7

He Who Accompanies Me

Amor enim, ex quo amicitia nominala est …

Ex quo exardesdt sive amor sive amicitia. Utrumque enim ductum est ab amando …¹

Cicero

nature, the minister of God and the governor of men, has made all of us in the same form, in the same mould as it were, so that we should recognise each other, as fellow-beings – or rather, as brothers.… Rather must we believe that in giving greater shares to some and less to others, she wanted to leave scope for the exercise of brotherly love, with some people being in a position to offer assistance and others needing it. Since then our good mother nature has given all of us the whole world as our dwelling, and has, so to speak, lodged us all in the same house, and has designed us on the same pattern so that each of us could see himself reflected in others and recognise himself in others, and has given us all the great gift of speech so that we could come to a still deeper acquaintance and brotherhood, and acquire a common will by sharing our thoughts one with another, and has striven by every possible means to bind us together in the tight embrace of kinship and companionship, and has shown in everything she does that her intention was not so much to make us united as to make us one – we cannot doubt that we are by nature free, since we are companions of each other. And nobody can imagine that nature has placed anyone in a position of servitude, since she has made each of us the companion of all others.²

La Boétie

But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it.

Montaigne

And the brother is revealed as my enemy, Schmitt said. My own enemy. The suitability [convenance: also affinity, correspondence, appropriateness, convenience] of the enemy. The suitability of the enemy at one’s own convenience. The enemy had indeed to be there already, so near. He had to be waiting, lurking close by, in the familiarity of my own family, in my own home, at the heart of resemblance and affinity, within parental ‘suitability’, within the oikeiótēs which should have lodged no one but the friend. This enemy was a companion, a brother, he was like myself, the figure of my own projection; but an exemplarity more real and more resistant than my own shadow. My truth in painting. The enemy did not rise up; he did not come after the friend to oppose or negate him. He was already there, this fellow creature, this double or this twin; I can identify and name him.

The proof? He has disappeared, he has slipped off and I must call him back. The proof, above all others, is that I am still able to address him, him as well as them (‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’) for there immediately are, and by this very token, more than one of them, for the enemy, by definition, includes me.… To the point of madness: how many of them, of us, are there? Are we going to count the enemies now? And suddenly, how many brothers? I can call the enemy to appeal to him. I can do so owing to him, owing to his being the origin as well as the destination of the call. When did this begin? Who began?

‘“Friends, there are no friends!” cried the dying sage;

“Enemies, there is no enemy” shouts the living fool that I am.’

A moment ago, we were saying that I can call the enemy. The friend too. Theoretically, I can talk to both. But between talking to them and speaking of them there is a world of difference. In the apostrophe, there are first of all the friends to whom the dying sage was talking, and the enemies whom the living fool addresses. This is in each case the first part of the sentence, the vocative moment of the interjection. Then come the friends and enemies – the second part of the sentence – of whom the sage and the fool speak, on the subject of whom they pronounce a verdict. On the subject of whom something is said in the form of assertion, predication, judgement. And as if by chance, from the moment they are spoken of instead of being spoken to, it is to say that they are no longer, or not yet, there: it is to register their absence, to record [constater] after having called. They are summoned to be spoken to, da, then dismissed, fort, saying to them, speaking of them, that they are no longer there. One speaks of them only in their absence, and concerning their absence.

We are now going to deal with this difference. We are going to speak of it while speaking to you, through several detours. In English, this would be to address the possibility of this question. The question lies clandestinely on the threshold of our sentence, restlessly occupying the grammatical secret of its first word, a single letter, ω. We are going to speak of it, talk with it, talk to it, across several philological debates around the unstable status of this initial ōméga. Everything, in effect, begins with the last letter; everything begins in a certain undecidability of the óméga. But before saying even one word about it, we can divine a certain friendship towards the enemy to whom we are talking, and sometimes this friendship is more intense than the one with the friend of whom we speak. But nothing is ever certain.

When you speak to someone, to a friend or an enemy, does it make any sense to distinguish between his presence or absence? In one respect, I have him come, he is present for me; I presuppose his presence, if only at the end of my sentence, on the other end of the line [au bout du fil], at the intentional pole of my allocution. But in another respect, my very sentence simultaneously puts him at a distance or retards his arrival, since it must always ask or presuppose the question ‘are you there?’. This drama of presupposition is at work in the messianic sentence we were speaking of above3 (the incredulous believer who presently addresses the Messiah, while the latter, in rags in one of the capital’s suburbs, moves about, as always, incognito: ‘When will you come?’, thereby removing or deferring into the future the very thing whose coming he verifies, calls for, salutes and perhaps fears). There is nothing fortuitous in the fact that this same contretemps also dictates, being itself just as insane and inevitable, the teleiopoetic sentence, an example of which we recognized in the Nietzschean promise of philosophers to come, philosophers of the perhaps who may perhaps come but who are already, perhaps, at the end of the sentence promising them – providing your friendship for me lets you hear it.

