The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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a legitimate decency before these problems and possibilities, perhaps we are mistaken about their value, perhaps we all thereby obey this will, (emphasis added)
A second draft contains two unerased conclusions:
1. But who is willing to concern himself with such ‘perhapses’! That violates good taste, especially virtue, when truth becomes scandalous to this point and renounces all decency: one must recommend prudence before that lady.
2. Perhaps! But who is willing to concern himself with these dangerous ‘perhapses’! That violates good taste, and also virtue. When truth becomes scandalous to this point, when this unscrupulous lady divests herself of her veils to this point and renounces all decency: away! Away with this seductress! May she henceforth go her own way! One can never be too prudent with a lady like that. You may tell me with a wink that ‘one is better off associating with a humble and modest error, with a nice little lie’.8
How much of a chance would a feminine friend have on this stage? And a feminine friend of hers, among themselves? See below.)
Among Friends
Epilogue
1
Fine to lie in quiet together
Finer still to join in laughing –
(Schon ists, miteinadander schweigen
Schoner, miteinander lachen, –)
Underneath a silken heaven
Lying back among the grasses
Join with friends in cheerful laughing,
(Lieblich laut mit Freunden lachen)
Showing our white teeth together.
Am I right? let’s lie in quiet;
Am I wrong? let’s join in laughing
And in being aggravating,
Aggravating, loudly laughing,
(Schlimmer machen, schlimmer lachen),
Till we reach the grave together.
(Bis wir in the Grube steigen.)
Not all silences chime together. Each time the quality, the modality, of the ‘keeping quiet together’ eludes a common measure. Here, we have just apprehended the moment when the keeping silent of compassion broke into laughter, into a resounding laughter but without a word, still silent, aphonic in the sonority of its break into laughter, into the hysterical laughter of rejoicing among friends.
[The question is one of tonality: Stimmung changes everything. Beyond the concept – even if it is the same one, and even if it becomes undecidable – Stimmung suspends or terrifies oppositions, converts the antithesis into its antithesis (friend into enemy, love into hate, etc.). There is little room for laughter in Heidegger. Nevertheless, if this subject did not result in too long a detour, we might recognize in the very possibility of this silence, the keeping-silent, the discretion, the secret of Schweigen or Verschwiegenheit, which Heidegger, as early as Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (paras 34 and 60), analyses at the heart of speech. Finding the resource of its own silence in the possibility of speaking, that which thus keeps silent belongs from then on to truth – more precisely, to one of the essential modes (to wit, speech or discourse, Rede) of opening or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), disclosedness to truth – that is, of truth ‘in which’ Dasein is, a Dasein originarily responsible, indebted or ‘responsibilizable’ (schuldig), but ‘in’ a truth that is every bit as originarily an ‘untruth’ (‘But Dasein is equiprimordially [gleichursprunglich] in the untruth’).9 We could demonstrate (and we would like to attempt this elsewhere) that this equiprimordiality of truth and untruth, like that of all the apparently opposite possibilities that are inextricably linked to it, destabilizes all the conceptual distinctions that seem to structure the existential analytic, dooming its logic to an Unheimlichkeit marking each of its decisive moments. In truth, it undoes, disidentifies, the identification of every concept. It appeals to a thinking beyond the concept, but a fortiori beyond intuition. It surpasses reason, but a fortiori the understanding too. This ‘thought’ – always supposing that the name fits the named and retains its validity beyond these final frontier oppositions; always supposing a proper name could be found for it in any singular language; always supposing that it still speculates – this excessive ‘thought’ belongs as little to the disinterested or theoretical, even discursive, order of philosophical speculation as the unchained desires of love and hate, friendship and enmity, when they unite in death, at any moment, in the taste of each of our desires. Defying all oppositions, this Unheimlichkeit would here suffice to usher in, between friend and enemy, every and all conversion, inversion and revolution [retournements]. It lodges the enemy in the heart of the friend – and vice versa. Why do we say it ‘lodges’ the other, the stranger, or the enemy? Because the word unheimlich is not unfamiliar, though it speaks precisely to the stranger, to the intimacy of the hearth and familial lodgings, to the oikeiótēs; but above all because it provides a place, in a troubling way, for a form of welcome in itself that recalls the haunt as much as the home – Unterkunft, lodgings, shelter, hospitable habitat, said the epilogue we cited above; and in a moment we will hear the voice of the friend as the voice of the spectre. The fact that in its very depth the keeping silent of Sein und Zeit never laughs will one day indicate to us one of the places for hearing once again the colloquy between Nietzsche and Heidegger, what there is ‘among [those] friends’ as well as ‘among [those] enemies’.]
We have just focused our attention on the avowed error, the endured illusion at the beginning of paragraph 376 of Human All Too Human – ‘Of friends’. The logic of avowal will justify, at the end of the paragraph, the inversion or conversion, the hour of joy that will come perhaps. This logic prepares the fool’s response, my living fool’s cry and the clamour of what could be called the call to the enemy: ‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’
Can an ‘alas!’, or an ‘if only there could be enemies’, or again: ‘instead of bewailing the friend, bewail the enemy!’, be inferred from this call? Perhaps. In all these hypotheses, this call to the enemy ipso facto converts the enemy into the friend: you must love your enemies, seine Feinde lieben, even if you pretend to love them, but no longer in a Christian fashion. And the friend is asked to convert himself into an enemy. No concept, nor any insurance contract between word and concept, vocable and meaning, is more stable, more reliable (bébaios, as Aristotle would say).
This conversion, then, will allow us no respite. We will never have done with it. In a modest book or elsewhere, for this interminability is no accident: one cannot, any more than one must not, have done with it. This is not a surpassable moment. It remains the structural condition of that which it must yet survive in making it possible: the sentence, the decision, the responsibility, the event, death itself.
Hence, we shall not finish with it. But the first reason that makes us wary of the opposition between the ‘dying sage’ and the ‘living fool’, and discourages any dwelling on the stabilized distinction between ‘Friends, there is no friend’ and ‘Enemies, there is no enemy’, is that one apostrophe can always feign to be the other. The dying sage can play fools, he can play the fool, and the fool can pretend to be wiser and deeper in death’s throes than the Greek philosopher that he has summoned to bear witness. The face of the fool can be a mask. Behind the mask, a sage wiser than the sage. Fundamentally, from one address to the other, the same person is speaking – him, me; and language liberates this substitution: ‘I’ is ‘me’, but an ‘I’ is a ‘him’. One is the other. One guards and guards himself from the other. One does violence to oneself, becoming violence. Here again the infinite build-up [surenchère, also a ‘raising of the stakes’], A build-up that does not even need an author’s intention, or a deliberate decision: it is carried away, it carries itself away, it throws itself into turmoil with the disidentification of concepts and terms that we are analysing right