The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

himself seems to gloss these two sayings of the sage and the fool, the dying and the living, his saying and mine. He affects, perhaps, to provide us with a key for a reading of the score. Again it is in the Vermischte Meinungen und Spruch, paragraph 246. The French translation of the tide of this short section has: ‘The sage passing himself off as a fool’: Der Weise sich als Narren gebend: The sage giving himself up as a fool, the sage when he intends to give himself up for a fool, when he agrees to present himself as that which he is not. I prefer to keep, in its literality and playfulness, the reference to the present, the gift, to giving oneself up as. For the simulacrum of this sage knows how to offer himself, he makes a gift, he makes himself into a gift, inspired by a generous friendship. He thereby gives the good to avoid doing evil to his Umgebung: his entourage, milieu, relatives. And he feigns, lies, disguises or masks himself, out of friendship for mankind, out of Menschenfreundlichkeit. philanthropy once again, humanity, sociability. Here is the English translation which we will modify or compare with the words of the original version only when we consider it especially indispensable:

      Paragraph 246. The wise man pretending to be a fool. The wise man’s philanthropy (Die Menschenfreundlichkeit) sometimes leads him to pose as excited, angry, delighted (sich erregt, erzurnt, erfreut zu stellen), so that the coldness and reflectiveness of his true nature (of his true essence, seines wahren Wesens) shall not harm those around him. (original emphasis)

      Lie, mask, dissimulation, the simulacrum bestows. It also provokes vertigo: the sage, for friendship’s sake – this is what makes him a sage – takes on the disguise of the fool, and, for friendship’s sake, disguises his friendship as enmity. But what is he hiding? His enmity, for the coldness and lucidity of his true nature are to be feared only where they may hurt and reveal some aggressivity. In sum, the sage presents himself as an enemy in order to conceal his enmity. He shows his hostility so as not to hurt with his wickedness. And why does he take such pains? Out of friendship for mankind, philanthropic sociability. His pose (sich stellen) consists – in the sheer difference between hot and cold, exalted anger and icy lucidity – in feigning to be precisely what he is, in telling the truth to conceal the truth and especially to neutralize its deadly effect, to protect others from it. He loves them enough not to want to do them all the evil he wants for them. He loves them too much for that.

      And what if tomorrow a new political wisdom were to let itself be inspired by this he’s wisdom, by this manner of knowing how to lie, dissimulate or divert wicked lucidity? What if it demanded that we know, and know how to dissimulate, the principles and forces of social unbinding [déliaison], all the menacing disjunctions? To dissimulate them in order to preserve the social bond and the Menschenfreundlichkeit? A new political wisdom – human, humanistic, anthropological, of course? A new Menschenfreundlichkeit pessimistic, sceptical, hopeless, incredulous?

      A new virtue, from that point on?

      The Nietzschean thought of virtue will not be simplified here. So very many apparently heterogeneous propositions would have to be not only reread but harmonized. The immense but rigorously coherent medley of Zarathustra’s addresses to his ‘brothers’ would also – and this would be an awesome and hitherto unaccomplished feat – have to be taken into account. Addresses to his friends who are also brothers. This consequence, in its shimmering mobility, its untenable instability, appears no less rigorous even though it is not systematic: not philosophical, moral, or theological. Its expository mode can never be reduced to what it nevertheless also is: the discipline of a psychology, a prophecy, a poetics. Our hypothesis is that the ‘genre’, the ‘mode’, the ‘rhetoric’, the ‘poetics’, and the ‘logic’ to which Zaradiustra’s songs belong – ‘Of the friend’, ‘Of the bestowing virtue’, ‘Of the virtuous’, Of the belittling virtue’ (examples of what interests us here) – could be determined, following old or new categories, only from the place of the very thing that is said there, in this specific place, about friendship and virtue, fraternity, and the saying of what is said there, in that way. We shall consider these passages when the time comes.

      This said and this saying call for a new type of address. They claim as much, in any case, teleiopoetically. To take saying and the virtue of speaking about virtue seriously is to acknowledge the address of a vocation: the brothers (past, present or to come) for whom Zarathustra destines such a harangue on friendship and on virtue, an ever-evil virtue. The brothers? Why the brothers? The addressees, as always, lay down the law of genre. We must meditate upon this: the addressees are brothers, and their coming virtue remains virile. The Gay Science (para. 169) says that declared enemies are indispensable for men who must ‘rise to the level of their own virtue, virility (Mannlichkeit), and cheerfulness’.

      We shall return to this later, then. But to confine ourselves here to the barest schema, let us note that the motive of virtue is never discredited – no more so than the word virtue, in its Greek or Judaeo-Christian cultural context. Virtue is regularly reaffirmed by Nietzsche according to a logic or a rhetoric that can be interpreted in at least three ways (at least three when the question concerns the author of ‘Our new “infinite” which never ceased to designate in this way a world that had become infinite again since opening for us onto an “infinity of interpretations.”’¹⁰):

      1. the deliberate perversion of the heritage – the opposite meaning under the same word;

      2. the restoration of a meaning perverted by the inherited tradition (Greek, Jewish, or Pauline-Christian);

      3. or a hyperbolic build-up (more Greek or more Judaeo-Christian than the Greek or the Judaeo-Christian).

      For this reason, one must not hesitate to take the ‘Path to a Christian virtue’ (Weg zu einer christlichen Tugend):¹¹ to learn from one’s enemies is the best path to loving them, for it puts us in a grateful mood towards them (one suspects that this is not the most Christian way of going down such a path, nor of thinking the unconscious of virtues). This again is a question of path, of progress along a path, of steps, gait, a way of walking, rather than a question of content. For there are ‘unconscious virtues’ – this, morality and philosophy could never admit – and like visible virtues, like those that one believes to be visible, these invisible virtues ‘follow their own course’ (gehen auch ihren Gang, with Nietzsche’s emphasis), but a ‘wholly different course’.¹² This difference comes to light only under a microscope, a divine microscope capable of perceiving delicate sculptures on the scales of reptiles.

      Hence we will not be too surprised, alongside this praise of enmity or these calls to the enemy, to see Nietzsche honouring friendship, the ‘good friendship’ – even the Greek brand – and sometimes beyond ‘the things people call love’.

      ‘Good friendship’ supposes disproportion. It demands a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me. By the same token it signifies a divorce with love, albeit self-love. The few lines defining this ‘good friendship’¹³ mark all these lines of division. ‘Good friendship’ can be distinguished from the bad only in eluding everything one believed one could recognize in the name friendship. As if it were a question of a simple homonym. ‘Good friendship’ is born of disproportion: when you esteem or respect (achtet) the other more than yourself. Nietzsche points out that this does not mean that one loves more than oneself – and there is a second division, within lovence, between friendship and love. ‘Good friendship’ certainly supposes a certain air, a certain tinge (Anstrich) of intimacy, but one ‘without actual and genuine intimacy’. It commands that we abstain ‘wisely’, ‘prudently’ (weislich), from all confusion, all permutation between the singularities of you and me. This is the announcement of the community without community of thinkers to come.

      Is such a friendship still Greek? Yes and no. Does this question make sense? Yes and no. If what Nietzsche understands here under the name friendship, if what he wants to have us hear and understand or give us to hear and understand for the future still chimes with philía but is already no longer Greek, then this is another way of suggesting that this experience, with