In both cases, appealing to the other presupposes his advent. By this very gesture the other is made to come, allowed to come, but his coming is simultaneously deferred: a chance is left for the future needed for the coming of the other, for the event in general. For, furthermore, who has ever been sure that the expectation of the Messiah is not, from the start, by destination and invincibly, a fear, an unbearable terror – hence the hatred of what is thus awaited? And whose coming one would wish both to quicken and infinitely to retard, as the end of the future? And if the thinkers of the ‘dangerous perhaps’ can be nothing other than dangerous, if they can signify or bring nothing but threat and chance at one and the same time, how could I desire their coming without simultaneously fearing it, without going to all ends to prevent it from ever taking place? Without going to all ends to skip such a meeting? Like teleiopoesis, the messianic sentence carries within it an irresistible disavowal. In the sentence, a structural contradiction converts a priori the called into the repressed, the desired into the undesired, the friend into the enemy. And vice versa. I must, by definition, leave the other to come (the Messiah, the thinker of the dangerous ‘perhaps’, the god, whoever would come in the form of the event – that is, in the form of the exception and the unique) free in his movement, out of reach of my will or desire, beyond my very intention. An intention to renounce intention, a desire to renounce desire, etc. ‘I renounce you, I have decided to’: the most beautiful and the most inevitable in the most impossible declaration of love. Imagine my having thus to command the other (and this is renunciation) to be free (for I need his freedom in order to address the other qua other, in desire as well as in renunciation). I would therefore command him to be capable of not answering – my call, my invitation, my expectation, my desire. And I must impose a sort of obligation on him thereby to prove his freedom, a freedom I need, precisely in order to call, wait, invite. What I thus engage in the double constraint of a double bind is not only myself) nor my own desire, but the other, the Messiah or the god himself. As if I were calling someone – for example, on the telephone – saying to him or her, in sum: I don’t want you to wait for my call and become forever dependent upon it; go out on the town, be free not to answer. And to prove it, the next time I call you, don’t answer, or I won’t see you again. If you answer my call, it’s all over.

‘Enemies, there is no enemy.’ The enemy is not given. Nietzsche’s cat’apostrophe was long since prepared, as we have seen, by such an avowal of hostility in self, within oneself. Not necessarily by a declaration of hostility but in the avowal of enmity – and in that of an enmity within the very intimacy of friendship. Prepared before Hegel, whose powerful heritage we have just recognized in The Concept of the Political, older than him in the patrimony, the ancestral interlocutor is once again he whose paternity Hegel was most inclined to invoke at every turn: Aristotle the grandfather. We must then return once more – and it will not be the last time we do so – to the one who will have been credited with these four incredible words that we are still transcribing without accent and without breathing, in an approximative spelling (O philoi, oudeis philos). We must return to the one to whom will have been lent, with so much interest, in a doubtful syntax, the indestructible capital of what, one day, one time, he would have given up to be heard ‘by the young Greeks admitted into his school’ – that is, this time citing Florian’s quotation:

‘My friends, there are no friends.’

The epigraph of the preface (1963) to The Concept of the Political, prior even to its first word, also convokes Aristotle. It does not relate at that point what Aristotle said about friendship or war. Nor what is said of what he said. But what he is said to have reported. For though his sayings are sometimes reported (like ‘O my friends, there is no friend’), Aristotle also reported the sayings of other sages. Schmitt’s epigraph, then, reports what Aristotle is said to have reported of what numerous sages declare and want to say, what they think of friendship as well as war, institution as well as destruction. It is said that Aristotle subscribed and spoke in unison with these sages (und spricht es mitsambt in). Like them, he believed that the cause (Ursache) of the institution (Stiftung) – hence the cause of the social and political bond, but also that of destruction (Störung) – is friendship on the one hand, war on the other.

Now for the epigraph, again a quotation: ‘Aristotle reports what numerous sages say and think, and he speaks with them: friendship and war are the origin of all institutions and all destruction.’4

If something is converted or inverted in the two Nietzschean apostrophes, this is perhaps not so much because of the content of the utterances: the reversal of friendship into enmity. Once again, a reversal would perhaps leave things unaltered. What is of more import is what is inscribed rather, earlier [plutôt, plus tôt], prior to their contents, in the modalities of the uttering. Here and now, the quotation in the past tense (so rief), the exclamation attributed to a dying sage (der sterbende Weise), is replaced by a quotation – or rather, by the performative uttering of an exclamation in the present tense (ruf ich). A first-person singular responds to it, a person presented precisely as a living fool (ruf ich, der lebende Τοr), a fool and living by that very token – and perhaps, too, because the loss of the enemy no longer leaves him either enough reason or enough force to identify himself, to pose himself in opposing himself, to present himself in the present or to gather himself as himself (ego cogito, ego sum, ‘the I think’ which acampantes all my representations, transcendental consciousness, Jemeinigkeit of Dasein, etc.). Without an enemy, I go mad, I can no longer think, I become powerless to think myself, to pronounce ‘cogito, ergo sum’. For that I must have an evil genius, a spiritus malignas, a deceitful spirit. Did not Schmitt allude to this in his cell? Without this absolute hostility, the ‘I’ loses reason, and the possibility of being posed, of posing or of opposing the object in front of it; ‘I’ loses objectivity, reference, the ultimate stability of that which resists; it loses existence and presence, being, logos, order, necessity, and law. ‘I’ loses the thing itself. For in mourning the enemy, I have not deprived myself of this or that, this adversary or that rival, this determined force of opposition constitutive of myself: I lose nothing more, nothing less, than the world.

