The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

is, if there ever is, when chance is no longer barred. There would be no future without chance. The rap of the ‘perhaps’ not only effects a catastrophic inversion, a reversal of the tradition – already paradoxical (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) – it provokes the avowal of the opposite, the confession of an error that is not foreign to the truth. This is perhaps truth itself, a superior or more profound truth.

      And 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.

      Und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal the freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt:

      ‘Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!’ so rief der sterbende Weise;

      ‘Feinde, es gibt keinen Feind!’ – ruf ich, der lebende Tor.⁴

      Numerous roads promise to open up on a reading of this reversing [renversante] apostrophe – an overwhelming one, too, since it converts the friend into the enemy. Someone complains, in sum, about the disappearance of the enemy. Would it already have taken place? In any case, this person fears that it has; he recalls it, announces and denounces it as a catastrophe. We shall listen once again, at more or less regular intervals, to a double clamour, the two times and two voices, the two persons of this exclamation: he/I, he exclaimed/I exclaimed, past/present, dying/living, wisdom/madness. But a single cry answers the other: this is what the dying sage cried, this is what I cry, I, the living fool, etc.: so rief der sterbende Weise … ruf ich, der lebende Tor.

      ‘That saying which Aristotle often repeated’ is, then, indeed one of someone who is dying – his last will and testament – already speaking from the place of death. A testamentary wisdom to which must be opposed, even at the price of madness, the exclaiming insurrection of the living present. The dying person addresses friends, speaking of friends to them, if only to tell them there are none. As for the living person, he addresses enemies, speaking to them of enemies, if only to tell them there are none. The dying person dies, turning towards friendship; the living person lives on, turning towards enmity. Wisdom on the side of death, and the past came to pass: the being-past of the passer-by. Madness on the side of life, and the present is: the presence of the present.

      This is far from the only time, as we have seen, that Nietzsche associates the thought of the friend-enemy or of the brother-enemy with madness, with sheer madness that begins by inverting all the senses of sense into their opposites. For sheer madness is a priori inscribed in the very sense of sense. The fool is already on the premises as a guest who would have preceded his host. He haunts him in advance, his shadow is watching in the darkness of all hospitality: Human All Too Human is a fool addressing fools, his friends the fools.

      The book is literally dedicated to a corporation of fools (Narren-Zunft). The madness is the dedication and the signature at the end. The verse epilogue, the post-lude (Ein Nachspiet), is entitled ‘Among Friends’ (Unter Freunden), and it also addresses an apostrophe to them, the friends. He asks neither to be excused nor pardoned for this book of unreason (diesem unvernunftigen Buche), only for the kind of hospitality offered to mad arrivants. He requests only that they open the doors of their hearts to him, that they listen to him, welcoming him into their selves; that they put him up, honour him – and learn from him, in sum, a history of reason. Only a fool can tell this story, only he can know how to submit reason to reason, how reason becomes what it should have been: finally brought to its senses.

      Having said this, we are going to read the book’s final lines and the envoy. It, too, is pronounced in the form of a salute or a leavetaking. A moment of separation with friends at last – friends who have become friends – and the testamentary connotation is not absent. All the more so given that in the middle of the epilogue, the epilogual nature of the apostrophe – that is, the beginning of the end – does not fail to appear. We shall have to climb the road separating us from the cemetery: ‘Till we reach the grave together. Friends!…’ Bis wir in the Grube steigen. /Freunde!

      If the address requests that we go beyond excuse and pardon, it still moves in the religious space of benediction or malediction. Unless this space would at last be opened by it. It conjures up malediction (Fluch) and pronounces benediction twice (Amen!, Und auf Wiedersehn!) in offering the promised coming of the event – in exposing, rather, the arriving stance [arrivance] of the question of the perhaps (‘So soils geschehn?’):

      Shall we do this, friends, again? … (Freunde! Ja! So soils geschehn?)

       Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

      No excuses! No forgiving!

      You who laugh and joy in living

      Grant this book, with all its follies (Diesem unvernunftigen Buche)

      Ear and heart and open door!

      Friends, believe me, all my folly’s (meine Unvemunft)

      Been a blessing heretofore!

      What I seek, what I discover – (Was ich suche, was ich finde –,)

      Has a book contained it ever?

      Hail in me the guild of fools! (die Narren-Zunft!)

      Learn what this fools-book’s (Narrenbuche) offence is:

      Reason coming to its senses! (Wie Vernunft kommt – ‘sur Vernunft’!)

      Shall we, friends, do this again? (Also, Freunde, soils geschehen? –)

       Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

      The envoy thus confirms that the friend cannot address anything other than a fool’s discourse to his friends. The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to do with the wisdom which, throughout the history of philosophy qua the history of reason, will have set the tone of this truth – by attempting to have us believe that amorous passion was madness, no doubt, but that friendship was the way of wisdom and of knowledge, no less than of political justice.

      Let us return now to ‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’, at paragraph 376 of Human All Too Human, 1. Let us recall only the following for the moment: that the reversal had been prepared by an avowal. By a sort of response to self; already, the same ‘sage’ – the presumed author of ‘O my friends’ – when he was not yet ‘dying’, accepted in the prime of life to contradict himself. In any case, he consented to declaring to himself an ‘error’ and an ‘illusion’ while appealing, in sum, to responsibility. A responsibility which, following the more or less latent – and thus silent – logic of the argument, can be exercised only in silence – indeed, in secret – in a sort of counterculture of knowing-how-to-keep-silent. As though the sage were speaking silently to himself about silence, answering himself saying nothing – in order to appeal to responsibility. One must know how to reach such silence; ‘they’ must learn how (‘und Schweigen mussen sie gelemt haben’):

      When one realizes this, and realizes in addition that all the opinions of one’s fellow men, of whatever kind they are and with whatever intensity they are held, are just as necessary and unaccountable (unverantwortlich) as their actions; if one comes to understand this inner necessity of opinions originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent, environment – perhaps one will then get free of that bitterness of feeling with which the sage cried: ‘Friends, there are no friends! (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!).’ One will, rather, avow to oneself (Er wird sich vielmehr eingestehen): yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend (und Schweigen mussen sie gelernt haben um dir Freund zu bleiben); for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows