The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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what we will call a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation – autochthonal or not, tellurian or not. This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.
If no dialectic of the State ever breaks with what it supercedes [relève] and from which it arises [ce dont elle relève] (the life of the family and civil society), if politics never reduces within itself this adherence to familial generation, if any republican motto almost always associates fraternity with equality and freedom, as for democracy, it is rarely determined in the absence of confraternity or brotherhood.
Literally or through a figure, but why this figure?
Democracy has seldom represented itself without the possibility of at least that which always resembles – if one is willing to nudge the accent of this word – the possibility of a fraternization. The fratriarchy may include cousins and sisters but, as we will see, including may also come to mean neutralizing. Including may dictate forgetting, for example, with ‘the best of all intentions’, that the sister will never provide a docile example for the concept of fraternity. This is why the concept must be rendered docile, and there we have the whole of political education. What happens when, in taking up the case of the sister, the woman is made a sister? And a sister a case of the brother? This could be one of our most insistent questions, even if, having done so too often elsewhere, we will here avoid convoking Antigone, here again the long line of history’s Antigones, docile or not, to this history of brothers that has been told to us for thousands of years.
As we know, what still links democratization, perhaps more today than ever before, to fraternization cannot always necessarily be reduced to patriarchy in which the brothers begin by dreaming of its demise. Patriarchy never stops beginning with this dream. This demise continues endlessly to haunt its principle.
At the centre of the principle, always, the One does violence to itself, and guards itself against the other.
In principle, then, we should also think – even though we did not mention it in the course of the sessions, even if we were not thinking it – about the political crime.
We are not referring necessarily to those crimes called political crimes, those assassinations with political motivation which litter History with so many corpses. Rather – a second hypothesis – a thinking of that crime in which, allowing for the difference of a repression, the political being of politics, the concept of politics in its most powerful tradition is constituted (the ‘real possibility’ of the enemy being killed, in which – much time will be devoted to this – Carl Schmitt identifies politics as such, and which he would desperately wish to distinguish from crime as well as from murder). Unless – and here is a third hypothesis – we must think the crime against the possibility of politics, against man qua political animal, the crime of stopping to examine politics [arraisonner la politique], reducing it to something else and preventing it from being what it should be.
One may say: here are three crimes and three hypotheses that very inadequately usher in prolegomena to friendship. A foreword would thus accumulate provisionally all the figures of grief. This word may be understood in French as: damage, blame, prejudice, injustice or injury, but also accusation, resentment or complaint, the call for punishment or vengeance. In English the same word means primarily pain or mourning, but grievance also expresses the subject of the complaint, injustice, conflict, a wrong that must be righted, a violence to be repaired.
‘O my friends, there is no friend’: this is perhaps a complaint, and a grievance, the complaint of one who complains, to oneself, of oneself, or complains of the other, to others. But here, with whom will the complaint about the other be lodged, given that we are addressing friends to inform them that there are none? That they are not present, that they are not there, present and living, be it only to receive the complaint or to deem it admissible? Be it only to understand, in a totally different way, the very grammar of this sentence, a kind of orphaned quotation in its original idiom?
Unless they should come, those friends, in small numbers.
How many are there? How many of us will there be?
(Yes, in small numbers, as Aristotle would characteristically insist, friends must be few in number, otherwise they could not be the friends of this friend.
– In small numbers, but what is a small number? Where does it begin and end? At one? At one plus one? One plus one man? One plus one woman? Or none whatsoever? Do you mean to say that it begins with all men and all women, with anyone? And does democracy count?
– Democracy counts, it counts votes and subjects, but it does not count, should not count, ordinary singularities: there is no numerus clausus for arrivants.
– It is perhaps still necessary to calculate, but differently, differently with one and with the other.)
Lest they come, perhaps, one day, the friends, whatever their number, and the unique friend would be enough as well, to receive the sentence for which each remains singularly the improbable addressee. Theirs is the task of countersigning the sentence to give it its chance, always, each time its first and only chance. Consequently, each time is the last.
But it will have been necessary to endure the crime. Three crimes, as we were saying, which are mutually exclusive. For we might perhaps, in the case of this grievance, have only the choice between these crimes which, however, seem irreducible. Between these incriminations and recriminations, between these forms of grief in which accusation mingles with mourning to cry out from an infinite wound. As if nothing could happen or be thought elsewhere than between these imputable crimes, between sentiments of guilt, responsibilities, compassions, testaments and spectres: endless processions and trials.
The infinite abysses of imputability open on to mourning in the shadow of each and every event of death. These events always threaten to carry limits away to their bottomless bottom. On the edges of the juridical, the political, the techno–biological, they risk sweeping away such very fundamental but today so precarious distinctions, more problematic and fragile than ever. Are we sure we can distinguish between death (so-called natural death) and killing, then between murder tout court (any crime against life, be it purely ‘animal’ life’, as one says, thinking one knows where the living begins and ends) and homicide, then between homicide and genocide (first of all in the person of each individual representing the genus, then beyond the individual: at what number does a genocide begin, genocide per se or its metonymy? And why should the question of number persist at the centre of all these reflections? What is a génos, and why would genocide concern only a species – a race, an ethnic group, a nation, a religious community – of ‘the human race’?), then between homicide and – we are told this would be an altogether different matter – the crime against humanity, then between war, the crime of war – which, we are told, would be something else again – and the crime against humanity. All these distinctions are indispensable – de jure – but they are also less and less applicable, and that cannot, de facto and de jure, fail to affect the very notion of the victim or the enemy – in other words, the grief.
We will then ask ourselves what a decision is and who decides. And if a decision is – as we are told – active, free, conscious and wilful, sovereign. What would happen if we kept this word and this concept, but changed these last determinations? And we will ask ourselves who sets down the law here. And who founds the law as a right to life. We will ask ourselves who grants or imposes the right to all these distinctions, to all these preventions and all the sanctions that they give rise to. Is it a living being? A living being purely and simply living, presently living? A living present? Which one? God? Man? Which man? For whom and to whom? Whose friend or enemy?
‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Opening with an apostrophe, this essay could simply let a call be heard, certainly, providing