How will reason be safeguarded in such a mourning? How is the enemy to be mourned? How is that to be worked out, however timidly? But at this point, how will you avoid thinking that reason is intimately linked to enmity, that reason is the friend of the enemy?

Philosophy is at stake here, and this is what the cry of the living fool gives up to be heard. This is the piece of news brought forth on the winds of rumour, in its direct and continuous propagation (‘O my friends…’) or in inverted form (‘Enemies…’).

Hence a first question: in what respect does Nietzsche here reverse a Greek and properly philosophical tradition of philía? In what respect, in a context which would rather be Zarathustra’s, does he denounce, instead, the Christian mutation that prefers the neighbour, to the Greek friend? And the neighbour, this other brother – is he not something else again than the Greek friend, than the near one of oikeiótēs or – to speak Ciceronian – the near one of propinquitas, the proximity of neighbourhood and familial alliance? Would this neighbour be something altogether different from my relatives, something else again in being simply altogether other, the trace or the son or the brother of the altogether other?

At the origin there is a rumour, an ‘it is said’, an ‘it is said that he is supposed to have said’. The origin of a rumour is always unknown. Indeed, this is how a rumour is identified. To say ‘the origin is not known and never will be’ is always – let us not doubt the importance of this risk – to open up the space of rumour and to license the ‘it is said’, ‘idle talk’, and the myth. But the question ‘Who signs a rumour?’ does not necessarily amount to the question ‘Who becomes responsible for its proverbialization?’.

If the author of these four words, their very first signatory, is a matter of conjecture, can you at least trust the letter of the reported remark? The very spelling and grammar of the transcription? Nothing is less certain. From quotation to quotation, from glosses to glosses, from poems to philosophemes, from fables of morality to precepts of wisdom, from Montaigne to Deguy and Blanchot, including Florian, Kant, Nietzsche, and so many others, an impressive convoy of Western culture has perhaps opted, at one particular marshalling yard, for a mistake on the part of a copyist or specialist in hermeneutics. Perhaps: there can be no testament without the possibility of a philological sidetracking. A testament is read, offers itself to readings, but also ordains readership; the testament is the Bible of hermeneutics. The feble would then not be The Hare, its Friends and the two Chipmunks but, rather, what the storyteller accuses the hare of not knowing: what Aristotle is reported to have said:

… but my hare had this whim / and didn’t know what Aristotle / Used to say to young Greeks upon entering his school: / My friends, there are no friends …

Come now, would Aristotle ever have said that? And what if it were a feble? And even supposing he said it, what could he have meant by it?

Let us first take note of this: the citational rumour does not seem to have any origin. It would never have begun, but would have simply alleged the simulacrum of its inauguration. In his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius does not himself quote the sentence Aristotle is reported to have said. He is already playing the spokesperson for what Favorinos reports in his Memoirs.

Everything here seems to issue from a last will and testament. Explicit arrangements were entrusted to lawful authorities by a mortal. The reference to Aristotle’s testament (diathékē) is its tone-imparting context. Friendship will never be described differently. Its description requires the last will and testament. Diogenes Laertius describes the contents of the testament like a public notary, a friend of the family, sharing in their mourning. He is, as it were, one of the legatees. As if he were conducting an inventory, he first reports the fine sentences and attractive apophthegms attributed to the philosopher. He is said to have answered the question ‘what is a friend?’ (ti esti phílos) through the economic figure of habitat. The body houses the soul, offers its hospitality, inviting it to stay over. But how is this topology of habitat in friendship to be thought? ‘What is a friend?’ Response: ‘One soul in twin bodies’.5

Dislodging the logic and identity of the territory in general, designating a principle of errancy, the letter of this response might well leave no one at peace. It would provide food for thought: a friend, having more than one place [‘twin bodies’], would never have a place of his own. He could never count on the sleep or nourishment of the economic intimacy of some ‘home’. The body of the friend, his body proper, could always become the body of the other. This other body could live in his body proper like a guest, a visitor, a traveller, a temporary occupant. Friendship would be unheimlich. How would unheimlich, uncanny, translate into Greek? Why not translate it by atópos: outside all place or placeless, without family or familiarity, outside of self, expatriate, extraordinary, extravagant, absurd or mad, weird, unsuitable, strange, but also ‘a stranger to’? Fundamentally, ‘unsuitable’ would be the most ominous, since friendship was so often defined by that suitability (oikeiótēs) fitting to familiarity, as in a bonding affinity. And here we have madness rising up on the premisses. If we are stressing this strange atopia of the friend, the reason lies in the irreducible tension that may ensue in its confrontation with the principle, at once topical and familial – precisely the principle of suitability – which elsewhere defines the political, but in its bond to the bond of friendship.

