The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ I feel myself – and in advance, before any contract – borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus that I feel myself (loving).

      Autology provides food for thought, as always: I feel myself loving, borne to love the deceased, this beloved or this lovable being of whom it has already been said that he was not necessarily alive, and that therefore he was bearing death in his being-loved, smack against his being-lovable, in the range [portée] of the reference to his very being-loved. Let us recall it, and let us do so in the words of Aristotle. He explains to us why one can rejoice and why there is a place for rejoicing in loving (dio to phileín khaírein), but one could never rejoice – or at the very least, we would say, not essentially, not intrinsically – in being loved (all’ ou to phileisthai estín). Enjoyment, the self-rejoicing, is immanent not to the beloved but to the loving, to its act, to its proper enétgeia,¹⁸ The criterion of this distinction follows an apparently invisible line. It passes between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the psychic and the a-psychic. A question of respiration or inspiration: loving belongs only to a being gifted with life or with breath (en empsúkô). Being loved, on the other hand, always remains possible on the side of the inanimate (en apsúkhô), where a psukhé may already have expired. ‘One also loves inanimate beings’ (phileitai gar kai ta ápsukha).¹⁹

      (We are striving to speak here in the logic of Aristotle’s two Ethics, doing everything that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his argumentation. The reader who is familiar with Aristotle may find that the tone has changed, however, along with the pathos and the connotations; he may suspect some slow, discreet or secret drift. Let us ask him – let us ask ourselves – what the law of this drift is and, more precisely, if there is one, and if it be pure, the purely conceptual, logical or properly philosophical law of order. A law which would not only be of a psychological, rhetorical or poetic order. What is taking place here? And what if what is taking place were taking place precisely between the two orders that we have just distinguished, at their very juncture? Let us not forget that in the case of psychology, the question of the psukhé, or of animate life, is at the heart of all philosophical reflection on philía. For Aristotle, neither rhetoric nor poetics could ever be excluded from this reflection; and poets are quoted, more than once called up to testify, even as judges of truth.)

      If philía lives, and if it lives at the extreme limit of its possibility, it therefore lives, it stirs, it becomes psychic from within this resource of survival. This philía, this psukhé between friends, sur-vives. It cannot survive itself as act, but it can survive its object, it can love the inanimate. Consequently it springs forward, from the threshold of this act, towards the possibility that the beloved might be dead. There is a first and irreducible dissymmetry here. But this same dissymmetry separates itself, after a fashion, in an unpresentable topology; it folds, turns inside out and doubles itself at the same time in the hypothesis of shared friendship, the friendship tranquilly described as reciprocal. I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not survive him, except to the extent to which he already bears my death and inherits it as the last survivor. He bears my own death and, in a certain way, he is the only one to bear it – this proper death of myself thus expropriated in advance.

      (I say that using the masculine gender {the [male] friend, he, and so forth} – not in the narcissistic or fraternal violence of a distraction, but by way of announcing a question awaiting us, precisely the question of the brother, in the canonical – that is, androcentric – structure of friendship.)

      In any case, philía begins with the possibility of survival. Surviving – that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited. For one does not survive without mourning. No one alive can get the better of this tautology, that of the stance of survival [survivance] – even God would be helpless.

      Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possiblility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved art of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship.

      But such a time gives itself in its withdrawal. It occurs only through self-effacement. [Il n’arrive qu’à s’effacer, also: ‘It succeeds only in effacing itself.’] It delivers itself up and withdraws twice and according to two modalities, as we shall see, in two times as incompatible as they are indissociable: firm and stable constancy on the one hand and, on the other, beginning again, renewal, the indefinite repetition of the inaugural instant, always anew, once again, the new in re-iteration. And this double contretemps delivers up the truth of friendship in the eerie light of a contre-jour, the present presents itself there only from within a source of phenomenal light which comes neither from the present (it is no longer the source) nor from the place from which it arises or in which it appears – the place of the gaze, of the self or of the ‘subject’, if you like. The contre-jour of this contretemps disjoins the presence of the present. It inscribes both intemporality and untimeliness in at least one of the figures of what Aristotle regularly calls primary friendship (e protè philía). Primary friendship: primary because it is the first to present itself according to logic and rank, primary according to sense and hierarchy, primary because all other friendship is determined with reference to it, if only in the gap of the drift or the failure. Primary friendship does not work without time, certainly, it never presents itself outside time: there is no friend without time (oud’ áneu khrónou phílos²⁰) – that is, without that which puts confidence to the test. There is no friendship without confidence (pístis), and no confidence which does not measure up to some chronology, to the trial of a sensible duration of time (è de pístis ouk áneu khrónou²¹). The fidelity, faith, ‘fidence’ [fiance], credence, the credit of this engagement, could not possibly be a-chronic. It is precisely by taking off from this credence [croire] that something like a temporalizing synthesis or symbolicity can be apprehended – beyond the letter of Aristotle’s text, one might say. Engagement in friendship takes time, it gives time, for it carries beyond the present moment and keeps memory as much as it anticipates. It gives and takes time, for it survives the living present. The paradox of the grieving survival is concentrated in the ever-so-ambiguous value of stability, constancy and firm permanence that Aristotle regularly associates with the value of credence or confidence (pístis). In primary friendship, such a faith must be stable, established, certain, assured (bébaios); it must endure the test of time. But at the same time, if this may still be said, áma, it is this faith which, dominating time by eluding it, taking and giving time in contretemps, opens the experience of time. It opens it, however, in determining it as the stable present of a quasi-eternity, or in any case from and in view of such a present of certainty. Everything is installed at home, as it were, in this conjunction of friendship, of ‘fidence’ and stable certainty. There is no reliable friendship without this faith (ouk ésti d’áneu písteōs philía bébaios²²), without the confirmed steadfastness of this repeated act of faith. Plato, too, associated philía with the same value of constancy and steadfastness. The Symposium recalls a few famous examples. A friendship that has become steadfast, constant or faithful (bébaios) can even defy or destroy tyrannical power.²³ Elsewhere, as we know – in the Timaeus, for example – the value of constancy is quite simply tied to that of the true or the veritable, in particular where it is a question of opinion or belief.

      In its sheer stability, this assured certainty is not natural, in the late and current sense of the term; it does not characterize spontaneous behaviour because it qualifies a belief or an act СКАЧАТЬ