The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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concept of decision. It is this act of the act that we are attempting here to think: ‘passive’, delivered over to the other, suspended over the other’s heartbeat. For a few sentences earlier on, ‘its heartbeat’ had to be necessarily accorded thus: as the heartbeat of the other. Where I am helpless, where I decide what I cannot fail to decide, freely, necessarily, receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the other. We say not only heart but heartbeat: that which, from one instant to another, having come again from an other of the other to whom it is delivered up (and this can be me), this heart receives, it will perhaps receive in a rhythmic pulsation what is called blood, which in turn will receive the force needed to arrive.
The reader will have sensed that this is what I would be tempted to call ‘lovence’: love in friendship, lovence beyond love and friendship following their determined figures, beyond all this book’s trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions of loving. This does not mean that lovence itself can take place figurelessly: for example, the Greek philía, courtly love, such and such a great current (as we call it) of mysticism. But a lovence cuts across these figures.
Providing you open yourself, trembling, on to the ‘perhaps’.
(We shall undoubtedly return to this point, directly or indirectly.)
That is what can take place, if one thinks with a minimum of coherence the logic of the perhaps. This is, rather, what can happen to logic following the experience of the perhaps. That is what may happen to experience, perhaps, and to the concept of experience. That is what could happen, if hope for such a thing were possible, among friends, between two, between two or more (but how many?), who love each other.
(In speaking like this, saying that love or friendship is improbable, I am saying nothing, I am neither stating nor describing anything. First of all because it is not certain that something of the sort exists, that anything ever exists outside of what I have to say about it, which you are reading perhaps in your own way; and this is precisely what I mean in drawing the perhaps into this free zone – where we can rely on nothing, nor count how many of us there are. Next, because no predication, no judgement of attribution – we have now seen this in sufficient depth – can measure up to what lets itself be thus marked – indeed, signed – by such a perhaps.
I am saying nothing, then, that can be said or is sayable.
And yet my saying, the declaration of love or the call to the friend, the address to the other in the night, the writing that does not resign itself to this unsaid – who could swear that they are consigned to oblivion simply because no said can speak them exhaustively?
The response no longer belongs to me – that is all I wanted to tell you, my friend the reader. And without knowing any longer if the rare or the numerous is preferable.
I assume responsibility for speaking rightly, justly, on this point, up until now, up to the point when I am no longer responsible for anything. Hence the point from which all responsibility is announced.)
This is undoubtedly only an active and hazardous, perhaps momentary, interpretation, of what Nietzsche thus said one day about chance, about the unknown factor, the ‘here and there’ of favour, of a sort of species of love, of the continuation or the follow-up to love, of a future for love the like of which it is not known if anyone will have ever had the experience. This is the conclusion of ‘The things people call love’ and, like a certain Aristotle, an Aristotle whose oligarchical recommendations no one, not even Nietzsche or Blanchot,18 will ever have disavowed, this conclusion pronounces something of a sentence on number. One must think and write, in particular as regards friendship, against great numbers. Against the most numerous who make language and lay down the law of its usage. Against hegemonic language in what is called public space. If there were a community, even a communism, of writing, it would above all be on condition that war be waged on those, the greatest number, the strongest and the weakest at the same time, who forge and appropriate for themselves the dominant usages of language – leaving open the question of knowing if the greatest force – in a word, hegemony or dynasty – is on the side of the greatest number; and if, as always according to Nietzsche, the greatest force be not on the side of the weakest – and vice versa. Cicero, as we recall, also explained in his own way this transmutation of weak into strong, dead into living, etc., and precisely as a history of friendship. This commutability is never alien to that which destabilizes the friend/enemy opposition. What, then, can the true name be? Of what ‘friendship’ can it be the ‘right name’? Is it only a name? Is it nameable, that which it is wearing itself out trying to name?
As we were saying, it would be better now to quote Nietzsche, to honour this chance:
At this point linguistic usage has evidently been formed (haben … den Sprachgebrauch gemacht) by those who did not possess but desired {the unfulfilled, those that covet out of need: die Nichthesitzenden und Begehrenden}. Probably, there have always been too many of these (immer zu viele). Those to whom much possession and satiety were granted in this area have occasionally (hier und da) made some casual remark about “the raging demon”, as that most gracious and beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles, did; but Eros has always laughed at such blasphemers; they were invariably his greatest favourites (seine grȯßten Lieblinge). – Here and there (hier und da) on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love (eine Art Fortsetzung der Liebe) in which this possessive craving of two people for each other (bei der jenes habsuchtige Verlangen zweier Personen nacheinander) gives way to a new desire and lust for possession (einer neuen Begierde und Habsucht), a shared higher thirst [Nietzsche’s emphasis: einem gemeinsamen höheren Durste] for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship (Ihr rechter Name ist Freundschaft).
Questions remain. In this semantic upheaval, why these words and not others? And what do ‘reciprocal’ and ‘common’ and ‘ideal’ and ‘higher’ and ‘right’ mean? What does the adjective ‘just’ or ‘right’ mean for all these words? Friendship as a just name? Or enmity – supposing, precisely, that is its opposite?
To take an example and to put these questions differently, what does Blake mean? Heartbroken, let down in a friendship he believes betrayed,19 he asks or pretends to ask Hayley, his friend, to become his enemy (Do be my enemy): but he ordains it also, since the phrase is in the imperative voice, in the name of friendship, for love of friendship (for Friendships sake).
A last fidelity to some spectre of lost friendship? A living enemy, the friend would remain today more present, and more faithful in sum than under his misleading features, in the figure or the simulacrum of the unfaithful friend. There would be more attentive friendship, singular attention and consideration in a tension full of hatred. The enemy is then my best friend. He hates me in the name of friendship, of an unconscious or sublime friendship. Friendship, a ‘superior’ friendship, returns with the enemy. There would be an enemy’s fidelity.
The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places. They intertwine, as though they loved each other, all along a spiralled hyperbole: the declared enemy (Blake declares the enemy by ordering him to declare himself: be my enemy), the true enemy, is a better friend than the friend. For the enemy can hate or wage war on me in the name of friendship, for Friendships sake, out of friendship for friendship; if in sum he respects the true name of friendship, he will respect my own name. He will hear what my name should, even if it does not, properly name: the irreplaceable singularity which bears it, and to which the enemy then bears himself and refers. If he hears my order, if he addresses me, me myself, he respects me, at hate’s distance, me beyond me, beyond my own consciousness. And if he desires my death, at least he desires it, perhaps, him, mine, singularly. The declared friend would not accomplish as much in simply declaring himself a friend while missing out on the name: that which imparts the name both to friendship and to singularity. That which deserves the name.
Every time, then, the issue involves the name. The name borne. The name which is imparted. The person imparting the name to the person to whom the name is handed down. The issue involves reference and respect.