[A digression here, remaining between square brackets, on suitability, unsuitability. Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most uncontestable consequence of this – if you like – doubly singular definition of the friend: the friend qua one soul (singularity) but in two bodies (duplicity). Here again quoting Aristotle, keeping to the letter of his discourse, Montaigne nurtures this double singularity. He maintains its rigour to the point of the most troubling paradoxes in the logic of gift, loan, debt or duty – indeed, in the logic of gratitude – and therefore in the genealogy of morals. For any and all calculations are impossible, and these very words lose their meaning if it is true that friends are ‘one soul in bodies twain following that most apt definition of Aristotle’s’. The impossibility of this calculation, the ruin of the ordinary meaning of words, the avalanche of logical and grammatical absurdities, are the signs that allow the difference between ‘sovereign and masterful’ friendship and ‘other ones’ to be determined. The philía most devoted to the other, the most heterotopical or heterophilial, is no other, finally, than the friendship of self, philautia, if not narcissism – and that’s not bad for a start. No more gifts or debts or duties between friends. If someone is to say thank you, it is the person giving to the person accepting. Montaigne has just quoted Aristotle (‘O my friends, there is no friend!’), and he then moves on:

In this noble relationship, the services and good turns which foster those other friendships do not even merit being taken into account: that is because of the total interfusion of our wills. For just as the friendly love I feel for myself is not increased – no matter what the Stoics may say – by any help I give myself in my need, and just as I feel no gratitude for any good turn I do to myself: so too the union of such friends, being truly perfect, leads them to lose any awareness of such services, to hate and to drive out from between them all terms of division and difference, such as good turn, duty, gratitude, request, thanks and the like. Everything is genuinely common to ‘them both: their wills, goods, wives, children, honour and lives; their correspondence is that of one soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s, so they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. (I emphasize ‘corrspondence’ [convenance]; earlier Montaigne had defined friendship as the ‘correspondence of wills’ [convenance des volontez].)]

Such is the ineluctable communal and communist consequence (stylistically at once both Platonic and Aristotelian) of this absolute community qua the community of souls. But a communism dreaming in secret of the secret, as we shall see, a political and apolitical communism which does not count – no further than to ‘one’, and therefore not even up to ‘one’. (Not even ‘Against One’, to cite the second tide given to On Willing Slavery by the Protestants, which Montaigne, at the outset of his chapter ‘On Friendship’ – on this great testamentary stage – recalls. The allusion to ‘our civil wars’ at the beginning of the chapter gives us the clue: we are going to speak again of stásis and fraternity, of stásis among brothers.) What is, in fact, the inevitable conclusion of this ‘correspondence’, this so-beautiful word often used to translate oikeiótēs? If correspondence is another name for an indivisible community of the soul between lovers, why should it harbour this taste of death, of the impossible, of the aporia? When friends correspond, when they suit one another, are a good match, when they match, one matching the other, when they agree to come to each other, then division would affect only their bodies, it would not harm the soul of those who thus love each other in sovereign friendship. In a moment Montaigne will draw from this indivisibility (‘For the perfect friendship which I am talking about is indivisible’) still other consequences – dangerous and abyssal ones! They will interest us under the heading of number, secrecy, and brotherhood [confrérie].

For the moment let us follow the economy of the gift, the gift without gift that Montaigne deduces from this joint ownership of the soul. In this gift without gift consequent upon the joint ownership of the soul, Montaigne recognizes not so much an indistinction, a confusion or a communion but, rather, a disproportionate inversion of dissymmetry: the ‘liberal’ is the one who consents to receive, the debtor the one who gives. The gift is not impossible, but it is the receiver who gives, and from this point on neither measure nor reciprocity will legislate in friendship. Neither synchrony nor symmetry. As if friends were never contemporaries. Broaching this passage, we shall be wondering whether the model of this friendship with neither measure nor reciprocity, this break with the mutuality of exchange, still derives from the Greek paradigm of philía, from which Montaigne still literally seeks inspiration. And whether this question makes sense, whether there is such a paradigm – if it is one – which would be an example of one (an exemplary model or artifact) and would be one.

The person who gives is therefore the one who receives, as we are told in ‘On Friendship’. The former thus gives only on condition that he does not have what he gives. The great but discreet tradition of this ‘giving what one does not have’ – which is bequeathed from Plotinus to Heidegger, then to Lacan (they do not return or give the gift back, of course; thus no one is in possession of it) – would now have to include Montaigne.

But we should underscore the fact that Montaigne, by presenting marriage, as he typically does,6 as that which bears only an ‘imaginary resemblance’ to this ‘holy bond’ of sovereign friendship, silently dismisses heterosexual friendship, excluding a holy bond that would unite anyone other than two men, two male ‘companions’, in the figure and the oath of friendship, if not in so-called natural fraternity. The bond between female companions or between a woman-friend and her companion could never be equal to its model: the bond of two male companions. The person who accompanies me, if he is the friend of the friend that I am, is a man. In any case, it indeed seems as if friendship between a man and a woman cannot be, in Montaigne’s view, ‘sovereign’ and capable of joint ownership:

That is why those who make laws forbid gifts between husband and wife, so as to honour marriage with some imagined resemblance to that holy bond, wishing to infer by it that everything must belong to them both, so that there is nothing to divide or to split up between them. In the kind of friendship I am talking about, if it were possible for one to give to the other it is the one who received the benefaction who would lay an obligation on his companion. For each of them, more than anything else, is seeking the good of the other, so that the one who furnished the means and the occasion is in fact the more generous, since he gives his friend the joy of performing for him what he most desires. When Diogenes the philosopher was short of money he did not say that he would ask his friends to give him some but to give him some back! And to show how this happens in practice I will cite an example – a unique one – from Antiquity, (p. 214; emphasis added)

