The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ decision and reflection: that which always takes time. Only those decisions that do not spring up quickly (me takhu) or easily (mēde radíōs) result in correct judgement (ten krísin orihḗn).²⁴ This non–given, non– ‘natural’, non–spontaneous stability thus amounts to a stabilization. This stabilization supposes the passage through an ordeal which takes time. It must be difficult to judge and to decide. A decision worthy of the name – that is, a critical and reflective decision – could not possibly be rapid or easy, as Aristotle then notes, and this remark must receive all the weight of its import. The time is the time of this decision in the ordeal of what remains to be decided – and hence of what has not been decided, of what there is to reflect and deliberate upon – and thus has not yet been thought through. If the stabilized stability of certainty is never given, if it is conquered in the course of a stabilization, then the stabilization of what becomes certain must cross – and therefore, in one way or another, recall or be reminded of – the suspended indecision, the undecidable qua the time of reflection.

      Here we would find the difference between spirit (the nous) and the animal body, but also their analogy. The analogy is as important as the difference, for it inscribes in the living body the habitus of this contretemps. It has its place in the very movement and in the possibility of such an inscription. The contretemporal habitus is the acquired capacity, the cultivated aptitude, the experimented faculty against the backdrop of a predisposition; it is the éxis that binds together two times in the same time, a duration and an omnitemporality at the same time. Such a contretemporality is another name for this psukhé, it is the being-animated or the animation of this life uniting the human spirit (the nous) and animality itself. This unifying feature conjugates man and animal, spirit and life, soul and body. It places them under the same yoke, that of the same liability [possibilité], that of the same aptitude to learn in suffering, to cross, to record and to take account of the ordeal of time, to withhold its trace in the body. This conjugation will warrant the poetic figure of the analogy which we will quote in a moment and which precisely names the yoke, the yoke effect.

      It is starting from this analogy that the difference lets itself be thought. In the passage of time through time. Time exits from time. The ordeal of stabilization, the becoming-steadfast and reliable (bébaios), takes time. For this ordeal, this experience, this crossing (peira), withdraws time, it removes even the time necessary to dominate time and defeat duration. Bébaios: the stable but also the reliable. It determines a temporal but also intemporal modality, a becoming-intemporal or omnitemporal of time, whatever it affects (certainty, calculability, reliability, ‘fidence’, truth, friendship, and so forth). But it also marks – or rather, it hides in marking – the passage between two absolutely heterogeneous orders, the passage from assured certainty, calculable reliability, to the reliability of the oath and the act of faith. This act of faith belongs – it must belong – to what is incalculable in decision. We know that this break with calculable reliability and with the assurance of certainty – in truth, with knowledge – is ordained by the very structure of confidence or of credence as faith.

      Hence of friendship. This structure is both acknowledged and unrecognized by Aristotle. The truth of friendship, if there is one, is found there, in darkness, and with it the truth of the political, as it can be thought in Greek: not only in the word bébaios (for example, for we do not think it possible to load such a burden on one word, on this word), but throughout the culture, the technics, the political organization and the Greek ‘world’ that carry it. In a state of intense philosophical concentration, we have here the whole story of eidos all the way up to the Husserlian interpretation of the idealization or production of ideal objects as the production of omnitemporality, of intemporality qua omnitemporality. It takes time to reach a stability or a certainty which wrenches itself from time. It takes time to do without time. One must submit, one must submit oneself to time in time. One must submit it, but – and here is the history of the subject as the history of time – in submitting oneself to it. To conjugate it, to enslave it, to place it under the yoke, and to do so for the spirit of man or of woman as for cattle – under the yoke (upozúgios):

      There is no stable friendship with confidence, but confidence needs time (áneu khrónou). One must then make trial (dei gar peiran labein), as Theogms says: ‘You cannot know the mind of man or woman till you have tried (prin peiratheíes) them as you might cattle (ósper upozugíou).²⁵

      But – as we shall see further on, in the course of one of our sallies to and fro – if primary friendship is excluded among animals, excluded between man and animal, excluded between the gods, between man and God, this is because éxis itself does not suffice for friendship. The disposition, the aptitude, even the wish – everything that makes friendship possible and prepares it – does not suffice for friendship, for friendship in act. Often éxis alone remains a simulacrum; it simulates or dissimulates real friendship, and makes the desire for friendship a case of wishful thinking, in which the signs of friendship are mistaken for friendship itself. The nub of the Aristotelian argument, as it can be formalized through development with other examples, certainly amounts to demanding and uncovering éxis, to taking into account a concrete and indispensable condition of possibility and describing it not as a formal structure, but – here, in any case – as a sort of existential opening (the power-of–being–a–friend, according to primary friendship, which is given neither to the animal nor to God). Aristotle, however, insists just as much, and with faultless rigour, on the insufficiency of this éxis, and thus on all conditions of possibility (liability [possibilité], aptitude, predisposition, even desire). The analysis of conditions of possibility, even existential ones, will never suffice in giving an account of the act or the event. An analysis of that kind will never measure up to what takes place, the effectivity – actuality – of what comes to pass – for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship. If we insist, in turn, on this necessary limitation in the analysis of conditions of possibility, in this thought of the possible, it is for at least two reasons.

      1. First of all, beyond this singular context (Aristotle on primary friendship), the wake of such a limitation crosses an immense problematic field, that of history, of the event, of the singularity of that which comes to pass in general. It is not enough that something may happen for it to happen, of course; hence an analysis of what makes an event possible – however indispensable it may continue to be, especially in Aristotle’s eyes – will never tell us anything about the event itself. But this evidence would still be too simple if one merely deduced from it an order of good sense: one that goes from the possible to the real, and from a retrograde analytic of the possible to the taking into account of the event, in the novelty of its appearance and the uniqueness of its occurrence. One cannot merely analyse the conditions of possibility, even the potentiality, of what occurs ‘once’, and then believe – this would be so naive – that one can say something pertinent about it. That which occurs, and thereby occurs only once, for the first and last time, is always something more or less than its possibility. One can talk endlessly about its possibility without ever coming close to the thing itself in its coming. It may be, then, that the order is other – it may well be – and that only the coming of the event allows, after the event [après coup], perhaps, what it will previously have made possible to be thought. To stay with our example: it is the experience of primary friendship, the meeting of its presence in act, that authorizes the analysis of éxis and of all predisposition – as well, for that matter, as of the two other types of friendships (derived, non-primary).

      Among the immense consequences of this strong logical necessity, we must reckon with those concerning nothing less than revelation, truth and the event: a thought (ontological or meta-ontological) of conditions of possibility and structures of revealability, or of the opening on to truth, may well appear legitimately and methodologically anterior to gaining access to all singular events of revelation – and the stakes of this irreducible anteriority СКАЧАТЬ