The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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is the future thus pre-illumined, beyond life, by the hope that friendship projects and inspires in this way? What is absolute hope, if it stems from friendship? However underdeveloped it may be, the Ciceronian answer leans sharply to one side – let us say the same side – rather than to the other – let us say the other. Such a response thus sets up the given state of our discussion. In two, three or four words, is the friend the same or the other? Cicero prefers the same, and believes he is able to do so; he thinks that to prefer is also just that: if friendship projects its hope beyond life – an absolute hope, an incommensurable hope – this is because the friend is, as the translation has it, ‘our own ideal image’. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word exemplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model. The two meanings (the single original and the multipliable copy) cohabit here; they are – or seem to be – the same, and that is the whole story, the very condition of survival. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognized in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes – in truth in ours – survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured, for this Narcissus who dreams of immortality. Beyond death, the absolute future thus receives its ecstatic light, it appears only from within this narcissism and according to this logic of the same.
(It will not suffice to claim exactly the contrary, as we will attempt to do, in order to provide a logical demonstration, in a decidable discourse; another way and another thought will be necessary for the task.)
This text by Cicero will also have been in turn, for a history (long and brief, past and to come), the glorious witness, the illustrious exemplar, of Ciceronian logic. This tradition is perhaps finished, even dying; it always will have been in its essence finishing, but its ‘logic’ ends up none the less, in the very consequence of the same, in a vertiginous convertibility of opposites: the absent becomes present, the dead living, the poor rich, the weak strong. And all that, acknowledges Cicero, is quite ‘difficult to say’, which means difficult to decide. Those who snigger at discourses on the undecidable believe they are very strong, as we know, but they should begin by attacking a certain Cicero as well. By reading him, then:
For the man who keeps his eye on a true friend, keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself (tamquam exemplar aliquod intuetur sui). For this reason, friends are together when they are separated, they are rich when they are poor, strong when they are weak (et imbecilli valent), and – a thing even harder to explain – they live on after they have died (mortui vivunt), so great is the honour that follows them, so vivid the memory, so poignant the sorrow. That is why friends who have died are accounted happy (ex quo illorum beata mors videtur), and those who survive them are deemed worthy of praise (vita laudabilis).3
In this possibility of a post mortem discourse, a possibility that is a force as well, in this virtue of the funeral eulogy, everything seems, then, to have a part to play: epitaph or oration, citation of the dead person, the renown of the name after the death of what it names. A memory is engaged in advance, from the moment of what is called life, in this strange temporality opened by the anticipated citation of some funeral oration. I live in the present speaking of myself in the mouths of my friends, I already hear them speaking on the edge of my tomb. The Ciceronian variety of friendship would be the possibility of quoting myself in exemplary fashion, by signing the funeral oration in advance – the best of them, perhaps, but it is never certain that the friend will deliver it standing over my tomb when I am no longer among the living. Already, yet when I will no longer be. As though pretending to say to me, in my very own voice: rise again.
Who never dreams of such a scene? But who does not abhor this theatre? Who would not see therein the repetition of a disdainful and ridiculous staging, the putting to death of friendship itself?
This premeditation of friendship (de amicitia, peri phillas) would also intend, then, to engage, in its very space, work on the citation, and on the citation of an apostrophe. Of an apostrophe always uttered close to the end, on the edge of life – that is to say, of death.
What transpires when an apostrophe is quoted? Does an apostrophe let itself be quoted, in its lively and singular movement, here and now, this impulse in which I turn towards the singularity of the other, towards you, the irreplaceable one who will be my witness or whom I single out? Can the transport of this unique address be not only repeated but quoted? Conversely, would the apostrophe ever take place, and the pledge it offers, without the possibility of a substitution?
We will read these themes of the apostrophic pledge and its quotation later on; they are no doubt inseparable from the theme of the name: from the name of the friend and, in the name, from the mortality of the friend, from the memories and from the testament which, using precisely the same appellation, these themes call up.
Familiarities. What is familiarity? What is familial proximity? What affinity of alliance or consanguinity (Verwandschaft) is concerned? To what elective familiarity could friendship be compared? In reading Montaigne, Montaigne reading Cicero, Montaigne bringing back a ‘saying’ ‘often repeated’, here we are already – another testament – back with Aristotle. Enigmatic and familiar, he survives and surveys from within ourselves (but how many of us are there?). He stands guard over the very form of our sentences on the subject of friendship. He forms our precomprehension at the very moment when we attempt, as we are about to do, to go back over it, even against it. Are we not obliged to respect at least, first of all, the authority of Aristotelian questions? The structure and the norm, the grammar of such questions? Is not Aristotle in fact the first of the maieutic tradition of Lysis, to be sure (Lysis, è peri philías), but beyond him, in giving it a directly theoretical, ontological and phenomenological form, to pose the question of friendship (peri philías), of knowing what it is (tí estí), what and how it is (poîón tí), and, above all, if it is said in one or in several senses (monakhôs légatai è pleonakhôs)?4
It is true that right in the middle of this series of questions, between the one on the being or the being-such of friendship and the one on the possible plurivocity of a saying of friendship, there is the question which is itself terribly equivocal: kai tís o phílos. This question asks what the friend is, but also asks who he is. This hesitation in the language between the what and the who does not seem to make Aristotle tremble, as if it were, fundamentally, one and the same interrogation, as if one enveloped the other, and as if the question ‘who?’ had to bend or bow in advance before the ontological question ‘what?’ or ‘what is?’.
This implicit subjection of the who to the what will call for question on our part – in return or in appeal. The question will bring with it a protestation: in the name of the friend or in the name of the name. If this protestation takes on a political aspect, it will perhaps be less properly political than it would appear. It will signify, rather, the principle of a possible resistance to the reduction of the political, even the ethical, to the ontophenomenological. It will perhaps resist, in the name of another politics, such a reduction (a powerful reduction – powerful enough, in any case, to have perhaps constructed the dominant concept of the political). And it will accept the risk of diverting the Lysis tradition. It will attempt to move what is said to us in the dialogue elsewhere, from its first words, about the route and the name, the proper and the singular name, at that moment when this ‘maieutic’ dialogue on friendship (è peri philías) begins, at the crossing of who knows how many passages, routes or aportas, with love (érōs). It begins as well, let us not forget, by ‘diverting’ Socrates from a path leading him ‘straight’ (euthu) from the Academy to the Lyceum.
Yes, since when – whether we know it or not – have we ceased to be Aristotle’s heirs? And how many of us? And turned, by him already, towards the heritage itself, towards the theme of some last will, towards the testamentary in itself? The Eudemian Ethics, for example, inscribes friendship, knowledge and death, but also survival, from the start,