Once again, it is always the example of a testament: poor Eudemus bequeathes nothing to his two rich companions, nothing but a responsibility, a duty, a debt: to provide for his mother until her death, and to provide the dowry for his daughter’s marriage. He is the liberal, since he ‘bestows a grace and favour on his friends when he makes use of them in his necessity. He left them heirs to his own generosity, which consists in putting into their hands the means of doing him good.’ But for Montaigne, this is only a pretext for posing the question of number. This example supposes ‘more than one friend’ (at least two, since Eudemus made one of the heirs the potential heir of the other). How are you going to reconcile ‘more than one friend’ with what ‘perfect friendship’ maintains of the ‘indivisible’? Each ‘gives himself so entirely’ to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another, to ‘share elsewhere’. But arithmetic defies arithmetic. Here indivisibility permits and interdicts counting. Yes, indivisibility, that of the soul and of friendship, but the perfect friend that I am, totally united in my soul to my friend, I wish to give him so much that I would prefer to see this singularity multiply to give him even more. I give of myself entirely, but this is not enough – I wish, so great is my love (in fact it is infinite), to multiply, to double, triple, quadruple my very entirety, so as to give myself entirely more than once:

For the perfect friendship I am talking about is indivisible: each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another: on the contrary, he grieves that he is not twofold, threefold or fourfold and that he does not have several souls, several wills, so that he could give them all to the one he loves. Common friendships can be shared.

We touch here on the most sensitive spot, the fragile and indispensable distinction, once again, between two kinds of fraternities, the natural one and the other. Natural fraternity (Montaigne, like Schmitt and so many others, seems to believe in the existence of such a thing) is not indispensable to perfect friendship; it would even be improper to it, as is natural paternity, for there can be no correspondence in the factual family (‘Father and son can be of totally different complexions: so can brothers’7). Likewise natural friendship can be only one of the attributes which I appreciate in the other, one among others in those ‘common, customary friendships’ which are by definition divisible. Whereas the fraternity of alliance or election, the figure or the oath, the correspondence of convention, the fraternity of the ‘covenant as one would say in English, the fraternity of spiritual correspondence, is the indivisible essence of ‘perfect friendship’. Natural fraternity is only an attribute; spiritual fraternity is a full-fledged essence, the very indivisibility of the soul in the coupling of sovereign friendship:

Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: this cannot possibly be duplicated. If two friends asked you to help them at the same time, which of them would you dash to? If they asked for conflicting favours, who would have the priority? (p. 215)

Not only the indivisibility, nor the uniqueness of the soul, but the singularity of the couple. Montaigne seems perfectly certain that one friend, one true friend, can never demand ‘conflicting favours’ of you (this contradicts – at least – the desire for ‘several souls and several wills’, a desire properly immanent to the one [true friend] and recognized as such by Montaigne). Montaigne, above all, marks off the simultaneously political and apolitical, or a-civic, structure of a perfect friendship which assumes the impossibility of honouring multiple demands and doing one’s duty beyond the couple of friends. This tension between politicism and apoliticism is all the more paradoxical since the model of the fraternal couple for such comparisons is regularly engaged in an extremely politicized scene. Here we have an invariant feature of which the friendship with the author of Against the One is only an example. Yet Montaigne also seems to mark off a certain transcendence of friendship with respect to the public or civic realm. Not without a subtle equivocation for which we shall have to account. It occurs at least twice in ‘On Friendship’.

1. The first time when Montaigne insists on the exceptional nature of this sovereign friendship. If it is exceptional, it depends on fortune, on what happens: túkhē; and if ‘it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries’,8 no political project can predict, prescribe or programme it. No one can legislate on the matter. A passive decision, an unconscious one, the decision of the other in myself. Exceeding all generality. If Aristotle tells us that ‘good lawgivers have shown more concern for friendship than for justice’, this is precisely because the former should be placed above the latter, and even that such legislation is perhaps no longer of a juridical or political order. (Michelet will say in his Journal – and we shall come back to this – ‘Fraternity is the law above the law’.⁹) The law of friendship here seems – at least for the Montaigne who refers in his own way to Aristotle’s authority – heterogeneous to political laws. Better yet, its universality being only one of exceptional singularities, it would be heterogeneous to genericity, to all law – indeed, to all concepts that would not form the genus of the non-genus, the genus of the unique. The unique must be, every time, as is said of genius, a genus: in its own unique respect its own genus. The condition for the outburst of the ‘I love you’ of love or friendship. Hence the obligatory conclusion that spiritual fraternity is ageneric and a-geneological. There is no law of the genus for such unique brothers:

thus preparing for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today. So many fortuitous circumstances are needed to make it, that it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries.

There seems to be nothing for which Nature has better prepared us than for fellowship – and Aristotle says that good lawgivers have shown more concern for friendship than for justice.10 Within a fellowship the peak of perfection consists in friendship; for all forms of it which are forged or fostered by pleasure or profit or by public or private necessity are so much the less beautiful and noble – and therefore so much the less ‘friendship’ – in that they bring in some purpose, end or fruition other than the friendship itself.

