4

The Phantom Friend Returning
(in the Name of ‘Democracy’)

Friends as ghosts (Die Freunde als Gespenster)

If we greatly transform ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become ghosts of our past: their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade [in a frightfully spectral manner (schattenhaft-schauerlich)] – as though we were hearing ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature.¹

Nietzsche

we may wonder why democracy was unable to forge a specific language for itself … nowhere else is the dissociation between the reality and name of democracy earned as far.… So, attacking democracy with its own weapons.…²

Nicole Loraux

We would, however, hesitate on the edge of a fiction. The world would be hanging on a sort of elementary, borderless hypothesis; a general conditionality would spread over all certainties. The virtual space and time of the ‘perhaps’ would be in the process of exhausting the force of our desires, the flesh of our events, the uttermost life of our lives. No, they would not be in the process of exhausting us, for the very presence of such a process would be reassuring and still too effective; no, they would be on the verge of success, and this imminence would suffice for their victory. It would suffice, not in the task of standing in opposition to this force and this life, nor in that of contradicting them – or even harming them – but, worse still, of making them possible, thereby making them simply virtual. From this virtuality they could never escape, even after their effectuation; this would, then, by the very fact, render them impossible, to the point of rendering their presumed reality simply possible. The modality of the possible, the unquenchable perhaps, would, implacably, destroy everything, by means of a sort of self-immunity from which no region of being, phúsis or history would be exempt. We could, then, imagine a time, this particular time – in any case we would not have any other at our disposal – but we would hesitate to say ‘this particular time’, for its presence, here and now, and its indivisible singularity, would give rise to doubt. We would want to reappropriate for ourselves, here and now, even this hesitation, even the virtualizing, suspenseful abeyance of this epoch, in order to do it in, to open it in a single stroke on to a time that would be ours, and only ours: the contemporary, should such a thing ever present itself. But we would not dare to give it a name. For fear of virtualizing even more – both our desires and our events – precisely on account of this abeyance. Nothing there could any longer be recognized, neither a moment nor a state, not even a transition. This would be an unprecedented time; a time which, reserving itself in the unique, would then remain without relation to any other, without attraction or repulsion, nor living analogy. Without even this friendship for itself, nor this enmity: without the love or the hate that would make this time appear as such. But absolutely without indifference. A time said to be contemporary that would be anything but contemporary – anything, except proper to its own time. It would resemble nothing, nor would it gather itself up in anything, lending itself to any possible reflection. It would no longer relate to itself. There would, however, be absolutely no indifference; it would not be – in other words, it would not be present – either with the other or with itself. Should it present itself, should it with some word, say ‘I’, its speech could only be that of a madman; and if it described itself as living, this would again be – and more probably than ever – a sign of madness.

One would then have the time of a world without friends, the time of a world without enemies. The imminence of a self-destruction by the infinite development of a madness of self-immunity. And anyone who would say ‘O my friends, there are no friends’, and again, or again, ‘O enemies, there is no enemy’, would convince us, following a cool, directly logical analysis of his statements, that he does not yet have a friend, but already no longer has an enemy. Or conversely, at the present time. This would be, perhaps, as if someone had lost the enemy, keeping him only in memory, the shadow of an ageless ghost, but still without having found friendship, or the friend. Or a name for either.

If we were not wary, in determining them too quickly, about precipitating these things towards an excessively established reality, we might propose a gross example, among an infinity of others, simply to set a heading: since what a naive scansion dates from the ‘fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall’, or from the ‘end-of-communism’, the ‘parhamentary-democracies-of-the-capitalist-Western-world’ would find themselves without a principal enemy. The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any price so-called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which, as Schmitt would have said – and this is our subject – it would lose its political being; it would purely and simply depoliticize itself [se dépolitiserait].

These are questions we therefore murmur to ourselves – the whisper of the aforementioned fiction, just for a start; without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? [où se trouver, où se trouver soi-même]? With whom? Whose contemporary? Who is the contemporary? When and where would we be, ourselves, we, in order to say, as in Nietzsche’s unbelievable teleiopoesis, ‘we’ and ‘you’? Let us call these questions fictive questions, to recall an evidence of common sense: I can address them – these anguished, but abstract and fleshless questions – only to an addressee; I can only throw them out towards a reader, whoever he may be; I can only destine them with the precipitative supposition of a we that, by definition and by destination, has not yet arrived to itself. Not before, at the earliest, the end and the arrival of this sentence whose very logic and grammar are improbable. For the ‘I’ that feigns to address these fictive questions finds itself comprised and determined in advance by the fact that it belongs to the most suspended ‘we’ of this supposed contemporaneity. It is the arrow of this teleiopoesis that we have been following, waiting for, preceding for such a long time – the long time of a time that does not belong to time. A time out of joint.

Let us start again. We had just attempted, in the preceding chapter, a first interpretation. One among an infinite number of other possible ones, as Nietzsche himself said one day, an interpretation of one of his sayings, the exegesis of a fiction or an apostrophe, in memory of Montaigne, who said it himself as the heir of Aristotle and Cicero, in the great unending maieutic tradition of Lysis (è peri philías, maieutikós).

Let us not forget that Lysis begins with the scene of a proper name which cannot at first be pronounced: who is the loved one? Will his name be cited? Will he be called by his name for the first time? Everything in the political question of friendship seems to be suspended on the secret of a name. Will this name be published? Will tongues be untied, and will the name be delivered over to public space? Will a public space be opened up? Centuries later, as we shall see, between Montaigne and La Boétie, the birth of friendship, the knowledge of the name and the question of public space will be caught up in the same knot. Here, the proper name to be quoted, Lysis, is not just any name. And it involves a knot. Maieutic as an effect of analysis [in English in the original], the Lysis quotes within itself its homonym, thereby tying itself to the common name (lysis) which designates, as if by chance, unbinding, detachment, emancipation, untangling, the tie undone or dissolved by analysis, solution – indeed, absolution, even solitude. Here we have an inaugural dialogue on friendship. Now, what is it called? Have we given it a thought? Its title quotes a proper name which commonly describes a knot undone, while engaging you in the analysis of what it means to be solitary.

Quoted quotations, then, on the subject of the possibility of quoting great friends, the true ones. Even if there are more than two of them, the model (exemplar) will most often be furnished by a twosome, by some great couples of friends. Always men. Well, more often than not, and that is what counts; it is of them that one speaks – the two of them, it is the twosome that is kept in memory and whose legend is archived. Our culture, our school, our literature are the theatre of these couples – and the posterity of these great friends. La Boétie knew that in advance; that is what he promised for the two of them, before evoking ‘a secret pact of nature’, ‘the paternal sap’ and the change ‘in name’:

Should destiny so desire, be assured that posterity

Will place our names on the list of celebrated friends.3

The interpretation involved here remains – there can be no doubt about it – insufficient and preliminary with regard to so many heritages, notably with regard to the Nietzschean corpus – an abundant, aphoristic and apparently unstable body of work. Our approach remains prudent and modest before this boundless provocation. We remain almost speechless before this demanding but, in its successive or simultaneous postulations, elusive indictment. Now, despite or on account of these precautions, such a reading may perhaps seem too philological, micrological, readerly – complacent, too, with the time it allows itself when matters are urgent, at just the moment when one should no longer wait. At a moment when our world is delivered over to new forms of violence, new wars, new figures of cruelty or barbarity (and not always to this ‘just’ and necessary barbarity that Benjamin sometimes called for against the other, the barbarity of the old culture), at a moment when hostilities are breaking out, no longer resembling the worst that we have ever known, the political and historical urgency of what is befalling us should, one will say, tolerate less patience, fewer detours and less bibliophilie discretion. Less esoteric rarity. This is no longer the time to take one’s time, as a number of our well-intentioned contemporaries must no doubt think – as if we had ever been allowed to take our time in history, and as if absolute urgency were not the law of decision, the event and responsibility, their structural law, which is inscribed a priori in the concept. Centuries of preparatory reflection and theoretical deliberation – the very infinity of a knowledge – would change nothing in this urgency. It is absolutely cutting, conclusive, decisive, heartrending; it must interrupt the time of science and conscience, to which the instant of decision will always remain heterogeneous. It is, nevertheless, true that we feel called upon, ‘live’, to offer answers or to assume immediate responsibilities. It is also true that these answers and responsibilities seem to be inscribed more naturally in the space of political philosophy. This is true – it will always be true – and in this respect we will always be in a state of lack [en défaut]. Our answers and our responsibilities will never be adequate, never sufficiently direct. The debt is infinite. Urgent because infinite. A priori infinite for a finite being, as soon as a duty, if there is one, presents itself to it.

