The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

us try to hear the ancestral wisdom of the address from within this place of reversal. What is there that is so stunning [renversant] here, and what has thereby been reversed? Here we have, for the first time, someone – another witness – coming forward to contest. He refuses even the accepted propriety of its paradox, as if the stakes were, then, to make it avow its other truth. In the history of the quoted quotation, in the incessant working? of its unfurling, Nietzsche’s upheaval would arrive as an interruption. It would inscribe in that history the scansion of an unprecedented event; but – hence the upsetting structure of the event – it would interrupt less than recall (and call again for) a rupture already inscribed in the speech it interrupts.

      By starting with at least a clue to this event, at the other end of the chain, we would, once again, wish to throw up the question of friendship as the question of the political. The question of the political, for this question is not necessarily, nor in advance, political. It is perhaps not yet or no longer thoroughly political, once the political is defined with the features of a dominant tradition.

      This counter-testimony occurs, as it rightly must, in Human All Too Human, when the excess of the beyond itself folds back into immanence, when what is human in man folds into the hem of the ‘all too’ of Nietzsche’s title, in the hollow of its vague [vague] modality, trembling and inscrutable but all the more forceful [déferlante, as in ‘une vague déferlante’ (breaking wave)]. The irresistible wave of the all too, a wave rolling up into itself, the enveloped violence of a wave welling up and falling back on itself. In this turn of the ‘all too’, around the ‘all too’ in its very revolution, another sentence begins in fact with a ‘perhaps’: there will come, perhaps; there will occur, perhaps, the event of that which arrives (und vielleicht kommt), and this will be the hour of joy, an hour of birth but also of resurrection; in any case, the passage from the dying to the living. Let us prick up our ears, for the moment, towards this perhaps, even if it prevents us from hearing the rest:

      Perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim:

      ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ thus said the dying sage;

      ‘Foes, there are no foes!’ say I, the living fool.⁴

      Why madness? And why should thought, the thought of friendship to come, lend itself inevitably, maddeningly, to madness? This long sentence should be quoted again, and in its original language. But let us observe in advance: such an event presents itself, certainly; it is, thus in the present, the event of a saying that speaks in the present. In the living present. It is the living fool that I am who is presently speaking to you. I say to you. Shouting, calling out (ruf ich…). An I is speaking to you. I am saying to you. You. I am speaking to you. To you, here and now, me: to remind or to announce, certainly; thus to tell you what is not yet, or what is no longer (the wisdom of the dying sage), but speaking to you in a perfectly present way.

      If it reaches us none the less with something of a delay – that of a quotation already – this saying of the living fool speaks in the present. It spoke to you, it was in the present speaking to you in order to make a promise. This is not, this was not, just any promise. The promise promises in that fundamental mode of ‘perhaps’, and even the ‘dangerous perhaps’ which will open, as Beyond Good and Evil prophesies, the speech of philosophers to come.

      What is going to come, perhaps, is not only this or that; it is at last the thought of the perhaps, the perhaps itself. The arrivant will arrive perhaps, for one must never be sure when it comes to arrivance; but the arrivant could also be the perhaps itself, the unheard-of, totally new experience of the perhaps. Unheard-of, totally new, that very experience which no metaphysician might yet have dared to think.

      Now, the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event – of friendship to come and friendship for the future. For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’. Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose possibilization must prevail over the impossible. For a possible that would only be possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak, life-assured. This would be a programme or a causality, a development, a process without an event.

      The possibilization of the impossible possible must remain at one and the same time as undecidable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself. What would a future be if the decision were able to be programmed, and if the risk [l’aléa], the uncertainty, the unstable certainty, the inassurance of the ‘perhaps’, were not suspended on it at the opening of what comes, flush with the event, within it and with an open heart? What would remain to come should the inassurance, the limited assurance of the perhaps, not hold its breath in an ‘epoch’, to allow what is to come to appear or come – in order to open up, precisely, a concatenation of causes and effects, by necessarily disjoining a certain necessity of order, by interrupting it and inscribing therein simply its possible interruption? This suspension, the imminence of an interruption, can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos; it is, in any case, the risk of an instability. The unstable or the unreliable is what Plato and Aristotle spoke of as that which is not bébaios (not firm, constant, sure and certain, reliable, credible, faithful). Whether in its ultimate or minimal form, the instability of the unreliable always consists in not consisting, in eluding consistency and constancy, presence, permanence or substance, essence or existence, as well as any concept of truth which might be associated with them. This inconsistency and/or inconstancy is not an indetermination, but supposes a certain type of resolution and a singular exposition at the crossroads of chance and necessity. The unstable is as required here as its opposite, the stable or the reliable of constancy (bébaios), and is indispensable to the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy of friendship. To think friendship with an open heart – that is, to think it as close as possible to its opposite – one must perhaps be able to think the perhaps, which is to say that one must be able to say it and to make of it, in saying it, an event: perhaps, vielleicht, perhaps – the English word refers more directly to chance (hap, perchance) and to the event of what may happen.⁵

      Now we know that this thought of the perhaps – this one and not any other – does not occur anywhere or anyhow. Far from being a simple indetermination, the very sign of irresolution, it just so happens that it occurs to Nietzsche in the upheaval of a reversing catastrophe: not so as to settle the contradiction or to suspend the oppositions, but at the end of a case pressed against ‘the metaphysicians of all ages’, precisely at the point where they stop in their ‘typical prejudice’ and their ‘fundamental faith’ (Grundglaube) – the ‘faith in antithetical values’ (Glaube an the Gegensätze der Werthe)⁶ – at that point where they are unable to think their reversal or inversion: that is, the non-dialectical passage from one to the other. This they cannot think, it frightens them; they are not able to endure the contamination coming from what is beyond both antithetical values. Despite the value that must be accorded to the ‘true’ and to the ‘veracious’, it is altogether ‘possible’, ‘it might even be possible (es ware)’ that the very thing constitutive of the ‘value of good and honoured things’ – and virtue (areté) is one of them – is related, knotted, entangled (verwandt, verknupft, verhakelt) – perhaps (vielleicht) identical in its essence – (wesengleich) to its antithesis, to wicked things. ‘Perhaps!’ (Vielleicht!)

      Before we even reach this exclamation, to this one-word phrase (Vielleicht!), a great number of perhapses have rained down. They have multiplied themselves in the writing of Nietzsche before becoming a theme, almost a name, perhaps a category. First of all in defining the ‘frog perspective’ to which Nietzsche compares metaphysics:

      For