Nor do those four ancient species of love conform to it: the natural, the social, the hospitable and the erotic, (p. 207)

Friendship at the principle of the political, to be sure, but then – and to this very extent – friendship beyond the political principle – is that right? Is that the good (beyond being)? The friendship of a justice that transcends right [le droit], the law [la lot] of friendship above laws – is this acceptable? Acceptable in the name of what, precisely? In the name of politics? Ethics? Law? Or in the name of a sacred friendship which would no longer answer to any other agency than itself? The gravity of these questions finds its examples – endless ones – every time a faithful friend wonders whether he or she should judge, condemn, forgive what he decides is a political fault of his or her friend: a political moment of madness, error, breakdown, crime, whatever their context, consequence, or duration.

2. The second time, in praising the response of Blosius when he declares his allegiance to the orders of Gracchus – an apparently unconditional fidelity, since it would have held even if Gracchus had ordered him to set fire to the temples. But, perhaps things are not so clear:

They were more friends than citizens; friends, more than friends or foes of their country or friends of ambition and civil strife. Having completely committed themselves to each other, they each completely held the reins of each other’s desires; granted that this pair were guided by virtue and led by reason (without which it is impossible to harness them together, Blosius’ reply is what it should have been.11

The dividing line between the political and the apolitical is no longer assumed as soon as the unconditional engagement (and therefore the apparently transcendental engagement with respect to the public realm) with the friend supposes a priori reason and virtue. They could never incite wrongdoing, nor even allow something harmful to the public sphere to be done. Friendship can exist only between good men, repeats Cicero.¹² Reason and virtue could never be private. They cannot enter into conflict with the public realm. These concepts of virtue and reason are brought to bear in advance on the space of the res publica. In such a tradition, a virtuous reason or a rational virtue that would not be in essence homogeneous to the best reason of State is unthinkable. All the couples of friends which serve as examples for Cicero and Montaigne are citizen couples. These citizens are men whose virile virtue naturally tends, however successful or unsuccessful the attempt, to the harmonization of the measure of friendship – unconditional union or affection – with the equally imperative reason of the State.

The friendship between these two men who are as brothers is also the passion of a love. At least love is its origin, for Cicero never fails to recall the affinity of friendship and love which gives the former its name (‘Amor enim, ex quo amicitia nominata est.’¹³) There is no secret capable of separating two experiences in which sometimes, in the singularity of an occurrence, what is fundamentally the same socius, the same friendship, the same virtue, the same reason, is revealed. This identity is sometimes revealed, it is perhaps bestowed by fortune and in a state of wonder: the túkhē of what happens to a virile couple of friends, ‘once every three centuries’.

Yet Montaigne seems to continue to dream of a fundamental apoliticism or transpoliticism, which would command secrecy, an equally unconditional secrecy. Placing the law of secrecy above the laws of the city, this apolitical drive divides reason or virtue. The apolitical drive allows the essence of secrecy – or the interdiction of perjury – and, simultaneously, the essence of the political, to be read. Essences not qua facts or orders, but qua two oaths, two engagements, two responsibilities. Here again, this double bind does not happen to fraternity like an accident, but draws an interior and tragic structure out to its limit. One must choose between the sovereign fraternity of secrecy between two, in the friendship of exception, and, on the other hand, the brotherhood or the conjunction of political secrecy, which begins with three:

If one entrusted to your silence something which it was useful for the other to know, how would you get out of that? The unique, highest friendship loosens all other bonds. That secret which I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can reveal without perjury to him who is not another: he is me. It is a great enough miracle for oneself to be redoubled: they do not realize how high a one it is when they talk of its being tripled. The uttermost cannot be matched. If anyone suggests that I can love each of two friends as much as the other, and that they can love each other and love me as much as I love them, he is turning into a plural, into a confraternity, that which is the most ‘one’, the most bound into one. One single example of it is moreover the rarest thing to find in the world, (p. 215)

In each feature of this sovereign friendship (exception, improbable and random unicity, metapolitical transcendence, disproportion, infinite dissymmetry, denaturalization, etc.), it might be tempting to recognize a rupture with Greek philía – a testamentary rupture, as some would hasten to conclude, a palaeo-or neo-testamentary rupture. How easy that would be! The irruption of the infinite! A reassuring principle would thereby be found, the diachronic order of a scansion, a periodization which the painstaking historian would then have to refine or overdetermine. But the fact is here before us: we have just verified that this new ‘paradigm’ is not the coherent and applied consequence of a Greek principle of correspondence or suitability (oikeiótēs). This logical concatenation could rightly, even literally, place itself under the aegis of Aristotle, under that of his argument reported by Diogenes Laertius – that ‘correspondence’ is but one ‘of one soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s’; that therefore friends ‘can neither lend nor give anything to each other’. If this continuity spreads across a logic, a rhetoric, and a politics of ‘spiritual’ friendship, then it would be difficult indeed, more reckless than might be believed, to oppose a Christian fraternity to some form of Greek fraternity. Not that the discrepancies are negligible – they are undoubtedly profound and irreducible – but they do not follow from a principle of distinction or opposition. Therefore their analysis demands other protocols. We are here in the vicinity of a generative graft in the body of our culture. ‘Our’ ‘culture’ is such an old body, but such a young one too. It is a child’s body, the body of so-called European culture, between all these testaments, between Greek philosophy and the so-called Religions of the Book. A patriarch, born yesterday, who knows but forgets, too young and too old to remember that his own body was grafted at birth. There is no body proper without this graft. This body ‘begins’ with this prosthesis or this supplement of origin. Among other consequences, endless political consequences should follow from this law. Furthermore, this is the exact locus of what is happening today, today more than ever, and will continue endlessly.