Without pretending to offer a defence or an adequate justification of our approach in this matter, let us nevertheless risk a limited hypothesis: questioned at once for itself and as a symptomatic effect, the event of the text signed ‘Nietzsche’ appears to us to mark, in already being a part of it, a mutation in the field of the political and of the community in general. No doubt Nietzsche is not the only one to have signalled this mutation. This is why we precisely speak, at least provisionally, of a field, even if the identity and closure of this field constitute precisely what is, from now on, most problematic. But who more or better than Nietzsche, who more thematically than he, would have called the politics and history of the world a history of the political (as political history), in its link to loving, precisely, to friendship as well as to love – more precisely, to the Greek, Jewish and Christian history of this link, of the binding and unbinding of this link? And thus to enmity, hatred, hostility and war? In other words, who would have better named our history, our memory, our culture, if there is one and if it is one? Who will have better represented what is happening to our world, what is happening to us, what is happening to us by affecting even the possibility of saying we – and precisely, concerning the political example of the friend/enemy opposition? Who better than he, from this point of view, will have represented the massive and molecular movement which, at the end of the last century, set out to agitate all the atoms – conceptual ones or not, the more or less semantic elements – of this unclosed ensemble? Who, if not Nietzsche, set out to overturn, to contest, even their elementary identity, to dissolve what is irreducible to analysis in them, to show the ineluctable necessity of this perversion which made opposites pass into one another: the friend into the enemy, the strong into the weak, the hegemonic into the oppressed, and so forth? And who brought it off, then, in an ensemble (or ‘field’, but one henceforth without an assignable limit, without assured and reassuring ground, but all the more finite for this very fact) – perhaps in a world, but in a world which suddenly no longer holds together, which has split asunder, no longer closes, is no longer within it, and appears to be delivered over to what resembles a chaotic madness, to disorder and randomness?

Certainly this mutation does not belong only to the order of discourse or to that of the text, in the narrow, ordinary and outdated sense of these terms. It is not only philosophical, speculative or theoretical. Multiple, expandable and protean as it may be, the corpus of a singular individual named ‘Nietzsche’ could not be its sole witness, even less contain it. As is the case in any mutation, this one is never exempt from repetition, but according to us, it would have affected the unity of this field, its closure as well as all the organizing concepts of something like a political community. Although this affirmation does not rely on any assured contemporaneity, we belong (this is what we take the risk of saying here) to the time of this mutation, which is precisely a harrowing tremor in the structure or the experience of belonging. Therefore of property. Of communal belonging and sharing: religion, family, ethnic groups, nations, homeland, country, state, even humanity, love and friendship, lovence, be they public or private. We belong to this tremor, if that is possible; we tremble within it. It runs through us, and stops us dead in our tracks. We belong to it without belonging to it. Within it we hear the resonant echo of all the great discourses (we have already named those of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, for example, but there are others, still so many others, far removed and quite close to us) where they assume the risk and the responsibility, but also where they give themselves over to the necessity of thinking and formalizing, so to speak, absolute dislocation, borderless disjoining; when these thinkers point to these obscure plights, sometimes according to the time without duration of a thunderbolt, sometimes following the regular revolutions of a watchtower, always emitting mad and impossible pleas, almost speechless warnings, words that consume themselves in a dark light, such as these typical and recurrent syntagms: ‘relation without relation’, community without community (‘the community of those without community’), ‘inoperative’ community, ‘unavowable’ communism or community, and all the ‘X without X’ whose list is, by definition, endless, finite in its infinitude. Yes, these warnings turn endlessly. Yes, like searchlights without a coast, they sweep across the dark sky, shut down or disappear at regular intervals and harbour the invisible in their very light. We no longer even know against what dangers or abysses we are forewarned. We avoid one, only to be thrown into one of the others. We no longer even know whether these watchmen are guiding us towards another destination, nor even if a destination remains promised or determined.

We wish only to think that we are on the track of an impossible axiomatic which remains to be thought. Now, if this axiomatic withdraws, from instant to instant, from one ray of the searchlight to another, from one lighthouse to the next (for there are numerous lighthouses, and where there is no longer any home these are no longer homes, and this is what is taking place: there are no longer any homes here), this is because darkness is falling on the value of value, and hence on the very desire for an axiomatic, a consistent, granted or presupposed system of values.

Now, what would a ‘history’, a science, or a historical action purporting to be resolutely and ingeniously extradiscursive or extratextual actually do? What would a political history or philosophy, at last realistic, in truth do, if they did not assume – so as to be confronted by and to account for the extreme formalization, the new aporias, the semantic inconstancy – all the disquieting conversions that we have just seen operating in these signals? What else could they do without attempting to read all the apparently contradictory possibles (‘relation without relation’, ‘community without community’, etc.) that these ‘sophisticated discourses’ impose on our memory? Let us answer: they could do very little, almost nothing. They would miss the hardest, the most resistant, the most irreducible, the othermost of the ‘thing itself. Such a political history or philosophy would deck itself out in ‘realism’ just in time to 611 short of the thing – and to repeat, repeat and repeat again, with neither consciousness nor memory of its compulsive droning.

For in the end, what does the fact that we may henceforth speak of and with these signals say about what is taking place in the world? The fact that we must speak in this way? The fact that the convincing, rigorous, ineluctable voice of necessity – its most responsible voice, too – resounds in just this way? For example, what has become of the real structure of the political – that of political forces and domination, the relations of strength and weakness, the ‘social bond’, the marks and the discourse that give it form – to allow us to speak of them in such a way today, seriously and solemnly? What has this reality become; but what was it in the first place, if that which goes beyond the understanding may now be heard and understood? Better yet, for it now to appear the most consistent? For it to be necessary for us to speak in this manner? For us to feel obliged to speak precisely in such a paradoxical, aporetic, impossible manner of community, law, equality, the republic and democracy? Fraternity? Of friendship, in sum, or enmity, given that the meaning of this ‘thing’ is implicit throughout, in each of these words?

Were we even to trust the still so crude concepts of effect or symptom, in speaking of ‘those sorts of things’, it should not be forgotten that these ‘things-texts’ consist precisely in a radical contestation of the traditional schemes of causality and signification, confronting us ceaselessly with the irreducibility of that which lies beyond this very discourse: the other, the event, singularity, power/weakness, differential force, the ‘world’, and so forth. How can one read these discourses as discourse, these writings, if you like (those of Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, and others, all those whose advent Nietzsche’s text – this is what we have wished to demonstrate – announces, or rather calls for, bringing law and disorder into the secret of this call, already bringing about what has yet to come, in the same teleiopoetic sentence)? Even if they were considered as derivable effects or symptoms, we would still have to analyse and formalize that possibility pertinently. Pertinently, and if possible – but that is exactly what the question is all about – exhaustively. Its complete formalization would be necessary not only to determine of what these texts are the symptomatic effect, but one would have to know of what this supposed cause, the thing, the ‘real’ itself, will have been capable. To account for a symptom-effect from within that of which it is supposed to be the symptom-effect, one must, first of all, attempt to read it in the language in which it speaks, even if the account is not limited to such a reading. Reading also consists in not being thus limited, from one trace to the next. Otherwise, the ‘reality’ of this real or the ‘history’ of this thing that one is claiming or that one has distinguished in the reading would remain both undetermined and imaginary. We know only too well how often this happens in the discourse – for let us not forget that theirs is a discourse as well – of countless ‘realistic’ champions of the historical referent and actuality [effectivité].

It is, therefore, with this concern in mind that we embark on what looks like a long detour, the first step of which was taken long ago. With this concern in mind we shall outline once again a more directly political reading, if you like, of Nietzsche’s vocative phrase (‘O enemies…’), as the teleiopoesis that regularly turned the friend into an enemy, and vice versa, with the risk of spectralizing – others would say: of losing – both.

– We have lost the friend, as it is said in this century.

– No, we have lost the enemy, another voice says, in this same waning century. Both voices speak of the political, and that is what we wish to recall. They speak, in sum, of a political crime of which it is no longer known – this is a question of borders – if it is to be defined in the order of the political (for instance, when there is assassination, torture, or terrorism in a given political state for political reasons) or if it is a crime against the political itself, when in one way or another it puts to death that without which a political crime could no longer be defined or distinguished from other sorts of crimes, when appeal to political reason or to some critique of political reason would no longer be possible. Following this hypothesis, losing the enemy would not necessarily be progress, reconciliation, or the opening of an era of peace and human fraternity. It would be worse: an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous – forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable. The figure of the enemy would then be helpful – precisely as a figure – became of the features which allow it to be identified as such, still identical to what has always been determined under this name. An identifiable enemy – that is, one who is reliable to the point of treachery, and thereby familiar. One’s fellow man, in sum, who could almost be loved as oneself: he is acknowledged and recognized against the backdrop of a common history. This adversary would remain a neighbour, even if he were an evil neighbour against whom war would have to be waged.

