (This ‘perhaps’ has already marked the hesitant gait of our reading.) Something trembles, for example, in what Aristotle calls the natural (phúsei) hierarchy – that is, the hierarchy inscribed from birth between those inclined to love (to kissing, to caressing), the philetikoi, and on the other hand, below them, the last ones, the philótimoi. They prefer to be loved; they thus seek honours, distinction, signs of recognition.¹³ In addition, even if there were no essentially erotic dimension, no desire at work in the ever-more-dissymmetrical hierarchy of the philía, how will its formal structure in the relation between the sublunary world and the Prime Mover be respected?

      If Eros and Philia are indeed movements, do we not have here an inverse hierarchy and an inverse dissymmetry? Prime Mover or pure Art, God sets in motion without Himself moving or being moved; He is the absolute desirable or desired, analogically and formally in the position of the beloved, therefore on the side of death, of that which can be inanimate without ceasing to be loved or desired (apsúkhon). Now in contrast to what takes place in friendship, no one will contest that this absolute object of desire is also found at the principle and at the summit of the natural hierarchy, whereas He does not allow himself to move or be moved by any attraction.

      Let us go back down to the sublunary world. The dissymmetry risks, apparently and at first glance, complicating the egalitarian schema of the isótēs or – if I may use the term – the reciprocalist or mutualist schema of requited friendship (antiphileîn), such as Aristotle seems to insist on privileging them elsewhere.¹⁴ The phileîn would therefore be more appropriate to the essence of friendship (kata ten philían); the act of loving would better suit friendship, if not the beloved (philéton). Aristotle, then, proposes to give proof or a sign (semeion) of this suitability. If a friend had to choose between knowing and being known, he would choose knowing rather than being known. Every time he evokes this alternative and determines the choice, Aristotle places himself in the hypothesis in which the two experiences (knowing and being known, loving and being-loved, the lover and the lovable) are not compatible, at the moment when they do not appear possible at the same time.¹⁵ Basically it makes little difference. Even if the movement of the act and the passivity of the state were simultaneously possible, if that could take place in fact, the essential structure of the two experiences and the two relations would remain no less different. This irreducible difference is that which counts and permits counting. It is what justifies the intrinsic hierarchy: knowing will never mean, for a finite being, being known; nor loving being loved. One can love being loved, but loving will always be more, better and something other than being loved. One can love to be loved – or to be lovable – but one must first know how to love, and know what loving means by loving. The structure of the first must remain what it is, heterogeneous to that of the other; and that structure, that of loving for the lover, will always – as Aristotle tells us, in sum – be preferable to the other, to that of the being-loved as lovable. Loving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge. It is the reference, the preference itself

      To make this understood, the Eudemian Ethics stages the example of what the women do in Antiphon’s Andromache. It is a matter of an example of adoption or of a nurse, of prosthetic maternity, of the substitution or the supposition of children, en tais upobolais, and here we are already in this familiarity of election which will everywhere remain our theme. These mothers confide their children to a nurse and love them without seeking to be loved in return. For to want to be known seems to be an ‘egoistic’ sentiment, as it is often translated; it is in any case a sentiment turned within oneself, in favour of oneself, for the love of self (autou éneka). It is passive, more in a hurry to receive or to enjoy the good than to do it, as Aristotle literally says (tou páskhein ti agathon alla mē poieîn); but one could just as well say: ready to receive the good that one does not have rather than to give that which one possesses (or even, as Plotinus will one day say – and this is something else – ready to give that very thing that one does not have). The Nichomachean Ethics recalls the same example, in order to make the same point. But Aristotle insists at this point on maternal joy or enjoyment [jouissance], in seeing there once again a sign or a proof of the preference (semeion d’ai metéres tô phileîn khaírousai¹⁶).

      How can you pass from maternal enjoyment to death? This passage is not visible in the immediacy of the text. Naming, cetainly, the enjoyment of maternal love in so far as it renounces reciprocity, the Nicomachean Ethics associates it neither with surviving nor with dying. The Eudemian Ethics speaks of the renunciation of the mother, in her very love, but without naming enjoyment and in order immediately to go on [enchaîner] to death. We have just recalled this logical chain. To want to be known, to refer to self in view of self, to receive the good rather than to do it or to give it – this is an altogether different thing from knowing. Knowing knows in order to do and to love, for love and in view of doing and loving (to de ginôskein tou poiein kai tou phileîn éneka), as Aristotle then says, concluding: ‘This is why we praise those who continue to love their deceased, for they know but are not known’ (dio kai tous emménontas tô phileîn pros tous tethneôtas epainoumen, ginṓskousi gár, all’ ou ginṓskontai¹⁷). Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philía to the limit of its possibility. But at the same time, it uncovers the ultimate spring of this possibility: I could not love friendship without projecting its impetus towards the horizon of this death. The horizon is the limit and the absence of limit, the loss of the horizon on the horizon, the ahorizontality of the horizon, the limit as absence of limit. I could not love friendship without engaging myself, СКАЧАТЬ