The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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in the direction of familiar sentences, sentences bound by two locutions: to appeal and to take one’s mark [faire appel, prendre appel]
The decision ‘to appeal’ would involve a procedure of re-examination. There is a grievance concerning the judgement handed down, concerning its givens, and the most accredited concepts of politics and the standard interpretation of friendship, as to fraternization: with a view to protesting or contesting – that is to say, to appealing – before another testimonial agency, from fact to law and from law to justice.
As for the impetus in ‘taking one’s mark’, this gathers up a stooping body, first folded in on itself in preparatory reflection: before the leap, without a horizon, beyond any form of trial.
Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating, Counting
‘O my friends, there is no friend.’
I am addressing you, am I not?
How many of us are there?
– Does that count?
– Addressing you in this way, I have perhaps not said anything yet. Nothing that is said in this saying. Perhaps nothing sayable.
Perhaps it will have to be admitted, perhaps I have not yet even addressed myself. At least, not to you.
How many of us are there?
– How can you count?
– On each side of a comma, after the pause, ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ – these are the two disjoined members of the same unique sentence. An almost impossible declaration. In two times [deux temps], Unjoinable, the two times seem disjoined by the very meaning of what appears to be at once both affirmed and denied: ‘my friends, no friend’. In two times but at the same time, in the contretemps of the same sentence. If there is ‘no friend’, then how could I call you my friends, my friends? By what right? How could you take me seriously? If I call you my friends, my friends, if I call you, my friends, how dare I add, to you, that there is no friend?
Incompatible as they may appear, and condemned to the oblivion of contradiction, here, in a sort of desperately dialectical desire, the two times already form two theses – two moments, perhaps – they concatenate, they appear together, they are summoned to appear, in the present: they present themselves as in a single stroke, in a single breath, in the same present, in the present itself. At the same time, and before who knows who, before who knows whose law. The contretemps looks favourably on the encounter, it responds without delay but without renunciation: no promised encounter without the possibility of a contretemps. As soon as there is more than one.
But how many of us are there?
And first of all – you already sense it – in pronouncing ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, I have yet to say anything in my name. I have been satisfied with quoting. The spokesman of another, I have reported his words, which belong in the first place (a question of tone, syntax, of a gesture in speech, and so on) to a slightly archaic language, itself unsettled by the memory of borrowed or translated speech. Having signed nothing, I have assumed nothing on my own account.
‘O my friends, there is no friend’ – the words not only form a quotation that I am now reading in its old French spelling. They have a different ring: already, such a very long time ago, they bore the quotation of another reader hailing from my homeland, Montaigne: ‘that saying which’, he says, ‘Aristotle often repeated’. It is found in the Essays,1 in the chapter ‘On Friendship’.
This, then, is a cited quotation. But the quotation of a saying attributed, only attributed, by a sort of rumour or public opinion. ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ is, then, a declaration referred to Aristotle. There will be no end to the work of glossing its attribution and its very grammar, the translation of these four words, three or four in Greek, since the only substantive in the sentence is repeated. Like a renowned filiation, an origin thus nicknamed seems, in truth, to lose itself in the infinite anonymity of the mists of time. It is not, however, one of those proverbs, one of those ‘sayings’ with no assignable author, whose aphoristic mode is seldom in the form of the apostrophe.
Quotation of friendship. A quotation coming from a chapter entitled ‘On Friendship’, after a title that repeats, already, an entire tradition of titles. Before naming Aristotle, Montaigne had massively quoted Cicero, his De Amicitia as much as the Tusculanes. Occasionally he had drawn the Ciceronian treatise within the genius of his paraphrase, precisely around this ‘O my friends’. The ‘sovereign and master-friendship’ had then to be distinguished from ‘friendships common and customary, in relation to which you must employ that saying which Aristotle often repeated’.
We have in memory our Laelius de Amicitia: we already hear the Ciceronian echo. Let us specify, in anticipation, just that the Ciceronian distinction between the two friendships (‘true and perfect’ or ‘vulgar and mediocre’) works only with an arithmetical twist. How many friends? How many of us are there? Determining a nomination and a quotation (pauci nominantur. those who are named or whose name is quoted are few and far between when true or perfect friendship is named), the distinction expresses rarity or the small in number. We shall never forget that. Are friends rare? Must they remain rare? How many are there? What account must be taken of rarity? And what about selection or election, affinity or proximity; what about parenthood or familiarity (oikeiótēs, as Plato’s Lysis already put it), what about one’s being-at-home or being-close-to-oneself in regard to that which links friendship to all laws and all logics of universalization, to ethics and to law or right, to the values of equality and equity, to all the political models of the res publica for which this distinction remains the axiom, and especially in regard to democracy? The fact that Cicero adds democracy as an afterthought changes nothing in the force or the violence of this oligophilial [oligophilique] note:
And I am not now speaking of the friendships of ordinary folk, or of ordinary people (de vulgari aut de mediocri) – although even these are a source of pleasure and profit – but of true and perfect friendship (sed de vera et perfecta loquor), the kind that was possessed by those few men who have gained names for themselves as friends (qualis eorum, qui pauci nominantur, fuit).2
An important nuance: the small in number does not characterize the friends themselves. It counts those we are speaking of, those whose legendary friendship tradition cites, the name and the renown, the name according to the renown. Public and political signs attest to these great and rare friendships. They take on the value of exemplary heritage.
Why exemplary? Why exemplary in a very strict sense? Rarity accords with the phenomenon, it vibrates with light, brilliance and glory. If one names and cites the best friends, those who have illustrated ‘true and perfect’ friendship’, it is because this friendship comes to illuminate. It illustrates itself, makes happy or successful things shine, gives them visibility, renders them more resplendent (secundas res splendidiores facit amicitia). It gives rise to a project, the anticipation, the perspective, the pro-vidence of a hope that illuminates in advance the future (praelucet), thereby transporting the name’s renown beyond death. A narcissistic projection of the ideal image, of its own ideal image (exemplar), already inscribes the legend. It engraves the renown in a ray of light, and prints the citation of the friend in a convertibility of life and death, of presence and absence, and promises it to the testamental revenance [ghostly apparition of the revenant, the ‘ghost’, its haunting return on the scene (Translator’s note)] of more [no more] life, of a surviving that will remain, here, one of our themes. Friendship provides numerous advantages, notes Cicero, but none is comparable to this unequalled hope, to this ecstasy towards a future which will go beyond death. Because of death, and because of this unique passage beyond life, friendship thus offers us a hope