Among all the possible political readings of Nietzsche’s phrase, we are on the verge of giving precedence to one, specifically where – at least apparently – it would lead back to a tradition, a tradition already in modernity. One which the twentieth century would certainly have replayed; and would replay again under new conditions, between two world wars and from one mutation to another of its postwar periods.

But it would lead back to a tradition of modernity which, in a naturally differentiated and complicated fashion, goes back at least to Hegel.

This tradition takes on systematic form in the work of Carl Schmitt, and we believe it is necessary to dwell temporarily on it here. At length, but temporarily. Certainly on account of the intrinsic interest of Schmitt’s theses – their originality, where they seem, however, as ragingly conservative in their political content as they are reactive and traditionalist in their philosophical logic. But also on account of their heritage. Their paradox and equivocality are well known. Is it fortuitous that the same filiation unites several right-wing and left-wing (Marxist, post-Marxist, and neo-Marxist) families?4

First reminder: for Schmitt, it is indeed nothing more and nothing less than the political as such which would no longer exist without the figure of the enemy and without the determined possibility of an actual war. Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself – and this would be our century’s horizon after two world wars. And today, how many examples could be given of this disorientation of the political field, where the principal enemy now appears unidentifiable! The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are; this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum, to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the ‘structuring’ enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases to be identifiable and thus reliable – that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential, interchangeable, metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with one another: conjuration.

Here is the Schmittian axiom in its most elementary form: the political itself, the being-political of the political, arises in its possibility with the figure of the enemy. It would be unfair, as is often done, to reduce Schmitt’s thought to this axiom, but it would nevertheless be indispensable to his thought, and also to his decisionism, his theory of the exception and sovereignty. The disappearance of the enemy would be the death knell of the political as such. It would mark the beginning of depoliticization (Entpolitisierung), the beginning of the end of the political. Facing this end, at the eschatological edge of this imminent death, at the moment when the political has begun to expire, the Christian sage or the fool might say, with a sighed alas: ‘there is no enemy! (es gibt keinen Feind!)’ But then, to whom would he address himself (‘Enemies …!’ ‘Feinde …!’), to which enemies? Perhaps to his political enemies with whom he would still share that love of war outside the horizon of which, according to Schmitt, there is no state. But perhaps he would also be addressing the enemies of the political, the ultimate enemies, the worst of them all, enemies worse than enemies.

At any rate, the Schmittian axiom is also posited in a ‘Nietzschean’ posterity. The fact that it is attuned to a fundamentally Christian politics is certainly not insignificant even if in many respects this is considered secondary. In The Concept of the Political,⁵ Schmitt (whose massively attested Nazism remains as complex and overdetermined as his relation to Heidegger, Benjamin, Leo Strauss,6 etc.) claims to have pinpointed the determining predicate, the specific difference of the political. He writes, for example: ‘The specific political distinction (die spezifisch politische Unterscheidung), to which political actions and notions can be reduced, is the distinction (Unterscheidung) between friend and enemy.’⁷

If the distinction or the differential mark (Unterscheidung), if the determination of the political, if the ‘political difference’ itself (die politische Unterscheidung) thus amounts to a discrimination (Unterscheidung) between friend and enemy, such a dissociation cannot be reduced to a mere difference. It is a determined opposition, opposition itself. This determination specifically assumes opposition. Should that opposition erase itself, and war likewise, the regime called ‘politics’ loses its borders or its specificity.

Schmitt draws a great number of consequences from this axiom and these definitions, notably with regard to a certain depoliticization. There would be an essential risk for modern humanity tout court, which, qua humanity, ignores the figure of the enemy. There is no enemy of humanity. A crime against humanity is not a political crime. Alas, for humanity qua humanity, there is not yet, or already no longer, any enemy! Anyone who takes an interest in humanity qua humanity has ceased, according to Schmitt, to talk about politics, and should realize it.

Is the person levelling this warning at us too much the sage or too much the fool? Schmitt claims that he has awakened a tradition that was beginning to lull. Whether we can substantiate them or not, some of his remarks must claim our attention here. We should underscore two of them. They deal on the one hand with the opposition public/private, and on the other with a certain concept of ethics. Let us begin with the first. The second will be taken up much later.

Although he does not propose equivalence or symmetry for the friend, one of the opposing terms of the discrimination (Unterscheidung), Schmitt considers that the enemy has always been esteemed a ‘public’ enemy. The concept of a private enemy would be meaningless. Indeed, it is the very sphere of the public that emerges with the figure of the enemy:

One may or may not share these hopes and pedagogic ideals. But, rationally speaking, it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend and enemy opposition, that this opposition still remains actual today, and that it subsists in a state of real virtuality (als reale Moglichkeit) for every people having a political existence.

Hence the enemy is not the competitor or the adversary in the general sense of the term. Neither is he the personal, private rival whom one hates or feels antipathy for. The enemy can only be an ensemble of grouped individuals, confronting an ensemble of the same nature, engaged in at least a virtual struggle, that is, one that is effectively possible (Feind ist nur eine wenigstens eventuell, d.h. der realen Moglichkeit nach kämpfende Gesamtheit von Menschen the einer ebensolchen Gesamtheit gegenubersteht).8

We have cited the letter of the last sentence of the original (slightly abused in the French translation) because the most obscure zone of the difficulty is enclosed therein. This last sentence points up in fact – but furtively, almost elliptically, as if it were self-evident – the innermost spring of this logic: the passage from possibility to eventuality (which is here specified as minimal eventuality) and from eventuality to effectivity-actuality (which in the sentence is named real possibility, ‘reale Mȯglichkeit’). This passage takes place, it rushes into place, precisely where the abyss of a distinction happens to be filled up. The passage consists in fact in a denial of the abyss. As always, the tank is replenished in the present, with presence [le plein se fait au présent]: in the name of a present, by allegation of presence – here, in the form of a present participle (kampfende). Schmitt emphasizes this present participle, as if to point to the sensitive spot of the operation, with an attentiveness which the translation, unfortunately, has passed over. As soon as war is possible, it is taking place, Schmitt seems to say; presently, in a society of combat, in a community presently at war, since it can present itself to itself, as such, only in reference to this possible war. Whether the war takes place, whether war is decided upon or declared, is a mere empirical alternative in the face of an essential necessity: war is taking place; it has already begun before it begins, as soon as it is characterized as eventual (that is, announced as a non-excluded event in a sort of contingent future). And it is eventual as soon as it is possible. Schmitt does not wish to dissociate the quasi-transcendental modality of the possible and the historico-factual modality of the eventual. He names now the eventuality (wenigstens eventuell), now the possibility (Moglichkeit), without thematizing the criterion of distinction. No account of this distinction is taken in the French translation.⁹ As soon as war is possible-eventual, the enemy is present; he is there, his possibility is presently, effectively, supposed and structuring. His being-there is effective, he institutes the community as a human community of combat, as a combating collectivity (kampfende Gesamtheit von Menschen). The concept of the enemy is thereby deduced or constructed a priori, both analytically and synthetically – in synthetic a priori fashion, if you like, as a political concept or, better yet, as the very concept of the political. From then on, it is important that the concept be purified of all other dimensions – especially of everything opposed to the political or the public, beginning with the private: anything that stems from the individual or even the psychological, from the subjective in general. In fact, this conceptual prudence and rigour are bound to imply, as is always the case, some sort of phenomenological procedure. Following what resembles at least an eidetic reduction, all facts and all regions that do not announce themselves as political must be put in parentheses. All other regional disciplines, all other knowledge – economic, aesthetic, moral, military, even religious knowledge – must be suspended, although the theological-political tradition has to remain in operation for essential reasons – this is well known, but we shall return to it later – in this apparently secular thought of the political.10 This prudence, at once phenomenological and semantic, is often difficult to respect, but the stakes involved, for Schmitt, are decisive. This prudence sometimes receives authorization, at least in The Concept of the Political, from a distinction first marked in two languages, Latin and Greek (hostis/inimicus, polémios/ekhthrós), as though the distinction of the political could not be properly formulated in more than two idioms; as if other languages, even the German language, could not have as clear an access to the distinction. But whether Schmitt allows himself this linguistic reference or whether it is used as a convenient pedagogic tool is difficult to say. He may well do both at the same time, as though the whole history of the political – that is, the rigorous determination of the enemy – sealed here or there, in a linguistic felicity, a universal necessity forever irreducible to it. In fact, following the publication of his book in 1932, Schmitt more than once returned to re-examine this linguistic limitation, in a context we shall specify in a moment.

