The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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the beloved will now unceasingly exceed all measurement and all moderation – that is, it will exceed the very principle of a calculation. It will perhaps introduce a virtual disorder in the organization of the Aristotelian discourse. (This ‘perhaps’ has already marked the hesitant gait of our reading.) Something trembles, for example, in what Aristotle calls the natural (phúsei) hierarchy – that is, the hierarchy inscribed from birth between those inclined to love (to kissing, to caressing), the philetikoi, and on the other hand, below them, the last ones, the philótimoi. They prefer to be loved; they thus seek honours, distinction, signs of recognition.13 In addition, even if there were no essentially erotic dimension, no desire at work in the ever-more-dissymmetrical hierarchy of the philía, how will its formal structure in the relation between the sublunary world and the Prime Mover be respected?
If Eros and Philia are indeed movements, do we not have here an inverse hierarchy and an inverse dissymmetry? Prime Mover or pure Art, God sets in motion without Himself moving or being moved; He is the absolute desirable or desired, analogically and formally in the position of the beloved, therefore on the side of death, of that which can be inanimate without ceasing to be loved or desired (apsúkhon). Now in contrast to what takes place in friendship, no one will contest that this absolute object of desire is also found at the principle and at the summit of the natural hierarchy, whereas He does not allow himself to move or be moved by any attraction.
Let us go back down to the sublunary world. The dissymmetry risks, apparently and at first glance, complicating the egalitarian schema of the isótēs or – if I may use the term – the reciprocalist or mutualist schema of requited friendship (antiphileîn), such as Aristotle seems to insist on privileging them elsewhere.14 The phileîn would therefore be more appropriate to the essence of friendship (kata ten philían); the act of loving would better suit friendship, if not the beloved (philéton). Aristotle, then, proposes to give proof or a sign (semeion) of this suitability. If a friend had to choose between knowing and being known, he would choose knowing rather than being known. Every time he evokes this alternative and determines the choice, Aristotle places himself in the hypothesis in which the two experiences (knowing and being known, loving and being-loved, the lover and the lovable) are not compatible, at the moment when they do not appear possible at the same time.15 Basically it makes little difference. Even if the movement of the act and the passivity of the state were simultaneously possible, if that could take place in fact, the essential structure of the two experiences and the two relations would remain no less different. This irreducible difference is that which counts and permits counting. It is what justifies the intrinsic hierarchy: knowing will never mean, for a finite being, being known; nor loving being loved. One can love being loved, but loving will always be more, better and something other than being loved. One can love to be loved – or to be lovable – but one must first know how to love, and know what loving means by loving. The structure of the first must remain what it is, heterogeneous to that of the other; and that structure, that of loving for the lover, will always – as Aristotle tells us, in sum – be preferable to the other, to that of the being-loved as lovable. Loving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge. It is the reference, the preference itself
To make this understood, the Eudemian Ethics stages the example of what the women do in Antiphon’s Andromache. It is a matter of an example of adoption or of a nurse, of prosthetic maternity, of the substitution or the supposition of children, en tais upobolais, and here we are already in this familiarity of election which will everywhere remain our theme. These mothers confide their children to a nurse and love them without seeking to be loved in return. For to want to be known seems to be an ‘egoistic’ sentiment, as it is often translated; it is in any case a sentiment turned within oneself, in favour of oneself, for the love of self (autou éneka). It is passive, more in a hurry to receive or to enjoy the good than to do it, as Aristotle literally says (tou páskhein ti agathon alla mē poieîn); but one could just as well say: ready to receive the good that one does not have rather than to give that which one possesses (or even, as Plotinus will one day say – and this is something else – ready to give that very thing that one does not have). The Nichomachean Ethics recalls the same example, in order to make the same point. But Aristotle insists at this point on maternal joy or enjoyment [jouissance], in seeing there once again a sign or a proof of the preference (semeion d’ai metéres tô phileîn khaírousai16).
How can you pass from maternal enjoyment to death? This passage is not visible in the immediacy of the text. Naming, cetainly, the enjoyment of maternal love in so far as it renounces reciprocity, the Nicomachean Ethics associates it neither with surviving nor with dying. The Eudemian Ethics speaks of the renunciation of the mother, in her very love, but without naming enjoyment and in order immediately to go on [enchaîner] to death. We have just recalled this logical chain. To want to be known, to refer to self in view of self, to receive the good rather than to do it or to give it – this is an altogether different thing from knowing. Knowing knows in order to do and to love, for love and in view of doing and loving (to de ginôskein tou poiein kai tou phileîn éneka), as Aristotle then says, concluding: ‘This is why we praise those who continue to love their deceased, for they know but are not known’ (dio kai tous emménontas tô phileîn pros tous tethneôtas epainoumen, ginṓskousi gár, all’ ou ginṓskontai17). Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philía to the limit of its possibility. But at the same time, it uncovers the ultimate spring of this possibility: I could not love friendship without projecting its impetus towards the horizon of this death. The horizon is the limit and the absence of limit, the loss of the horizon on the horizon, the ahorizontality of the horizon, the limit as absence of limit. I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life. I feel myself – and in advance, before any contract – borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus that I feel myself (loving).
Autology provides food for thought, as always: I feel myself loving, borne to love the deceased, this beloved or this lovable being of whom it has already been said that he was not necessarily alive, and that therefore he was bearing death in his being-loved, smack against his being-lovable, in the range [portée] of the reference to his very being-loved. Let us recall it, and let us do so in the words of Aristotle. He explains to us why one can rejoice and why there is a place for rejoicing in loving (dio to phileín khaírein), but one could never rejoice – or at the very least, we would say, not essentially, not intrinsically – in being loved (all’ ou to phileisthai estín). Enjoyment, the self-rejoicing, is immanent not to the beloved but to the loving, to its act, to its proper enétgeia,18 The criterion of this distinction follows an apparently invisible line. It passes between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the psychic and the a-psychic. A question of respiration or inspiration: loving belongs only to a being gifted with life or with breath (en empsúkô). Being loved, on the other hand, always remains possible on the side of the inanimate (en apsúkhô), where a psukhé may already have expired. ‘One also loves inanimate beings’ (phileitai gar kai ta ápsukha).19
(We are striving to speak here in the logic of Aristotle’s two Ethics, doing everything that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his argumentation. The reader who is familiar with Aristotle may find that the tone has changed, however, along with the pathos and the connotations; he may suspect some slow, discreet or secret drift. Let us ask him – let us ask ourselves – what the law of this drift is and, more precisely, if there is one, and if it be pure, the purely conceptual, logical or properly philosophical law of order. A law which would not only be of a psychological, rhetorical or poetic order. What is taking place here? And what if what is taking place were taking place precisely between the two orders that we have just distinguished, at their very juncture? Let us not forget that in the case of psychology, the question of the psukhé, or of animate life, is at the heart of all philosophical reflection on philía. For Aristotle, neither rhetoric nor poetics could ever be excluded from