The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

truth by including their friends among things or in view of things, instead of treating things as things of friendship, as affairs (prágmata) belonging to the sphere of friends, serving the cause of friends, assigned first and foremost to friends.²⁷

      Recommending this preferential attribution, Aristotle speaks, then, of friends rather than of friendship. One must not only prefer friendship, but give the preference to friends. Since it is a question of singularities, this is an inevitable consequence: one must prefer certain friends. The choice of this preference reintroduces number and calculation info the multiplicity of incalculable singularities, where it would have been preferable not to reckon with friends as one counts and reckons with things. So the arithmetic consideration, the terrible necessity of reckoning with the plurality of friends (phíloi, this plural that we shall come across again later in the two possible grammars for the sentence quoted and examined by Montaigne), still depends on temporality, on the time of friendship, on the essence of philía that never works without time (áneu khrónou). One must not have too many friends, for there is not enough time to put them to the test by living with each one.

       For one must live with each him. With each her.

      Is that possible?

      Living – this is understood with with. Whatever the modalities may later be, living is living with. But every time, it is only one person living with another: I live, myself, with (suzao), and with each person, every time with one person. In the passage we will quote in translation, the conjunction between the test or the experience (peira) of time (khronos) and of singularity, of each one (ékastos) must yet again be underlined. This bond of time and number in the principle of singularity is never separated from the hierarchical principle: if one must choose, then the best must be chosen. A certain aristocracy is analytically encompassed in the arithmetic of the choice:

      The primary friendship (e philía e prōte) then is not found towards many (en pollois), for it is hard to test many men (kalepon pollôn peiram labein), for one would have to live with each (ekásto gar an édei suzêtaí). Nor should one choose a friend like a garment. Yet in all things it seems the mark of a sensible man (tou noun ékhontos) to choose the better of two alternatives; and if one has used the worse garment for a long time and not the better, the better is to be chosen, but not in place of an old friend (anti tou pálai philou), one of whom you do not know whether he is better. For a friend is not to be had without trial (áneu peíras) nor in a single day (mias ēméras), but there is need of time (alla khrónou dei) and so ‘the bushel of salt’ has become proverbial.²⁸

      The bushel-of-salt proverb recalls simultaneously the test and the parcelling–out, the experience and the part taken: one must have eaten the whole bushel of salt with someone before one is able to trust him, in a stable, sure, time-tested way, but the time of renewed ‘fidence’ eludes time, it conquers time in yet another way. Previously, the stable steadfastness of the reliable (bébaios) appeared to us in the form of continuity, duration or permanence: the omnitemporality that in time overcomes time. But to pass to the act beyond éxis, to be renewed and reaffirmed at every instant, the reliable in friendship supposes a re–invention, a re–engagement of freedom, a virtue (areté) that interrupts the animal analogy we were discussing above. This is another way of negating time in time, this time in the form of discontinuity, through the reinvention of the event. But here again the economy of time, even of the ‘at the same time’ (áma), commands that the instant of the act and the plenitude of enérgeia be linked to the calculation of number. The test of friendship remains, for a finite being, an endurance of arithmetic. Indeed, the friend must not only be good in himself, in a simple or absolute (aplôs) manner, he must be good for you, in relation to you who are his friend. The friend is absolutely good and absolutely or simply the friend when these two qualities are in harmony, when they are ‘symphonious’ with one another. All the more so, no doubt, when the friend is useful to his friend even if he is not absolutely virtuous or good (spoudaios). This last passage²⁹ is famous for its reputed obscurity, but the conclusion seems clear: it is not possible to love while one is simultaneously, at the same time (ama), the friend of numerous others (to de pottois áma einai phílon kai to phileîn kōlúet); the numerous ones, the numerous others – this means neither number nor multiplicity in general but too great a number, a certain determined excess of units. It is possible to love more than one person, Aristotle seems to concede; to love in number, but not too much so – not too many. It is not the number that is forbidden, nor the more than one, but the numerous, if not the crowd. The measure is given by the act, by the capacity of loving in act: for it is not possible to be in act (energein), effectively, actively, presently at the heart of this ‘numerous’ (pros pollous) which is more than simple number (ou gar oión te áma pros pollous energein). A finite being could not possibly be present in act to too great a number. There is no belonging or friendly community that is present, and first present to itself, in act, without election and without selection.

      This will have been understood in a flash: if the question of arithmetic seems grave and irreducible here, the word ‘arithmetic’ remains inadequate. The units in question are neither things, these prágmata to which the friend must always be preferred, nor numbers. This restrained multiplicity calls for an account, certainly, and one must not have too many friends, but it nevertheless resists enumeration, counting–off, or even pure and simple quantification.

      Why do we insist on this difficulty here and now? First of all, because it announces one of the possible secrets – thus hiding it still – in the cryptic tradition of the apostrophe brought up by Montaigne and so many others. One of the secrets which has remained a secret for the reporters themselves, as if it had to reserve itself for a few people. We will come back to this later. Next, because this secret merges with virtue’s (ateté). We should not pretend to know what this word means without having thought the enigma of phileîn. No doubt they are one and the same. And finally, because the quantification of singularities will always have been one of the political dimensions of friendship, of a becoming-political of a friendship which may not be political through and through – not originarily, necessarily or intrinsically. With this becoming-political, and with all the schemata that we will recognize therein – beginning with the most problematic of all, that of fraternity – the question of democracy thus opens, the question of the citizen or the subject as a countable singularity. And that of a ‘universal fraternity’. There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ (koína ta philōn), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. Tragically irreconcilable and forever wounding. The wound itself opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other.

      But where every other is equally altogether other. More serious than a contradiction, political desire is forever borne by the disjunction of these two laws. It also bears the chance and the future of a democracy whose ruin it constantly threatens but whose life, however, it sustains, like life itself, at the heart of its divided virtue, the inadequacy to itself. Would virtue ever have existed without the chaos opening in silence, like the ravenous mouth of an immeasurable abyss, between one or the other of these laws of the other? There is no virtue without this tragedy of number without number. This is perhaps even more unthinkable than a tragedy. The unthinkable filters through Aristotle’s staid treatise, under his worldly-wise counsel, under the wisdom of his precepts: my friends, if you want to have friends, do not have too many.

      Note that the counsellor never says how many, nor at what number virtue becomes impossible. What knowledge could ever measure up to the injunction to choose between those whom one loves, whom one must love, whom one can love? Between themselves? Between them and the others? All of them?

      At stake is virtue, which is no longer in nature, this virtue whose name will remain suspended,