Would the question still be, as it always is, that of the ‘right name’, as Nietzsche would say? The question of the right name of friendship or of its supposed antithesis, enmity? We, speakers of Latin that we are, would have to understand, in adjusting our language on this point, that the antithesis of friendship in the political sphere is not, according to Schmitt, enmity but hostility. First consequence: the political enemy would not inevitably be inimical, he would not necessarily hold me in enmity, nor I him. Moreover, sentiments would play no role; there would be neither passion nor afrect in general. Here we have a totally pure experience of the friend-enemy in its political essence, purified of any affect – at least of all personal affect, supposing that there could ever be any other kind. If the enemy is the stranger, the war I would wage on him should remain essentially without hatred, without intrinsic xenophobia. And politics would begin with this purification. With the calculation of this conceptual purification. I can also wage war on my friend, a war in the proper sense of the term, a proper, clear and merciless war. But a war without hatred.

Hence a first possibility of semantic slippage and inversion: the friend (amicus) can be an enemy (hostis); I can be, hostile towards my friend, I can be hostile towards him publicly, and conversely I can, in privacy, love my enemy. From this, everything would follow, in orderly, regular fashion, from the distinction between private and public. Another way of saying that at every point when this border is threatened, fragile, porous, contestable (we thus designate so many possibilities that ‘our time’ is accentuating and accelerating in countless ways), the Schmittian discourse collapses. It is against the threat of this ruin that his discourse takes form. It defends itself, walls itself up, reconstructs itself unendingly against what is to come; it struggles against the future with a prophetic and pathetic energy. But it is also from within this threat, from within the dread that it seems to provoke in this traditionalist and Catholic thinker of European law, that he is able to see coming, better than so many others, the force of the future in this threatening figure. This reactive and unscrupulous dread is often presented in the rigour of the concept, a vigilant, meticulous, implacable rigour inherited from the tradition – from a tradition, moreover, that this entire discourse intends to serve and repeat, in order to put it up against the novelty of what is coming and to see, so it would seem, that it carries the day. With the energy of a last-ditch effort. If one is not to lose the enemy, one must know who he is, and what, in the past, the word ‘enemy’ always designated – more precisely, what it must have designated. No, what it should have designated:

The enemy is solely the public enemy (nur der öffentliche Feind), because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; polémios, not ekhthrós. As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted ‘Love your enemies’ (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads diligite hostes vestros, agapâte tous ekhthrous umôn and not diligite inimicus vestros. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, that is, one’s adversary.11

(We could say a great deal today, among so very many other analogous indications that abound in Schmitt’s text, on the choice of this example: Islam would remain an enemy even though we Europeans must love the Muslims as our neighbours. At a determining moment in the history of Europe, it was imperative not ‘to deliver Europe over to Islam’ in the name of a universal Christianity. You are obliged, you will always have been obliged, to defend Europe against its other without confusing the genres, without confusing faith and politics, enmity and hostility, friendship and alliance or confusion. However, a coherent reading of this example should go further: today more than ever such a reading should take into account the fact that all the concepts of this theory of right and of politics are European, as Schmitt himself often admits. Defending Europe against Islam, here considered as a non-European invader of Europe, is then more than a war among other wars, more than a political war. Indeed, strictly speaking, this would be not a war but a combat with the political at stake, a struggle for politics. And this holds even if it is not necessarily a struggle for democracy, which is a formidable problem in any reading of Schmitt. From then on the front of this opposition is difficult to place. It is no longer a thoroughly political front. In question would be a defensive operation destined to defend the political, beyond particular states or nations, beyond any geographical, ethnic or political continent. On the political side of this unusual front, the stakes would be saving the political as such, ensuring its survival in the face of another who would no longer even be a political enemy but an enemy of the political – more precisely, a being radically alien to the political as such, supposing at least that, in its purported purity, it is not Europeanized and shares nothing of the tradition of the juridical and the political called European.)

Although it can never be reduced to a question of language or discourse, the differentiated rooting of this friend/enemy opposition in certain idioms could never be considered accidental or extrinsic. It recalls the too-evident fact that this semantics belongs to a culture, to structures of ethnic, social and political organization in which language is irreducible. One would then have to follow closely12 all the difficulties encountered by Schmitt in the justification of his terminological distinctions. Schmitt returns to this difficulty as if in passing, but regularly, in footnotes that one may be tempted to read as second thoughts, or at least as signs of worry. The Greek distinction (polémios/ekhthrós) is sustained only with a brief reference to the Republic (V, 470), where Plato opposes war strictly speaking (pólemos) to civil war, to rebellion or to uprising (stasis).¹³ Without specifying what type of relationship or connection this is, Schmitt recalls Plato’s insistence on the distinction ‘bound’ (verbunden) to that of two sorts of enemies (polémios and ekhthrós) – that is, the distinction between pólemos (‘war’) and stásis (‘riot, uprising, rebellion, civil war’). He adds:

In Plato’s eyes, only a war between Greeks and barbarians (‘natural enemies’) is actually a war (wirklich Krieg), whilst struggles (die Kämpfe) between Greeks are of the order of stásis (internecine quarrels). The dominant idea here is that a people cannot wage war on itself and that a ‘civil war’ is never but a rending of self but would perhaps not signify the formation of a new State, or even of a new people.14

This last hypothesis seems hardly Platonic. In any case, it would seem to us, not literally so and not in this context. Plato does say, in fact, that the Greeks, where there is a disagreement [différend] (diaphorá) between themselves, consider it an internal discord (stásis), since it is quasi-familial (ōs oikeíous), but they never bestow on it the name of war (pólemos) (471a). It is true that between themselves, the Greeks always end up in reconciliation (a theme that reappears in Menexenus), and never seek either to subjugate or to destroy. They attack only the ‘causes’, the authors of the disagreement – that is (a specification upon which, from different points of view, we shall not cease to insist) the few in number. But if Plato indeed says that the barbarians are natural enemies and that, as we will read, the Greeks are ‘by nature friends among themselves’, he does not conclude, for all that, that civil war (stásis) or enmity between Greeks is simply outside of nature. He invokes an illness, which is something else again. Above all, far from being satisfied with the opposition on which Schmitt relies so heavily, the Republic indeed prescribes its erasure. In this case, it is indeed recommended that the Greeks behave towards their enemies – the barbarians – as they behave today among themselves. This prescription is laid down like a law.

I, he said, agree that our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents in this wise [semblable doit être, ‘their policy must be similar’] (omologô outō dein), while treating barbarians as Greeks now (ōs nun) treat Greeks. Let us then lay down this law also (tithômen dē kai teuton ton nómon), for our guardians, that they are not to lay waste the land or burn the houses. Let us so decree (thomen), he said, and assume that this and our preceding prescriptions are right. (471bc [translation modified])

