The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

Herolde und Vorlaufer).

      This precursivity does not stop at the premonitory sign. It already engages a bottomless responsibility, a debt whose sharing out [partage] is differentiated enough to warrant a prudent analysis. Nietzsche sometimes says ‘I’ and sometimes ‘we’. The signatory of the precursory discourses addressed to you is sometimes me, sometimes us – that is, a community of solitary friends, friends ‘jealous of solitude’, jealous of their ‘proper and profound solitude of midday-midnight’ who call other friends to come.

      This is perhaps the ‘community of those without community’.¹⁵

      But the declared responsibility, the Schuldigkeit thus named, is mine, that of the person saying I. It says, I say, I must answer at the same time before the philosophers of the future to come (before them), before the spectre of those who are not yet here, and before the philosophers of the future that we (we) already are, we who are already capable of thinking the future or the coming of philosophers of the future. A double responsibility which doubles up again endlessly: I must answer for myself or before myself by answering for us and before us. I/we must answer for the present we for and before the we of the future, while presently addressing myself to you, and inviting you to join up with this ‘us’ of which you are already but not yet a member. At the end of the teleiopoetic sentence you, readers, may have already become, nevertheless, the cosignatories of the addresses addressed to you, providing, at least, that you have heard it, which you are invited to do to the best of your ability – which thus remains your absolutely and irreplaceably singular responsibility.

      This is a double but infinite responsibility, infinitely redoubled, split in two [dé-doublée], shared and parcelled out; an infinitely divided responsibility, disseminated, if you will, for one person, for only one – all alone (this is the condition of responsibility) – and a bottomless double responsibility that implicitly describes an intertwining of temporal ekstases; a friendship to come of time with itself where we meet again the interlacing of the same and the altogether other (‘Grundlich-Anderes’) which orientates us in this labyrinth. The to-come precedes the present, the self-presentation of the present; it is, therefore, more ‘ancient’ than the present, ‘older’ than the past present. It thus chains itself to itself while unchaining itself at the same time; it disjoins itself, and disjoins the self that would yet join itself in this disjunction.

      Shall we say that this responsibility which inspires (in Nietzsche) a discourse of hostility towards ‘democratic taste’ and ‘modem ideas’ is exercised against democracy in general, modernity in general; or that, on the contrary, it responds in the name of a hyperbole of democracy or modernity to come, before it, prior to its coming – a hyperbole for which the ‘taste’ and ‘ideas’ would be, in this Europe and this America then named by Nietzsche, but the mediocre caricatures, the talkative good conscience, the perversion and the prejudice – the ‘misuse of the term’ democracy? Do not these lookalike caricatures – and precisely because they resemble it – constitute the worst enemy of what they resemble, whose name they have usurped? The worst repression, the very repression which one must, as close as possible to the analogy, open and literally unlock?

      (Let us leave this question suspended, it breathes the perhaps’, and the perhaps to come will always have anticipated the question. It is a subsidiary question, always late and secondary. At the moment of its formation, a perhaps will have opened it up. A perhaps will perhaps always forbid its closing, where it is in the very act of forming. No response, no responsibility, will ever abolish the perhaps. The perhaps must open and precede, once and for all, the questioning it suspends in advance – not to neutralize or inhibit, but to make possible all the determined and determining orders that depend on questioning (research, knowledge, science and philosophy, logic, law, politics and ethics, and in general language itself): this is a necessity to which we are attempting to do justice in several ways.

      For example:

      1. By recalling this acquiescence (Zusage) more originary than the question which, without saying yes to anything positive, can affirm the possibility of the future only by opening itself up to determinability, thus by welcoming what still remains undetermined and indeterminable. It is indeed A perhaps that cannot as yet be determined as dubitative or sceptical,¹⁶ the perhaps of what remains to be thought, to be done, to be lived (to death). Now this perhaps not only comes ‘before’ the question (investigation, research, knowledge, theory, philosophy); it would come, in order to make it possible, ‘before’ the originary acquiescence which engages the question in advance with [auprès de] the other.

      2. By specifying recurrently: ‘if there is one’, by suspending the thesis of existence wherever, between a concept and an event, the law of an aporia, an undecidability, a double bind occurs in interposition, and must in truth impose itself to be endured there. This is the moment when the disjunction between thinking and knowing becomes crucial. This is the moment when one can think sense or non-sense only by ceasing to be sure that the thing ever occurs, or – even if there is such a thing – that it would ever be accessible to theoretical knowledge or determinant judgement, any assurance of discourse or of nomination in general. Thus we regularly say – but we could multiply the examples – the gift, if there is one; invention, if there is any such thing,¹⁷ and so forth. This does not amount to conceding a hypothetical or conditional dimension (‘if, supposing that, etc.’) but to marking a difference between ‘there is’ and ‘is’ or ‘exists’ – that is to say, the words of presence. What there is, if there is one or any, is not necessarily. It perhaps does not exist nor ever present itself; nevertheless, there is one, or some; there is a chance of there being one, of there being some. Perhaps – although the French peut-être is, perhaps, with its two verbs (pouvoir and Are), too rich. Would not the original possibility we are discussing efface itself better in the adverbs of other languages (vielleicht or perhaps, for example)?

      I underscore, then, we underscore – more precisely we, in turn, re-mark what the I itself (Nietzsche, if you like), will have underlined: its responsibility, the obligation to answer, the responsibility which consists in calling as much as in responding to the call, and always in the name of a singular solitude, proper solitude, solitude strictly speaking. In the name of the friend jealous of his solitude, jealous of his secret without secret. Let us then remark, too, the flexions and reflections of personal pronouns, between I, they, we and you: I feel responsible towards them (the new thinkers who are coming), therefore responsible before us who announce them, therefore towards us who are already what we are announcing and who must watch over that very thing, therefore towards and before you whom I call to join us, before and towards me who understands all this and who is before it all: me, them, us, you, etc.

      But in saying this I feel I have a duty (I feel I have the responsibility, the debt or the duty: fuhle ich … die Schuldigkeit), almost as much towards them as towards us, their heralds and precursors, us free spirits! – to blow away from all of us an ancient and stupid prejudice and misunderstanding which has all too long obscured the concept ‘free spirit’ like a fog. In all the countries of Europe and likewise in America there exists at present something that misuses this name, a very narrow, enclosed, chained up species of spirits who desire practically the opposite of that which informs our aims and instincts – not to mention the fact that in regard to those new philosophers appearing (heraufkommenden neuen Philosophen) they must certainly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, in short and regrettably, among the levellers (Nivellirer), these falsely named ‘free spirits’ – eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modem ideas’, men without solitude one and all, without their own solitude (allesammt Menschen ohne Einsamkeit, ohne eigne Einsamkeit), good clumsy fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! (wobei the Wahrheit glucklich auf den Kopf zu stehn kommt!)