The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
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If philía lives, and if it lives at the extreme limit of its possibility, it therefore lives, it stirs, it becomes psychic from within this resource of survival. This philía, this psukhé between friends, sur-vives. It cannot survive itself as act, but it can survive its object, it can love the inanimate. Consequently it springs forward, from the threshold of this act, towards the possibility that the beloved might be dead. There is a first and irreducible dissymmetry here. But this same dissymmetry separates itself, after a fashion, in an unpresentable topology; it folds, turns inside out and doubles itself at the same time in the hypothesis of shared friendship, the friendship tranquilly described as reciprocal. I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not survive him, except to the extent to which he already bears my death and inherits it as the last survivor. He bears my own death and, in a certain way, he is the only one to bear it – this proper death of myself thus expropriated in advance.
(I say that using the masculine gender {the [male] friend, he, and so forth} – not in the narcissistic or fraternal violence of a distraction, but by way of announcing a question awaiting us, precisely the question of the brother, in the canonical – that is, androcentric – structure of friendship.)
In any case, philía begins with the possibility of survival. Surviving – that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited. For one does not survive without mourning. No one alive can get the better of this tautology, that of the stance of survival [survivance] – even God would be helpless.
Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possiblility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved art of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship.
But such a time gives itself in its withdrawal. It occurs only through self-effacement. [Il n’arrive qu’à s’effacer, also: ‘It succeeds only in effacing itself.’] It delivers itself up and withdraws twice and according to two modalities, as we shall see, in two times as incompatible as they are indissociable: firm and stable constancy on the one hand and, on the other, beginning again, renewal, the indefinite repetition of the inaugural instant, always anew, once again, the new in re-iteration. And this double contretemps delivers up the truth of friendship in the eerie light of a contre-jour, the present presents itself there only from within a source of phenomenal light which comes neither from the present (it is no longer the source) nor from the place from which it arises or in which it appears – the place of the gaze, of the self or of the ‘subject’, if you like. The contre-jour of this contretemps disjoins the presence of the present. It inscribes both intemporality and untimeliness in at least one of the figures of what Aristotle regularly calls primary friendship (e protè philía). Primary friendship: primary because it is the first to present itself according to logic and rank, primary according to sense and hierarchy, primary because all other friendship is determined with reference to it, if only in the gap of the drift or the failure. Primary friendship does not work without time, certainly, it never presents itself outside time: there is no friend without time (oud’ áneu khrónou phílos20) – that is, without that which puts confidence to the test. There is no friendship without confidence (pístis), and no confidence which does not measure up to some chronology, to the trial of a sensible duration of time (è de pístis ouk áneu khrónou21). The fidelity, faith, ‘fidence’ [fiance], credence, the credit of this engagement, could not possibly be a-chronic. It is precisely by taking off from this credence [croire] that something like a temporalizing synthesis or symbolicity can be apprehended – beyond the letter of Aristotle’s text, one might say. Engagement in friendship takes time, it gives time, for it carries beyond the present moment and keeps memory as much as it anticipates. It gives and takes time, for it survives the living present. The paradox of the grieving survival is concentrated in the ever-so-ambiguous value of stability, constancy and firm permanence that Aristotle regularly associates with the value of credence or confidence (pístis). In primary friendship, such a faith must be stable, established, certain, assured (bébaios); it must endure the test of time. But at the same time, if this may still be said, áma, it is this faith which, dominating time by eluding it, taking and giving time in contretemps, opens the experience of time. It opens it, however, in determining it as the stable present of a quasi-eternity, or in any case from and in view of such a present of certainty. Everything is installed at home, as it were, in this conjunction of friendship, of ‘fidence’ and stable certainty. There is no reliable friendship without this faith (ouk ésti d’áneu písteōs philía bébaios22), without the confirmed steadfastness of this repeated act of faith. Plato, too, associated philía with the same value of constancy and steadfastness. The Symposium recalls a few famous examples. A friendship that has become steadfast, constant or faithful (bébaios) can even defy or destroy tyrannical power.23 Elsewhere, as we know – in the Timaeus, for example – the value of constancy is quite simply tied to that of the true or the veritable, in particular where it is a question of opinion or belief.
In its sheer stability, this assured certainty is not natural, in the late and current sense of the term; it does not characterize spontaneous behaviour because it qualifies a belief or an act of faith, a testimony and an act of responsible freedom. Only primary friendship is stable (bébaios), for it implies decision and reflection: that which always takes time. Only those decisions that do not spring up quickly (me takhu) or easily (mēde radíōs) result in correct judgement (ten krísin orihḗn).24 This non–given, non– ‘natural’, non–spontaneous stability thus amounts to a stabilization. This stabilization supposes the passage through an ordeal which takes time. It must be difficult to judge and to decide. A decision worthy of the name – that is, a critical and reflective decision – could not possibly be rapid or easy, as Aristotle then notes, and this remark must receive all the weight of its import. The time is the time of this decision in the ordeal of what remains to be decided – and hence of what has not been decided, of what there is to reflect and deliberate upon – and thus has not yet been thought through. If the stabilized stability of certainty is never given, if it is conquered in the course of a stabilization, then the stabilization of what becomes certain must cross – and therefore, in one way or another, recall or be reminded of – the suspended indecision, the undecidable qua the time of reflection.
Here we would find the difference between spirit (the nous) and the animal body, but also their analogy. The analogy is as important as the difference, for it inscribes in the living body the habitus of this contretemps. It has its place in the very movement and in the possibility of such an inscription. The contretemporal habitus is the acquired capacity, the cultivated aptitude, the experimented faculty against the backdrop of a predisposition; it is the éxis that binds together two times in the same time, a duration and an omnitemporality at the same time. Such a contretemporality is another name for this psukhé, it is the being-animated or the animation of this life uniting the human spirit (the nous) and animality itself. This unifying feature conjugates man and animal, spirit and life, soul and body. It places them under the same yoke, that of the same liability [possibilité], that of the same aptitude to learn in suffering, to cross, to record and to take account of the ordeal of time, to withhold its trace in the body. This conjugation will warrant the poetic figure of the analogy which we will quote in a moment and which precisely names the yoke, the yoke effect.
It is starting from this analogy that the difference lets itself be thought. In the passage of time through time. Time exits from time. The ordeal of stabilization, the becoming-steadfast and reliable (bébaios), takes time. For this ordeal, this experience, this crossing (peira),