One last word to close this long parenthesis on ‘one soul in bodies twain’.

‘One soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s’: between Aristotle and Montaigne, among all the discourses setting; off a powerful historical tremor, there is not only Cicero, but so many others. In the tortured landscape of these geological folds, on the crests of another massif rising out of it to leave on it an immense and singular signature, there is Saint Augustine. On the friend, the couple of friends, on mourning and the testament, the flow and the economy of tears on the death of a friend, the Christian infinitization of friendship or of spiritual fraternity which continues, beyond all ‘conversion’, to implement, in their translations, Greek and Roman schemata, Book IV of his Confessions would here deserve, for itself alone, an interminable meditation. We will, however, have to limit ourselves to a sort of preliminary topology.

In the first place, Augustine adopts, without quoting it, the ‘most apt definition of Aristotle’s’: ‘one soul in bodies twain’. But he does so in surprise at having survived his friend. If he is one with the deceased, if their soul is indivisible, how could survival be possible? Augustine knew his Aristotle; thus he could write: ‘Still more I wondered that he should the and I remain alive, for I was his second self (ille alter eram). How well the poet put it when he called his friend the half of his soul. I felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies.’ From this admirable and rightly erroneous calculation, Augustine first draws – this will be a first stage to his move – a cunning, profound, troubling consequence, which bears both his inimitable signature and a form of universal revelation. He avows ‘horror’, and confesses to a double terror: that of surviving and not surviving, of surviving with half his soul amputated – the ineluctable arithmetical consequence of the Aristotelian axiom – but also that of not surviving, that is, of perhaps (forte) not keeping within himself, in what is left of self, at least a little of the beloved. ‘Perhaps’ signs the wager, and signs the calculation as well: ‘Life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with only half a soul. Perhaps (forte) this, too, is why I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well might then be wholly dead.’14 This is an abyssal calculation: do you desire to survive for yourself or for the person whom you are mourning, from the moment the two of you are as one? The paradoxes concerning the gift we were evoking above (concerning what would come down to giving in the name of the other [donner au nom de l’autre, also: ‘giving to the other’s name’]) in this case translate as follows: ‘to survive, or not, the name of the other [or: ‘in the name of the other’]’, for self or for the other, for the other in self, in a narcissism which is never related to itself except in the mourning of the other. Augustine can be suspected of offering his own egotistical interest in the conservation of the ideal pretext of the other’s survival in self. Let us not proceed too quickly. For Saint Augustine will have preceded us on this path, and he will perhaps have been mistaken to accuse himself so quickly: later on – in his Retractations, in fact – he will beat his breast in a retrospective denunciation of the ‘declamation’ and ‘ineptitude’ of the Confessions, when he presumed to desire survival in order to have his friend survive in him. But here he is assigning all the weight of the excuse – in truth, the chance of mitigation, of an extenuating circumstance if not of an exoneration – to a modest adverb, the one to which we have entrusted so much, on which we have wagered so much, the adverb perhaps: ‘This declaration appears to me as flimsy as the confession is grave, although the ineptitude is in some fashion tempered by the perhaps added to it.’15

In the second place, an economy without reserve is unleashed, announcing literally what we were calling above, with Montaigne, the arithmetical challenge of arithmetic, the indivisibility that induces a desire for an infinite multiplication of the subject. Hence a desire that aggravates all the more, to the point of vertigo, the originary guilt born with friendship. There is nothing fortuitous here, nothing necessarily indicating, the path of a historical influence. For it is due to the internal logic of the indivisibility of the soul in the couple of friends: ‘This is what we cherish in friendship, and we cherish it so dearly that in conscience we feel guilty if we do not return love for love (si non amaverit redamantem), asking no more of our friends than these expressions of goodwill (praeter indicia benivolentiae). This is why we mourn their death … and life becomes a living death because a friend is lost.’¹⁶

Lastly, in the third place, the infinitization qua conversion in God, if this can be said, of this model of fraternal friendship. Here, one would then have to call on the testimony of the entirety of the Confessions, for this is the very law of their movement. In following our lead, we will limit ourselves to this point of passage where that which is turned towards God, towards His face, entrusted to God, trusting in God, assembled in and affected by God, in the dwelling place of God, in the home – that is, in the family or in the filiation of God, in this ‘God of virtues’ whom we pray to convert us and to tum us towards Him (‘Deus virtutum converte nos et ostende fadem tuam’¹⁷), is not only the friendship of the friend but the enmity of the enemy. The enemy, too, must be loved according to God. The friend should be loved in God; the enemy must be loved not – to be sure – in God, but because of God. The question is not loving the enemy in God – this would, moreover, be impossible – but one can and must love one’s enemy because God ordains as much, for himself, because of the Cause he is. The enemy is thus inimicus, not hostis. One can imagine what Schmitt would have done with this passage, how he would have articulated it on to Christian politics and on to the properly political texts of Saint Augustine. Augustine says this at the heart of the Confessions: ‘Blessed are those who love you, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake.’18

Was this a digression? We shall go no further for the moment. This is perhaps enough to de-configure, if not disfigure, the exemplary paradigms, the classifications, and the customary periodizations. The fact that Saint Augustine and Montaigne (among others) continue to develop, deploy and make explicit Aristotelian and Ciceronian motifs, to claim authority for themselves in the letter of these texts while undoubtedly submitting them to a sort of infinite transplantation, to an uprooting and a transplantation of the infinite, is enough to cause us to suspect something untimely, some non-identity with self, in each of the presumed models: Greek, Roman, Christian. Later, and again on the subject of fraternity between brothers, we shall speak of other revolutions without revolution – the French Revolution, for example – and its relation to Saint Augustine among others.]

