The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

(bébaios), that on which virtue depends – therefore of liberty, decision and reflection – can no longer be only natural. No more so than time, which does not belong to nature when it puts primary friendship to the test. In the history of the concept of nature – and already in its Greek history – the virtue of friendship will have dug the trench of an opposition. For it obliges Aristotle himself to restrain the concept of nature: he must oppose it to its other – here to virtue – when he classes friendship among stable things (tôn bebaíōri), in the same way as happiness belongs to self-sufficient and autarkic things (tôn autárkōn). It is the same immanence that provides shelter from external or random causalities. And constancy is virtuous only by reason of its autonomy, of the autarky of decisions which renew themselves, freely and according to a spontaneous repetition of their own movement, always new but anew and newly the same, ‘samely’ new. This is not possible without some naturality, but that is not in nature: it does not come down to nature. Having quoted and approved Euripides’ Electra (e gar phúsis bébaios, ou ta khremata: for nature is stable, not wealth), Aristotle adds that it is much more beautiful (polu de kállion) to say virtue (ateté) in this case rather than nature (polu de kállion eipein oti ē aretē tés phúseds).³⁰ Since friendship does not – and above all must not – have the reliability of a natural thing or a machine; since its stability is not given by nature but is won, like constancy and ‘fidence’, through the endurance of a virtue, primary friendship, ‘that which allows all the others to be named’ (di’ēn ai állai légontaí), we must say that it is founded on virtue (é kat’aretēn estí).³¹ The pleasure it gives, the pleasure that is necessary – this is the immanent pleasure of virtue. There may well be other forms of friendship, those whose name is thereby derived from primary friendship (for example, says Aristotle, with children, animals, and the wicked), but they never imply virtue, nor equality in virtue. For if all the species of friendship (the three principal ones, according to virtue, to usefulness or to pleasure) imply equality or equity (isótēs), only primary friendship demands an equality of virtue between friends, in what assigns them reciprocally to one another.

      What can such equality in virtue be? What can it be measured against? How do you calculate a non-natural equality whose evaluation remains both immanent, as we have just seen, but at the same time obliged to reciprocity – that is, to a certain symmetry? One wonders what is left of a friendship which makes the virtue of the other its own condition (be virtuous if you want me to love you), but one wonders, too, what would be left of friendship without this condition, and when the number without number intervenes, when virtue is not dispensed in excess. And how can we reconcile this first imperative, that of primary friendship, with what we have begun to uncover: the necessary umlaterality of a dissymmetrical phileîn (you are better off loving than being loved) and the terrible but so righteous law of contretemps?

      Is there a conflict here in the philosophy of phileîn, in the Aristotelian philosophy of friendship? For other Aristotelian axioms, which we shall consider, seem to forbid or contradict the call of dissymmetry and this law of contretemps. For example, the axiom which holds that the friend is another self who must have the feeling of his own existence – an inseparable axiom which makes friendship proceed from self-love, from philautía, which is not always egoism or amour-propre.

      Unless one would find the other in oneself, already: the same dissymmetry and tension of surviving in self, in the ‘oneself thus out of joint with its own existence. To be able or to have to be the friend of oneself – this would change nothing in the testamentary structure we are discussing. It would break all ipseity apart in advance, it would ruin in advance that which it makes possible: narcissism and self-exemplarity. We are speaking about anything but narcissism as it is commonly understood: Echo, the possible Echo, she who speaks from, and steals, the words of the other [celle qui prend la parole aux mots de l’autre], she who takes the other at his or her word, her very freedom preceding the first syllables of Narcissus, his mourning and his grief. We are speaking of anything but the exemplarity of the Ciceronian exemplar. An arche-friendship would inscribe itself on the surface of the testament’s seal. It would call for the last word of the last will and testament. But in advance it would carry it away as well.

      It would be extraneous neither to the other justice nor to the other politics whose possibility we would like, perhaps, to see announced here.

      Through, perhaps, another experience of the possible.

2

       Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb

      Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake

      Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.

      Blake

      Love of one’s enemies? I think that has been well learned: it happens thousandfold today.…¹

      The life of the enemy. He who lives to combat an enemy must see to it that he remains alive.²

      Nietzsche

      ‘O my friends, there is no friend’: wisdom and last will. The tone of the address is at first uncertain, no doubt, and we shall try here only one variation among so many other possibilities.³

      But on a first hearing, one that lets itself be ingenuously guided by what some call ordinary language and everyday words, by an interpretation very close to some common sense (and that is quite a story already!), the sentence seems to be murmured. Mimicking at least the eloquent sigh, this interpretation takes on the sententious and melancholy gravity of a testament. Someone sighs; a wise man, perhaps, has uttered his last breath. Perhaps. Perhaps he is talking to his sons or his brothers gathered together momentarily around a deathbed: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’.

      The testament thereby reaches us who also inherit it, beyond its natural and legitimate heirs, through an unindicated channel and with the meaning of the inheritance remaining to be deciphered. We are first of all ordered to understand it correctly. Nothing can justify once and for all my starting off, as I am in fact doing, from the place of the language and the tradition in which I myself inherited it – that is to say, the French of Montaigne. It so happens that we worry over this love of language when, in the place of the other, it becomes a national or popular cause. Without denying this limit, which is also a chance (for one must indeed receive the address of the other at a particular address and in a singular language; otherwise we would not receive it), I would like to recognize here the locus of a problem – the political problem of friendship.

      The apostrophe ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ states the death of friends. It says it. In its ‘performative contradiction’ (one should not be able to address friends, calling them friends while telling them that there are no friends, etc.) this saying hesitates between the established fact – it has the grammatical form of such a fact – and the judgement of the sentence: so be it, since it is so; and keep it intact in memory, and never forget it. The address is addressed to memory but also comes to us from memory – and quoted from memory, for ‘the saying that Aristotle often repeated’, is quoted by Montaigne, as others had quoted it before him; he recites it by heart, where such an event is not attested by any literal document.

      The death of friends, as we were saying above: both the memory and the testament. Let us recall, to begin with, that the chain of this quoted quotation (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) displays the heritage of an immense rumour throughout an imposing corpus of Western philosophical literature: from Aristotle to Kant, then to Blanchot; but also from Montaigne to Nietzsche who – for the first time, so it would seem – parodies the quotation by reversing it. In order, precisely, with the upheaval, to upset its assurance.

      There is indeed something of an upheaval here, and we would like to perceive, as it were, its seismic waves, the geological figure of a political revolution which is more discreet – but no less disruptive – than the revolutions known under that name; it