Although Schmitt, to my knowledge, does not do so – never with sufficient precision, in any case – it must also be recalled that we are dealing with the very famous passage in which, in view of what is proper to justice (diakaiosúnē) and to injustice (adikía), Plato excludes the possibility of realizing this ideal State as long as philosophers do not reign over it, as long as the kings and sovereigns, the ‘dynasts’ who dispose of power, are not philosophers (473cd) – that is, as long as philosophía is not bound to political power, synonymous, if you will, with dúnamis politiké: in other words, as long as justice is not bound to power, as long as justice is not one with force. As long as this unity remains out of reach – that is, for ever – the conceptual unities that depend on it – in fact, every one that Plato proposes or recalls – remain ideal entities. No empirical language is in fact fully adequate to it. This improbability does not rule out, on the contrary, it commands, as we know if we follow Plato – the perfectly rigorous description of these pure structures of the ideal State; for they give their meaning, legitimately and on principle, to every concept, and hence to every term, of political philosophy. It is no less the case that the distinction polémios/ekhthrós, considered precisely in its purity, already implies a discourse on nature (phúsis) that makes us wonder how Schmitt, without looking into the question more closely, could incorporate it into his general theory. Let us never forget that the two names that Plato is intent on keeping should name rigorously, in their ideal purity, two things that are in nature. These two names (pólemos and stasis) are in fact assigned to two kinds of disagreement, contestation, disaccord (diaphorá). The disagreement (diaphorá) between those who share kinship ties or origins (oikeion kai suggenés: family, household, intimacy, community of resources and of interests, familiarity, etc.) is stásis, the discord or war that is sometimes called civil. As for the diaphorá between foreigners or foreign families (allótrion kai othneion), it is sheer war (pólemos). The naturalness of the bond uniting the Greek people or the Greek race (Hellénikon génos) always remains intact [inentamée], in pólemos as well as in stásis. The Greek génos (lineage, race, family, people, etc.) is united by kinship and by the original community (oikeion kai suggenés). On these two counts it is foreign to the barbarian génos (to de barbarikô othneión te kai allótrion) (470c). As in every racism, every ethnocentrism – more precisely, in every one of the nationalisms throughout history – a discourse on birth and on nature, a phúsis of genealogy (more precisely, a discourse and a phantasm on the genealogical phúsis) regulates, in the final analysis, the movement of each opposition: repulsion and attraction, disagreement and accord, war and peace, hatred and friendship. From within and without. This phúsis comprises everything – language, law, politics, etc. Although it defines the alterity of the foreigner or the barbarian, it has no other. ‘We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature (polemíous phúsei einat), and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred (kai pálemon tēn ékhthran taùtēn klētéon)’ (ibid.). But even when Greeks fight and wage war among themselves, we should say that they are no less naturally friends (phúsei phílous einat). Sickness is what then emerges, an equally natural sickness, an evil naturally affecting nature. It is divided, separated from itself. When such an event occurs, one must speak of a pathology of the community. In question here is a clinic of the city. In this respect the Republic develops a nosological discourse; its diagnostic is one of ill health and dissension, a faction inside Greece (nosein d’en tô toioutō tēn ‘Helláda kai stasiásein). Stásis, the name that should apply to this hatred or to this enmity (ékhthra), is also a category of political nosography.

In following a certain logic staged by Menexenus, this accident, evil or sickness15 that internal dissension (stásis) is could not be explained, even, in the last instance, by hatred, enmity (ékhthra) or malice. One would have to spot in this stásis a fetal disorder, a stroke of bad luck, misfortune (dustukhía) (244a). The question whether this staging is ironic (we shall return to this point¹⁶), whether the most common logic and rhetoric, the most accredited eloquence of epitáphios, is reproduced by Plato in order to belittle it, only gives that much more sense to the fictive contents of the discourse attributed to Aspasia, that courtesan who, moreover, plagiarizes another fureral oration and mouths once again the ‘fragments’ of a discourse by Pericles (236b). We have here a gold mine of commonplaces. The fact that the satirical character of this fiction-in-a-fiction has been ignored so often and for such a long time can hence be explained. Among the commonplaces, then, there is the assiduity with which Greeks hasten to reunite with Greeks. This ease in reconciliation has no other cause than actual kinship, suggéneia, which produces a solid friendship founded on homogeneity, on hemophilia, on a solid and firm affinity (bébaion) stemming from birth, from native community. This kinship nurtures a constant and homophilial friendship (philían bébaion kai omóphulon) not only in words but in fact, in deeds (ou lógō all’ étgō). In other words, the effectivity/actuality of the tie of friendship, that which assures constancy beyond discourses, is indeed real kinship, the reality of the tie of birth (è tô onti suggéneia). Provided that it is real – and not only spoken or set by convention – this syngenealogy durably guarantees the strength of the social bond in life and according to life.

(We insist on this condition: a dreamt condition, what we are calling here a phantasm, because a genealogical tie will never be simply real; its supposed reality never gives itself in any intuition, it is always posed, constructed, induced, it always implies a symbolic effect of discourse – a ‘legal fiction’, as Joyce put it in Ulysses on the subject of paternity. This is true also – as true as ever, no matter what has been said, down to and including Freud – of maternity. All politics and all policies, all political discourses on ‘birth’, misuse what can in this regard be only a belief some will say: what can only remain a belief; others: what can only tend towards an act of faith. Everything in political discourse that appeals to birth, to nature or to the nation – indeed, to nations or to the universal nation of human brotherhood – this entire familialism consists in a renaturalization of this ‘fiction’. What we are calling here ‘fraternization’, is what produces symbolically, conventionally, through authorized engagement, a determined politics, which, be it left-or right-wing, alleges a real fraternity or regulates spiritual fraternity, fraternity in the figurative sense, on the symbolic projection of a real or natural fraternity. Has anyone ever met a brother? A uterine or consanguine (distantly related) brother? In nature?)

Return to Menexenus. The supplementary proof of the ease with which the Greeks achieve reconciliation and pardon among themselves, the sign showing that stásis does not in any way originate in hatred but in misfortune (dustukhia), is us. We say so, and that is enough. The logic of testimony, the becoming-proof of a testimony that should never become equivalent to proof, can be found at work here in its privileged place: in kinship. We can testify, we the living, we the survivors who share this homophilia and who, therefore, are qualified to speak of it from within: ‘And that such was the fact we ourselves are witnesses, we the living (mártures … oi zôntes): are of the same race with them, and have mutually received and granted forgiveness for what we have done and suffered.’17 Aspasia’s discourse draws all the political consequences of proper birth [bonne naissance], of a eugenicism (eugéneia) that is nothing but – has no other function than that of – autochthony. The homage to the earth and to the mother goes hand in hand with the eulogy of fraternization – more precisely, of fraternal democracy, which no way excludes the aristocracy of virtue and of wisdom. It is equality of birth (isogonía), ‘natural’ equality (kata phúsiri), that necessarily demands the search for ‘legal’ equality (isonomía kata nómon) – that is, an equality compatible with an aristocracy founded upon the reputation of virtue and wisdom (ē aretes dóxē kai phoneseos). Nature commands law; equality of birth founds in necessity legal equality. Having quoted this passage,¹⁸ we shall come back to the modality of this necessity.

It comes as no surprise that such a discourse should have its privileged resource in the testimonial, testamentary fervour of the heir – in other words, in the funeral oration.

(Our hypothesis here is that no great discourse on friendship will ever have eluded the major rhetoric of epitáphios, and hence of some form of transfixed celebration of spectrality, at once fervent and already caught in the deathly or petrified cold of its inscription, of the becoming-epitaph of the oration. The great examples awaiting us, from Montaigne to Blanchot, will not make us change our mind. But there would be so many, an infinite number, of other examples. What discourse does not call up the deceased? Does not appeal to the deceased? The becoming-epitaph of epitáphios, the impression in space of a funeral speech, is what the first word dedicated to the deceased promises. At the beginning of this lógos, there is the promise of epitaph.)

Aspasia’s discourse is a summons to appear before the dead. You must answer for the dead, you must respond to them. Here and now. But this responsibiity can be called for only by first of all summoning the dead. They are, after a fashion, made to be born again; they are convoked in an invocation, once again, of their birth. The oath of this co-engagement thus resembles a fraternal conjuration:

A word is needed which will duly praise the dead and gently admonish the living, exhorting the brethren and descendants (ekgónois men kai adelphois) of the departed to imitate their virtue, and consoling their fathers and mothers and the survivors, if any, who may chance to be alive of the previous generation … And first as to their [noble] birth. Their ancestors were not strangers, nor are these their descendants sojourners only (en tē khóra [métèques dans le pays]), whose fathers have come from another country, but they are the children of the soil, dwelling and living in their own land (tô onti en patrídi oikountas kai zôntas). And the country which brought them up is not like other countries, a stepmother to her children, but their own true mother (all’upo metros tēs khóras en é ókoun); she bore them and nourished them and received them, and in her bosom they now repose. It is meet and right, therefore, that we should begin by praising the land which is their mother, and that will be a way of praising their noble birth (eugéneia).19

After the eulogy of the authentic or veritable mother – that is, having reversed the order of precedence betweeen earth and mother (the latter imitates the former, and not the other way round (238a)) – the political consequence follows as a matter of course: the aristo-democracy of brothers according to virture. The name ‘democracy’ has less import, as we shall see, than the concept aimed at here: the right of the best, starting from equality at birth, from natural, homophilial, autochthonous equality. In truth, it is less a question of consequence than of political principle. It is the politeía that forms men, from the moment it regulates itself, in its laws, on phùsis, on eugenics and on autochthony, giving them food and education (trophē) – not the other way round. This is what must be enunciated, this is what must be recalled, for at stake is an act of memory – this is what must engage memory in the present, in the presence of the dead, if that can be said; for however difficult this remains to say (Cicero will agree: difficilius dictu est, mortui vivunt), the dead live and the absent are present. They still keep watch over those who keep watch over them. And the given word [the ‘pledge’, la parole donnée] before the living dead, before ‘the dead here present’, rushes up here and now, in the first person plural, in the faithful and present tradition of our politics:

