The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

security, safety (Sicherheit, Ungefahrlichkeit), comfort and an easier life for all; their two most oft-recited doctrines and ditties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ – and suffering itself they take for something that has to be abolished. We, who are the opposite of this … [we think that] everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species man (der species Mensch).¹⁸

      And here, once again, a ‘perhaps’ arrives to spread disquiet in the opposition itself. The perhaps carries away the extreme alterity, the possibility of this other end, this other term which structures no less the antidemocratic provocation, and results in there never being ‘enough to say’ or ‘enough to silence’:

      We do not say enough when we say even that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point, at the other end (at the altogether other end, Nietzsche’s emphasis: am andern Ende) from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: as its antipodes perhaps (als deren Antipoden vielleicht)?

      At each instant the discourse is carried out to its limit, on the edge of silence: it transports itself beyond itself. It is swept away by the extreme opposition – indeed, the alterity – by the hyperbole which engages it in an infinite build-up [surenchère] (freer than the freedom of the free spirit, a better democrat than the crowd of modem democrats, aristocrat among all democrats, more futural and futurist than the modem), swept away by the perhaps that arrives to undecide meaning at each decisive moment.

      All this (this surplus of democracy, this excess of freedom, this reaffirmation of the future) is not, so we suspect, very promising for the community, communication, the rules and maxims of communicational action. Nietzsche continues, in effect:

      Is it any wonder we ‘free spirits’ are not precisely the most communicative of spirits (die mitteilsamsten Geister)? that we do not want to betray in every respect from what (wovon) a spirit can free itself and to what (wohin) it is then perhaps driven? And as for the dangerous formula ‘beyond good and evil’ with which we at any rate guard against being taken for what we are not: we are something different (wir sind etwas Anders) from ‘libres-penseurs’, ‘liben pensatori,#x2019;, Freidenket’, or whatever else all these worthy advocates of ‘modern ideas’ like to call themselves.¹⁹

      And now, for the finishing touch, the owls in full light of day – ourselves again – the scarecrows that we owe it to ourselves to be today; friendship without friendship of the friends of solitude, the surplus of free will, and once again the perhaps in which I see you coming, you, the arrivants to come, you the arrivant thinkers, you the coming, the upcoming (das Kommenden), the new philosophers, but you whom I see coming, me, I who am already perhaps a little like you who are perhaps a little like us, a bit on our side, you the new philosophers, my readers to come, who will be my readers only if you become new philosophers – that is, if you know how to read me – in other words, if you can think what I write in my stead, and if you know how to countersign in advance or how to prepare yourself to countersign, always in imminent fashion, what you inspire in me here exactly, teleiopoetically:

      curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible, ready for every task that demands acuteness and sharp senses, ready for every venture thanks to a superfluity of ‘free will’ (dank einen Uberschusse von ‘freiem Willen’), with fore-and back-souls into whose ultimate intenions no one can easily see, with fore-and backgrounds to whose end no foot may go, hidden under mantles of light, conquerors even though we look like heirs and prodigals, collectors and arrangers from morn till night, misers of our riches and our full-crammed cupboards, thrifty in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemata, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of labour even in broad daylight (mitunter Nachteulen der Arbeit auch am hellen Tage); yes, even scarecrows when we need to be – and today we need to be: in so far, that is, as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude (unserer eignen tiefsten mitternachtlichsten, mittaglichsten Einsamkeit) – such a type of man are we, we free spirits! and perhaps you too are something of the same type, you coming men? you new philosophers? (und vielleicht seid auch ihr etwas davon, ihr Kommenden? ihr neuen Philosophen? –) {Nietzsche’s emphasis}.²⁰

      Community without community, friendship without the community of the friends of solitude. No appurtenance. Nor resemblance nor proximity. The end of oikeiótēs? Perhaps. We have here, in any case, friends seeking mutual recognition without knowing each other. One who calls and questions oneself is not even sure that the new philosophers will be part of the free spirits that we are. The rupture will perhaps be radical, even more radical. Perhaps those whom I am calling will be unrecognizable enemies. In any case, I am not asking them to be like me, like us, as the French translation we have quoted puts it. Friends of solitude: this must be understood in multiple fashion: they love solitude, they belong together – that is their resemblance, in a world of solitude, of isolation, of singularity, of non-appurtenance. But in this singular world of singularities, these ‘sworn friends of solitude’ are conjurers; they are even called to be conjurers by one of the heralds, the one who says I but is not necessarily the first, though he is one of the first in our twentieth century to speak this community without community.

      To speak to it and thereby – let us not hesitate to clarify this – to form or to forge it. And to do so in the language of madness that we must use, forced, all of us, by the most profound and rigorous necessity, to say things as contradictory, insane, absurd, impossible, undecidable as ‘X without X’, ‘community of those without community’, ‘inoperative community’, ‘unavowable community’: these untenable syntagms and arguments – illegible, of course, and even derisive – these inconceivable concepts exposed to the disdain of philosophical good conscience, which thinks it possible to hold out in the shade of the Enlightenment; where the light of the Enlightenment is not thought, where a heritage is misappropriated. For us there is no Enlightenment other than the one to be thought.

      This secretless conjuration plots itself between day and night, between midday and midnight, in the risk of the perhaps – that is, in the already incalculable anticipation of this risk, this thought of risk which will be characteristic of the new philosophy. This already of the perhaps acts. We have already undergone the effects of its action; we have this in memory, do we not? It acts within itself – in immanent fashion, we will say – although this immanence consists too in leaving self. Leaving oneself as of oneself, which can be done only by letting the other come, which is possible only if the other precedes and informs me – only if the other is the condition of my immanence. Very strong and very feeble, the already of the perhaps has the paradoxical force of a teleiopoetic propulsion. Teleiopoesis makes the arrivants come – or rather, allows them to come – by withdrawing; it produces an event, sinking into the darkness of a friendship which is not yet.

      Autobiographical as it remains in the circular movement of its arrow, a boomerang that none the less relentlessly pursues its progress towards changing the place of the subject, teleiopoesis also defines the general structure of political allocution, its lure and its truth. We have indeed come into a certain politics of friendship. Into ‘great polities’, not into the one with which the political scientists and the politicians (sometimes too the citizens of modern democracy) entertain us: the politics of opinion.

      For one should not believe that our perhaps belongs to a regime of opinion. That would be a case of credulousness – just an opinion, and a poor one at that. Our unbelievable perhaps does not signify haziness and mobility, the confusion preceding knowledge or renouncing all truth. If it is undecidable and without truth in its own moment (but it is, as a matter of fact, difficult to assign a proper moment to it), this is in order that it might be a condition of decision, interruption, revolution, responsibility and truth. The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth. But the friends of truth are not, by definition, in the truth; they are not installed there as in the padlocked security of a dogma