The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

It determines a temporal but also intemporal modality, a becoming-intemporal or omnitemporal of time, whatever it affects (certainty, calculability, reliability, ‘fidence’, truth, friendship, and so forth). But it also marks – or rather, it hides in marking – the passage between two absolutely heterogeneous orders, the passage from assured certainty, calculable reliability, to the reliability of the oath and the act of faith. This act of faith belongs – it must belong – to what is incalculable in decision. We know that this break with calculable reliability and with the assurance of certainty – in truth, with knowledge – is ordained by the very structure of confidence or of credence as faith.

      Hence of friendship. This structure is both acknowledged and unrecognized by Aristotle. The truth of friendship, if there is one, is found there, in darkness, and with it the truth of the political, as it can be thought in Greek: not only in the word bébaios (for example, for we do not think it possible to load such a burden on one word, on this word), but throughout the culture, the technics, the political organization and the Greek ‘world’ that carry it. In a state of intense philosophical concentration, we have here the whole story of eidos all the way up to the Husserlian interpretation of the idealization or production of ideal objects as the production of omnitemporality, of intemporality qua omnitemporality. It takes time to reach a stability or a certainty which wrenches itself from time. It takes time to do without time. One must submit, one must submit oneself to time in time. One must submit it, but – and here is the history of the subject as the history of time – in submitting oneself to it. To conjugate it, to enslave it, to place it under the yoke, and to do so for the spirit of man or of woman as for cattle – under the yoke (upozúgios):

      There is no stable friendship with confidence, but confidence needs time (áneu khrónou). One must then make trial (dei gar peiran labein), as Theogms says: ‘You cannot know the mind of man or woman till you have tried (prin peiratheíes) them as you might cattle (ósper upozugíou).²⁵

      But – as we shall see further on, in the course of one of our sallies to and fro – if primary friendship is excluded among animals, excluded between man and animal, excluded between the gods, between man and God, this is because éxis itself does not suffice for friendship. The disposition, the aptitude, even the wish – everything that makes friendship possible and prepares it – does not suffice for friendship, for friendship in act. Often éxis alone remains a simulacrum; it simulates or dissimulates real friendship, and makes the desire for friendship a case of wishful thinking, in which the signs of friendship are mistaken for friendship itself. The nub of the Aristotelian argument, as it can be formalized through development with other examples, certainly amounts to demanding and uncovering éxis, to taking into account a concrete and indispensable condition of possibility and describing it not as a formal structure, but – here, in any case – as a sort of existential opening (the power-of–being–a–friend, according to primary friendship, which is given neither to the animal nor to God). Aristotle, however, insists just as much, and with faultless rigour, on the insufficiency of this éxis, and thus on all conditions of possibility (liability [possibilité], aptitude, predisposition, even desire). The analysis of conditions of possibility, even existential ones, will never suffice in giving an account of the act or the event. An analysis of that kind will never measure up to what takes place, the effectivity – actuality – of what comes to pass – for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship. If we insist, in turn, on this necessary limitation in the analysis of conditions of possibility, in this thought of the possible, it is for at least two reasons.

      1. First of all, beyond this singular context (Aristotle on primary friendship), the wake of such a limitation crosses an immense problematic field, that of history, of the event, of the singularity of that which comes to pass in general. It is not enough that something may happen for it to happen, of course; hence an analysis of what makes an event possible – however indispensable it may continue to be, especially in Aristotle’s eyes – will never tell us anything about the event itself. But this evidence would still be too simple if one merely deduced from it an order of good sense: one that goes from the possible to the real, and from a retrograde analytic of the possible to the taking into account of the event, in the novelty of its appearance and the uniqueness of its occurrence. One cannot merely analyse the conditions of possibility, even the potentiality, of what occurs ‘once’, and then believe – this would be so naive – that one can say something pertinent about it. That which occurs, and thereby occurs only once, for the first and last time, is always something more or less than its possibility. One can talk endlessly about its possibility without ever coming close to the thing itself in its coming. It may be, then, that the order is other – it may well be – and that only the coming of the event allows, after the event [après coup], perhaps, what it will previously have made possible to be thought. To stay with our example: it is the experience of primary friendship, the meeting of its presence in act, that authorizes the analysis of éxis and of all predisposition – as well, for that matter, as of the two other types of friendships (derived, non-primary).

      Among the immense consequences of this strong logical necessity, we must reckon with those concerning nothing less than revelation, truth and the event: a thought (ontological or meta-ontological) of conditions of possibility and structures of revealability, or of the opening on to truth, may well appear legitimately and methodologically anterior to gaining access to all singular events of revelation – and the stakes of this irreducible anteriority of good sense or common sense are limitless. ‘In fact’, ‘in truth’, it would be only the event of revelation that would open – like a breaking–in, making it possible after the event – the field of the possible in which it appeared to spring forth, and for that matter actually did so. The event of revelation would reveal not only this or that – God, for example – but revealability itself. By the same token, this would forbid us saying ‘God, for example’.

      Is there an alternative here? Must one choose between these two orders? And is this necessary first of all in the case of the so-called ‘revealed’ religions, which are also religions of the social bond according to loving (love, friendship, fraternity, charity, and so forth)? Must one choose between the priority of revelation (Offenbarung) and that of revealability (Offenbarkeit), the priority of manifestation and that of manifestability, of theology and theiology, of the science of God and the science of the divine, of the divinity of God?²⁶ And above all, supposing there were an alternative between these two orders, what difference would it make to introduce this Aristotelian proposition according to which there could never be (primary) friendship between God and man? We shall come across this question again, but it implicitly organizes all reflection on the possibility of a politics of friendship.

      2. The thought of the act or the event from which the Aristotelian argument derives its authority is also, rather than a thought of each (good sense and common sense), a thought of ‘each one’, of individual singularity. It is true that this thought of each one can take root, in order to return, in phrónesis, in perspicacious judgement and in the prudence of common sense. If the indispensable possibility of éxis does not suffice, if for that one must pass to the act and if that takes time while overcoming time, this is because one must choose and prefer: election and selection between friends and things (prágmata), but also between possible friends – and this will soon lead us back to the vicinity of an ‘O phíloi oudeis phílos’, whose ‘O’ we shall not determine for the moment, and to its arithmetic lesson. Why are the mean, the malevolent, the ill-intentioned (phauloi) not, by definition, good friends? Why do they ignore the sharing or the community of friends (koina ta phílōn)? Because they prefer things (prágmata) to friends. They stock friends among things, they class friends at best among possessions, among good things. In the same stroke, they thus inscribe their friends in a field of relativity and calculable hypotheses, in a hierarchical multiplicity of possessions and things. Aristotle affirms the opposite: in order to accomplish the antithesis of these mean people or bad friends, I assign (prosnémō) relations otherwise, and distribute the priorities differently. I include good things among friends or in view