Thus born into the world and thus educated, the ancestors of the departed lived and made themselves a government (politeían [political regime]), which I ought briefly to commemorate. For government is the nurture of man (politeía gar trophē anthrṑpōn estín [le régime politique qui forme les hommes]), and the government of good men is good, and of bad men bad. And I must show that our ancestors were trained under a good government (en kale politeía etráphēsan [(ils) ont été nourris sous un bon gouvernement]), and for this reason they were good, and our contemporaries are also good, among whom our departed friends are to be reckoned (ōn oíde tugkhánousin óntes oi teteleutēkótes). Then as now, and indeed always, from that time to this, speaking generally, our government was an aristocracy (aristokratía) – a form of government which receives various names, according to the fancies of men, and is sometimes called democracy (dēmokraíd), but is really an aristocracy or government of the best which has the approval of the many (met’eudoxías plḗthous aristokratía). For kings we have always had, first hereditary and then elected, and authority is mostly in the hands of the people, who dispense offices and power to those who appear to be most deserving of them. Neither is a man rejected from weakness or poverty or obscurity of origin, nor honored by reason of the opposite, as in other states, but there is one principle – he who appears to be wise (sophos) and good (agathos) is a governor and ruler (kratei kai árkhei). The basis of this our government is equality of birth (ē ex isou génesis), for other states are made up of all sorts and unequal conditions of men, and therefore their governments are unequal – there are tyrannies and there are oligarchies, in which the one party are slaves and the others masters. But we and our citizens are brethren, the children all of one mother (mias mētros pántes adelphoi phúntes), and we do not think it right to be one another’s masters or servants, but the natural equality (kata phúsin) of birth compels us to seek for legal equality (isonomían anagkázei zētein kata nomon), and to recognize no superiority except in the reputation of virtue and wisdom.20

(The brothers have just been named in this passage (adelphoi). They have called themselves – themselves, reflexively – ‘brothers’, ‘we and ours’. They have named themselves with the name ‘truly fair and full of love’ – that is, the ‘name of brother’, as Montaigne will say in ‘On Friendship’, this ‘soldering that binds brothers together’, this ‘brotherly harmony’). Brothers have named themselves brothers in so far as they issue from one and the same mother: uterine brothers. But what will one say of brothers (‘distantly related’ or ‘consanguine’) who are thus called because they issue from the same father? And what about the sister? Where has she gone?

Since the question of brother and sister will play for us, as the reader has already sensed, a determining role, let us refer immediately to Emile Benveniste’s indispensable information on the ‘two Greek words for “brother”, adelpkós and kasígnētos’, as well as those on the ‘notion of phrā́tēr’ and phrātría²¹ On this point as on so many others, this information sets out for us the immensity and complexity of the tasks at hand. If it were still necessary, it would be enough to recall us to prudence and modesty. The present essay risks only – I must insist on this once again – a barely preliminary step into these still so obscure regions. Benveniste’s article would have to be quoted in its entirety, and what stems from the most precious knowledge – but also what it sometimes introduces, in the apparent neutrality of its metalinguistic presentation, by way of unquestioned axioms – would have to be carefully analysed. I shall retain here only that which will be of the greatest import, from the vantage point of its contents as much as that of its methodology, to the outcome of my argument, notably with regard to a Christian semantics of fraternity or sorority. At stake would be, in short, the Christianization of fraternization, or fraternization as the essential structure of Christianization:

Such is this complex history in which we see that, when a culture is transformed, it employs new terms to take the place of traditional terms when they are found to be charged with specific values. This is what happened to the notion of ‘brother’ in Ibero-Romance. As a term of kinship, Latin frater has disappeared, and it has been replaced by hermano in Spanish and irmão in Portuguese, that is to say by Latin germanus. The reason for this is that in the course of Christianization, frater, like soror, had taken on an exclusively religious sense, ‘brother and sister in religion’. It was therefore necessary to coin a new term for natural kinships, frater and soror having become in some way classificatory terms, relating to a new classificatory relationship, that of religion.²²

This passage points up an example of decisions made by the author of Indo-European Language and Society, but left in the dark: why are these two kinships (said to be ‘natural’ or of an ‘exclusively religious’ nature) still kinships or classificatory kinships? What is the analogy? How does the tropical or homonymic passage from one register to the other take place? In what manner is it or is it not a question of rhetoric or of linguistics? Why should that force us to question again the concept of institution, of proof, indication, and linguistic testimony operating in this study (one of the exemplary places with regard to this, as we will attempt to demonstrate elsewhere, would be the chapter on ‘ius and the oath in Rome’ and everything concerning testimonial semantics)? What does ‘religious’ mean? And what does ‘natural’ mean, when one knows that no classificatory kinship is devoid of all religiosity? The rest of Benveniste’s article thus renews contact with the non-natural equivalent (Benveniste says mystical as in Joyce’s Ulysses, where paternity, as we have said, is named a legal fiction and the entire mystique of kinship is restaged) of pre-Christian religiosity in a phratry which this time has issued from ‘the same father’ and not, as in Menexenus, from one and the same mother. ‘Apparently slight facts’, indications of a ‘profound transformation’, Benveniste rightly concludes:

Similarly in Greek it was necessary to distinguish two types of kinship, and phrā́tēr now being used solely as a classificatory term, new terms for consanguineous ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ had to be forged.

These lexical creations often overturn the ancient terminology. When Greek used for ‘sister’ the feminine form (adelphḗ) of the term for brother (adelphós), this instituted a radical change in the Indo-European state of affairs. The ancient contrast between ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ rested on the difference that all the brothers form a phratria mystically [Demda’s emphasis] descended from the same father. There are no feminine ‘phratriai’. But when, in a new conception of kinship, the connection by consanguinity is stressed – and this is the situation we have in historical Greek – a descriptive term becomes necessary, and it must be the same for brother and sister. In the new names the distinction is made only by morphological indication of gender (adelphós, adelphḗ). Apparently slight facts, like this one, throw light on the profound transformation which the Greek vocabulary of kinship has undergone.

We have been taking our semantic bearings in the immense space of an adventuresome questioning, and we should like to question this ‘profound transformation’ in its intrinsic relation to the transformation that can affect the philía. This, then, is perhaps the place to quote, to doubly heuristic ends, Benveniste’s analogous conclusion, this time at the end of an article on phílos. It deals in a first stage with the genealogy of cīvis (fellow citizen) in a familial group which is a group of friends as well. The social value of phílos is linked to hospitality. The guest is phílos. Phileî is to ‘hospitize’. Phileîn, philótēs imply the exchanged oath, phílēma the embrace hailing or welcoming the guest. In Homer, phílos is not only the friend, it has possessive value, at times without apparent friendly affect (‘his knees’, ‘his son’) and ‘without distinction’. At the end of a long article whose rich and detailed insights defy description, here is the conclusion which is of the greatest import for us:

It would take many chapters to list and analyse with the necessary care all the examples of phílos where it is said to be ‘possessive’. We believe, however, that we have interpreted the most important. This re-examination was necessary to expose a long-standing error, which is probably as old as Homeric exegesis, and has been handed down from generation to generation of scholars. The whole problem of phílos deserves a full examination. We must start from uses and contexts which reveal in this term a complex network of associations, some with institutions of hospitality, others with usages of the home, still others with emotional behaviour; we must do this in order to understand plainly the metaphorical applications to which the term lent itself.

Although he seems to have no doubts (where we would be more inclined to entertain them) about the possibility of ‘understanding plainly the metaphorical applications’, and first of all, of ‘plainly understanding’ what ‘metaphor’ means in this context, Benveniste concludes – and these are the final words of the article:

All this wealth of concepts was smothered and lost to view once phílos was reduced to a vague notion of friendship or wrongly interpreted as a possessive adjective. It is high time we learned again how to read Homer.

As to the etymology of phílos, it is now clear that nothing which has been proposed on this subject holds good any longer [an allusion here to an interpretation proposed in 1936 at the ‘Société de Linguistique’ that appeared in BSL 38, 1937, p. x]. We now know that the protohistory of the word belongs to the most ancient form of Greek: Mycenean already had proper names composed with phílos-: pi-ro-pa-ta-ra (=Philopatra), pi-ro-we-ko (=Philowergos), and so on. The discussion about its origins is thus not finished. It is more important to begin to see what it signifies.23

‘To begin to see what it signifies’? Indeed.

In the passage from Menexenus that we were analysing, three points still have to be noted. The first concerns the necessity of equality, the next the tie Unking Greek fraternity to itself in pólemos as well as in stásis. The last point has to do with the suspended usage of the word ‘democracy’.

