The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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the other. It has at least the figure of the other. The necessary consequence of this strange configuration is an opportunity for thought. Beyond all ulterior frontiers between love and friendship, but also between the passive and active voices, between the loving and the being-loved, what is at stake is ‘lovence’ [aimance].5 You must know how it can be more worthwhile to love lovence. Aristotle recalls not only that it is more worthwhile to love, but that you had better love in this way, and not in that way; and that hence it is more worthwhile to love than to be loved. From then on, a singular preference destabilizes and renders dissymmetrical the equilibrium of all difference: an it is more worthwhile gives precedence to the act over potentiality. An activity carries it away, it prevails over passivity.
Ever-ready Aristotelian scholastics would tempt us confidently to take this a step further: this it is more worthwhile would acknowledge the preeminence of form over matter. And after a deduction of this sort, one would no longer be wary of a worrisome consequence. Rushing to the end, such a pre-eminence would then come, for once, with Aristotle, for a single time, not only to link lovence to dying, but to situate death on the side of act and on the side of form. For once, but irreversibly.
How does this come about? How would act, this time, bear itself over to death’s side? How would it bear death? For it bears death in itself in this case; it contains death. Preference and reference. But it bears death in itself in bearing itself over to death. It transports itself in death by that which, in it, at the time of death, addresses its reference in a single stroke.
Let us then see death coming on the road of this argumentation. Is not death, moreover, in question – death in so far as one sees it coming, and even in so far as a knowledge knows what it knows in seeing it coming, only in seeing it coming?
Aristotle therefore declares: as for friendship, it is advisable to love rather than to be loved. Let us not forget the general horizon of this affirmation. Justice and politics are at stake. This passage from the Eudemian Ethics opens, in fact, with the question of what is just, the just (to dikaíon) in friendship.6 What arises in the first place is precisely the question of the just or of justice, dikaiosúnē. Justice characterizes a way of behaving. It consists in behaving in a certain way: in accordance with the just, in harmony with the principle of the just. In its dignity as well as its necessity, this question is immediately equal to that of the beautiful and the desirable in friendship. It arrives, then, also in the first place, immediately following the general opening on the subject of friendship (peri philías): What is friendship? How or what is it? What is a friend? Is friendship said in one sense or in several?7
The whole task should certainly consist in determining this justice. But that seems possible only by forcing several aporias. We will begin, as always, with the implicit reference to Lysis (214–16), with the aporia of a friendship which seems doomed to the similar and to the dissimilar.8 But even before this first aporia, the just will be said and the passage will be forced only by first aligning oneself on a commonly held opinion. This opinion concerns the very work of the political: the properly political act or operation amounts to creating (to producing, to making, etc.) the most friendship possible (tês te gar politikês érgon einai dokei málista poiêsai philían9).
How is this the most possible to be understood? How many? Can that be calculated? How can you interpret the possibility of this maximum or this optimum in friendship? How is it to be understood politically? Must the most friendship [plus d’amitié] still belong to the political?
In all good sense, what you hear above all is loving; you must hear loving; you cannot fail to hear it in total confidence when the word friendship resounds: friendship consists in loving, does it not; it is a way of loving, of course. Consequence, implication: it is therefore an act before being a situation; rather, the act of loving, before being the state of being loved. An action before a passion. The act of this activity, this intention of loving, the phileín, is more proper to friendship itself (kata ten philían) than the situation which consists in letting oneself be loved or inducing love, in any case in being loved (phileisthai). Being-loved certainly speaks to something of philía, but only on the side of the beloved (philéton). It says nothing of friendship itself which implies in itself, properly, essentially, the act and the activity: someone must love in order to know what loving means; then, and only then, can one know what being loved means.
Friendship, the being-friend – what is that, anyway? Well, it is to love before being loved. Before even thinking about what loving, love, lovence mean, one must know that the only way to find out is by questioning first of all the act and the experience of loving rather than the state or situation of being loved. Why is that? What is its reason? Can we know? Well, precisely by reason of knowledge – which is accorded or allied here to the act. And here we have the obscure but invincible force of a tautology. The argument seems, in fact, simple: it is possible to be loved (passive voice) without knowing it, but it is impossible to love (active voice) without knowing it. Science or self-consciousness knows itself a priori comprehended, comprehended and engaged in the friendship of the one who loves – to wit, in the friend – but science or self-consciousness is no longer comprehended or engaged, or is not yet so on the side of the one who is loved. The friend is the person who loves before being the person who is loved: he who loves before being the beloved, and perhaps (but this is something else, even though the consequence follows) he who loves before being loved. Engaged science or consciousness here means conscripted twice over: implicated as in a condition of possibility (theoretical chain) and held in a pledge, a promise, an alliance (performative chain). This view can always fall back on the following analytic evidence: one must start with the friend–who–loves, not with the friend–who–is–loved, if one is to think friendship. This is an irreversible order. One can be loved while remaining ignorant of that very thing – that one is loved – and in this respect remain as though confined to secrecy. It could be said that such a secret is never revealed. But one cannot love, and one must not love, in such a state of ignorance of friendship itself (ésti gar lanthánein philoámenon, philoûnta d’oú10). Axiom: the friendship I bear [porte] for someone, and no doubt love as well, cannot remain a secret for myself. Even before it is declared (to the other, in a loud voice), the act of love would thereby be, at its very birth, declared. It would be in itself declared, given over to knowledge or to consciousness. The declaration would in truth be inscribed upon its art of birth. One loves only by declaring that one loves. Let us call that, for convenience’s sake, an axiom: the premiss of this entire line of reasoning seems to appeal to good sense, it is posed as unquestionable. As incontestable, in fact: one cannot bear witness against it without being party to it.
But there, in the dark, objections are massing up. We will abandon them to their virtuality for the moment. Being loved – what does that mean? Nothing, perhaps – nothing in any case of friendship itself in which the loved one, as such, has nothing to know, sometimes nothing to do. Being loved therefore remains – with regard to friendship itself, and therefore with regard to the friend – an accident (to men gar phileisthai sumbebekós11). Friendship, what is proper or essential to friendship, can be thought and lived without the least reference to the be–loved, or more generally to the lovable – in any case, without having to set out from there, as from a principle. If we trusted the categories of subject and object here, we would say in this logic that friendship (philía) is first accessible on the side of its subject, who thinks and lives it, not on the side of its object, who can be loved or lovable without in any way being assigned to a sentiment of which, precisely, he remains the object. And if we do say ‘think and love’, as we shall see later, life, breath, the soul, are always and necessarily found on the side of the lover or of loving, while the being-loved of the lovable can be lifeless; it can belong to the reign of the non-living, the non-psychic or the ‘soulless’ (en apsúkhô12). One cannot love without living and without knowing that one loves, but one can still love the deceased or the inanimate who then know nothing of it. It is indeed through the possibility of loving the deceased that the decision in favour of a certain lovence comes