When Diogenes Laertius reads off Aristotle’s bequest, the issue is more than one of friendship. The lead is hardly hidden from view; it only disappears, to appear again a little further on. Instead of citing a sentence written by Aristotle, Diogenes is content with reporting the Memoirs of Favorinos, which themselves report sayings which are supposedly Aristotle’s. Some series of apophthegms seem to line up aphorisms. The deductive law seems non-apparent. Under their surface discontinuity, a secret logic is controlling the reported sayings and the indirect propositions. Immediately following this domestic quip, if you like, on the way in which the soul of friends inhabits more than one body, and on the arithmetical oddity that then transforms the habitat into a haunting fear (how might a single soul inhabit more than one body without haunting them?), here are two aphorisms on the brevity of life, on the economy of survival and on the blindness of the gaze: among men, there are the savers: they believe they are immortal; they economize, rein themselves in, abstain, dispense with expenditure as if they have to live for ever (ōs aei zēsoménous); then there are those who spend and dispense without calculation because life is too short, as if they are about to the the next minute (ōs autíka tethnēxomēnous). As for the question of knowing why so much time is spent on the handsome, Aristotle would have rejected it as a blind question (tuphlou, éphē, to erōtēma). Why? Because one must be blind not to know the answer in advance: beauty itself? Or because only a blind person is interested in beauty, in the visibility of bodies?

More or less under the safekeeping of writings to which reference is sometimes made, Aristotle’s sayings thus consigned are most often inspired, like all wisdom, by an ethical or political concern: equality, reciprocity (we might say a mutualism, a Friendly Society of antiphileîn which we shall later distinguish, as rigorously as possible, however difficult it sometimes remains, from egalitarianism and social security), distributive or proportional justice, a certain concept of the rights of men or of the human person. All these themes come to conspire in the murmur of an ambiguous sigh: ω ϕίλοι, οὐδεἰσ ϕίλοσ, a cryptic phrase whose grammar, written form, and initial accentuation still remain to be determined. Let us repeat: for the moment we are writing it without accents. In particular without an accent on the ω, without an underscored iota and without a spirit. This letter will have sketched, so as to give it space and form, a sort of crypt. Replete with twin ghosts. Around the crypt, mourning and ritual, in the course of centuries, ceremonies repeat themselves, and incantatory formulas inherited across generations of priests, and philological haunting, for love of a phrase: the history of a canonical sentence – a history, then, of exegesis, the work of the copyist: transcription, translation, tradition. All the transfers imaginable. But around a so-discreet diacritical mark, the underscored mark of a single letter which appears and disappears, around another pronunciation – in other words, around a way of saying otherwise. It would all come down to a difference in the way of accentuating, chanting, therefore of addressing the other. Would such a history really have depended on a single letter, the ω, the omega opening its mouth and tossing a sentence to the other? Hardly anything at all? Less than a letter?

Yes, it will have been necessary to decide on an aspiration, on the softness or hardness of a ‘spirit’ coming to expire or aspire a capital O, an ω: is it the sign of a vocative inteqection, ω, or that of a pronominal dative, ω with a hoi, and hence an attribution – the friends, ϕίλοι, remain motionless, indifferent to what is happening to them in either case, the vocative or the nominative?

ω ϕίλοι, οὐδεἰσ ϕίλοσ.

What does that change? Everything, perhaps. And perhaps so little. We shall have to approach prudently, in any case, the difference created by this trembling of an accent, this inversion of spirit, the memory or the omission of an iota (the same iota synonymous in our culture for ‘almost nothing’). We shall have to approach these differences wherever they count: in the modality of the uttering, the meaning of the sentence, the choice of philosophemes – in the very politics conforming to, or exploiting them [qui s’y plient ou emploient].

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* Further on, Montaigne will speak again of ‘the seam [couture] that joins [souls] together’, on the page preceding the exposition on perfect friendship, namely friendship among men: ‘brotherly harmony’ is a ‘solder binding brothers together’; the vocabulary of the artifice, seam and solder, are as important as – if not more important than – fraternity itself. Montaigne insists on this point: friendship is not and must not be a natural fraternity, but a fraternity of alliance, adoption, election, oath. Why, then, this ‘natural’ figure? Why this adherence or this reference again to a natural bond, if one has set out to de-naturalize? Why does the natural schema remain? This is our question.

* Nicoimachean Ethics, VIII, 1, 1115a 22–6; Politics, II, 4, 1262b 7–9.

† Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 1, 1155a 26–7: ‘when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well’, p. 1825 [revised Oxford translation].