1. Necessity. Everything seems to be decided where the decision does not take place, precisely in that place where the decision does not take place qua decision, where it will have been carried away, where it will have got carried away in what has always-already taken place: at birth, in other words the day before birth, in this necessity which makes obligatory (anagkázei), at birth, in noble birth, in eugenic birth, the search for an equality before the law in conformity with equality of birth. We were saying above that nature commands law, that equality at birth founds in necessity legal equality. It is difficult to decide here if this foundation in necessity is a just foundation, just according to nature or just according to the law. If there is a justification to this foundation (this would be Begründung in German, or Rechtfertigung), it is to the extent that the justification strictly speaking, nomological justification, is founded firmly on the physio-ontological ground of what is in nature, revealing itself in truth at birth. The same relation would thereby tie birth in general to what is noble in noble birth [ce qu’il y a de bon dans la bonne naissance] (eugéneia). Everything called democracy here (or aristo-democracy) founds the social bond, the community, the equality, the friendship of brothers, identification qua fraternization, and so forth, in the link between this isonomic and the isogonic tie, the natural bond between nómos and phúsis, if you like, the bond between the political and autochthonous consanguinity. This is also a bond between a (theoretical or ontological) report and a performative commitment (promise, oath, fidelity to dead ancestors, and so forth). This bond between the two ties – this synthetic a priori necessity, if we can speak of it thus – ties what is to what must be, it obliges, it connects the obligation to the tie of birth which we call natural; it is the obligatory process of a natural law, the embedding of an ‘it is necessary’ in the filiation of what is, of what is born and what dies. It is the place of fraternization as the symbolic bond alleging the repetition of a genetic tie. Responsibility must imperatively answer for itself before what is, at birth and at death. In more modern terms, one might speak of the foundation of citizenship in a nation. Such a bond between two structurally heterogeneous ties will always remain obscure, mystical, essentially foreign to rationality – which does not mean simply irrational, in the equally modem sense of the term. It will always be exposed, to say the least, to the ‘sophistications’, mystifications, and perversions of rhetoric. Sometimes to the worst symptoms of nationalism, ethnocentrism, populism, even xenophobia. It is not sufficient to free the concept of public enemy of all private hatred – indeed, of all psychology of the passions, as Schmitt would have it – to exclude the xenophobic exclusion of this ‘logic’. Are we certain that throughout all the mutations of European history (of which, of course, the most rigorous account must be taken), no concept of the political and of democracy has ever broken with the heritage of this troubling necessity? Made a radical, thematic break with it? This is the question we are concerned with here.

2. Fraternity. Since the distinction between polémios and ekhthrós (enemy of war, political enemy and hated enemy, object of hatred in general, and so on), and then, between pólemos and stásis (war/internal dissension, inter-ethnic, interstate or international war/internal or civil war, and so on) is so important to us in the deconstructive problematization of a certain Schmittian discourse, let us also emphasize that this same ‘obligatory necessity’ binds the Greeks one to another at the same time in the war they wage on Greeks and in their war with barbarians. As long as they remain faithful to the memory of their dead, to the fathers of their dead – that is, to the spectres of their fathers of noble birth – they are bound by this testamentary tie which, in truth, is nothing other than their originary patrimony. A monumental memory begins by instituting them in telling them who they really are. The memory of their dead – their fathers of noble birth – recalls nothing less than their truth, their truth qua political truth. This memory inaugurates as much as it recalls or reproduces truth. The obligatory necessity of this bond of memory forms the condition of their political freedom. It is the element of their freedom, the sense of their world as the truth of their freedom. It is their freedom – indeed, for them, the only imaginable freedom. Truth, freedom, necessity, and equality come together in this politics of fraternity. One can hardly see how a perhaps could ever stand a chance in such a politics, the chance of an absolute housebreak or hospitality, an unpredictable decision or arrivance. Except by accident or fortuitously – and this is why we are speaking of chance – a perhaps always delivers itself to chance; thus one cannot, one must not, hope – for the perhaps – some essential or necessary possibility, or a non-accidental condition. On the contrary, perhaps the perhaps will have opened for this configuration (the bond between the two necessities, the two equalities, freedom, truth, fraternity: in a word, ‘the epitome’ of Greek politics) the possibility of configuring itself in a forgetting of the perhaps. This forgetting of the perhaps, this amnesia of the decision without decision, of the absolute arrivant – that is what is perhaps hidden in the Greek act of memory. Forgetting or memory, the Greek son or brother recalls them to himself in his combat for freedom on the outside and from within. This is how we might read the follow-up of Aspasia’s discourse:

And so their and our fathers, and these too, our brethren, being nobly born and having been brought up in all freedom, did both in their public and private capacity (kai idía kai dēmosùía) many noble deeds famous over the whole world. They were the deeds of men who thought that they ought to fight both against Hellenes for the sake of Hellenes on behalf of freedom (tēs eleutherías), and against barbarians in the common interest of Hellas. (239ab)

3. The name ‘democracy’. The hesitation, even the indifference as to the name of ‘democracy’ will have been noted earlier on. One person calls it ‘democracy’, someone else will give it another name ‘according to his fancy’ (an khaírē). It is not the name but the thing or the concept that counts ‘in truth’: aristocracy, the power of the best (the most virtuous and the most wise) with the ‘approbation’ of the multitude (plêthos), the right opinion (eudoxía) of the crowd, as it is sometimes translated, of the masses, the people, one could also say of the majority. Let us say of number – that is, the greatest number.

(Among all the questions of number that should attract an essay on the politics of friendship, let us never give short shrift to what is called demography. It has always been a sensitive and classic stake of the democratic tradition. How far beyond a certain number of citizens can a republic still claim to be a democracy? If this becomes problematic well before the canonical examples of Athens, Corsica, Geneva or Poland, if this begins with number itself, with the supplement of ‘one more [plus un, also ‘no more’]’, what will be said, beyond the billions, of a universal democratic model which, if it does not regulate a world State or super-State, would still command an international law of European origin?)

If the word ‘democracy’ allies itself or competes with that of aristocracy, it is because of number, of the reference to the required approbation of the greatest number. We are giving preference to this translation by ‘number’ – legitimately, we believe – the better to highlight the arithmetical dimension that will mark the entire history of the concept of friendship, at least since Aristotle, and that will later determine our way of listening to ‘O philoi, oudeis philos’ (in the way we are for the moment transcribing it: without accents and without breathing, for the question of number will arise again with this grammatical choice and reading decision). Must friends be in number? Numerous? In great numbers? How many will there be? At what point do ‘great numbers’ begin? What does ‘a friend’ mean? ‘A friend’ in the feminine? ‘Some friends’ in the masculine or feminine? ‘No friend’, in either gender? And what is the relationship between this quantum of friendship and democracy, as the agreement or approbation of number? We are saying here number as the greatest number, to be sure, but in the first place number as the deployment of countable unity, of the ‘one more’ and of this calculable form of presentable unity, the voice of the subject.

Let us put these questions aside for the moment, but not before registering this nominalist or conventionalist style of hesitation of the subject of the name ‘democracy’. This hesitation, even this indifference, is relative; it does not fall into arbitrariness. It limits itself by itself in keeping an irreducible bond to conceptual necessity. This necessity amounts twice over to number – that is, to presumed calculability: once in the form of decision (no democracy without the decided and declared approbation of the greatest number) and once in the form of that which passes, predicts and makes the decision possible: birth – this is the so-equivocal concept of double equality (isonomy founded on isogony).

But providing these conceptual traits are maintained, providing they are associated with eugenics (autochthony plus consanguinity) on the one hand, and with the aristocracy of virtue on the other, the name could, if one wished, be changed.

There is a strategy here whose stakes are limitless, even if we situate its effect in a quite particular place: in a text, one of Plato’s dialogues whose authenticity used to be called into question (but this, it would seem, is no longer the case today,24 and it is of little import to our subject) and, within this dialogue, in the form of an epitáphios put, to satiric ends, in the mouth of a courtesan and plagiarizer. Even if we took into account its irony, and underwrote it here (and why shouldn’t we? Who would deny it? Let us say that to this extent at least, our critical or ‘deconstructionist’ worries still belong to a certain Platonic heritage of this irony: they participate in the heritage or share it, perhaps, therefore divide it), let us not forget that Plato is dealing with a thematics and an eloquence corresponding to the most stable structures, the dominant, most accredited topoi of a Greek discourse. This is not to say to a homogeneous Greek discourse or people, identical to themselves – we do not believe so – but, let us say, to what in them represents the ‘greatest number’ precisely, whether it be a matter of the political in general or of democracy in particular. If an orator is all the more eloquent in praising his listeners, as Socrates suggests in Menexenus (235d), in listening to him the ‘exemplary’ image (in the Ciceronian sense of which we have already spoken) or the ‘ideal self of the people applauding can be determined. This image can either pre-exist the orator or form itself, re form itself, in the mirror thus held out. In both cases, it is a matter of a people in so far as it can identify itself, in so far as it is what it is or would wish to be. And it would be easy to show that under the eloquence of the epitáphios that Menexenus seems to denounce, and at the very moment when Socrates belittles Aspasia, who knows precisely how to say ‘what should be delivered’ (236b) to flatter the expectations of the orator’s public, one meets again, precisely for this very reason, the axioms, the conceptual veins, the oppositions and associations which structure not only dominant Greek discourse but, on the other hand, elsewhere, Plato’s least ironic political discourse, in the most numerous places of the Platonic ‘corpus’, especially in the Republic, with regard, precisely, to the political enemy qua pólemos or stásis.

To be sure, we cannot thereby absolutely justify the privilege of this reference to Menexenus. There will never be an absolute justification to such a limit. We shall attempt only this: an appeal to another reason to explain our choice in part. This reason intersects with the preceding reasons, and one has already sensed what it is: the genre of epitáphios, of the funeral oration, of the discourse of mourning in general, of heritage and testament, whose theme has preoccupied us for quite some time. Our reflection on friendship, where it will have intersected the political thing [la chose politique], will regularly pass through this moment of political mourning. It seems to us to be constitutive, with the figure of the brother, of the model of friendship that will have dominated, in all its canonical authority, the Greek or Christian discourses. One should, more prudently, say ‘Greek, Christian, and beyond’, to designate those places towards which we are still timorously advancing: Judaism and Islam, at the very least, where the figure of the brother accumulates so many virtues, of course, but above all starting from and still in Nietzsche’s wake, and the entire passage beyond whose movement bears his name. That is to say, everywhere (it is ‘our time’, the out-of-jointness proper to our time, if it is one, to our experience of being ‘out of joint’ [in English in the text]), in every place where a tradition thus tends of itself to break with itself, not being able to do so, by definition, in anything but an irregular and a trembling fashion.

Nevertheless, considered in itself, beyond the ruses and irony that may mark Menexenus, this hesitation over the name ‘democracy’ will always provide food for thought. If, between the name on the one hand, the concept and the thing on the other, the play of a gap offers room for rhetorical effects which are also political strategies, what are the lessons that we can draw today? Is it still in the name of democracy that one will attempt to criticize such and such a determination of democracy or aristo-democracy? Or, more radically – closer, precisely, to its fundamental radicality (where, for example, it is rooted in the security of an autochthonous foundation, in the stock or in the genius of filiation25) – is it still in the name of democracy, of a democracy to come, that one will attempt to deconstruct a concept, all the predicates associated with the massively dominant concept of democracy, that in whose heritage one inevitably meets again the law of birth, the natural or ‘national’ law, the law of homophilia or of autochthony, civic equality (isonomy) founded on equality of birth (isogony) as the condition of the calculation of approbation and, therefore, the aristocracy of virtue and wisdom, and so forth?

What remains or still resists in the deconstructed (or deconstructible) concept of democracy which guides us endlessly? Which orders us not only to engage a deconstruction but to keep the old name? And to deconstruct further in the name of a democracy to come? That is to say, further, which enjoins us still to inherit from what – forgotten, repressed, misunderstood, or unthought in the ‘old’ concept and throughout its history – would still be on the watch, giving off signs or symptoms of a stance of survival coming through all the old and tired features? Would there be in the concept of eudoxia (reputation, approbation, opinion, judgement), and in the concept of equality (equality of birth, isogonia, and equality of rights, isonomia) a double motif that might, interpreted differently, exclude democracy from autochthonous and hemophilic rooting? Is there another thought of calculation and of number, another way of apprehending the universality of the singular which, without dooming politics to the incalculable, would still justify the old name of democracy? Would it still make sense to speak of democracy when it would no longer be a question (no longer in question as to what is essential or constitutive) of country, nation, even of State or citizen – in other words, if at least one still keeps to the accepted use of this word, when it would no longer be a political question?

This last hypothesis may lead to two types of rejoinder to the Schmittian project or, if you prefer, to two distinct sides of the same answer to The Concept of the Political, that is, to the reconstruction of the political. On the one hand, we seem to be confirming – but not by way of deploring the fact, as Schmitt does – an essential and necessary depoliticization. This depoliticization would no longer necessarily be the neuter or negative indifference to all forms of the social bond, of the community, of friendship. On the other hand, through this depoliticization, which would apply only to the fundamental and dominant concept of the political, through this genealogical deconstruction of the political (and through it to the democratic), one would seek to think, interpret and implement another politics, another democracy. One would seek to say it, to thematize it, to formalize it in the course of a deconstruction – the course of the world – under these old names. Saying, thematizing, formalizing are not neuter or apolitical gestures, arriving after the fact from above [en surplomb]. These gestures are positions staked out in a process. Calling this experience (for it is an experience that crosses through and ventures out before being a philosophical, theoretical or methodological statement) ‘genealogical deconstruction’ would here no longer be naming, as was often done, an operation proceeding only through genealogical analysis, retrospection and reconstitution. At stake would thus be a deconstruction of the genealogical schema, a paradoxical deconstruction – a deconstruction, at once genealogical and a-genealogical, of the genealogical. It would concern, by way of a privilege granted – thus its attribute – the genealogical. Wherever it commands in the name of birth, of a national naturalness which has never been what it was said to be. It would concern confidence, credit, credence, doxa or eudoxia, opinion or right opinion, the approbation given to filiation, at birth and at the origin, to generation, to the femiliarity of the family, to the proximity of the neighbour – to what axioms too quickly inscribe under these words. This is not to wage war on them and to see evil therein, but to think and live a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin. Hence, which begin where the beginning divides (itself) and differs, begin by marking an ‘originary’ heterogeneity that has already come and that alone can come, in the future, to open them up. If only unto themselves.

Saying that to keep this Greek name, democracy, is an affair of context, of rhetoric or of strategy, even of polemics, reaffirming that this name will last as long as it has to but not much longer, saying that things are speeding up remarkably in these fast times, is not necessarily giving in to the opportunism or cynicism of the antidemocrat who is not showing his cards. Completely to the contrary: one keeps this indefinite right to the question, to criticism, to deconstruction (guaranteed rights, in principle, in any democracy: no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction). One keeps this right strategically to mark what is no longer a strategic affair: the limit between the conditional (the edges of the context and of the concept enclosing the effective practice of democracy and nourishing it in land [sol] and blood) and the unconditional which, from the outset, will have inscribed a self-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and the duty for democracy itself to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive self-delimitation. Delimitation not only in the name of a regulative idea and an indefinite perfectibility, but every time in the singular urgency of a here and now. Precisely through the abstract and potentially indifferent thought of number and equality. This thought certainly can impose homogenizing calculability while exalting land and blood, and the risk is as terrifying as it is inevitable – it is the risk today, more than ever. But it perhaps also keeps the power of universalizing, beyond the State and the nation, the account taken of anonymous and irreducible singularities, infinitely different and thereby indifferent to particular difference, to the raging quest for identity corrupting the most indestructible desires of the idiom.

But we have undoubtedly just given in to precipitation. We will now have to decelerate slightly, and again take up a patient reading of Schmitt. We were drawn into this detour – as the reader will perhaps recall – by the highly elliptical justification that Schmitt gives in a few lines to the choice of his words, sometimes to his concepts: private enemy /public or political enemy (ekhthrós/polémios, inimicus/hostis), war and internal dissension, war and civil war (pólemos/stásis). The detour was necessary in order to try to understand what ‘enemy’, ‘on our side, on the home front’, has meant over the centuries. And in what respect, if Schmitt is to be believed, politics could never be thought without knowing what ‘enemy’ means, nor a decision made without knowing who the enemy is. That is to say: without the identification by which the enemy is identified, himself, and by which one is identified, oneself.

We shall try to show further on in what respect this double identification engages in privileged fashion both brother friends and brother enemies in the same process of fraternization.

Henceforth, things have begun to appear a little more complicated than Schmitt has it. In any case, in the Platonic justifications he finds for a semantics without which his discourse would become dangerously fragile. We shall take them into account in making a few more steps in our reading of The Concept of the Political (1932) and in the singular itinerary that this work will have begun, down to the Théorie du partisan. Note incidente relative au concept du politique (1962).